:: Friday, December 27, 2002 ::

The Gujarat Riots and the Dalits:

Anand Teltumbde , a Dalit scholar and activist within the Ambedkarite movement, has some interesting thoughts on the recent riots in Gujarat and the role of caste in the violence; some salient theme that we have discussed previously have emerged from a field trip he made to Gujarat and I thought it pertinent to look at some of them, the text of the full report can be found at Ambedkar.org.

Visiting a camp some differences become apparent very quickly, particulalry the quite different self-consciousnees of Dalits in gujarat from those elsewhere, as Teltumbde notes when talking to a young Dalit:

What was amusing about the Kankaria camp was that everyone there identified himself or herself as Hindu. They were all Dalits. As a matter of fact Hindu cannot be an adequate identity for anyone. Hindu only evokes curiosity about the caste. Unless one knew the caste, the identity was not complete. But for the past decade or so this impossible identity is being concertedly forged in the laboratory of Hindutva. It is not that Hindutva has dissolved castes, abandoned its varnashramdharma. Far from it, it has used it skillfully to lure the lower caste Dalits and Shudras and the non-caste Tribals into its fold as Hindus against the other religious minorities. It is therefore Dahyabhai who
identified himself as Hindu would not readily say Harijan, the Gandhian epithet derided and discarded by the Dalits elsewhere but habitually worn by most Dalits in Gujarat as their identity. He appeared puzzled, some what annoyed with my enquiry about his caste. Took a longish pause before he muttered the caste that he belonged to. I did not get it right, but my friend who knew Gujarati told me that it was a scheduled caste. I checked it
with Dahyabhai, “Dalit?”. He nodded in affirmative but said, “han, Harijan”. This split second commonplace conversation reveals volumes about the consciousness of
the Dalits in Gujarat, the hegemonic spell of Hindutva over them and their resultant condition post-Gujarat carnage of unsung death and devastation.

Teltumbde has more sobering thoughts on how these differences affected the role Dalits in Gujarat played in the esuing violence that occurred:

But, when the fact finding reports of the civil rights organizations noted the Dalit role in the Gujarat carnage against Muslims and the various commentators started issuing their comments thereon, it created an impression that the entire killing was executed by the Dalits and the Tribals. Notwithstanding, the now established fact that the carnage was not at all a spontaneous reaction but a well planned operation against an unarmed people, notwithstanding the uncovering of identities of some culprits, who planned and led the mobs to commit some of the most ghastly crimes, and the fact that they were not Dalits, and notwithstanding the general observation that the Hindutva forces managed to get people across all castes, classes, ages and even genders to participate in this carnage, the involvement of the Dalits and Tribals only received particular attention. It came handy for the caste prejudices of people to insinuate that such heinous killings cannot be the act of the cultured Brahmins in the Sangh Pariwar. It had to be the barbarous people like Dalits and Tribals to commit such inhuman acts as to rape teenage girls and old women in public view, to reap open the uterus of pregnant ladies, extricate the foetus with spike of trishul and stuff the burning rags into her uterus- cavity; throw the kids into bakery ovens etc. It evoked disgust, not for the Modis, Zadaphias and their VHP Bajrang Dal cohorts
who planned and directed this odious tragedy but for the poor innocent people like the Dalits and Tribals. It confirmed their mental models hammered out in their minds by their obscurantist socialization and casteist culture that the Dalits were uncultured, barbarous and intrinsically inferior peopleIt is a fact that the Dalits and Tribals were used in large numbers in violence against Muslims but no one can say that the entire carnage was their act. Rather, being in the
neighborhood of Muslim masses, only the Dalits suffered their counterattacks. It was not because they identified their attackers as living in their neighborhood but because of their sheer vulnerability. The caste people and that includes backward castes, the torchbearers of the Hindutva, are not to be found in the relief camps because they are not as vulnerable. These people did it and got away with it. Either way, if people are to be charged it always came handy to catch hold of some one like a Dalit. The bias is intrinsic, embedded in the system that readily problematises the have-nots. While the Tribal crowds looting the shops and houses belonging to Muslims was eloquently written on and
showed on the television, there was no such media celebration when the high caste gentlemen and ladies from well to do homes looted the high brow Muslim stores in the posh localities of Ahmedabad in broad day light. Now that the storm is settling and the police machinery is getting activated, it will be the Dalits and Tribals who will be stamped as the sole perpetrators of the Gujarat carnage.

