Dalit anger is not new. India keeps caste alive and kicking

If screaming headlines in newspapers and shrill TV studio debates are a measure of the ferment and outrage around us, then at this very moment we in India are being boiled alive in a cauldron brimming over with Dalit anger. But that’s not quite the case.

The Tamil superhero Rajinikanth’s new film Kabali has just opened to packed houses across the country. Kashmir, to use a unique Indian expression, is limping back to normalcy after a bout of rioting.

Farmers are celebrating this monsoon’s bountiful rains. The chattering classes are, well, chattering away. In brief, India is trudging along as usual. The much-reported Dalit anger is just another distraction in this country's daily life.

Protests

True, there are street protests at Una in Gujarat, where a group of "cow protection" vigilantes, among them a Muslim man, assaulted Dalits, the outcastes of Indian society, for skinning a dead cow.

And in Lucknow, the lumpen followers of India’s tallest Dalit leader Mayawati have been hurling choicest abuse at the wife and daughter of a (now sacked) BJP leader for using the "P" word while criticising their dear leader, "Behenji".

The anger of politicians and intellectuals on public display is largely faux; the ersatz outrage that is periodically witnessed reaffirms the "liberal" credentials of our Leftliberal elite, but does little to alleviate the misery of India’s Scheduled Castes who are yet to claw up the economic ladder to comparative prosperity.

There is no percentage in blaming any single person, community, political party, organisation, or even the provincial administration. For all our pretences of social equality, caste and casteism permeate both society and polity.

Manusmriti, a long-forgotten and entirely ignored text of Hindu code, is often targeted as the fountainhead of caste, casteism and caste-based discrimination. That is far from the truth.

The Constitution of the Socialist, Secular, Democratic Republic of India mandates caste in the most insidious manner; caste-based affirmative policies reinforce casteism and serve as the premise of identity politics.

In fact, barring possibly West Bengal, which has had a three-decade long engagement with upper caste Communists in power, caste shapes identity and defines, ever so narrowly, an individual, family and community.

Sperm banks in Bihar have test-tubes neatly categorised according to the caste of the donor. Educated and skilled IT engineers pushing the frontiers of technology avail of their services, along with clients from the rural hinterland.

The obsession with caste purity is not necessarily limited to the upper castes, or "forward castes" as they are referred to, relegating the others to the stature of "backward castes".

This crude definition forms the core of heartland politics; it’s all perfectly legitimate and politically sanctioned. The woman who cleans the building where we live belongs to one of the lowest rungs of the listed Scheduled Castes (the Dalits have their own caste hierarchy).

Her husband is a layabout and she has a brood of children. Word went around one day that her daughter had eloped — escaped from grinding poverty, really — with a young man who had a job.

Our cleaning woman was most distraught. We tried to reason with her, tell her that it means she has one less mouth to feed, that the man had a job and she would be happy.

It was like talking to a wall. She kept repeating, “But he’s not from our caste.” The runaway girl was dragged back, bundled off to her native village, and forcibly married to a man “from our caste”.

Experience

This real-life experience recalled an anecdote recounted by Nirad C Chaudhuri in one of his autobiographical writings. One evening there was loud wailing at the house next door where a well-off Bengali Christian family lived.

Nirad Babu asked his wife to check if everything was fine. She found the women of the family were inconsolable because the only son had decided to marry a woman of his choice. Further inquiries revealed the woman was a Bengali Christian, too.

Then what’s your problem, a perplexed Mrs Chaudhuri asked. “Don’t you see, she is from a lower caste,” retorted the daughter before breaking into a fresh bout of loud sobbing.

This was long before Independence and the advent of Nehruvian socialism that was supposed to rid India of its cobwebs of faith, superstition and other associated social ills. Seven decades after India woke to freedom as the world slept, the markers of caste and community have grown firmer.

Example

It’s not about Hindus alone; Christians, Muslims and Sikhs segregate themselves in sub-communities of upper and lower, forward and backward castes. Sikhism as a faith is a shining example of egalitarianism and equality. In practice, Jat Sikhs refuse to let in Mazhabi Sikhs.

Christian graveyards have designated areas for Scheduled Caste converts. Muslims place their social ancestry just below their faith; both are non-negotiable. The near-extinct Brahmos disowned and discarded the caste they were born into, but never opened the doors of their splendid chapels to those born into lower castes.

A slew of laws, from temple entry to prohibition of atrocities, has served little purpose other than breeding new animosities.

If laws were enough deterrent, Meenakshipuram, where 300 Dalit families embraced Islam hoping to escape discrimination and ostracisation in 1981, would not have happened. We are what we are, as a nation and a people.

To remould ourselves and recast our attitudes, we need our inner voice of reason to be awakened. That can be done either through a constitutionally mandated "Second Republic" or a massive multi-faith reform movement. There is no third option.

Since neither the first nor the second will happen any time soon, we should give up our false pretences and get real.

For starters, ignore the sanctimonious carping of self-righteous politicians whose political fortunes are linked to keeping caste identities alive and pandering to rank casteism.