Modi’s Swachh Bharat is also an excuse for India to be cleansed of its 'unwanted others'
In Pratapgarh (Rajasthan), the local civic body chief and three other municipal council employees engaged in the Swachh Bharat campaign lynched Zafar Khan, a local activist, to death on June 16.
His fatal “crime” was that he objected to them taking photographs of women defecating in the open. Zafar died on the spot, an FIR was registered and his body would now go for an autopsy.
However, if we really wanted to know what killed Zafar, we ought to rather do an autopsy of our society, our polity. But before that, let us go over what happened in some more detail.
The incident, as reported by The Indian Express, took place near Bagwasa Kachi Basti area around 6.30 am when a few women had gone to attend the nature’s call. The employees of Pratapgarh town municipality tried scaring away the women and started taking photographs of the women defecating in the open.
It was then that Khan intervened and tried stopping them from taking pictures. In retaliation, the civic officials beat him till he died on the spot. “My brother Zafar… asked them not to click photographs,” wrote Noor Mohammad in his complaint, “but the men started assaulting him with lathis, and punched and kicked him. He fell and died on the spot. All the people present at the spot, including the women, can identify the men who killed my brother.”
And it is not surprising, given the pattern since the Dadri incident, that an FIR was filed not against the assaulters but against the deceased based on the Nagar Parishad commissioner’s complaint under IPC sections 332 (voluntarily causing hurt to deter public servant from his duty) and 353 (assault or criminal force to deter public servant from discharge of duty).
The CPI (ML), a Left organisation of which Khan was a member, later shared a letter written by him in which he had detailed the harassment of women by civic officials. This included “running after women, taking away their water mugs and abusing them while they defecated”.
In a statement, CPI (ML) said: “Comrade Zafar himself had submitted a memorandum to the Nagar Parishad against the campaign of public shaming and bullying of women for defecating in the open.”
The profile of the assaulters
Now let’s look at the profile of the assaulters. Is it a coincidence that the Parishad commissioner is one Ashok Jain and the employees under him, his subordinates, are the likes of Kamal Harijan, Ritesh Harijan and Manish Harijan? No.
While the white collar jobs or the upper echelon within civic bodies remain “reserved” for the dominant caste, the army of subordinates in menial employment across municipalities continues to remain “reserved” for the Dalits, reproducing in exact the existing caste hierarchies in the society.
There are for instance around 30,000 sanitation workers employed by the Greater Mumbai Municipal Corporation and all 30,000 are Dalits. This is representative of the caste profile of the workers who are working in the underpaid, as also informal quarters, of the sanitation department across the country.
Milind Ranade, the general secretary of the Mumbai Sanitation Workers’ Union, says that at places, the Brahmins are permanent workers, but they are not actually doing the sanitation work. Rather, he is receiving a salary of Rs 21,000 and paying a Dalit to do the work at Rs 5,000, while on paper the employee is marked “present”.
He is getting Rs 15,000 for nothing while Rs 1,000 is given for officials as dasturi (commission) to keep quiet. He also adds that each state now uses contract workers for the core functions of the corporation, which means only Dalits are becoming contract workers. So, instead of getting permanent employment, they work with no job or social security, with no PF or gratuity or anything, without any protection of law.
From sweepers to manual scavengers to ragpickers – a look into their profiles exemplifies the perpetuation of the Brahmanical edicts of purity and untouchability in our “Swachh Bharat”.
But similarly, the fact that the one lynched to death is one Zafar Khan is also not a coincidence. Because the only instance where the likes of Ashok Jain come together with the likes of Kamal Harijan, Ritesh Harijan and Manish Harijan is when they are placed vis-a-vis a Zafar Khan.
Ambedkar’s insight is clinical in this context when he says, “Hindu society as such does not exist. It is only a collection of castes... A caste has no feeling that it is affiliated to other castes, except when there is a Hindu-Muslim riot.”
From Gujarat to Trilokpuri to UP, it is only in communal flare-ups, pogroms or anti-Muslim electoral polarisation that a momentary curtain is drawn upon the existing hierarchies of caste. The Bheem Army activist of Saharanpur Chandrashekar puts it succinctly, “For elections, we are Hindu. After that we are Dalits.”
And herein lies the significance of constantly stoking the communal fire for the RSS and the BJP. It is only the “unwanted other” of the Muslim – personified as Zafar Khan or Pehlu Khan or Mohd Akhlaq – that keeps the saffron myth alive.
Cleansed India?
And this is where the imagery of “clean India” comes the closest to a “cleansed India” - an India that is cleansed of its “unwanted others”. Cleansing, or more precisely ethnic cleansing, has been an integral part of the fascist agenda. It has been so since the Nazis. And even then this was packaged in the idea of “racial hygiene”.
