From Khairlanji to Kanpur and beyond

Despite the unfortunate destruction of public property involved, the protests highlight Dalit anger, frustration and alienation. They are also a grim reminder of the distance Indian society must travel to become minimally inclusive in regard to its most persecuted minority.

The protests were spontaneous. No political party, including any of the dozen factions of the Republican Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party, or Dalit Panthers, led them. But a carnage of Dalits, at Khairlanji in Maharashtra on September 29, formed their real backdrop -- and produced the trigger.

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In that episode, four members of the Bhotmange family, including two women, were killed by a caste-Hindu mob because two of them appeared as witnesses for another Dalit victim of casteism. All four were paraded naked and the women gang-raped before being killed.

Khairlanji's shame was compounded by the Maharashtra government's monumental callousness -- especially the police's failure to register the crime under the SC and ST Atrocities Act -- and the supine response of the Dalit leadership, which didn't even mention the outrage in hundreds of big meetings held days later, on the 50th anniversary of Ambedkar's conversion to Buddhism.

Khairlanji exemplifies the intensity and pervasiveness of the discrimination Dalits face despite decades of job and educational quotas. Education doesn't guarantee better treatment, nor does economic status. The Bhotmanges were educated and owned five acres of irrigated land. They were lynched because they asserted their rights.

Despite its exceptional violence, Khairlanji conforms to a pattern of exclusion, sanctioned by religion and custom, which stretches all the way from the remotest village to elite institutions in the heart of India's capital.

At the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, India's best-known teaching hospital, Dalit students suffer a system of apartheid, run with the authorities' connivance. AIIMS' Dalit students cannot live in upper caste-dominated hostels or eat at the same table. The government recently appointed a committee to investigate AIIMS. The Institute administration refused to cooperate with it.

Numerous other medical colleges too have been sites of upper caste domination. They played a pernicious role in recent agitations against quotas for the other backward classes. Dalit students are particularly vulnerable in such colleges given the system of internal evaluation, typically by prejudiced upper-caste examiners. They cannot protest against discrimination for fear of being further victimised.

Ordinary Dalits are worse off than those who make it to professional courses. For instance, the repugnant practice of manual scavenging still persists. An estimated 6.8 to 13 lakh Dalits continue to carry human excreta. It's clear that the deadline (2007) for eradicating this disgraceful practice won't be met, perhaps not even by 2010.

Reports of national and state-level Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Commissions reveal persistent and all-encompassing anti-Dalit discrimination, reflected in unpaid labour and humiliating practices such as barring Dalit women from covering their heads while passing through the upper-caste segment of a village.

Khairlanji is only one thread in a web of hierarchical social relationships and victimisation by virtue of birth, sanctioned by the Dharmashastras. Khairlanji also exposes the yawning gap between Dalit masses and political leaders. The leaders have lost touch with reality. Many are distrusted by the masses for their lack of identification with their constituency's problems, their lavish lifestyles, and their corruption.

India is now witnessing the emergence of a third-generation post-Ambedkar Dalit leadership. The first generation consisted of veteran Republicans and Congressmen like Bhaurao Krishnarao Gaekwad, BP Maurya, Dadasaheb Rupawate, RS Gavai and Jagjivan Ram. It got quickly discredited.

The second generation, represented by the Dalit Panthers -- who made a revolutionary beginning in Maharashtra 35 years ago -- has also been co-opted. One of its brightest stars, the great poet Namdeo Dhasal, now sings paeans to Tinpot Dictator Bal Thackeray. Other leaders, like Prakash Ambedkar, Ramdas Athavale and Jogendra Kavade, only have a limited following. Most of the rest stand marginalised.

Mayawati is the unquestioned leader of UP's Dalits, whose influence is growing in other states too. Although she's emerging as India's foremost Dalit leader, she lacks a strategy for social transformation along secular, egalitarian lines.

None of these leaders combines Dr Ambedkar's dual agenda -- of Dalit representation and radical, inclusive social change. The sole exception may be the Justice Party's Udit Raj.

The Dalit protests have put the third-generation leadership on test: It must sense the masses' mood and articulate their aspirations, or face total isolation.

However, Khairlanji makes one thing clear. Most Dalits have no use for the brand of identity politics that intellectuals like Chandra Bhan Prasad propound, centred on celebrating the birthday of Thomas Babington Macaulay, the founder of the colonial system of educating local clerks. Some Dalits have even invented a new deity, the English language.

Prasad & Co are more concerned to create a new class of Dalit millionaires than to redress the Dalit masses' problems. These are worsening under the impact of globalisation, privatisation, and liberalisation -- leading to greater inequalities, and displacement and dispossession of the poor -- which these globalisers favour. Their agendas can't strike a chord among ordinary Dalits.

The present moment confronts Indian society with a challenge: how should it address continuing Dalit oppression? If reservations haven't done the job adequately, should the state try other forms of affirmative action, including aggressive public education, sensitisation of upper-caste groups, and stricter laws to punish caste discrimination?

At the level of civil society, can India afford not to have a reform movement, which combats social pathologies involving deep-rooted discrimination based on birth? How might such a movement be launched to campaign for a more inclusive society?

These questions can no longer wait for an answer.

Praful Bidwai is an eminent Indian columnist.