India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

by Ramachandra Guha

  Four decades of affirmative action had created a strong and articulate middle class among the Scheduled Castes. In the beginning, the SCs were mainly recruited at the bottom of the state machinery, filling menial jobs; over time, they came to be better represented at the higher levels, working as Class I magistrates and officers in the secretariat. The numbers in Table 26.1 are telling indeed.

  A government job provided both economic security and social prestige. By 1995 more than 2 million Dalits were thus advantaged. Of course, the majority of their ilk continued to live lives that were economically impoverished as well as socially degrading – working as agricultural labourers, sweepers and construction workers.12 Still, there was now a sizeable middle class to take their case forward. This was the class which staffed BAMCEF, and which then assumed leading roles in Kanshi Ram’s Bahujan Samaj Party. In this respect, the path they followed was very nearly the reverse of the OBCs. Having tasted political power, the OBCs sought to claim administrative power through the Mandal Report. The SCs, however, first acquired a stake in the administration, before seeking a greater role in party politics.

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  Table 26.1 – Employment profile of Scheduled Castes in the government of India

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  No. of Scheduled castes employed SC job as % of total jobs

  Group 1965 1995 1965 1995

  Class I 318 6,637 1.64 10.12

  Class II 864 13,797 2.82 12.67

  Class III 96,114 378,172 8.88 16.15

  Class IV 101,073 2,221,380 17.75 21.60

  Total 198,369 2,619,986 13.17 17.43

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  SOURCE: Niraja Gopal Jayal, (‘Social Inequality and Institutional Remedies: A Study of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes’), paper presented at NETSAPPE Conference, Bangalore, June 2003.

  The BSP made its debut in the 1984 general election. It garnered more than a million votes, but won no seats. In subsequent elections it was more successful, winning, for example, eleven seats in 1996 and fourteen in 1999. But where it really made an impression was in state elections in Uttar Pradesh. Here, the party activists successfully wooed the Dalit masses, warning them that the Congress wanted only pliant chamchas (sycophants) from their ranks. The BSP, on the other hand, stood for ‘social justice’, even ‘social transformation’. Only a party of their own could enhance the dignity, pride and prospects of the Dalits.13

  The message was carried by Dalit lawyers, teachers and officers to their less privileged brethren. Apart from holding meetings and rallies, these intellectuals published a series of tracts providing the lower castes with a heroic history of their own. These were driven by the conviction that ‘till now Indian history is mostly written by Brahmins’. Now, an alternate narrative was constructed, which claimed that it was actually the Dalits who ‘created cultures such as Harappa and Mohenjodaro’. But then the invading Aryans ‘took away their land, alienated them forcibly, hijacked their culture, and subjected them to a state of slavery’. Throughout history this suppression had been stoutly resisted, by Dalit workers, peasants, singers and poets. Their deeds – real as well as mythical – were commemorated in booklets printed and distributed in the hundreds of thousands in the Uttar Pradesh of the 1990s.14

  Political organization and the evolution of social conscience, working hand in hand, enabled the BSP to take impressive strides in Uttar Pradesh. Between 1989 and 2002 five assembly elections were held in the state. The number of seats won in these polls by the BSP was, successively, 13, 12, 69, 67 and 98. By the end it was garnering a steady 20 per cent of the popular vote. The BSP’s gains were mostly at the expense of the Congress. This party powered by Dalits had emerged as one of the three major political groups in the state, the others being Mulayam’s Samajwadi Party and the Hindu-oriented Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

  By this time, Kanshi Ram had been supplanted as the BSP’s main leader by a one-time protégée. Hername was Mayawati. She was born in 1956 in New Delhi, the daughter of a government clerk. Her ambition was to join the prestigious Indian Administrative Service, but an encounter with Kanshi Ram at a BAMCEF rally made her enter politics instead. At public meetings she attracted attention by her oratorical skills, with her slashing wit aimed mostly at the rival Congress Party. By the early 1990s she had become the public face of the party. Realizing that the Dalits could never come to power on their own, she sought to build cross-caste and cross-party alliances. She enjoyed three brief spells as chief minister, heading coalition governments formed in collaboration either with the Samajwadi Party or the BJP.15

