THE victimhood of Dalits, the people designated as ‘untouchables’ within the caste society of the Indian subcontinent, is unquestioningly the worst in the history of mankind. Officially they are one-sixth of India’s population and their numbers could get closer to one-third if Dalits in the Christian and Muslim communities were included. Contrary to commonplace theories about the origin of caste, most of which variously attribute it to non-material factors, the origin of castes may be meaningfully traced to the uniqueness of the material endowment of the Indian subcontinent. When nomadic tribes began to settle down as agriculturists, they underwent a structural change due to the constraints imposed by factors such as terrain, soil, water and climatic conditions, in various regions.

For instance, in some regions of Europe, these factors were such (undulating terrain, low productivity soil, limited sources of water and limited sunshine) that they afforded a small window within which vast tracts of lands could be cultivated with the help of huge dedicated manpower. It could only be possible with a large army of serfs and thus it gave rise to serfdom. In contrast, these factors were abundantly available (vast amounts of flat and productive lands; plenty of water sources, and other factors such as sunshine and congenial seasons) in the Indian subcontinent, and hence there was no need for the tribes that settled for agriculture to undergo any structural change. They could settle down with their tribal identities intact. These identities themselves were the ‘primitive castes’.

Later, when the outside tribes vanquished them, they overlaid caste with their varna structure and imparted to them a sense of hierarchy. In the course of time, this hierarchical structure was fortified with an ideological one comprising magico-relgious codes, characteristic of all agricultural societies. Together with this force and numerous castes, the system assumed a self-organizing and self-regulating character. This held the Indian social structure to remain unchanged through many politico-religious upheavals until medieval times, to earn the dubious distinction of being the longest living man-made system in the world.

It was the emergence of an alternative civilizational paradigm, the Islamic civilization, that posed the first threat. This was followed by British colonial rule, bringing more changes in its wake. These changes, particularly the latter, brought in by colonial rule, proved positively consequential to the Dalits. After the transfer of power, further changes fell upon Indian society which on the one hand saw a section of the Dalits rising to constitute a middle class and on the other, witnessed a majority of Dalits being exposed to a crises of livelihood. From the 1990s, when India adopted neoliberal policies with its free market ethos, it catalyzed the resurgence of the Hindutva ideology. The country has since gone through a rapid reversal of the gains of anti-caste struggles during the previous century. The Dalit victimhood necessarily under-went changes through these broad phases of recent history.

 

The victimhood of Dalits as an analogue of caste consciousness is an integral part of the history of the subcontinent. However, it could only be discerned in modern times, especially from the dawn of the last century, that had seen the emergence of proto Dalit movements in most parts of the country. With the emergence of Babasaheb Ambedkar, these movements melted into a pan-Dalit movement, albeit not without its dissenters. The discourse of victimhood therefore, continues to be dominated by the Ambedkarite dictum that it was sourced from the ideology of Hindu Dharmashastras. As a matter of fact, while these scriptural sources contributed to cementing an ideological foundation, its significance began to diminish once the system acquired self-organizing and self-regulating characteristics as the life world of the people.

The recent resurgence of Hindutva, the political ideology of neo-Brahminism, has certainly enlivened religious consciousness of society and reinvigorated this life world, but its source still lies in the contemporary political economy and not in the scriptures of Hinduism. I will briefly explain this proposition with the help of the changing contours of victimhood of Dalits from the classical times through the present era, which may be characterized as Hindutva-fascism.

In the classical system, castes were clustered within a varna and together internalized the varna hierarchy vis-à-vis other varna castes. This sense of inter-varna hierarchy was imbibed by castes even within the same varna. Each caste conducted itself with a contentious sense of superiority vis-à-vis other castes. Paradoxically, this induced sense of intra-varna hierarchy appears to have had a greater impact than the inter-varna hierarchy, insofar as it prevented similarly placed castes from coming together. It kept them engaged in internecine contention for superiority, leaving the larger structure unchallenged. This may be seen as one of the important reasons for the above-referred longevity of the caste system.

The structure was metaphorically described by Ambedkar as being a multi-storey tower with no ladder between its storeys. A more accurate metaphor may be a building with five self-contained storeys; each storey housing numerous castes, all fighting with each other for a notionally superior place. This arrangement was sustained by the ideological glue of Brahmanism with a promise of reward, but also by the threat of punishment embedded within it.

 

As a result, people internalized their caste status as a divine bequest, and any sense of victimhood was erased as their fate. They could perhaps avoid this status in the next birth, not by revolting against it but by acquiescing to it as their dharma. By far the villages were self-contained in which everyone was assigned rights and obligations according to their caste. Typically, the people at the bottom of this pyramid, the untouchables, only had obligations but no rights. Since there was no sense of victimhood, there was no drive to remove it. The society was fossilized with stagnant production and frozen social relations. Whatever little change that did come was absorbed by it to attain a new equilibrium.