I have not myself in all of what I have read encountered any of the special attention paid to Dalit or tribal participation in the riots that Teltumbde alludes to; in fact though such particpation was not the norm in the past but did occur to some significant level in the post-Godhra carnage; it was noted mostly by civil rights campaigners and secularists who were alarmed and some rather Romanticist Gandhians and utopianists who were appalled that communties they thoguht were immune to the allures of communalism succummbed and joined in the pogrom willingly. Of course the reaction in the mainstream press may well have contained more of the reaction that Teltumbde outlines above. In seeking to see why such participation occurred in Gujarat, he explores some of the caste histroy in the recent period:

Historically, Gujarati Dalits never developed Dalit consciousness that characterized the Ambedkarian movement in neighboring Maharashtra. They remained under paternalistic influence of Gandhi as his Harijans as a part of Hindu community. The Dalit Panther movement in 1970s did stir the educated Dalit youths in urban areas but could not reach out beyond them. For the first time the statewide 1981 riots awakened the Dalits to the ground reality and impelled them towards the Ambedkarian Dalit identity. The following birth anniversary of Ambedkar marked this sudden change of consciousness. Many Ambedkarite activists had striven before for creating this Dalit consciousness in them
through the Dalit Panthers, various Buddhist organisations, Bamcef, DS4, BSP etc. but their influence remained at best confined to certain pockets. The violence of 1981 riots achieved in one shot what they could not do over many years. It is significant to remember that during these riots the Muslims had sheltered Dalits at many places. Dalits faced the wrath of same Brahmins, Banias and Patidars combine again in 1985 although this time their agitation was against the hike in job quotas for the OBCs in government and educational institutions. Ironically the Dalits upheld the reservations for the OBCs under the Mandal Commission and bore the wrath of the higher castes but the actual beneficiaries continued not only to be with the higher castes but also against Dalits.

I am not totally convinced by this arguement: after all the spread of Ambedkarite movements outside Maharashtra was quite late, the BSP stronghold of Uttar Pradesh only saw a powerful Dalit movement in the 1990's; this also ignores the dynamics of the so-called KHAM alliance of Congress and the machinations in dividing the votes of what Congress politicans euphemistiacally termed the "weaker sections of society". Such an alliance should have provided alternative axis of mobilisation, even if they were not able to hang on to political power in the legislature but instead seem to have collapsed. Teltumbde then turns to offering more economic and materialist causes behind the emergence of communalism amongst the Gujarati Dalits:

The general economic dilapidation of Dalits in Gujarat due to closures of textile mills during 1980s came handy for BJP to lure away the crisis-ridden masses to its obscurantist projects constructing a viable identity of the ‘other’. Over 50 major textile mills were closed down during the middle of 1980s throwing over one lakh workers on the road. Later, during 1990s due to impact of globalization, the spate of closure and retrenchment followed aggravating the economic crisis of the Dalits further. Generally the Dalits who constituted unskilled or low skill labour in factories could be easily displaced by new automating technology and social prejudices made them further vulnerable to loss of job. Their struggle for survival impelled them to take up some casual work which was traditionally being done by the Muslims. Thus began a sort of economic competition and clash of interest between the Dalits and the Muslims. Wherever the Dalit-Muslim clashes have occurred in Ahmedabad, this economic contradiction can be underscored easily in the change of occupational pattern that came during the last two decades. With no regular source of income and without any regular job, as Jan Breman1 observed, many could not even escape the wave of lumpenisation which augered well for any kind of rioting. The impact of globalization should not be conceived in narrow terms as entailing mere job losses. The growth centric economic development that globalization promotes invariably marginalizes people issues as has happened in Gujarat. The economic boom in early 1990s created along side great disparities; while the industrialists, traders and educated middle castes benefited with this boom the farmers who had enjoyed tremendous prosperity during the green revolution years until the previous decades saw stagnation in their income, the lower classes anyway left out of the distribution net. When this boom receded resulting into the decline in the living standard of population as indicated by the actual decline in per capita income after 1996-972, it created fertile grounds for communal identities to flourish. Few realize that Globalisation with its ideological thrust on the autonomy of an individual and free market that provides unfettered space for these autonomous individuals is intrinsically supportive of the all shades of ‘social Darwinism’ that certainly includes fundamentalism, communalism and fascism. It is not only in India, where the growth of the Hindutva forces can be directly correlated with the advance of globalization, but also all over the world that the fundamentalism of some kind is seen on rise. The atomized individual is basically a insecure creature in the market place, having lost the protective cover of the organizations like trade unions etc. readily accepted community in Hindutva when offered by the Sangh. Dalits also could not be exception to this process.

