My Seditious Heart

by Arundhati Roy

  By the mid-1940s, as the prospect of partition loomed, the subordinated castes in several states had been “assimilated” into Hinduism. They began to participate in militant Hindu rallies; in Noakhali in Bengal, for instance, they functioned as an outlying vigilante army in the run-up to the bloodbath of Partition.262

  In 1947 Pakistan became the world’s first Islamic republic. More than six decades later, as the war on terror continues in its many avatars, political Islam is turning inward, narrowing and hardening its precincts. Meanwhile, political Hinduism is expanding and broadening. Today, even the Bhakti movement has been “assimilated” as a form of popular, folk Hinduism.263 The naram dal, often dressed up as “secular nationalism,” has recruited Jotirao Phule, Pandita Ramabai, and even Ambedkar, all of whom denounced Hinduism, back into the “Hindu fold” as people Hindus can be “proud” of.264 Ambedkar is being assimilated in another way, too—as Gandhi’s junior partner in their joint fight against untouchability.

  The anxiety around demography has by no means abated. Hindu supremacist organizations like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Shiv Sena are working hard (and successfully) at luring Dalits and Adivasis into the “Hindu fold.” In the forests of Central India, where a corporate war for minerals is raging, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal (both organizations that are loosely linked to the RSS) run mass conversion programs called “ghar wapsi”—the return home—in which Adivasi people are “reconverted” to Hinduism. Privileged-caste Hindus, who pride themselves on being descendants of Aryan invaders, are busy persuading people who belong to indigenous, autochthonous tribes to return “home.” It makes you feel that irony is no longer a literary option in this part of the world.

  Dalits who have been harnessed to the “Hindu fold” serve another purpose: even if they have not been part of the outlying army, they can be used as scapegoats for the crimes the privileged castes commit.

  In 2002, in the Godhra railway station in Gujarat, a train compartment was mysteriously burned down, and fifty-eight Hindu pilgrims were charred to death. With not much evidence to prove their guilt, some Muslims were arrested as the perpetrators. The Muslim community as a whole was collectively blamed for the crime. Over the next few days, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal led a pogrom in which more than two thousand Muslims were murdered, women were mob-raped and burnt alive in broad daylight, and a hundred and fifty thousand people were driven from their homes.265 After the pogrom, 287 people were arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA). Of them, 286 were Muslim and one was a Sikh.266 Most of them are still in prison.

  If Muslims were the “terrorists,” who were the “rioters”? In his essay “Blood under Saffron: The Myth of Dalit–Muslim Confrontation,” Raju Solanki, a Gujarati Dalit writer who studied the pattern of arrests, says that of the 1,577 “Hindus” who were arrested (not under POTA, of course), 747 were Dalits and 797 belonged to “Other Backward Classes.” Nineteen were Patels, two were Banias, and two were Brahmins. The massacres of Muslims occurred in several cities and villages in Gujarat. However, Solanki points out that not a single massacre took place in bastis where Dalits and Muslims lived together.267

  Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat who presided over the pogrom, has since won the state elections three times in a row. Despite being a Shudra, he has endeared himself to the Hindu right by being more blatantly and ruthlessly anti-Muslim than any other Indian politician. When he was asked in a recent interview whether he regretted what happened in 2002, he said, “[I]f we are driving a car, we are a driver, and someone else is driving a car and we’re sitting behind, even then if a puppy comes under the wheel, will it be painful or not? Of course it is. If I’m a Chief Minister or not, I’m a human being. If something bad happens anywhere, it is natural to be sad.”268

  As blatantly casteist and communal as the Hindu right is, in their search for a foothold in mainstream politics, even radical Dalits have made common cause with it. In the mid-1990s, the remarkable Dalit poet Namdeo Dhasal, one of the founders of the Dalit Panthers, joined the Shiv Sena. In 2006, Dhasal shared the dais with RSS chief K. S. Sudarshan at a book launch and praised the RSS’s efforts at equality.269

  It is easy to dismiss what Dhasal did as an unforgivable compromise with fascists. However, in parliamentary politics, after the Poona Pact—or rather, because of the Poona Pact—Dalits as a political constituency have had to make alliances with those whose interests are hostile to their own. For Dalits, as we have seen, the distance between the Hindu “right” and the Hindu “left” is not as great as it might appear to be to others.

