Social unrest tells of conflicted status of backward caste people
AGITATION BY THE UNDERPRIVILEGED REVEALS A FLAWED, FRAYED SOCIAL CONTRACT
On January 1 this year, riots broke out at Bhima-Koregaon near Pune in Maharashtra over the commemoration of a 200-yearold historical event.
On January 1, 1818, the British-Indian army had registered a major victory over the Peshwa ruler of the western region of undivided India. A key component of that British-Indian contingent was a group of Dalit — or backward caste — fighters. This victory is perceived by the Dalits as a symbolic triumph of a marginalised community over the dominant class in 19th century Maharashtra.
This year, like every other year over the last two centuries, as the day was being marked by members of the Dalit community through public celebrations, clashes broke out between them and certain rightist fringe groups who considered commemoration of the Maratha ruler’s defeat as an affront to Indian’s nationalistic ethos.
Empowerment sans gains
It is significant that such dialectically opposite and conflicting interpretations of history is perhaps in keeping with the serious difference of opinion that had surfaced between B.R. Ambedkar — the foremost leader of the Dalit community and the Indian Constitution’s chief architect — on the one hand and Mahatma Gandhi on the other, over the assigning of a suitable social marker and commensurate political rights to this community.
A fact-finding committee, led by the Deputy Mayor of Pune Siddharth Dhende claimed on Tuesday that the Bhima-Koregaon violence was “pre-planned” and orchestrated by right-wing activists Sambhaji Bide and Milind Ekbote.
Commenting on the incident, political psychologist and social theorist Ashis Nandy told Gulf News: “It is rather ironical that the socially deprived class [Dalits] in India is suddenly feeling politically empowered. There are so many states that have backward caste representatives as their chief ministers. Added to that of course is the even larger reality that the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, himself is a member of a backward caste.”
According to Nandy, what has led to so many protest-demonstrations in the recent past is a certain degree of political empowerment without any matching social or economic gains for this class. “Unfortunately, no government has sought to address this disenchantment in coherent terms,” Nandy added.