Again I remain less than totally swayed by such arguements; they don't seem to fully account for why certain districts remained relatively calm while others degenerated in violence failry quickly. Certain ideas of the rise of fundamentalism being a rise to the disenchanment of modernisation process make some intuitive sense but again don't account for the diverse range of reactions seen. The rest of Teltumbde's paper contains some rather stereotypical complaiints about the Muslim communities' insularity and inability to build cross-communal alliances. Apart from the simplified views of the Muslim comunity being offered, it ignores the real difficulties invilved in builiding such electoral alliances, though as the example of Muslim support for the BSP and the SP in Uttar Pradesh shows it can be done; more importantly it overlooks the very real failure of the Dalits themselves to ally with other margnisalised groups like the OBCs and the Tribals. Indeed to turn Teltumbde on his head I find it interesting that he separates tribals from Dalits as a category when looking at the two communties; one would have thoguht that a real application of Bahujan Samaj ideology would conflate the two and not see any distinction. This indicates to me that sectarian thinking has not fully allowed the removal of varna-type distinctions within the Dalit movement, even if jati-type ones have collapsed.

:: Conrad Barwa 5:24 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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Re: Muslim Women in India

Zoya Hasan’s and Ritu Menon’s survey linked to below just reveals a basic fact that is shockingly overlooked by much of the public discourse on the Muslim community in India. Which is that they are a community that suffers from high levels of poverty and low human development indicators and who have few avenues for improving their socio-economic position. Many consist of poor Muslim castes such as weaver groups in Uttar Pradesh and the slums of major metropolises such as Calcutta and Mumbai are densely populated with poor Muslims who eke out an inadequate living from the so-called “informal sector” which makes them vulnerable to the operations of mafias and corrupt state representatives both of whom siphon off a share of their meagre earnings. IT is disturbing that such a deprived and situationally weak community has managed to arouse so much ire or that the BJP has managed to successfully portray them as a threat to much of middle-class India. Of course there are certain areas where Muslims are in a better position such as Kerala with its history of impressive social development, or the prosperous Bohra community in western India but these are not the norm for the Indian Muslim community as a whole. How has the BJP been so successful in turning a community, which so obviously suffers from many problems of development into a threat?

I can think of only several possible answers. As Thomas Blom Hansen has noted, there is an element of jouissance, which he defines as “stolen enjoyment” that pervades much of the Hindutva discourse on Muslims. Listening to the hate rhetoric of a Rithambara or an Uma Bharati one realises just how much invective and energy is needed to create the impression of a Hindu-Muslim divide and then a Muslim threat. Such campaigns take enormous levels of organisation, energy and resources; which to my mind is a good sign as it means not only are such divisions and conflict not primordial but generated but that to create a sufficiently communal atmosphere it is necessary to put in substantial effort to destroy a pre-communal stability. Much of this is done by couching appeals to frustrated desires for the ‘good life’ to the urban proletariat and petit bourgeoisie hit by rising prices, stagnant incomes and restricted job opportunities by alluding to the “stolen enjoyment” of the minority community, which is seen to be enjoying those very things denied to the audience. There is a lot of sublated and displaced attraction to the recurrent images given of the “virile, lusty and rapacious Muslim male” who is ever ready to degrade and physically possess non-Muslim women and whose masculinity is seen in stark contrast to Hindu male passivity; such rhetoric is targeted specifically at young Hindu men urging them to abandon their supposedly passive and tolerant ways and to regain their masculinity. The Muslim male is said to desire Hindu women and patriarchical notions of honour are activated to protect Hindu womanhood from such a fate: in a region where the honour and standing of a community is bound up intimately with the status and behaviour of its womenfolk such devices have deep resonances. Another theme is the constant allusions, interestingly even in academic texts on the topic, of the sudden infusion of Gulf money especially during the 1980’s which is meant to have inflated the incomes of Muslim groups quite rapidly and generated inter-communal conflict based on envy and Muslims became more assertive over a short period of time and challenged supposed Hindu dominance in public spheres in a way not seen before. The timing of this supposed prosperity was meant to explain at least in part the rising levels of communal conflict in the 1980’s and the rise of Hindutva appeals in the 1990’s. Even such highly regarded scholar such as Ashutosh Varshney, in his recent work on Hindu-Muslim Riots in India falls into this trap when looking at communal riots in Lucknow and Aligarh and attributes some of the sources to the rising prosperity of Muslim craftsmen groups over the last two decades; even more disappointingly he fails to provide any convincing data or evidence. Any look at the socio-economic profile of the Muslim community can easily expose such claims for the fabrications that they are and again are used as an example of jouissance that the Muslim Other is meant to be enjoying at the cost of the Hindu majority. A similar comparison can be made with the allegation of Christian conversions, whereby financial inducements, were meant to lure poor and low caste people away from the fold of Hinduism to Christianity. This reveals not only an implicit casteism and homogenisation of the Indian Christian community which has its own internal caste conflicts but also is directed towards the complete failure of the developmental state to make sufficient progress in poverty reduction and an alternative way of living with dignity for much of the labouring poor. Again the Other is posited as enjoying an “excess” whether of masculine virility or material wealth that “we” are being deprived of.