  Despite the debacle of the Poona Pact, Ambedkar didn’t entirely give up the idea of separate electorates. Unfortunately, his second party, the Scheduled Castes Federation, was defeated in the 1946 elections to the Provincial Legislature. The defeat meant that Ambedkar lost his place on the Executive Council in the Interim Ministry that was formed in August 1946. It was a serious blow, because Ambedkar desperately wanted to use his position on the Executive Council to become part of the committee that would draft the Indian Constitution. Worried that this was not going to be possible, and in order to put external pressure on the Drafting Committee, Ambedkar, in March 1947, published a document called States and Minorities—his proposed constitution for a “United States of India” (an idea whose time has perhaps come). Fortunately for him, the Muslim League chose Jogendranath Mandal, a colleague of Ambedkar’s and a Scheduled Castes Federation leader from Bengal, as one of its candidates on the Executive Council. Mandal made sure that Ambedkar was elected to the Constituent Assembly from the Bengal province. But disaster struck again. After Partition, East Bengal went to Pakistan and Ambedkar lost his position once more. In a gesture of goodwill, and perhaps because there was no one as equal to the task as he was, the Congress appointed Ambedkar to the Constituent Assembly. In August 1947, Ambedkar was appointed India’s first law minister and chairman of the Drafting Committee for the Constitution. Across the new border, Jogendranath Mandal became Pakistan’s first law minister.270 It was extraordinary that, through all the chaos and prejudice, the first law ministers of both India and Pakistan were Dalits. Mandal was eventually disillusioned with Pakistan and returned to India. Ambedkar was disillusioned too, but he really had nowhere to go.

  The Indian Constitution was drafted by a committee and reflected the views of its privileged-caste members more than Ambedkar’s. Still, several of the safeguards for Untouchables that he had outlined in States and Minorities did find their way in. Some of Ambedkar’s more radical suggestions, such as nationalizing agriculture and key industries, were summarily dropped. The drafting process left Ambedkar more than a little unhappy. In March 1955, he said in the Rajya Sabha (India’s Upper House of Parliament): “The Constitution was a wonderful temple we built for the gods, but before they could be installed, the devils have taken possession.”271 In 1954, Ambedkar contested his last election as a Scheduled Castes Federation candidate and lost.

  Ambedkar was disillusioned with Hinduism, with its high priests, its saints and its politicians. Yet the response to temple entry probably taught him how much people long to belong to a spiritual community, and how inadequate a charter of civil rights or a constitution is to address those needs.

  After twenty years of contemplation, during which he studied Islam as well as Christianity, Ambedkar turned to Buddhism. This, too, he entered in his own, distinct, angular way. He was wary of classical Buddhism, of the ways in which Buddhist philosophy could, had, and continues to be used to justify war and unimaginable cruelty. (The most recent example is the Sri Lankan government’s version of state Buddhism, which culminated in the genocidal killing of at least forty thousand ethnic Tamils and the internal displacement of three hundred thousand people in 2009.272) Ambedkar’s Buddhism, called “Navayana Buddhism”273 or the Fourth Way, distinguished between religion and dhamma. “The purpose of Religion is to explain the origin of the world,” Ambedkar said, sounding
very much like Karl Marx, “the purpose of Dhamma is to reconstruct the world.”274 On October 14, 1956, in Nagpur, only months before his death, Ambedkar, Sharda Kabir, his (Brahmin) second wife, and half a million supporters took the vow of the Three Jewels and Five Precepts and converted to Buddhism. It was his most radical act. It marked his departure from Western liberalism and its purely materialistic vision of a society based on “rights,” a vision whose origin coincided with the rise of modern capitalism.

  Ambedkar did not have enough money to print his major work on Buddhism, The Buddha and His Dhamma, before he died.275

  He wore suits, yes. But he died in debt.

  Where does that leave the rest of us?