As a matter of fact, during this period, large tracts of the subcontinent came under the religious hegemony of Buddhism and Jainism, ideological streams that were against Brahmanism and its caste system. However, support from kings and merchants that made them dominant were also factors that induced sloth, both physical as well as intellectual, in their order. Buddhist monks, contrary to their creed of wandering among the masses, were seduced by the comforts of a vihara life, and engaged in sterile philosophizing. The castes which had become the life world of people, remained unaffected. Moreover, it is unlikely that these shramanic religions touched the lives of the lowest untouchables. After the end of the Gupta Empire (320-550 CE), as the patronage of the kings dwindled, Buddhism further lost its moorings and could not survive the onslaught of the Brahmanic attack by Adi Shankara in the 8th century.

 

Islam arrived on the western coast of India as early as the 7th century CE through Arab traders and merchants, who became the carriers as well as propagators of the new faith. Small Muslim settlements arose in coastal Malabar and Konkan Gujarat. When Muslim rule began to take root in the subcontinent, the early conversions took place mainly from the upper castes for reasons of patronage, such as social mobility among the Muslim ruling elite, or for relief from taxes. However, when Sufi saints (Islamic mystics) entered India around the 12th century, people of lower orders like artisan and untouchable castes came under their influence and embraced Islam in large numbers. These conversions posed a challenge to the caste system, but it remained confined to demography. It gave a fillip to syncretic belief systems such as the Bhakti movement with its anti-caste position. The Bhakti movement condemned the social practices and oppressive features of Hindu society and also attacked the Muslim orthodoxy. It opposed the caste system and the practice of untouchability.

All this made little difference, however, to the condition of the Dalits. The state of the Dalits in those times is described in the travelogues of people like Al-Beruni, who visited India at the beginning of the 11th century and said, ‘they are occupied with dirty work, like cleansing of the villages and other services… they are illegitimate children; for according to general opinion they descend from a Sudra father and Brahmin mother as the children of fornication.’¹

Such was the hegemonic force of the Hindu caste system that it overwhelmed even an egalitarian Muslim society, which developed stratifications like ashraf (‘noble’, and included all descendants of foreigners and converts from high caste Hindus) and ajlaf (literally ‘wretches’ or ‘mean people’; also called kamina or itar, ‘base’ or rasil, a corruption of rizal, ‘worthless’). In some places a third class, arzal or ‘lowest of all’, was added. No other Mohammedan would associate with them, and they were forbidden to enter a mosque or to use the public burial ground.

 

It was during this period that the Dalits became conscious of their victimhood, which was still ordained by the priesthood in the name of religion. They tried to escape their fate by leaving their villages and embracing Islam, but even so they were soon identified as being of low caste. The period, however, had witnessed movements that forefronted their victimhood and attempted to create consciousness against it, though it failed to bring about much change so far as their physical suffering was concerned.

The advent of the British in India, however, proved a great cataly-zer of positive change in the lives of the Dalits. The East India Company, in order to secure their suzerainty and face the rival European forces, began raising its army by recruiting Dalits in large numbers. In pockets under the native rulers like the Peshavas, their oppression had reached hideous levels. The condition of the Dalits in Peshavai is typically depicted as an earthen pot around their necks to hold their spittle, and a thorny branch tied to their behind to erase their footsteps. Kumbhojkar cited Mukta Salave, a 15-year-old girl from the untouchable Mang caste, who had studied in a school started by Jotiba Phule.² Mukta in one of her essays depicted the fate of her castemen: ‘They regularly used to make the mangs and mahars drink oil mixed with red lead and then buried them in the foundations of their mansions, thus wiping out generation after generation of these poor people. Under Bajirao’s rule, if any mang or mahar happened to pass in front of the gymnasium, they cut off his head and used it to play "bat ball", with their swords as bats and his head as a ball, on the grounds.’ The prospect of enrolling in the British army was hailed by the Dalits.

 

British rule brought multifarious opportunities to the lower castes – employment in the army and other civilian establishments; opening of doors to education through army schools and also schools started by Christian missionaries; opportunities to migrate out of the village to the new cities and employment in factories and commercial establishments that had mushroomed; and the institutional structure of governance that they established which treated them as equal to others. A class of urban Dalits soon arose that began to voice its victimhood. The agitation created incipient movements of Dalits in many part of the subcontinent, which coagulated into a pan-Indian Dalit movement under Ambedkar.

 

Under colonial rule, while social discrimination against Dalits remained unabated, there was now a fear of the law against their blatant victimization. Many reform movements cropped up among the Hindus too, which took an anti-untouchability stand and had a dampening impact on its practice. Also, the Congress, particularly under Gandhi, created a general awareness against the practice of untouchability. But more than all of this, the multi-pronged attack mounted on the caste system by Ambedkar and its skilful politicization, led to the awakening of the Dalits against their discrimination and on society in general, to dampen their basic casteist instincts. It were the institutional safeguards and provisions for educational and economic upliftment, secured by Ambedkar during colonial times in favour of Dalits, that empowered them to resist injustice. It was during the colonial rule that the Dalits won themselves a new political identity of Scheduled Caste, shorn off the Hindu religion, and various safeguards, mainly due to the leadership of Ambedkar.

