Banyan Tree Adventures

by Keith Forrester

  There are some 180 million Dalits today in India and, on a wide variety of measures, are substantially worse off when compared with the rest of the population; less than a third are literate, just under 50% exist on less than $2 a day and infant mortality rates much higher. There are another 60 million Dalits around the world who continue to face discrimination to a greater or lesser degree. CasteWatch UK for example was recently formed to confront the spreading influence of caste in Britain. In India Dalits confront total social exclusion especially in rural areas on a daily basis. For example, eating out often includes sitting outside, eating at a distance from other customers, drinking from special ‘Untouchable’ cups and poured from a non-polluting distance. After drinking, the cup must be washed by the Dalit and placed on the Dalit cup shelf outside the cafe.

  Entrenched systems of privilege anywhere diminish the quality of life and democracy for all. In Britain we are familiar with the upper echelons of the military, the judiciary, the media, the civil service and our political parties being dominated by the minority from a fee-paying educational background. Although different in nature, origin and outcome both systems socially and politically exclude and divide. In India, the violence, oppression and social brutality of caste continues for around one quarter of the population. Examples and reports almost on a weekly basis of caste violence in the media are not uncommon. A recent article in the Indian Economic and Political Weekly journal analyses in painful detail the ransacking and torching of 268 Dalit homes in three villages in Tamil Nadu’s Dharmapuri district. Tamil Nadu is a state with a record of many progressive reforms in recent years and home to major anti-caste organisations yet is witnessing rising violence against Dalits. In 2011, 890 Dalit women were murdered, 40% of them in caste honour killings. A nongovernment organisation in Madurai, Tamil Nadu has recorded 144 murders, 18 of which were women and 336 cases of atrocities against Dalits.

  Numerous other reports and stories of atrocities suffered by Dalits today could be identified. In the British Guardian newspaper of October 2014, for example, there is an article entitled “Lynching of boy underlines how the curse of caste still blights India”. The report details the burning alive of Sai Ram aged 15, a goat herder whose goats strayed on to the land of a higher landowning caste in a village south of Patna in the state of Bihar. Sai Ram was just one of 17,000 Dalits to fall victim to caste violence in Bihar. Earlier that month, five Dalit women were allegedly gang-raped by upper caste men. Of the 17,000 pending trials in Bihar involving charges of violence against Dalits, only a tenth were dealt with in 2013.

  Lowest on the caste demarcations are the 800,000 or so toilet cleaners. Thekaekara reports on an interview with a toilet cleaner from Gujarat which illustrates the humiliation, suffering and stoicism of one particular occupational grouping. “In the rainy season,” the woman said, “it is really bad. Water mixes with the shit and when we carry it (on our heads) it drips from the basket, onto our clothes, our bodies, our faces. When I return home I find it difficult to eat food sometimes. The smell never gets out of my clothes, my hair. But this is our fate. To feed my children I have no option but to do this work.” ‘Fate’ is the key word in these comments from the toilet cleaner. ‘Fate’ for many Dalits is seen as an incontestable consequence of a religiously ordered and structured social system; a system that is characterised by its extreme inequality, labour and sexual exploitation (semi-slavery in some cases), powerlessness and degradation. What started out as medieval occupational divisions were cemented structurally by a set of powerful social and cultural rules. The origins of caste are disputed. For some, the nature of this ‘fate’ for most people is underpinned and legitimated by powerful 3,000-year-old Indian Hindu texts, scriptures and spiritual claims. Occasionally, a dissenting view can be found. An article in daily newspaper The Hindu from 2001 challenges the religious orthodoxy underpinning casteism. The Rig Vedic scriptures, it argues, not only repudiated the birth-based caste system but advocated a Varna system based on Talent, Action and Aptitude (Guna, Karma and Svabhava). The article continues by stating, “that scriptural legitimacy had to be invented for caste… as it could not have been justified or legitimated in other way… In point of fact, caste is a post-Vedic invention meant to perpetuate the religious, social and economic domination of a few over the rest.” More recent studies on the origins of caste stress the colonial experience of the British as crucial in persisting with and codifying understandings and practices of caste. It was a useful and convenient administrative tool for arranging and governing the myriad complex communities.

