THE DALITS' DILEMMA
The coming elections have highlighted the threats to the autonomy of Maharashtra's Dalit community. Ranjit Hoskote discusses the issues involved.
THE MANIFESTOES of political formations make for sombre reading, once history has bypassed their rhetoric and overturned the ideals they enshrine. "Who are our enemies," asked the Dalit Panthers of Mumbai in what must now, perhaps, be described as their vision statement of 1972. Their answer was ready at hand: "Power, wealth, price. Landlords, capitalists, moneylenders and their lackeys. Those parties who indulge in religious or casteist politics and the government which depends on them..."
To many observers on the Left, in that period of naxalite unrest with the New Left upsurge in Europe and the United States still fresh in mind, the Panthers were the great new hope for a better India. They embodied a revolution that would confront the interwoven strands of class and caste, that would unmask oppression at the level of materiality as well as culture, translating into political action the teachings, variously imbibed, of the Buddha, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, Marx and Mao.
As legatees of the Black Panthers and the naxalites, the Dalit Panthers sparked off a great pan-Indian wave of awakening in which, as Gail Omvedt points out, the downtrodden and the proletarian identities became conjoined as a potent source of resistance.
This wave, which began in the working-class districts of Mumbai, may be said to have peaked in northern India with Kanshi Ram's formation, in 1980, of the Bahujan Samaj Party.
If the tone of defiance in the 1972 manifesto falls so oddly on the ear today, it is because so many of the organisation's founder-members have abdicated their radical inspiration. They have gravitated rightwards towards the same parties whose religious and casteist approach they once denounced. The tiger, the Shiv Sena's emblem, appears to be a more persuasive beast than the panther: the same voices that demanded the transformation of India into `Dalitistan' in the 1980s have now signed up with the forces of Akhand Bharat (composite India).
It would be far too facile to ascribe this ideological shift to political opportunism alone. Rather, it may be more constructive to examine the issues at stake in the context of an evolving Dalit post-modernity in which the certitudes of the Marxist-existentialist tradition that gave birth to the Dalit Panthers have all been demolished. The rightward shift of the Panthers may well incarnate a tough realism. This would, of course, bring little comfort to those who believe that, because Left-liberal forces have treated the Dalits as a showpiece of progressive politics, the Dalits must return the compliment by playing showpiece forever. For the Panthers, who are intellectuals, writers and academics, reflect the turmoil in Maharashtra's Dalit community, which finds itself cheated of the benefits of six decades of development, bereft of effective leaders, and deployed as a vote bank in the demographic warfare that has been dignified with the title of the electoral process. Although precise figures are difficult to come by, observers have recently expressed dismay that significant numbers of Dalits in Maharashtra, mainly neo-Buddhists belonging to the formerly untouchable Mahar community, are prepared to try out the Shiv Sena.
The social and economic transformations of the 1990s could scarcely have thrown up a different result. All through that momentous decade of globalisation, during which the protected market was opened up to trans-national players, private enterprise promoted while public spending was cut back, and the sunrise sectors of software, finance and banking shone while the old textile industry faded away, Dalits in Maharashtra watched as other classes and communities benefited from this wave of progress. In Mumbai, where the Dalits have long been associated with the textile industry, the contrast between the old and new has been most poignantly sharp: towers of affluence have soared above the ruins of Mumbai's old mill-lands, and industrial localities have been transformed into developers' paradise-islands. Thus the younger generation of Dalits has had to make a choice between an established but discredited leadership from within the community, and an emergent, apparently successful leadership - which happens to be provided by the traditional enemy, Shiv Sena, which has called for a strong coalition with the Dalits.
The cynical interpretation of the Sena's sudden love for the Dalits is that it is looking for a fresh base from which to recruit storm troopers for its periodic displays of might. The more charitable reading is that the Sena may be undergoing a gradual makeover. If Uddhav Thackeray's careful exploration of the landscape of electoral possibilities is any index, the Sena may, over the next decade, renounce the maverick and incendiary approach perfected by its founder, Bal Thackeray. In that case, it would have to adopt the more careful, consolidationist methods of a normal political party. As such, it has already begun to present itself as a constructive, ecumenical platform that wishes to expand far beyond its strongholds in Mumbai and coastal Maharashtra. In attempting to build itself such a broad base in the State, the Sena has been courting the influential Maratha community, while also strengthening its presence among the Kunbis and the Other Backward Castes (OBCs). Its appeal to Dalits is the next logical move in mobilising a new regional entity that transcends the conventional divides of caste and caste-based interest.
The casualty, in this narrative, is the hope of an autonomous Dalit stance, a Dalit future different from those composed by the social scriptwriters of the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party and the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party alliances, and the caste-class alignments they embody. This predicament may be traced, in turn, to three signal failures. First, it can be argued that the Dalit Panthers never outgrew their fascination with a Fanonist politics of redemption by violence; if the CPI (M-L) served as their guiding light in the 1970s, the Sena provided the updated model for the 1990s, even if the caste-class narrative of revolution had to be replaced by a regional-linguistic one. Secondly, the post-Ambedkarite Republican Party of India (RPI) leadership utterly failed to execute Dr. Ambedkar's dream of a resistance alliance that would not remain confined to a specific caste, but which would embrace dissent and dissidence across sectarian lines.
Thirdly, and this is the most delicate yet vital issue, the Ambedkarite revolution has remained unfinished precisely because it has neglected its founder's culminating project: the re-invention of the Dalit identity as a Buddhist identity, the charging of resistance with the ethical and spiritual energies of meditation, self-discipline and a symbolic imagination that proposes an alternative to prevailing orthodoxy. As Buddhist practitioners linked to the Dalit community admit, Dalit Buddhism has suffered the same fate as many other revolutionary social experiments that struggle to articulate themselves in a world dominated by the forces they oppose. The pressures on Dalit Buddhism are enormous, since it operates in conditions of lack and resentment, with models of violent self-assertion ready to hand. In consequence, Buddhism has become a symbol of difference rather than a significantly different ground of being and action, among the majority of Maharashtra's Dalits. The danger with symbols is that they can easily be appropriated, as the machine of Hindutva has demonstrated by absorbing Dr. Ambedkar into its hall of glory.
The autonomy of Maharashtra's Dalit community may depend crucially on their re-reading of his revolutionary teachings, rather than a token profession of reverence for his aura.