The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring became a tool to “cleanse” the German nation of the “unwanted”. One can recall the cleansing drives of the Jews, the Gypsies, the homosexuals, the disabled, the old, and the “commies” under Hitler.
And this is accomplished by creating an internal “other” – an “enemy within” who stands in the way of achieving the ultimate “national glory”. In Hitler’s Germany it was certainly the Jews. Venomous hate was packaged and spread describing the Jews at times as “wandering cultural parasites, consumed by sex and money”; as a poisonous "race," which "lived off" the other races and “weakened” them; as “vermin” that needed to be cleansed.
Much of the same were borrowed into the Indian context by the RSS with the Jews being replaced by Muslims. There is an eerie similarity in the language, expressions, hate-words, and propaganda tools we hear around today in this country whether in the name of “gau-raksha”, or “Love-Jihad”, or “ghar-wapsi”.
So much so that the “Sharia-Bolshevic threat” – a curious expression that made most of us laugh when the ABVP peddled it in JNU - was nothing but a rip off from the Nazi coinage of “Judeo-Bolshevic threat”.
In the vision of a Hindutva, or to be precise, a Brahmanical Hindutva and ruthlessly neo-liberal India, while Muslims top the rank of “unwanted others” to be cleansed, there are plenty underneath them. The Dalits, Christians, women, Leftists, workers, farmers, other genders - they are all in that list.
Modi’s Swachh Bharat ultimately is also an India that is cleansed of its “unwanted others”, of all those dissenters or “anti-nationals” as they are labelled today. So when the Swachh Bharat campaign claims the life of one Zafar Khan, it must cause alarm.
Swachh Bharat, Gandhi and his Harijans
A few last thoughts. The RSS/BJP, unlike the Congress, is a far more regimented, cadre-based social force with a clear ideological direction. Being so, the present government is also in a spree to “cleanse” India of earlier moorings or motifs of the earlier Congress regime.
One such symbol that has been under the axe has been that of Gandhi. Whether from Khaadi Udyog or from textbooks and so on, Gandhi as an icon has been cropped out. RSS with its proud history of being avowedly against Gandhi, as also with its iconisation of Nathuram Godse, his killer, gives the ideological basis to this “cleansing”.
And hence it’s not surprising. In such a context, however, what is rather perplexing is the fact that Modi chose to use Gandhi for none other than his most publicised Swachh Bharat Mission. Why? The answer probably lay in caste.
The Swachh Bharat Abhiyan is the biggest flagship project of the Modi government and is also one of the biggest testaments to the gross invisibilisation of caste in this country. The national convenor of Safai Karmchari Andolan (SKA) Bezwada Wilson raises a simple question: who will clean the 12 crore toilets being built under Swachh Bharat campaign?
And in the absence of suction pumps, how shall they be cleaned? Far from any goal of eradicating manual scavenging, the Swachh Bharat Mission is a recipe to perpetuate manual scavenging by the Dalits for decades to come.
The anger and anguish of the Dalit sanitation workers raged through the country as the Bheem Army raised these fundamental questions and many more. The historic Una uprising was also spearheaded by Dalits who, being denied of land and every other resource, were forced to be employed in the menial tasks of skinning and removing dead animals.
Being lynched for the same by “gau rakshaks”, they refused to remove carcasses anymore. It is in this context that Gandhi comes to the rescue of Modi. The choice of Gandhi in anticipation of these contradictions seems to have been a conscious one so as to use the identity of Gandhi’s spiritual, docile and benign Harijan as opposed to the far more dangerous, vocal and politically conscious Dalit identity.
It seems to be only to tap into Gandhi’s vocabulary of invisibilising caste and the material and cultural indignation ingrained in the caste system.
Bezwada Wilson says: “In my school textbooks, I never read about what BR Ambedkar had to say about untouchability. We only knew what Gandhiji had to say. And we know that Gandhiji compared women manual scavengers to mothers who clean up their babies. Even today, we are not ready to acknowledge the indignity of an entire community assigned to clean up other people’s excrement.”
That pair of glasses that forms the symbol of Modi’s Swachh Bharat Mission is therefore one of his biggest trickery. And if this can be harnessed further to mobilise the Dalits to spill Muslim blood, to make one oppressed fight the other, that would be his biggest success.
The most “dangerous” and thereby also a most befitting reply to this agenda of perpetuating casteist and communal hatred thereby came last year from Una. As the Dalits and Muslims marched together through the streets of Gujarat demanding land, employment and dignity, it could strike at the roots of both cow-communalism and caste discrimination.
As they prepare to carry forward the agenda of Una this year again with yet another “Azadi March”, we ought to strengthen them by all possible means.