  Though they call the age we are living through the Kali Yuga,276 Ram Rajya could be just around the corner. The fourteenth-century Babri Masjid, supposedly built on the birthplace of Lord Ram in Ayodhya, was demolished by Hindu storm troopers on December 6, 1992, Ambedkar’s death anniversary. We await with apprehension the construction of a grand Ram temple in its place. As Mahatma Gandhi desired, the rich man has been left in possession of his (as well as everybody else’s) wealth. Chaturvarna reigns unchallenged: the Brahmin largely controls knowledge; the Vaishya dominates trade. The Kshatriyas have seen better days, but they are still, for the most part, rural landowners. The Shudras live in the basement of the Big House and keep intruders at bay. The Adivasis are fighting for their very survival. And the Dalits—well, we’ve been through all that.

  Can caste be annihilated?

  Not unless we show the courage to rearrange the stars in our firmament. Not unless those who call themselves revolutionary develop a radical critique of Brahminism. Not unless those who understand Brahminism sharpen their critique of capitalism.

  And not unless we read Babasaheb Ambedkar. If not inside our classrooms, then outside them. Until then we will remain what he called the “sick men” and women of Hindustan, who seem to have no desire to get well.

  “For Ambedkar, ‘the people’ was not a homogeneous category that glowed with the rosy hue of innate righteousness.”

  First published as the introduction to B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (New Delhi: Navayana, 2014).

  PROFESSOR, P.O.W

  May 9, 2015, marks one year since Dr. G. N. Saibaba, lecturer of English at Ramlal Anand College, Delhi University, was abducted by unknown men on his way home from work. When her husband went missing and did not respond to calls to his cell phone, Vasantha, Dr. Saibaba’s wife, filed a missing person’s complaint in the local police station. Subsequently, the unknown men identified themselves as the Maharashtra Police and described the abduction as an arrest.

  Why did they abduct him in this way when they could easily have arrested him formally, this professor who happens to be wheelchair bound and paralyzed from his waist down since he was five years old? There were two reasons: First, because they knew from their previous visits to his house that if they picked him up from his home on the Delhi University campus, they would have to deal with a crowd of angry people—professors, activists, and students who loved and admired Professor Saibaba not just because he was a dedicated teacher but also because of his fearless political worldview. Second, because abducting him made it look as though they, armed only with their wit and daring, had tracked down and captured a dangerous terrorist.

  The truth is more prosaic. Many of us had known for a long time that Professor Saibaba was likely to be arrested. It had been the subject of open discussion for months. Never in all those months, right up to the day of his abduction, did it ever occur to him or to anybody else that he should do anything else but face up to it fair and square. In fact, during that period, he put in extra hours and wrote his doctoral thesis on the politics of the discipline of Indian English writing. Why did we think he would be arrested? What was his crime?

  In September 2009, the then home minister P. Chidambaram announced a war called Operation Green Hunt in what is known as India’s Red Corridor. It was advertised as a cleanup operation by paramilitary forces against Maoist “Terrorists” in the jungles of Central India. In reality it was the official name for what had so far been a scorched-earth battle being waged by state-sponsored vigilante militias (the Salwa Judum in Bastar and unnamed militias in other states). The mandate was to clear the forests of its troublesome residents so that mining and infrastructure-building corporations could move ahead with their stalled projects. The fact that signing over Adivasi homelands to private corporations is illegal and unconstitutional did not bother the United Progressive Alliance government of the time. (The present government’s new Land Acquisition Act proposes to exalt that lawlessness into law.) Thousands of paramilitary troops accompanied by vigilante militias invaded the forests, burning villages, murdering villagers, and raping women. Tens of thousands of Adivasis were forced to flee from their homes and hide in the jungle for months under the open sky. The backlash against this brutality was that hundreds of local people signed up to join the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) raised by the Communist Party of India (Maoist), whom former prime minister Manmohan Singh famously described as India’s “single largest internal security threat.” Even now, the whole region remains convulsed by what can only be called a civil war.

  As is the case with any protracted war, the situation has become far from simple. While some in the resistance continue to fight the good fight, others have become opportunists, extortionists, and ordinary criminals. It is not always easy to tell one group from another, and that makes it easy to tar them all with the same brush. Horrible atrocities have taken place. One set of atrocities is called Terrorism and the other, Progress.