  Irrespective of the origins of caste, more worrying is the spread of caste in more recent times to other religions that admit converts from Hinduism such as Islam, Christianity and Buddhism. Even Sikhism the great reforming religion launched some 300 years ago is not exempt from aspects of casteism. If the euphoric birth of Independent India was expected to wash away caste, the opposite has happened. A narrow and intolerant form of Hinduism has begun to assert itself in the country over the last two or three decades. “The major institutions of our society and culture of our society are being ideologically colonised. Policies and priorities are being tilted in favour of the upper castes and to the disadvantage of the dalits and minorities. The rights and guarantees enshrined in the Constitution are being eroded,” argues The Hindu article. And this was written in 2001, before the Saffron march and the landslide national election of Narendra Modi and the BJP in 2014.

  Any discussion of caste and necessary reforms inevitably throws up the name of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, seen as one of India’s foremost crusaders for dignity and human rights – and from a Dalit background. Traditionally recognised by all as the architect of India’s Constitution as mentioned in the previous chapter, Ambedkar has nevertheless suffered in much historical and intellectual appraisals of the country’s struggles for Independence and in post-India developments. An informative article by Namit Arora in monthly Indian journal The Caravan from 2013 explores this neglect and draws parallels between Ambedkar’s life with that of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the United States. While opposing British colonialism, Ambedkar didn’t join the Congress Party which was leading the struggle against the British. In contrast to both Nehru and Gandhi, Ambedkar understood, “that India’s deeply entrenched social inequities and caste loyalties were serious obstacles to democratic participation and a shared sense of citizenship and nationhood,” suggests Arora. Focussing on political democracy while doing little to achieve social democracy, wrote Ambedkar, was “to build a palace on a dung heap.” It was Ambedkar’s political struggles with Nehru and, above all, Gandhi over advancing the situation of ‘the depressed classes’ (through reservations) in the proposed new independent India that led to his invisibility or at least marginality, in the chronicles of India’s struggles in the last century. Additionally, he sought to ban polygamy and advance the rights of women, especially upper caste women. His democratic socialist ambitions, however, clashed with the sanitised ‘correct’ nationalist, Hindu version of what officially happened; that is, a Congress-led struggle largely populated by upper caste men. Leading a mass conversion to Buddhism which he argued was better adapted to the modern age than Hinduism added to the antipathy he faced from the dominant class.

  Today, however, as Arora documents, there is a renewed interest, re-examination and celebration, over the last decade or so, of Ambedkar’s activities and writings. New studies, films, articles in popular outlets, websites and numerous new statues testify to this growing mainstream interest. Arora sees this growth as being fuelled by the growing politicisation of the lower castes and growth of low-caste political parties together with the emergence of a small group of educated and self-confident Dalit scholars, activists and artists. However, as he concludes in his article, Ambedkar’s critique of India, “rooted in a worldly, inclusive, scrupulously reasoned, secular and radical egalitarianism, coupled with bracing civil rights talk of social justice and dignity still hasn’t received its due in mai
nstream scholarship and opinion.”

