Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (19 page)

As blatantly casteist and communal as the Hindu right is, in their search for a foothold in mainstream politics, even radical Dalits have made common cause with it. In the mid-1990s, the remarkable Dalit poet
Namdeo Dhasal, one of the founders of the
Dalit Panthers, joined the
Shiv Sena. In 2006, Dhasal shared the dais with RSS chief
K.S. Sudarshan at a book launch and praised the RSS’s efforts at equality.
²⁶⁹

It is easy to dismiss what Dhasal did as an unforgivable compromise with fascists. However, in parliamentary politics, after the Poona Pact—rather
because
of the Poona Pact—Dalits as a political constituency have had to make alliances with those whose interests are hostile to their own. For Dalits, as we have seen, the distance between the Hindu ‘right’ and the Hindu ‘left’ is not as great as it might appear to be to others.

Despite the debacle of the Poona Pact, Ambedkar didn’t entirely give up the idea of separate electorates. Unfortunately, his second party, the
Scheduled Castes Federation, was defeated
in the 1946 elections to the Provincial Legislature. The defeat meant that Ambedkar lost his place on the Executive Council in the Interim Ministry that was formed in August 1946. It was a serious blow, because Ambedkar desperately wanted to use his position on the Executive Council to become part of the committee that would draft the Indian Constitution. Worried that this was not going to be possible, and in order to put external pressure on the Drafting Committee, Ambedkar, in March 1947, published a document called
States and
Minorities
—his proposed constitution for a ‘United States of India’ (an idea whose time has perhaps come). Fortunately for him, the
Muslim League chose
Jogendranath Mandal, a colleague of Ambedkar’s and a Scheduled Castes Federation leader from Bengal, as one of its candidates on the Executive Council. Mandal made sure that Ambedkar was elected to the Constituent Assembly from the Bengal province. But disaster struck again. After partition, East Bengal went to
Pakistan and Ambedkar lost his position once more. In a gesture of goodwill, and perhaps because there was no one as equal to the task as he was, the Congress appointed Ambedkar to the Constituent Assembly. In August 1947, Ambedkar was appointed India’s first Law Minister and Chairman of the Drafting Committee for the Constitution. Across the new border, Jogendranath Mandal became Pakistan’s first Law Minister.
²⁷⁰
It was extraordinary that, through all the chaos and prejudice, the first law ministers of both India and Pakistan were Dalits. Mandal was eventually disillusioned with Pakistan and returned to India. Ambedkar was disillusioned too, but he really had nowhere to go.

The Indian Constitution was drafted by a committee, and reflected the views of its privileged-caste members more than Ambedkar’s. Still, several of the safeguards for Untouchables that he had outlined in
States and Minorities
did find their way in. Some of Ambedkar’s more radical suggestions, such as nationalising
agriculture and key industries, were summarily dropped. The drafting process left Ambedkar more than a little unhappy. In March 1955, he said in the Rajya Sabha (India’s Upper House of Parliament): “The Constitution was a wonderful temple we built for the gods, but before they could be installed, the devils have taken possession.”
²⁷¹
In 1954, Ambedkar contested his last election as a Scheduled Castes Federation candidate and lost.

Ambedkar was disillusioned with Hinduism, with its high priests, its saints and its politicians. Yet, the response to temple entry probably taught him how much people long to belong to a spiritual community, and how inadequate a charter of civil rights or a constitution is to address those needs.

After twenty years of contemplation, during which he studied
Islam as well as
Christianity, Ambedkar turned to
Buddhism. This, too, he entered in his own, distinct, angular way. He was wary of classical Buddhism, of the ways in which Buddhist philosophy could, had and continues to be used to justify war and unimaginable cruelty. (The most recent example is the
Sri Lankan government’s version of state Buddhism, which culminated in the
genocidal killing of at least 40,000 ethnic Tamils and the internal displacement of 300,000 people in 2009.
²⁷²
) Ambedkar’s Buddhism, called ‘Navayana Buddhism’
²⁷³
or the Fourth Way, distinguished between religion and
dhamma. “The purpose of Religion is to explain the origin of the world,” Ambedkar said, sounding very much like Karl Marx, “the purpose of Dhamma is to reconstruct the world.”
²⁷⁴
On 14 October 1956, in
Nagpur, only months before his death, Ambedkar,
Sharda Kabir, his (
Brahmin) second wife, and half a million supporters took the vow of the Three Jewels and Five Precepts and converted to Buddhism. It was his most radical act.
It marked his departure from Western
liberalism and its purely materialistic vision of a society based on ‘rights’, a vision whose origin coincided with the rise of modern
capitalism.

Ambedkar did not have enough money to print his major work on Buddhism,
The
Buddha and His Dhamma
, before he died.
²⁷⁵

He wore suits, yes. But he died in debt.

Where does that leave the rest of us?

Though they call the age we are living through the
Kali Yuga,
²⁷⁶
Ram Rajya could be just around the corner. The fourteenth-century
Babri Masjid, supposedly built on the birthplace of Lord Ram in Ayodhya, was demolished by Hindu storm troopers on 6 December 1992, Ambedkar’s death anniversary. We await with apprehension the construction of a grand Ram temple in its place. As Mahatma Gandhi desired, the rich man has been left in possession of his (as well as everybody else’s) wealth.
Chaturvarna reigns unchallenged: the
Brahmin largely controls knowledge; the Vaishya dominates trade. The Kshatriyas have seen better days, but they are still, for the most part, rural landowners. The Shudras live in the basement of the Big House and keep intruders at bay. The
Adivasis are fighting for their very survival. And the Dalits—well, we’ve been through all that.

