Beef eating protest alone won’t solve Tamil Nadu’s Dalit crisis

In India, one only has to read the newspapers to think this is a nation of comedians, allowing the press to file Onion-like reports every day. Arguably, the most ridiculous of these stories come out of Tamil Nadu. Take, for instance, the controversy around the ‘thaali removal function’. It all began when a TV channel, Puthiya Thalaimurai, announced a programme to debate the relevance of the 'thaali', as the mangalsutra is known in Tamil. Hindu outfits immediately protested against the programme, and the channel subsequently cancelled it, but two low intensity tiffin box bombs were nevertheless thrown at the channel’s office. 

The most vociferous protests against the programme had come from the Hindu Munnani Katchi, a saffron party formed in the wake of the 1981 Meenakshipuram Conversions, which witnessed more than 800 Dalits mass convert to Islam in a village where the caste Hindus were preventing them from entering temples and accessing public wells.

Chances are that the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK), originally formed by EV Ramaswamy with the lofty goal of fighting casteism and the unrelated one of claiming a Tamil homeland within the then Madras Presidency, would have protested against the programme if it hadn’t been for the Hindu outfits’ protest. The DK now has nebulous goals, which range from atheism to increasing reservation for caste Hindus, and include protecting Tamil culture somewhere along the way.

Amid the slew of articles debating whether the thaali was a traditional part of the Tamil culture and Hindu weddings, these two parties clashed over the issue. The DK now held that the thaali represented ‘slavery’ and ‘oppression of women’.

The result of this tug of war was the announcement of a function by the DK, hilariously titled ‘Thaali removal and beef banquet’, and held for good measure on April 14, the birth anniversary of Dr BR Ambedkar, the Dalit icon who has been regularly appropriated for causes on which his stance is unknown.

The police promptly imposed a ban order on the function. The DK approached the High Court, where a single judge quashed the ban order, only for his decision to be overturned by a special bench the next day, right before the scheduled start of the event at 10:00 am. 

However, the DK had advanced the function to 7:00 am, and 21 women – some accompanied by their spouses – were said to have attended, and discarded their thaalis. Conveniently for the DK, the women donated these gold ornaments to its coffers. 

Since the thaali is traditionally removed upon the death of the husband, the Hindu Munnani symbolically held the sixteenth day ceremonies, which are observed for the dead, at the end of the month, praying for the ‘souls’ of the men who had been ‘murdered’ by their wives through the disposal of the thaali.

Hindu groups had also countered the function by distributing thaalis, vermillion and turmeric to married women in temples across the state. 

This little dance is yet another instance of Tamil Nadu going nuts over 'protecting culture' on the one hand and 'ending superstition' on the other, usually to the detriment of everyone involved. 

Every January, when Pongal comes around, most Dravida parties unite to protest against the Supreme Court ban on jallikattu, or bull-fighting, a monstrously cruel ‘sport’ in which lives of men and cattle were lost every year.

In the case of the thaali issue, the DK appeared rather surprised that no mainstream political party had got involved. Strangely enough, even DMK patriarch Karunanidhi, who can usually be relied on to exacerbate any public disorder when he is not in power, distanced himself from it. The DK and its affiliates responded with aggression. 

This party had made its name in its early years by bringing Dalits into the inner sanctum of temples, where only priests are allowed. They were also famous for threatening priests to recite shlokas in Tamil instead of Sanskrit. 

Now, hooligans from its affiliated parties have taken to equating all ‘regressive’ rituals with Brahminism. They tend to express their anti-Brahminism by brutalising old men and cutting off their sacred threads.

The ongoing fight between parties of contrasting ideologies in Tamil Nadu is symptomatic of the state’s clinging on to a notion that it is ‘progressive’, while embracing the most futile causes. 

How can a cause such as the ‘burden of the thaali’ be said to have any significance when husbands are entitled by law to rape their wives? What is the point of debating gender equality in a country which cannot even guarantee the safety of women, where there are no statistics on acid attacks, where lawmakers are obsessed with whether women were ‘asking for it’ by wearing what they were wearing, where wife-beating is considered macho?

How can a beef-eating banquet be seen as a symbol of liberation from casteism when the Divya-Ilavarasan case caused caste-driven riots throughout Tamil Nadu, culminating in the suspicious death of the Dalit youth, Ilavarasan, only two years ago?

And, how does attacking defenceless old men amount to fighting casteism?

While no one is willing to touch on issues that are in urgent need of debate, parties in this state busy themselves with protesting against television programmes and movies.

That is progressive Tamil Nadu for you.