‘Today I don’t feel I am lower than somebody. Okay, I am a Dalit. I am the son of a scavenger. My mother was a scavenger. So?’
Iremember clearly that when I used to read about the independence movement during childhood, I used to feel unlucky. I used to wonder why I wasn’t born at the time of the freedom struggle. I was born into a very different kind of world. I knew I was an untouchable. And I would try and forget this about myself. I would try to ignore it. I would even try to change it, by perhaps trying to change my name. But people would remind me constantly. Remind me that I am an untouchable in many ways. This is when I understood that the freedom we have won is only a political freedom. There are still several individual freedoms that we need to fight for. I realised that there is a missing legacy in the freedom movement, that of women, Dalits and adivasis who fought, but whose efforts were not recorded. Today, we represent all of them.
Human scavenging, of course, existed through all of this. It had done under the many rulers of India, it continued after Independence, and it continues to exist today. This can’t be freedom. There needs to be an end to this.
Personally, just the sight of somebody cleaning human excreta, I can’t bear it. The fight is to get it stopped immediately. People keep talking about how, after the freedom struggle, this is the largest democratic struggle for independence. You can call it what you want. I do believe the zeal of any person to live freely is something we cannot ignore. I go to the human scavengers and talk to them, and they are still trying to break free.
There are usually two voices and lines of thought that people push forth at safai karamchari mahilas working as human scavengers. One is, “Didi, aap itna achha kaam karte ho, aap nahin karenge toh aur kaun karega?” This is the glorification. This is something Mahatma Gandhi did, and what Narendra Modi perpetuates. It needs to stop.
The other is “Didi, we understand that you should not be doing this work, but agar yeh nahin karenge toh aap kaise jiyenge? Aap ka livelihood yahi hai.” It’s so cruel. We have made a package deal of their birth and livelihood. And a clear boundary is drawn, beyond which they apparently cannot function.
But the reality, which people manipulate and put before the scavengers in these ways is, “Didi, agar aap nahin karenge toh mere liye safai kaun karega?” It’s a very systematic manipulation. The line of the Safai Karamchari Andolan is that human scavenging will not be done at any cost. This is azaadi.
The problem is, we are not identifying or recognising the things that continue to keep us captive. It is not just about freedom for Dalits or untouchables. If you think I am lower than you, you are a slave. You have a psychological problem. Caste is one of the biggest diseases. Patriarchy is another virus we never acknowledge. Babasaheb Ambedkar took two very important steps in this regard, one is Article 17 of the Constitution, which outlaws untouchability. But for this to have had a countrywide effect, we needed a programmatic intervention. The second was the Hindu Code Bill. He had to resign because it wasn’t accepted.
Today, you have made Ambedkar a huge symbol. The prime minister says he too is an Ambedkar bhakt. But what was Ambedkar’s vision? Why don’t you start implementing it? The casteist mindset is a virus that no government, till today, has had the power or courage to take on. And it’s the same with patriarchy. There are many doctors, but what they do is hand out medication that furthers the ills of the body or system. Come August 15, it should be our aim to wipe out this disease. It’s like we have a very beautiful building, but it has neither an elevator nor stairs to connect the floors. There is no interaction, relationship between them. The only way forward is to break down the walls, the shackles of caste and patriarchy, and rebuild Indian society.
“THE FIGHT TO STOP MANUAL SCAVENGING HAS BEEN THE LARGEST DEMOCRATIC STRUGGLE SINCE INDEPENDENCE”