Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (2 page)

Revolutions can, and often have, begun with reading.

If you have heard of
Malala Yousafzai but not of
Surekha Bhotmange, then do read Ambedkar.

Malala was only fifteen but had already committed several crimes. She was a girl, she lived in the Swat Valley in
Pakistan,
she was a
BBC blogger, she was in a
New York Times
video, and she went to school. Malala wanted to be a doctor; her father wanted her to be a politician. She was a brave child. She (and her father) didn’t take heed when the
Taliban declared that schools were not meant for girls and threatened to kill her if she did not stop speaking out against them. On 9 October 2012, a gunman took her off her school bus and put a bullet through her head. Malala was flown to England, where, after receiving the best possible medical care, she survived. It was a miracle.

The US President and the Secretary of State sent messages of support and solidarity.
Madonna dedicated a song to her.
Angelina Jolie wrote an article about her. Malala was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize; she was on the cover of
Time
. Within days of the attempted assassination,
Gordon Brown, former British Prime Minister and the UN Special Envoy for Global Education, launched an ‘I am Malala’ petition that called on the Government of
Pakistan to deliver education to every girl child. The US drone strikes in Pakistan continue with their feminist mission to ‘take out’ misogynist,
Islamist terrorists.

Surekha Bhotmange was forty years old and had committed several crimes too. She was a woman—an ‘Untouchable’, Dalit woman—who lived in India, and she wasn’t dirt poor. She was more educated than her husband, so she functioned as the head of her family. Dr Ambedkar was her hero. Like him, her family had renounced Hinduism and converted to
Buddhism. Surekha’s children were educated. Her two sons Sudhir and Roshan had been to college. Her daughter Priyanka was seventeen, and finishing high school. Surekha and her husband had bought a little plot of land in the village of Khairlanji in the state of Maharashtra. It was surrounded by farms belonging to castes that considered themselves superior to the Mahar caste that Surekha belonged to. Because she was Dalit and had no right to aspire to a good life, the village panchayat did not permit her to get an
electricity connection, or turn her thatched mud hut into a brick house. The villagers would not allow her family to irrigate their fields with water from the canal, or draw water from the public well. They tried to build a public road through her land, and when she protested, they drove their bullock carts through her fields. They let their cattle loose to feed on her standing crop.

Still Surekha did not back down. She complained to the police who paid no attention to her. Over the months, the tension in the village built to fever pitch. As a warning to her, the villagers attacked a relative of hers and left him for dead. She filed another police complaint. This time, the police made some arrests, but the accused were released on bail almost immediately. At about six in the evening of the day they were released (29 September 2006), about seventy incensed villagers, men and women, arrived in tractors and surrounded the Bhotmanges’ house. Her husband Bhaiyalal, who was out in the fields, heard the noise and ran home. He hid behind a bush and watched the mob attack his family. He ran to Dusala, the nearest town, and through a relative managed to call the police. (You need contacts to get the police to even pick up the phone.) They never came. The mob dragged Surekha, Priyanka and the two boys, one of them partially blind, out of the house. The boys were ordered to rape their mother and sister; when they refused, their genitals were mutilated, and eventually they were lynched. Surekha and Priyanka were gang-raped and beaten to death. The four bodies were dumped in a nearby canal, where they were found the next day.
¹

At first, the press reported it as a ‘morality’ murder, suggesting that the villagers were upset because Surekha was having an affair with a relative (the man who had previously been assaulted). Mass protests by Dalit organisations eventually prodded the legal system into taking cognisance of the crime. Citizens’ fact-finding committees reported how evidence had
been tampered with and fudged. When the lower court finally pronounced a judgement, it sentenced the main perpetrators to death but refused to invoke the
Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act—the judge held that the Khairlanji massacre was a crime spurred by a desire for ‘revenge’. He said there was no evidence of rape and no caste angle to the killing.
²
For a judgement to weaken the legal framework in which it presents a crime, for which it then awards the death sentence, makes it easy for a higher court to eventually reduce, or even commute, the sentence. This is not uncommon practice in India.
³
For a court to sentence people to death, however heinous their crime, can hardly be called just. For a court to acknowledge that caste prejudice continues to be a horrific reality in India would have counted as a gesture towards
justice. Instead, the judge simply airbrushed caste out of the picture.