Dalit victimhood was still seen as rooted in Hindu religion and promoted by priestly Brahmins. The doyens of non-Brahmin reformers such as Jotiba Phule, Babasaheb Ambedkar and Periyar Ramasamy, all problematized the Hindu religion for the plight of low castes. The anti-caste movements that germinated during the colonial period had thus targeted the Hindu religion and the Brahminic castes as the custodians. An opportunity arose for India to end its historical evils of casteism and communalism when it embarked upon writing a new constitution. However, the ruling classes exposed their Brahmanic duplicity by mouthing one type of slogan but doing exactly the opposite.

The Constitution, the writing of which was presided over by Ambedkar, skilfully preserved castes in the name of social justice, as was also done to religion by disallowing the inclusion of ‘secularism’. Reservations, instituted in colonial times, were cleverly used to potentially casteize society by opening it up to all and sundry castes. Both caste and religion, which had proved their divisive prowess during colonial times, were seen as important weapons to manipulate people. The ruling classes would certainly not like to lose that. Myriad other policies too had an impact on society in one way or the other. For instance, the Congress continued to pursue pro-capitalist policies under the rhetoric of socialism.

 

When land reforms and the Green Revolution were implemented in India, those policies resulted in creating and enriching a tiny class of rich farmers in the villages and flooding capitalist relations in the countryside. This reduced the Dalits to being rural proletariats without the protection of the traditional relationship of interdependence. The class contradiction between farm labour and the rich farmer precipitated through familiar faultlines of caste, a new genre of caste atrocities beginning with the Kilvenmani massacre in December 1968. A spate of atrocities followed thereafter and became a new normal.

During these times, the Dalits, enabled by the reservation policy, had made significant progress in getting an education and finding employment in government jobs. This was, however, grudged by the non-Dalit farming castes in the villages, particularly as they had suffered persisting agrarian crises that led to violence on the slightest pretext. The founding of the Dalit Panthers in 1972, was precisely a reaction to the growing atrocities. This class formation in rural areas soon resulted in the intensification of electoral competition which gave rise to a politics of ‘vote banks’, based on caste and communities. This process fragmented and eventually destroyed the Dalit movement. Dalit victimhood in this phase was shaped less due to religio-cultural factors and more by the dynamics of the new post-colonial political-economy unleashed by the constitutional state.

 

From the 1990s, after India adopted neoliberal reforms and officially discarded its socialistic or pro-poor rhetoric, the situation began to further worsen for the Dalits. Neoliberalism ostensibly came in the form of an economic theory that upheld a free market paradigm, but in reality it was an ideology akin to Spencer’s Social Darwinism. The competitive ethos unleashed by these reforms marginalized the discourse around social justice; resulted in the withdrawal of the state from many traditional government roles of being a provider of public services that hit them the hardest; the commercialization of health services and education increasingly deprived them of these basic services; and the rise of the right wing BJP, piggy-backing on this rightist ideology, effectively reversed the gains of the anti-caste movement. Increasingly driven into their identity cocoon, the Dalits were rendered defenceless against the aggressive onslaught of the Hindutva forces. Dalit victimhood had now primarily to do with the economics unleashed by global capitalism, and much less as a result of the Hindu religion.

The 2014 elections marked a kink in this depressing history. After the victory in the elections, when the Hindutva forces captured power under the leadership of Narendra Modi, they have aggressively embarked on accomplishing their long cherished goal of a Hindu Rashtra. They have launched a multi-pronged attack on every marker of constitutional democracy – its institutional structure, opposition parties, the independent media, the secular polity, rationalism and intellectualism. They even tricked gullible Dalits into their fold by displaying their fake love for Ambedkar, but sought to destroy those who did not succumb. They picked select targets among radical Dalit students and took the life of Rohith Vemula. They mounted an attack on every trace of resistance, identified as human rights defenders, and radical elements among Dalits by deeming them as ‘urban naxals’, to misuse draconian laws like UAPA that can incarcerate them for long years in jail. The strategy is to terrorize them into submission and send out a message to all – that the state can do anything to anyone without rhyme or reason.

 

The victimhood of Dalits has now assumed a qualitatively new form. An educated Dalit may have superlative distinctions, and a record of selfless service, but could easily be destroyed by being stamped an urban naxal. This label easily ‘others’ him from the Dalit community (using the contradiction between the leftism of Naxals and Ambedkarism as rooted among Dalits). His reputation could be tarnished, his family destroyed, he could effectively be silenced by incarcerating him in jail. It presents a lesson to all that they should beg not demand; pray not claim; fear not challenge.

This victimhood of Dalits is due to fascism, Hindutva just being its analogue. It has nothing to do with the Hindu religion, but is invoked for its political construction. The invocation of Hindu tradition and culture by the forces of Hindutva will certainly push the country back into a marsh of irrationality, but its motive force is fascism, Brahminic fascism.

 

Footnotes:

1. Edward C. Sachau, Alberuni’s India: An Account of the Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Geography, Chronology, Astronomy, Customs, Laws and Astrology of India About A.D.1030. Rupa & Co, New Delhi, 2002 (Trubner & Co., 1888), pp. .135-136.

2. Shraddha Kumbhojkar, ‘Contesting Power, Contesting Memories: The History of the Koregaon Memorial’, Economic and Political Weekly 47(42), 20 October 2012.