by Barkha Dutt
Ambedkar, who once described himself as ‘repugnant to the Hindus’, called for an end to the absolute sanctity of Hindu scriptures: ‘[T]he enemy you must grapple with is not the people who observe caste but the Shastras which teach them this religion of caste.’
Gandhi and Ambedkar had their biggest confrontation over the demand for separate electorates for ‘untouchables’—Gandhi thought this demand by Ambedkar was ‘absolutely suicidal’. The Mahatma went on a fast unto death demanding the British withdraw their assent to Ambedkar’s demand. Finally, in what came to be known as the Poona Pact of 1932, Ambedkar compromised. Voters would not be segregated by caste, but there would be a fixed number of seats reserved for candidates from the ‘depressed’ castes. By 1935 the Simon Commission had given the nomenclature ‘Scheduled Castes’ to all the ‘untouchable’ castes identified by the census; the act was modified to include Scheduled Tribes by an independent India in 1950. Caste—far from being annihilated—came to occupy a permanent seat in the gladiatorial ring of Indian politics.
III
He was getting his head shaved. Thousands were watching as the razor blade travelled down the back of his head with the precision of a cartographer’s pen. After all, with this single act, he was mapping a new identity. The crowd cheered him on, Buddhist chants filled the air and monks in red robes looked quizzically at the cameras. At the end of the ceremony the man on stage had a new name—Udit Raj. The old one—Ram—had been abandoned, as had the religion (Hinduism) that he was born into. He was among thousands of Dalits who had just embraced Buddhism in a conversion ceremony performed amid raging controversy and tight security.
A former revenue service office in the government, Udit Raj was positioning himself as the newest Dalit messiah. His own journey was rather less dramatic than he made it out to be—this was not a battle of the scale and intensity waged by Ambedkar in the previous century—but it was nevertheless an important skirmish in a war that seemed to have no end in sight. And it gave me an opportunity to examine whether all the promises made towards the social upliftment of Dalits by politicians of every hue were anything more than an eyewash.
I met Udit Raj in south Delhi’s Laxmi Bai Colony where the once freshly painted white walls of flats allotted to mid-ranking bureaucrats had begun to turn yellow, and satellite dishes shared space on small terraces with drying clothes and crisscrossing electricity wires. There was nothing to distinguish the apartment from any other middle-class home except the wall clock, which had stickers of Ambedkar and the Buddha stuck on the inside of its plastic surface. On another wall, somewhat incongruously, was a poster of a WWF wrestling star, all long-haired and beefed up. On the street outside his house, a small group of neo-Buddhist supporters dressed in ritual robes—recent converts to the faith—were getting their shoes polished by a cobbler. It was hard to miss the symbolism of that moment.
The cobbler’s name was Mange Lal, but to most of the world he was a ‘chamar’, a pejorative used for those who work with leather. His customers today were also born into castes that had been shunned and persecuted the way Mange Lal still was. But as they thrust their shoes forward for just a bit more shine they obviously believed they had swapped their birth castes for a new identity—one that gave them more dignity than Mange Lal, to begin with.
I stopped to talk to Mange Lal when he was done with his customers. The slogan scrawled across Udit Raj’s car caught his attention. Might there be something in it for him? ‘Hamara to beet gaya lekin ho sakta hai bachchon ke liye kuch ho sakta (It’s too late for me, but maybe my children can be saved from their plight),’ he said. Behind me a loud argument had broken out between the monks and a passer-by. I turned to find an old man, out for a morning walk, engaged in an unpleasant debate with them. ‘They should not convert. Why are they converting?’ he began shouting when I asked him what he was objecting to.
‘But they have to face discrimination in their own faith,’ I argued as gently as I could, initially respectful of his age.
‘Who says? These people converted because they didn’t do their duty. They converted because they thought preference milega. Yeh log pehle kya thhe? Dalit thhe. Unka kya kaam hota hai? They should have just done their jobs,’ he said aggressively.
‘This is the twenty-first century, sir, why should only Dalits do some jobs?’ I said, repulsed by his twisted logic.