  Any discussion about caste is complex. Andre Beteille has pointed out in many recent articles that there has been a steady and continuous decline in practices associated with purity and pollution both in inter-caste relations and in the relations between men and women. “Untouchability has also declined,” he argues. The reason for this decline he suggests is the rise and social and cultural ascendancy of the middle class. Behaviour determined by rituals of purity and pollution are “inconsistent with the functional requirements” of a modern society. The rise of the Indian middle class has not led to the elimination of inequality “but it has rendered obsolete some of its most oppressive and odious forms.” While I am sure that Beteille is correct especially in urban areas, it is in the political sphere that caste is seen as getting stronger rather than weaker. In a contradictory and recent development, the phenomenon of caste has emerged in certain areas as more important today than in the past. Indian political parties have always played caste politics. ‘Vote banks’, where social groups such as lower caste groups are ‘persuaded’ to vote a particular way, have always been a feature of electoral politics in India. Local landowners, industrialists and moneylenders for example have always used their dependents – tenants and labourers – as vote banks. But as Christophe Jaffrelot points out in The Caravan from 2012, in the 1980s and 1990s this system began to disintegrate. Local low-caste parties began to emerge in a number of states. The growing political clout of these parties has resulted in a number of important consequences. First, an increased turnout of voters. India is probably unique in having a higher vote amongst the poor when compared to the wealthy. Secondly, there has been growing rejection of elite idioms, most notably away from English as the main language. Thirdly, there has been the growing influence and power of state legislatures at the expense of the centre. But in this case, small is not necessarily beautiful. This fragmentation along party lines has not always led to a deepening of democracy as will be later examined.

  Even where the caste system has lost some of its earlier brutality and barbarity, it continues to be an important instrument of power throughout Indian society, argue Dréze and Sen. They list a number of key social institutions – such as universities, reporters, police officers, trade unions, legal bodies and artists – where around 75% of the top posts are shared by upper caste groups. And this is in places where the upper caste groups make up only 20% of the population. Other recent stories in the media detail the suicides of Dalit students in elite universities due to caste prejudice and discrimination. In 2016 Outlook magazine outlined the spreading boycotts and demonstrations across Mumbai, Pune, Delhi and Hyderabad by Dalit students, provoked to action by the rising and confident Hindutva student movement. ‘Anti-nationals’ as non-Hindutva students are described are being purged. The hanged Dalit student at Hyderabad University was another gruesome statistic of Dalit deaths. Armed confrontational incidents along inter-caste lines in Bihar over the last few years have fuelled fears of further bloodshed.

  In the success stories of India today, most would have assumed a dissolving and disappearing of caste beliefs and rituals. Inter-caste marriages are on the rise, laws prohibiting caste are in place, positive discrimination or quotas to ensure Dalit participation are promoted but, it seems, caste practices persist. Six decades of illegality but still today caste persists. It is the great embarrassment that is not mentioned. It is not only not mentioned in polite company, but until recently was not recorded or included in survey data.

  Being poor, being socially marginalised and humbled as well as being powerless point towards understandings and experiences of injustice. While there is evidence available of the improvements achieved in addressing those conditions contributing towards these socio-political injustices over the last few decades, there has been no ‘breakthrough’. Change for the better, studies suggest, has been incremental. The evidence still suggests instead a perniciousness that is a result of a network of the mutually reinforcing of severe inequalities that result in an oppressive social system, as Dréze and Sen relentlessly demonstrate in page after page in their An Uncertain Glory. Those at the bottom of these multiple disadvantages, they illustrate, “live in conditions of severe disempowerment.”

  Caste has a peculiar role in India that separates the country from all others. Being poor, however, is more than the caste system, important as it is in understanding poverty. There is probably no single bullet that unlocks or changes these circumstances. However, in discussions with friends and from general reading, something becomes clearer. There is one factor that seems to come closest to being ‘the magic bullet’ – to carry a greater weight than other issues. This magical ingredient is the role and contribution of women.

  Women and the ‘new’ India

  Poverty at the end of the day is a political issue. It can be eliminated or exacerbated through political action and programmes. Any welfare initiatives directed towards alleviating poverty as outlined above are to be welcomed. Any institutional reform in this direction is important. Crucial to the success of these reforms though is the role of women. Reinforcing the grip of caste on social injustice and inequalities is the issue of gender. “Gender inequality,” demonstrate Dréze and Sen, “is among the social disparities that keep large numbers of people on the margin of the ‘new India’.”