  Writing in the 1970s, the journalist and old India hand James Cameron pointed out that the prominent women in Indian public life all came from upper-class, English-speaking backgrounds. ‘There is not and never has been a working-class woman with a function in Indian politics’, remarked Cameron, ‘and it is hard to say when there ever will be. Within two decades there was an answer, or perhaps one should say a refutation, when a lady born in a Dalit home became chief minister of India’s most populous state.16

  In other parts of the country the Dalit voice was also being heard. The ‘most significant feature of the Scheduled Castes in contemporary India’, wrote the sociologist Andreé Béeteille, ‘is their increased visibility’ . They were ‘still exploited, oppressed and stigmatized; but their presence in Indian society could no longer be ignored’.17

  Once submissive as well as suppressed, the Dalits now knew of their rights under the Indian Constitution, and were prepared to fight for them. Indeed, the man who piloted that constitution, B. R. Ambedkar, had become the symbol and inspiration for Dalits everywhere. One anthropologist writes that ‘across Tamil Nadu, statues, portraits, posters and nameplates bearing the image of Dr Ambedkar proliferate. Halls, schools and colleges named after him abound and even his ideological opponents feel obliged to reproduce his picture and lay claim to his legacy.’18 Much the same was true of most other states of the Union. Wherever Dalits lived or worked, photographs of Ambedkar were ubiquitous: finely framed and lovingly garlanded, placed in prominent positions in hamlets, homes, shops and offices. Meanwhile, in response to pressure from Dalit groups, statues of Ambedkar were put up at public places in towns and cities – at major road intersections, outside railway stations, in parks. The leader was portrayed standing proud and erect, clutching in his right hand a copy of the constitution he had authored.

  Fifty years after his death, B. R. Ambedkar is worshipped in parts of India which he never visited and where he was completely unknown in his own lifetime. Wherever there are Dalits – which is pretty well almost every district in India – Ambedkar is remembered and, more importantly, revered.19

  IV

  The rising self-consciousness of the Dalits was accompanied by an escalation of caste conflict. Throughout the 1990s, there were a series of violent clashes in the countryside, in which Dalits were usually on the receiving end. The root of the conflict was material – the fact that it was the OBCs or upper castes who owned the land, and the Dalits who cultivated it. But the form in which it was expressed was often ideological. That Dalits could ask for better wages or for more humane treatment was seen by their presumed superiors as a sign that they needed to be quickly, and if necessary brutally, put back in their place.

  One theatre of this conflict was the southernmost districts of the southern state of Tamil Nadu. The clashes here were between the Thevars, a rising middle caste of landowners, and the landless Dalits. They could be sparked by disputes over wages, or over pique that a community once condemned to scavenging was now sending members to the Indian Administrative Service. The Dalits, emboldened, were refusing to be served tea in a separate glass at village cafés (along-standing custom). And for each statue built by the Thevars of their revered leader Muthuramalinga Thevar(1908–65), the Dalits would build a statue of Ambedkar in reply. (Indeed, some of the bloodiest clashes were provoked by the demolition by one side of a statue erected by the other.) The rows were mater
ial as well as ideological, they were frequent, and they were costly. In a single decade, caste conflicts in Tamil Nadu resulted in more than a hundred deaths.20

  There were also comparable conflicts in northern India. We may take as representative an incident in the Haryana village of Jhajhar where, on the evening of 15 October 2002, a group of Dalits were beaten to death. Earlier that day the victims were travelling to the market, to sell hides of dead cows that they had collected. According to one version, they were halted by the police, who asked them for proof of how they had come by the hides. By another account the Dalits themselves stopped to kill and then skin a cow walking by the road. It was this latter (and less likely) version that gained currency. The rumour that a cow had been slaughtered spread through the vicinity, sparking anger because the animal is regarded as holy by upper-caste Hindus. A large mob descended on the police station and dragged out the ‘violators’, the men in uniform looking on. They were flogged and killed right on the main road itself.21