‘Even a Brahmin today does the work of other castes,’ the man was carrying on, undeterred, getting more and more cantankerous and shrill in his responses.
I finally ventured to ask him his caste.
‘I am a Brahmin,’ he said, proudly.
‘And what do you do?’
‘I retired as an under secretary in the Ministry of Personnel,’ he said, before giving the monks one final glare and stomping off.
‘Dekh liya aapne (Now you see),’ said one of the monks to me.
The blatant prejudice the government official displayed had shocked me even though it was an ever-present reality in the lives of millions of my fellow Indians. For most of my life, until my work led me to explore social fault lines, I had absolutely no idea what my caste was. I would aggressively dismiss queries about it by declaring that I did not believe in it as an identity marker. But of course that disbelief came from a position of privilege, from never knowing what it meant to be ridiculed and abused for an accident of birth. I used to think it was my education and upbringing that allowed me to disregard caste entirely. But the vitriol displayed by the ‘educated’ official I had just met made me realize how simplistic my thinking was. His outburst had captured two realities—the continued stranglehold of caste, even in urban, educated India, and the simmering resentment of many towards those who tried to escape it by converting to another faith.
The blistering row over conversions captures how caste intolerance continues to fracture Hindu society and, even more dangerously, has the potential to blow up into larger religious conflict. Sociologist Kancha Ilaiah, the author of Why I am Not a Hindu, told me, ‘The Dalits have no alternative but to seek a spiritual system for themselves. These people are now demanding the Right to Religion.’
But critics of mass conversions, the RSS prominent among them, have often called for the ‘ghar wapsi’ (homecoming) of all those who have left the fold of Hinduism. In December 2014, within months of Narendra Modi taking charge as prime minister, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat hijacked the BJP’s development headlines by declaring that those who had ‘lost their way’ must be brought back ‘home’. ‘Woh log apne aap nahin gaye, unko loot kar, laalach de kar le gaye (Those people didn’t go of their own volition, they were “looted” and bribed into converting),’ Bhagwat said while addressing a Virat Hindu Sammelan in Kolkata, playing on the familiar trope that proselytizing faiths like Christianity and Islam were ‘stealing’ Hindus with inducements and threats. ‘Abhi chor pakda gaya hai. Mera maal chor ke paas hai. Aur yeh duniya jaanti hai. Main apna maal wapas loonga, yeh kaunsi badi baat hai (If a thief is caught and I find my belongings with him, will I not retrieve my belongings? What’s the issue in that)?’ he went on to say.
What was less clear is what caste a reconvert to Hinduism would become, though affiliate groups of the RSS like the VHP promised that anyone ‘coming back’ could choose their caste, reinforcing the links between conversions and upward mobility.
In January 1927, the Mahatma had this to say about conversions: ‘I am against conversion, whether it is known as shuddhi by Hindus, tabligh by Mussalmans, or proselytizing by Christians’. Ambedkar, his intellectual antagonist, who had already declared that he would ‘not die a Hindu’, converted to Buddhism in 1956, just two months before his death.
By May 2014, Udit Raj, the man who had vowed to uplift millions of India’s downtrodden by encouraging them to change their religion, joined the BJP. It was no ordinary political irony; the BJP was the most trenchant critic of mass conversions. For India’s Dalits, Udit Raj was one among many politicians who had used the collective oppression
of the community to climb up the ladder of ambition. In fact, it was increasingly becoming evident that traditional Dalit politics had failed to bring about transformative change. Even the Bahujan Samaj Party—founded by Kanshi Ram and built by Mayawati on the provocative slogan of ‘Tilak, Tarazu or Talwar, inko maaro joote chaar (Thrash the Brahmin, the Bania and the Rajput with shoes)’—eventually had to move to a more inclusive caste formula that brought Dalits and Brahmins together. Even so, the party drew a blank in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Many leaders in the Dalit community believed that their future could no longer bank on the power of politics—or even affirmative action alone.