  As noted earlier, the authors compare the progress towards poverty alleviation in India with a number of its neighbours. India does not fare well. In particular they look at Bangladesh, a very poor country that only gained independence in 1971. Despite calamities from cyclones, famine and civil war in the 1970s, the country remains one of the poorest in the world but has made rapid progress on a number of social fronts and in living standards over the last couple of decades. As Dréze and Sen indicate, it has overtaken India in crucial areas of social development even given its much lower growth rate. Despite the ‘democratic problems’ in Bangladesh, there are “also features of astonishing achievement… that cannot but excite interest, curiosity and engagement,” they argue. “The most important clue (to these astonishing achievements) is a pattern of sustained positive change in gender relations.” On a wide variety of gender indicators – such as participation in the workforce, literacy and education, health education, breastfeeding, hygiene facilities – Bangladesh has overtaken India. Although not fully yet understanding all the changes underway in Bangladesh, the authors feel that it is the crucial participation and activity of Bangladeshi women that accounts for the difference.

  By way of contrast, Dréze and Sen examine a number of social indicators in India to illustrate the marginalisation of women – this “truly shocking” picture, as they put it. Their analysis is wide ranging in their attempt to illustrate the absence of women as significant actors – socially, economically and politically. The issues that they identify contribute towards the low-status and marginalised nature of women especially from the lower castes.

  First is the pain behind the figure of there being 37 million more men than women in the country. As Sunny Hundal summarises the consequences flowing from this figure, “A social time-bomb is now setting off… with terrifying consequences.” Most of these ‘surplus’ men are at a marriageable age. The state of Punjab is seen to have the worst ratio – 300 girls per 1,000 boys. For India to have a ‘natural’ sex ratio similar to the rest of the world, India would need to have another 23 million women. Adding this total to the earlier 37 million results in a 60 million ‘missing’ women from the population of India. A large cause of these skewed ratios and the missing millions are the rise of sex-selective abortions due to availability of ultrasound technology. Boys are preferred for a number of reasons. Dowry payments for example, although illegal for many decades, are a major reason. Daughters impose a considerable financial cost on their parents. ‘Pay now, save later’ warn some of the unlawful marketing hoardings. Far from decreasing, the practice of dowry has spread to now involve communities previously without a dowry
tradition. Secondly, women’s workforce participation rates are extremely low – 15% – and for those with work, they are likely to get considerably less pay than men. Thirdly, women are less likely to be able to read or write when compared to men – 47% of rural women and 70% of urban women are literate. The corresponding figures for men are 66% and 82% respectively. Fourthly, there is a long history of official indifference to claims of rape by women. In the vast majority of cases, rape crimes are committed against women from lower castes. Victim blaming and a slow bureaucratic justice system result in a massive underreporting of rape – some estimates calculate that only 10% of cases are reported. Fifthly, the low status of women is seen as contributing to this gender inequality. The child malnutrition rate in India is nearly double that of sub-Saharan Africa but nearly a quarter of Indians are born with low birth weights which are 40% higher than in sub-Saharan Africa. Why this discrepancy? Because Indian boys receive more attention and preference at meals than girls, who eat later and less than their brothers. In some of the country’s poorest states, annual surveys indicate that girls are going missing not so much because of foeticide but from infanticide. Sixthly, this persuasive patriarchal form of social and cultural relations works itself out in varied ways. Property inheritance is strongly patrilineal and post-marital residence remains overwhelmingly patrilineal. Freedom of movement is curtailed. Over 40% of child marriages in the world take place in India. There are over a 1,000 ‘honour killings’ a year in India, happening in big cities as well as rural areas. Most of the perpetrators were family members and represented a culture of honour, patriarchal authority and violence for the transgression of the perceived value of ‘respect’. Jason Burke from The Guardian quotes Prem Chowdhry, “The social situation is very volatile. The marriage market is very tight and that causes huge problems… leaving more than a third of lower caste men without wives.”