  Atrocities against Dalits were by no means the preserve of caste Hindus alone. In the Punjab, the landowning Jat Sikhs resented the growing self-confidence of the labouring and artisanal castes. From the early twentieth century Dalit Sikhs had struggled for a share of the land and access to shrines (both controlled by Jats). Some Dalits sought escape in a religion of their own, named Adi-Dharm. More recently, the prosperity fuelled by the Green Revolution had opened up new possibilities for low castes: work in towns and factories and opportunities to start their own businesses. There was also a growing Sikh diaspora, which sent money back to their kinsmen in the village.22

  Again, one conflict may be taken as representative. This was over control of a shrine in the village of Talhan, on the outskirts of the industrial city of Jalandhar. The shrine was in memory of an artisan turned saint named Baba Nihal Singh. Sikhs of all castes worshipped there, and in such numbers that their offerings made the temple one of the richest in the whole district. (The collection was estimated at Rs50 million annually.) However, the temple committee was controlled by Jats. They decided how the money was to be spent, whether in the beautification of the shrine, in building roads to the village, or on feasts. The Dalits had long asked, and long been denied, representation in the management committee. At last they decided to take the matter to court. In January 2003, while the case was being heard, the Jats announced a social boycott of the Dalits. They in turn organized a series of protest strikes. Six months later the groups clashed violently at a village fair. The administration then intervened to work out a compromise; two Dalits were inducted into the management committee, but they had to maintain Sikh tradition by keeping their hair and beard unshorn.23

  V

  Nowhere were the Dalits so oppressed as in the state of Bihar; nowhere were they better organized to resist; nowhere were caste conflicts so frequent, so bitter, or so bloody.

  The agrarian system of eastern India had historically exhibited the grossest forms of feudalism. In neighbouring West Bengal these inequalities had been attenuated by land reforms, but in Bihar they persisted into the present. The middle and upper castes owned the land, and the Dalits tilled it. From the 1970s, however, Maoist radicals had taken up their case. Although they had more or less disappeared from West Bengal, where their movement had begun a decade previously, these Naxalites had steadily gathered strength in the districts of central Bihar. They formed agricultural labour fronts which demanded higher wages, shorter hours and an end to social coercion (which, in some areas, included the right of the landlord to a low-caste bride on her wedding night). They also demanded a share of village common land, and access to natural resources such as fresh-water fish, theoretically owned by the ‘community’ as a whole, but usually the preserve of the upper castes alone.24

  Their mobilization by left-wing radicals had instilled a great deal of self-respect among the lowliest in central Bihar. Travelling through the state in 1999, the journalist Mukul noticed a newfound confidence among the Dalits. Visitors were treated as social equals, and met with the salutation ‘Namaskar, bhaijee’(Greetings, brother). Unlike in the past, the Dalits ‘do not fold their hands. They do not bend their body. They do not call anybody “huzur”, “sahib”, “sir”, or anything like this. This newfound word [bhaijee], is heard repeated all over the region in village after village and haunts the heart.’25

  The anthropologist Bela Bhatia writes that ‘this sense of dignity is one of the principal achievements of the Naxalite movement’. Other achievements included an end to forced labour and a significant enhancement of the wage rate. Normally paid in kind, this had doubled; besides, the quality of the grain was much better than before. Once made to work twelve hours non-stop, labourers were now allowed regular breaks. And, for the first time in recorded or unrecorded history, women were both paid and treated the same as men.

