IN a TV debate on Barack Obama’s India policy, while other discussants dilated on the loftier issues of military strategies, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Taliban and so on, Prof Kancha Ilaiah said America’s first black president was good news for India’s Dalits.
Ilaiah teaches political science in Hyderabad in southern India and has written an array of candidly insightful books on Dalits, being one himself adding to their authenticity. It was interesting to hear a different voice and another argument on high politics, which, if translated into practice, could comfortably usher a revolution, not in India alone but in the entire South Asian region.
But why would Obama be interested in the Dalits of India? Or would it be better to ask how people at the bottom of the caste heap (and with no corporate interlocutor yet worth the name) could be of any interest to an American president, no matter that his unexpected victory did cause, as much as it reflected, an upheaval against a deep-rooted prejudice?
The answer may lie in the fact that in the run up to his own election Obama was subjected to the vilest racial slurs, an indication that though he may have won a majority of the presidential votes, the deeper recesses of the otherwise democratic United States remain vulnerable to centuries of cultivated bias. In the equation between the largest democracy and the most powerful democracy, the Dalit question may not be larger than the lump in Ilaiah’s throat as he spoke emotionally on his expectations from the Obama presidency.
Of course, there is a very fair chance that India may get its first Dalit prime minister in the elections expected in April, possibly as a foil to the two main upper caste parties that have dominated the nation’s firmament so far. But there are equal and opposite energies at work to deny Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati (who like most Dalits is known by just one name) a shy at the top job. Moreover, it is not clear if she will pass Ilaiah’s stringent test for an ideal Dalit leader.
However, there are good reasons to believe that a Dalit woman leader in India would be good for political peace and economic progress in South Asia. The Dalits, more so their women, being at the receiving end of a biased state apparatus, would seem to have little if any interest in drumming up a stand-off with neighbours. There was this very telling picture of an eight-year old Dalit girl being mercilessly beaten by a policeman of a higher caste in the Sunday papers. In other words, Dalits have enough of it on their plate to have an appetite for communal politics that underpins irrational choices of war and strife.
This does not translate into a lack of interest in domestic sociology or global crosscurrents. When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government was virtually bribing rival parties to support a civilian nuclear deal with the United States, it was Mayawati who had opposed it on the grounds of its adverse international ramifications. The deal had inbuilt negative implications for India’s relations with Iran.
What gives Ilaiah’s thoughts muscle is the fact that many of the problems surrounding nearly all the major issues in South Asia link up with either tribespeople or the Dalits, including their Muslim variants. From Balochistan in the west to the Chittagong Hill Tracts in the east, the journey would take us over swathes of territory like the vast Dandakaranya forests where Lord Ram went into exile, and which are today the hotbed of mostly Dalit and tribal-led Maoist campaigns for violent emancipation — where the powerful elites are coveting the ample natural resources and trampling the fundamental rights of the larger Bahujan communities.
Obama’s passage to the White House was bumpy, not the least because his friend and pastor Jeremiah Wright was projected by rival campaigners as a black anti-American rabble-rouser. Obama disowned his critical worldview to become more acceptable as a moderate leader. Similarly, Mayawati’s early views on caste would almost certainly be dug out, and they were not any less controversial than Jeremiah White’s. While she has already made her peace with a more accommodating moderate line, Ilaiah’s trenchant views about Dalit liberation remain.
Bahujans comprise a majority of Indian people who have suffered at the wrong end of history. In this respect Ilaiah’s politics flows from the Dalit-Bahujan marriage with Muslims, “particularly indigenous converts who form the vast majority of the Muslim population”. The latter share much in common in terms of culture with the Dalits, says Ilaiah. “Both belong, in contrast to the Hindus, to a meat-eating culture, and in a society where what you eat determines, in a very major way, your social status; this is crucial.”
It was in the struggle of the Dalit-Bahujans against the Brahminical state that Dalit-Bahujans converted in large numbers to Buddhism, Sikhism, Islam and Christianity, says Ilaiah. These were social protest movements to gain social rights and self-respect. “The whole Buddhist phenomenon in our early history was a story of Dalit-Bahujan protest.”
Ilaiah claims that Islam championed social equality and that there was a total absence of the feeling of untouchability among its followers. This may not be quite accurate, certainly not in practice. Muslim rulers adopted the ways of local high caste chieftains, and there is evidence they mistreated lower caste subjects.
Ilaiah thinks otherwise. “Take a very simple thing — the Hindu namaste, folding your hands to greet someone — is a very powerful symbolic statement. It suggests that I recognise you but you should not touch me. In contrast, the custom that the Christians introduced of shaking of hands is a touching relationship, while the Muslims go even further and physically embrace you. Even today in the villages the Muslims are the only people who actually physically embrace the Dalit-Bahujans.”
Women will play a natural leadership role in a Dalit-Bahujan-led society. “Central to that task would be re-writing Dalit-Bahujan history to show, for instance, their knowledge systems, their role in the productive process, their great contributions to the development of technology or in the realm of spirituality or how their societies afford women a much higher status than the Brahminic. Sati and dowry have historically been specifically Hindu problems never ours.”
If the next Indian elections do throw up a scattered coalition, as is widely expected to happen, and powerful lobbyists do not subvert the verdict, an Indian Dalit leader may well be getting ready to tell the world: “Yes, we can.” Ilaiah would exult in the partial fulfilment of his dream. And Obama would be meeting a different shade of the black problem, possibly more deep-rooted and more intractable than his own.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com
Source: http://dawn.net/wps/wcm/connect/Dawn%20Content%20Library/dawn/the-paper/columnists/a+different+shade+of+black
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