  In 2010 and 2011 when Operation Green Hunt was at its most brutal, a campaign against it began to gather speed. Public meetings and rallies took place in several cities. As word of what was happening in the forest spread, the international media began to pay attention. One of the main mobilizers of this public and entirely un-secret campaign against Operation Green Hunt was Dr. Saibaba. The campaign was, at least temporarily, successful. The government was shamed into pretending that there was no such thing as Operation Green Hunt, that it was merely a media creation. (Of course, the assault on the Adivasi homelands continues, largely unreported, because now it is an Operation Without a Name. This week, on May 5, 2015, Chhavindra Karma, the son of the founder of Salwa Judum Mahendra Karma, who was killed in a Maoist ambush, announced the inauguration of Salwa Judum-2. This despite the Supreme Court judgment declaring Salwa Judum-1 to be illegal and unconstitutional and ordering that it be disbanded.)

  In Operation No-Name anybody who criticizes or impedes the implementation of state policy is called a Maoist. Thousands of Dalits and Adivasis, thus labeled, are in jail absurdly charged with crimes like Sedition and Waging War against the State under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act—a law which would make any intelligent human being bust a gut laughing if only the uses to which it is being put were not so tragic. While villagers languish for years in prison, with no legal help and no hope of justice, often not even sure what crime they have been accused of, the state has turned its attention to what it calls Overground Workers in the cities.

  Determined not to allow a repeat of the situation it found itself in earlier, the Ministry of Home Affairs spelled out its intentions clearly in its 2013 affidavit filed in the Supreme Court. It said: “The ideologues and supporters of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in cities and towns have undertaken a concerted and systematic propaganda against the State to project it in a poor light … it is these ideologues who have kept the Maoist movement alive and are in many ways more dangerous than the cadres of the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army.”

  Enter Dr. Saibaba.

  We knew he was a marked man when several clearly planted, hyperbolic stories about him began appear in the papers. (When they don’t have real evidence, their next best option—tried and tested—is to create a climate of suspicion around the
ir quarry.)

  On September 12, 2013, his home was raided by fifty policemen armed with a search warrant for stolen property from a magistrate in Aheri, a small town in Maharashtra. They did not find any stolen property. Instead, they took away (stole?) his personal laptop, hard disks, and pen drives. Two weeks later Suhash Bawache (the investigating officer for the case) rang Dr. Saibaba and asked him for the passwords to access the hard disks. He gave it to them. On January 9, 2014, a team of policemen interrogated him at his home for several hours. And on May 9 they abducted him. That same night they flew him to Nagpur and from there drove him to Aheri and then back to Nagpur with hundreds of policemen escorting the convoy of jeeps and mine-proof vehicles. He was incarcerated in the Nagpur Central jail in its notorious “Anda Cell,” adding his name to the three hundred thousand under-trials who crowd our country’s prisons. In the midst of all the high theater, his wheelchair was damaged. Dr. Saibaba is what is known as “90 percent disabled.” In order to prevent his physical condition from further deteriorating, he needs constant care, physiotherapy, and medication. Despite this he was thrown into a bare cell (where he still remains) with nobody to assist him even to use the bathroom. He had to crawl around on all fours. None of this would fall under the definition of torture. Of course not. The great advantage the state has over this particular prisoner is that he is not equal among prisoners. He can be cruelly tortured, perhaps even killed, without anybody having to so much as lay a finger on him.

  The next morning’s papers in Nagpur had front-page pictures of the heavily armed team of Maharashtra Police proudly posing with their trophy—the dreaded terrorist, Professor P.O.W., in his damaged wheelchair.

  He has been charged under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, Section 13 (taking part in/advocating/abetting/inciting the commission of unlawful activity); Section 18 (conspiring/attempting to commit a terrorist act); Section 20 (being a member of a terrorist gang or organization), Section 38 (associating with a terrorist organization with intention to further its activities); and Section 39 (inviting support and addressing meetings for the purpose of encouraging support for a terrorist organization.) He has been accused of giving a computer chip to Hem Mishra, a Jawaharlal Nehru University student, to deliver to Comrade Narmada of the CPI (Maoist). Hem Mishra was arrested at the Ballarshah railway station in August 2013 and is in Nagpur jail along with Dr. Saibaba. The three others accused with them in this “conspiracy” are out on bail.