  The long-term aim of these radicals, however, was the overthrow of the Indian state. Open and hidden, legal and illegal, activities were carried on side by side: processions and strikes on the one hand, the collection of weapons and attacks on their enemies on the other. The Naxalites had their own Lal Sena (Red Army), whose members were trained in the use of rifles, grenades and land mines. They also had their safaya (clean-up) squads, whose marksmen were trained to assassinate particularly oppressive landlords.26

  In response, the ruling elites had formed senas of their own. Each of the landowning castes maintained its own private army. The Bhumihars had their Ranbir Sena, the Kurmis their Bhoomi Sena, the Rajputs their Kunwar Sena, the Yadavs their Lorik Sena. The modern history of Bihar, circa 1980 to the present (2007), is peppered with gruesome massacres perpetuated by one caste/class group upon another. Sometimes, a Bhumihar or Yadav sena would round up and burn a group of Dalits. At other times Naxalites would raid an upper-caste hamlet and shoot its inhabitants. According to one (and certainly incomplete) list, in the years 1996 and 1997 there were thirteen such incidents, in which more than 150 individuals perished.27 Behind this violence lay a savage and sometimes almost incomprehensible hatred. ‘Mera itihaas mazdooron ki chita par likhi hogi’, claimed one Bhumihar landlord – My biography will be written around the funeral pyres of [Dalit] labourers. ‘Aath ka badla assi se lenge!’ shouted the Naxalites – If you kill eight of ours we will kill eighty in revenge.28

  By the mid-1990s, in much of Bihar the state had no visible presence at all. As one upper-caste gunman told a visiting journalist: ‘The police are hijras [hermaphrodites]. They should wear bangles and saris ... If a murder took place in front of their eyes anywhere hereabouts, they wouldn’t have the guts to file an FIR [First Information Report]. There is no government or police. Just us Ranvirs and the M-Lvadis [i.e. Naxalites].’29

  The growing power of the Naxalites in Bihar was spectacularly underlined by an attack on the town of Jehanabad in November 2005. Hundreds of gunmen stormed the town, rained down bombs on government offices and attacked the jail. They freed 200 inmates, mostly of their own party, among them their area commander. The operation was made easier by the fact that a large chunk of the district police force was away on election duty. Still, the act highlighted the fragility of the legally constituted state in Bihar. For Jehanabad is a mere forty miles from the provincial capital, Patna.30

  VI

  The Naxalites were also active among the Scheduled Tribes (or adivasis), the other group recognized by the Indian Constitution as historically disadvantaged. The adivasis lived in the most resource-rich areas of India – with the best forests, the most valuable minerals, and the freest-flowing rivers. Over the years they had lost many of these resources to the state or to outsiders, and struggled hard to retain what remained.

  A particular target of tribal ire was the Forest Department, which restricted their access to wood and to non-timber forest produce such as honey and herbs, which they collected and sold for a living. In the state of Madhya Pradesh, the trade in tendu leaves (used for making bidis, or cheroots) was particularly lucrative. The government had
handed over the trade to private contractors, but the actual collection was done by the tribals. The rates were niggardly: Rs30 for 5,000 leaves. In the early 1990s the tribals demanded higher rates; when this was denied, they set up roadblocks on the state’s major routes.31

  A variety of activists were working in adivasi areas, some Gandhian in orientation, others Marxist. The causes they embraced included access to land and forests and the provision of decent schools and hospitals. These were, surely, the groups most neglected by the Indian state, and also the most condescended to. The colonial regime had designated an array of tribal communities as being ‘criminal’, their crime being that they lived not in settled villages but moved around in search of a living. After Independence these tribes had been formally ‘denotified’, but the prejudice against them remained. Officials posted in tribal districts were known for their disdain towards those whom they were paid to serve. Once quiescent, under activist influence the tribals were now moved to protest; the consequence was a series of clashes withthepolice.32

  The most celebrated of tribal assertions in the 1990s was the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement). Its leader was a woman named Medha Patkar, who was not herself a tribal but a social worker raised and radicalized in Bombay. The movement aimed at stopping a massive dam on the Narmada river which would render homeless some 200,000 people, the majority of them adivasi in origin. Patkar organized the tribals in a series of colourful marches: to the dam site in Gujarat, to the city of Bhopal (capital of Madhya Pradesh, the state to which most of those affected belonged), to the national capital, Delhi, there to demand justice from the mighty government of India. The leader herself engaged in several long fasts to draw attention to the sufferings of her flock.33