Of course such elements form only the part of the persuasive discursive basis of Saffronist appeals. Structural basis lie elsewhere; politically as noted by many observers the Nehruvian legacy was never very strong and was undermined substantially by his dynastic successors in the supposedly “secular” Congress. Harold Gould’s longitudinal study of the Faizabad parliamentary constituency elections from the 1950’s onwards shows the blatant use of communal and religious sentiments by the Congress in the Ayodhya elections of 1952 and the politicisation of Babri Masjid issue at the state level at least. Nehru was aware of such tactics and complained to the then Uttar Pradesh Chief Minster GB Pant but when met with stonewalling tactics allowed the issue to lie. The later use of communal politics of Indira Gandhi, who by some commentators was said to have outdone “even the BJP” and the corrupt clientist deals of Rajiv Gandhi are more obvious to most interested observers of Indian politics. The BJP’s task was made much easier by the fact that Congress had been communalising politics for decades before all the while mouthing secular dogma.

Samir Amin has also a more long-term interpretation of what he calls the rise of ethno-nationalist movements. In this view, after the failure of the growth deaceds and developmental optimism of the modernising project undertaken by many Third World states in the 1950’s and the 1960’s and the collapse of Communism in the USSR which ensured the hegemony of the Neo-liberal project a crisis of reproduction occurred amongst many elites in the developing world. Deprived of secular and progressive forms of legitimacy and economic stability and reacting to the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the 1980’s and the pressure of Globalisation in the 1990’s alternative forms of political mobilisation were needed to shore up popular support and to allow the change from auto-centric to integrated growth paths in the world economy. This accounts for the turn to ethno-nationalism and other primordial movements such as those of the Islamists and religious fundamentalists in differing parts of the periphery. While, this is a simplification both of Amin’s more complicated thesis and reality it is interesting to see the fractured links between the Neo-liberal project and the revival of these primordial and particularistic movements as quite frequently the two feed into each other rather than engage each other in a confrontational manner.

While I dislike ordinal ranking schemes and classification, an argument increasingly heard amongst middle class Hindu circles is that it is the backward nature of Muslim society which is responsible in particular for the plight of Muslim women in their societies; the implication being that Hindu society (read non-Muslim Indian) not suffering from the same reactionary tendencies offers a much better position to women in its fold – again the theme of the status of women is re-articulated as a marker of a community’s superiority even in this supposed modernist discourse of progress. What is ignored and not looked at is the comparatively superior performance of many Muslim countries, especially those in the Middle-East so often targeted for censure in this regard on both the UN Human Development Index and the Gender Development Index (figures from the UN human Development Report for a 16 year period from 1980 to 1996, the only country that does much worse than India is Yemen). It is comfortably relegated to the background that if societal and restrictive constraints on Muslim women were so rigorous then why is their socio-economic position in so many Islamic countries better than their Muslim sister in India?

:: Conrad Barwa 3:46 PM [Permanent Link] :: ::
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