Can caste be annihilated?

Not unless we show the courage to rearrange the stars in our firmament. Not unless those who call themselves revolutionary develop a radical critique of
Brahminism. Not unless those who understand Brahminism sharpen their critique of capitalism.

And not unless we read Babasaheb Ambedkar. If not inside our classrooms, then outside them. Until then we will remain
what he called the “sick men” and women of Hindustan, who seem to have no desire to get well.

1
For this account of Khairlanji, I have drawn on
Anand Teltumbde (2010a). For one of the first comprehensive news reports on the incident, see Sabrina Buckwalter (2006).

2
For an analysis of the lower court judgement, see S. Anand (2008b).

3
On 11 July 1996, the
Ranveer Sena, a privileged-caste, feudal militia murdered twenty-one landless labourers in
Bathani Tola village in the state of Bihar. In 2012, the Patna High Court acquitted all the accused. On 1 December 1997, the Ranveer Sena massacred fifty-eight Dalits in
Laxmanpur Bathe village, also in Bihar. In April 2010, the trial court convicted all the twenty-six accused. It sentenced ten of them to life imprisonment and sixteen to death. In October 2013, the Patna High Court suspended the conviction of all twenty-six accused, saying the prosecution had not produced any evidence to guarantee any punishment at all.

4
These are some of the major crimes against Dalits and subordinated castes that have taken place in recent times: in 1968, in
Keezhvenmani in the state of Tamil Nadu, forty-four Dalits were burnt alive; in 1977, in
Belchi village of Bihar, fourteen Dalits were burnt alive; in 1978, in
Marichjhapi, an island in the Sundarbans mangrove forest of West Bengal, hundreds of Dalit refugees from Bangladesh were massacred during a left-led government’s eviction drive; in 1984, in
Karamchedu in the state of Andhra Pradesh, six Dalits were murdered, three Dalit women raped and many more wounded; in 1991, in
Chunduru, also in Andhra Pradesh, nine Dalits were slaughtered and their bodies dumped in a canal; in 1997, in
Melavalavu in Tamil Nadu, an elected Dalit panchayat leader and five Dalits were murdered; in 2000, in
Kambalapalli in the state of Karnataka, six Dalits were burnt alive; in 2002, in
Jhajjar in the state of Haryana, five Dalits were lynched outside a police station. See also the documentation by Human Rights Watch (1999) and the Navsarjan report (2009).

5
BAWS 9, 296. All references to B.R. Ambedkar’s writings, except
from
Annihilation of Caste
, are from the
Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches
(BAWS) series published by the Education Department, Government of Maharashtra. All references to
Annihilation of Caste
(henceforth AoC) are from the Navayana edition.

6
Rupa Viswanath (2012) writes, “Where ‘Dalit’ refers to all those Indians, past and present, traditionally regarded as outcastes and untouchable, ‘SC’ is a modern governmental category that explicitly excludes Christian and Muslim Dalits. For the current version of the President’s Constitution (
Scheduled Castes) Order, which tells us who will count as SC for the purposes of constitutional and legal protections, is entirely unambiguous: ‘No person who professes a religion different from the Hindu, the Sikh or the Buddhist religion shall be deemed to be a member of a Scheduled Caste.’ ” She goes on to say, “It was only under Congress rule, in 1950, that the President’s Order explicitly defined SC on the basis of religious criteria, although Christian Dalits were excluded from SC for electoral purposes by the Government of India Act 1935. From that point onwards, Dalits who had converted out of Hinduism lost not only reservations, but also, after 1989, protection under the Prevention of Atrocities Act. Later, SC was expanded to include Sikh and Buddhist Dalits, but official discrimination against Muslim and Christian Dalits remains.” If Christians as well as Muslims who face the stigma of caste were to be included in the number of those who can be counted as Dalit, their share in the Indian population would far exceed the official 2011
Census figure of 17 per cent. See also Note 2 to the Preface of the 1937 edition of AoC (184).

7
On 16 December 2012, a woman was brutally tortured and gang-raped in a bus in New Delhi. She died on 29 December. The atrocity led to mass protests for days together. Unusually, a large number of middle-class people participated in them. In the wake of the protests the law against rape was made more stringent. See Jason Burke’s reports in
The Guardian
, especially “Delhi Rape: How India’s Other Half Lives” (10 September 2013).
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/10/delhi-gang-rape-india-women
. Accessed 12 September 2013.

8
National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) 2012, 423–4.

9
Privileged castes punish Dalits by forcing them to eat human excreta though this often goes unreported. In
Thinniyam village in Tamil Nadu’s Tiruchi district, on 22 May 2002, two Dalits, Murugesan and Ramasami, were forced to feed each other human excreta and branded with hot iron rods for publicly declaring that they had been cheated by the village chief. See Viswanathan (2005). In fact, “The Statement of Objects and Reasons of the
Scheduled Castes and
Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989” states this as one of the crimes it seeks to redress: “Of late, there has been an increase in the disturbing trend of commission of certain atrocities like making the Scheduled Caste person eat inedible substances like human excreta and attacks on and mass killings of helpless Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and rape of women belonging to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.”

10
According to the tenets of their faith, Sikhs are not supposed to p
ractise caste. However, those from the Untouchable castes who converted to Sikhism continue to be treated as Untouchable. For an account of how caste affects Sikhism, see Mark Juergensmeyer (1982/2009).