IV
‘Capitalism is our only weapon to eliminate caste,’ the excitable Dalit scholar Chandra Bhan Prasad would tell me, sometimes leaping out of his chair to underline his argument. He would often come on my television shows armed with a hand-drawn doodle of the ‘only goddess’ he said his atheist self could ever worship. Needless to say, she didn’t belong to the Hindu pantheon. He called her ‘The Goddess of English’ and he built a modern mythology around her borrowing heavily from the symbol of America’s Statue of Liberty. He even began to build a temple to her in a village of Uttar Pradesh where more than half the population was Dalit. The goddess wore a hat and gown; like Ambedkar, she held a copy of the Indian Constitution, but to root her in a more contemporary idiom, she also had a keyboard and a pen, and stood atop a computer screen. Chandra Bhan called her a symbol of ‘Dalit renaissance’.
It was in the potential mobility of class, even with its capacity to create new social disparities, that many Dalit groups saw their exit from the claustrophobic confines of caste. That lion of the Dalits, Ambedkar, was always presented in a blue three-piece suit—one hand holding the Constitution, the other upraised as if acknowledging the cheers of followers. His dress and manner were in stark contrast to the more traditional dress code and imagery used by the average Indian politician. It suggested that the Dalits aspired to join India’s English-speaking elite. The statue presented him as a man of enlightenment, a middle-class intellectual who had successfully shrugged off the victimhood of caste by being unapologetically westernized when needed. At a time in Indian politics when ‘suit-boot’ had come to be a political paraphrase for elitism and cronyism, Ambedkar’s suit and boot was worn like a badge of honour. For many of my Dalit friends, it was a symbol of elite acceptance. An alternative iconography for the traditionally oppressed was not strictly a new idea. Even in the face of scathing criticism, caste-leaders like Mayawati had built sprawling Dalit memorial parks in cities like Lucknow and Noida. But these had also included statues of her, suggesting not merely narcissism but also copycat feudalism, an imbibing of the very characteristics that ‘outcasts’ had been stigmatized by.
A former Naxalite who had once been an ultra-left revolutionary, Chandra Bhan had travelled across the ideological spectrum to become a passionate advocate of the power of markets over Marx. He did not believe that converting to another faith would make any difference to the social or economic status of his community. ‘Out of every hundred Dalits, forty-nine are landless labourers. It is immaterial for them if they declare that they are Buddhists today or Christians tomorrow. The conversions have no impact on their economic conditions. In fact, it’s just the opposite. The energy of the Dalit movement is getting wasted,’ he argued.
But would their betterment come from capitalism alone as Chandra Bhan believed? Almost twenty-five years after the advent of economic reforms, data released by the government was anything but encouraging. The latest socio-economic caste census conducted between 2011 and 2013 confirmed how fundamental structural inequities of caste and class continued to be the big unreported India story. Seven out of ten households in India remain rural and most lived on less than Rs 200. More than half of all rural families were landless, and 70 per cent of all Scheduled Castes fell in this category.
In other words, the oppression of caste compounded by the hierarchies of class ensured that India’s most oppressed social community, the Dalits, remained at the bottom of the social totem pole.
■
It was clear that in the twenty-first century, India would not be stepping back from its somewhat confused and tentative, yet warm and welcoming embrace of capitalism. From time to time, governments would fall back on populism or protectionism, and various parties might resort to welfare schemes, but there was one word in the Preamble (introduced through an amendment in 1976 in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency) that people would not miss, and that was the self-description of the country as ‘socialist’. Even B. R. Ambedkar had opposed its inclusion, arguing during the Constituent Assembly debates that ‘how society should be organized in its social and economic side are matters which must be decided by the people themselves depending on time and circumstance’.
No one wanted to go back to the years of queuing up for a phone connection or paying bribes in exchange for an out-of-turn allotment of a gas cylinder; from telecom to aviation, services by private players were lapped up. Had political parties united to alter the amendment that first tagged India as socialist, I don’t think it would have evoked any significant popular backlash.
Activists like Chandra Bhan did not dispute that the original ascent of caste-based parties in India, in particular Dalit-driven groups like the Bahujan Samaj Party, were emblematic of a new political assertiveness by those who had been marginalized for centuries. But its impact had stagnated, there was no second wave of social reform—the Dalit vote had empowered the politicians more than the community. Now many of them looked towards a combination of wealth creation and anglicization to provide the upward mobility that affirmative action or political slogans had failed to for decades. In an aping of the business culture of India’s power elite, they began to form Dalit Chambers of Commerce. Like the saccharine profiles of the rich and the famous in Fortune and Forbes, they too wanted the Dalit millionaires in their community to be feted and fussed over. Milind Kamble, the understated chief of the Dalit Chambers of Commerce and the owner of a construction business, once told me proudly, ‘Main Sharad Pawar ko paani pilata hoon (I give Sharad Pawar water to drink)’. His company had built the pipeline that supplied water to the pocket borough of one of the most powerful politicians in India. That it was water made its own statement—from separate village wells to separate kitchen tumblers, the controlled access to water had been one of the most wretched and visible aspects of social bigotry. Kamble excitedly shared how he had been featured in an upscale glossy. ‘They said that before me Ambani and Tata had sat in this very chair for a photo-shoot.’
Chandra Bhan introduced me to Kalpana Saroj, the glamorous Dalit CEO of a business enterprise valued at over $100 million. Kalpana was the daughter of a police constable who had been unable to resist community pressure and had married her off at the age of twelve. At her husband’s home she was expected to mop the floors, wash clothes and cook food for a household of ten. She would be kicked around and beaten at the slightest pretext. Eventually, not able to bear her suffering and humiliation, her father brought her home. ‘They taunted me in the neighbourhood and accused me of bringing shame to my family,’ Kalpana told me. ‘I had tried everything—the military, nursing school, a police recruitment camp, but I was either too young or too uneducated. In desperation, I drank a bottle of poison. I didn’t want to live.’
When I met her she was trying to decide whether her company should invest in a private chopper. The turnaround of her life had been dramatic and inspirational and all the more so because her success was entirely self-made. When she survived her suicide attempt she started stitching blouses for an income of a few rupees a piece. When her father lost his job it fell upon her to support her siblings and parents on her tiny tailoring business. It was when her younger sister fell fatally ill that her ambitions altered. ‘Her words haunt me even today, she begged us to save her. But we did not have the funds to provide her medical help. It’s then that I decided that life wit
hout money is useless and I was going to make lots of it.’
Starting with seed capital from a government scheme, she started making cheap knock-offs of high-end furniture. Gradually, she ventured into real estate before reviving the ailing metal and engineering Kamani Tubes Company. She would go on to become its chairwoman.
I asked her if she no longer faced discrimination. Had her caste ceased to be a factor now that she was a wealthy entrepreneur? ‘No, not entirely,’ she admitted, but proudly introduced me to her son-in-law, a Brahmin by birth. Was this love conquering caste or wealth flattening out prejudice, I asked Kalpana. The question seemed to confuse her. Love was her preferred answer but she was proud of what she had created for her family and the new stature and access it afforded her. This was some of the change post-liberalization India was going through. New money was creating new barriers and bringing old ones down. Yet, it could not be said that India was today a more equal society than at the time of its birth as a republic. For every exception like Kalpana Saroj there was a daily atrocity committed in the name of caste or class, sometimes both.
I met Pawan Malviya, a young man from Madhya Pradesh who was surprised to find that anyone outside of his village was interested in him. When he got married he wanted to sit on a horse, just as upper-caste grooms did and take his wedding procession to his bride’s house. Outraged by this cultural assertion of equality, the other villagers threatened to stone him if he persisted with his audacious plans. The local administration’s proposed solution spoke to the truth of an India we are too embarrassed to confront. To try and make peace between the warring factions the district officials suggested that the ‘offended’ parties shut their windows and doors when the procession passed by so they didn’t have to witness the abomination of a lower-caste Hindu appropriating their custom. The groom’s wishes prevailed, except he wore a helmet and rode his horse through a cascade of stones and bricks, while the police looked on helplessly.