Surekha Bhotmange and her children lived in a
market-friendly democracy. So there were no ‘I am Surekha’ petitions from the United Nations to the Indian government, nor any fiats or messages of outrage from heads of state. Which was just as well, because we don’t want daisy-cutters dropped on us just because we practise caste.
⁴

“To the Untouchables,” Ambedkar said, with the sort of nerve that present-day intellectuals in India find hard to summon, “Hinduism is a veritable chamber of horrors.”
⁵

For a writer to have to use terms like ‘Untouchable’, ‘Scheduled Caste’, ‘Backward Class’ and ‘Other Backward Classes’ to describe fellow human beings is like living in a chamber of horrors. Since Ambedkar used the word ‘Untouchable’ with a cold rage, and without flinching, so must I. Today ‘Untouchable’ has been substituted with the Marathi word ‘Dalit’ (Broken People), which is, in turn, used interchangeably with ‘Scheduled Caste’. This, as the scholar Rupa Viswanath points out, is incorrect practice, because the term ‘Dalit’ includes
Untouchables who have converted to other religions to escape the stigma of caste (like the Paraiyans in my village who had converted to Christianity), whereas ‘Scheduled Caste’ does not.
⁶
The official nomenclature of prejudice is a maze that can make everything read like a bigoted bureaucrat’s file notings. To try and avoid this, I have, mostly, though not always, used the word ‘Untouchable’ when I write about the past, and ‘Dalit’ when I write about the present. When I write about
Dalits who have converted to other religions, I specifically say Dalit Sikhs, Dalit Muslims or Dalit
Christians.

Let me now return to
Ambedkar’s point about the chamber of horrors.

According to the
National Crime Records Bureau, a crime is committed against a Dalit by a non-Dalit every sixteen minutes; every day, more than four Untouchable women are raped by Touchables; every week, thirteen Dalits are murdered and six Dalits are kidnapped. In 2012 alone, the year of
the
Delhi gang-rape and murder,
⁷
1,574 Dalit women were raped (the rule of thumb is that only 10 per cent of rapes or other crimes against Dalits are ever reported), and 651 Dalits were murdered.
⁸
That’s just the rape and butchery. Not the stripping and parading naked, the forced shit-eating (literally),
⁹
the seizing of land, the social boycotts, the restriction of access to drinking water. These statistics wouldn’t include, say,
Bant Singh of Punjab, a Mazhabi Dalit Sikh,
¹⁰
who in 2005 had both his arms and a leg cleaved off for daring to file a case against the men who gang-raped his daughter. There are no separate statistics for triple amputees.

“If the fundamental rights are opposed by the community, no Law, no Parliament, no Judiciary can guarantee them in the real sense of the word,” said Ambedkar. “What is the use of fundamental rights to the
Negro in America, to the
Jews in Germany and to the Untouchables in India? As Burke said, there is no method found for punishing the multitude.”
¹¹

Ask any village policeman in India what his job is and he’ll probably tell you it is to ‘keep the peace’. That is done, most of the time, by upholding the caste system. Dalit aspirations are a breach of peace.

Annihilation of Caste
is a breach of peace.

Other contemporary abominations like
apartheid,
racism, sexism, economic imperialism and religious fundamentalism have been politically and intellectually challenged at international forums. How is it that the practice of caste in India—one of the most brutal modes of hierarchical social organisation that human society has known—has managed to escape similar scrutiny and censure? Perhaps because it has come to be so fused with Hinduism, and by extension with so much that is seen to be kind and good—mysticism, spiritualism, non-violence, tolerance, vegetarianism, Gandhi, yoga, backpackers, the Beatles—that, at least to outsiders, it seems impossible to pry it loose and try to understand it.

To compound the problem, caste, unlike say apartheid, is not colour-coded, and therefore not easy to
see
. Also, unlike apartheid, the caste system has buoyant admirers in high places. They argue, quite openly, that caste is a social glue that binds as well as separates people and communities in interesting and, on the whole, positive ways. That it has given Indian society the strength and the flexibility to withstand the many challenges it has had to face.
¹²
The Indian establishment blanches at the idea that discrimination and violence on the basis of caste can be compared to racism or to apartheid. It came down heavily on Dalits who tried to raise caste as an issue at the 2001 World Conference against Racism in
Durban, insisting that caste was an “internal matter”. It showcased theses by well-known
sociologists who argued at length that the p
ractice of caste was not the same as racial discrimination, and that caste was not the same as race.
¹³
Ambedkar would have agreed with them. However, in the context of the Durban conference, the point Dalit activists were making was that though caste is not the same as race, casteism and racism are indeed comparable. Both are forms of discrimination that target people because of their descent.
¹⁴
In solidarity with that sentiment, on 15 January 2014 at a public meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr’s 85th birth anniversary,
African Americans signed “
The Declaration of Empathy”, which called for “an end to the oppression of Dalits in India”.
¹⁵

In the current debates about identity and
justice, growth and development, for many of the best-known Indian scholars, caste is at best a topic, a subheading, and, quite often, just a footnote. By force-fitting caste into reductive Marxist class analysis, the progressive and left-leaning Indian intelligentsia has made seeing caste even harder. This erasure, this Project of Unseeing, is sometimes a conscious political act, and sometimes comes from a place of such rarefied privilege that caste has not been stumbled upon, not even in the dark, and therefore it is presumed to have been eradicated, like smallpox.

The origins of caste will continue to be debated by anthropologists for years to come, but its organising principles, based on a hierarchical, sliding scale of entitlements and duties, of purity and pollution, and the ways in which they were, and still are, policed and enforced, are not all that hard to understand. The top of the caste pyramid is considered pure and has plenty of entitlements. The bottom is considered polluted and has no entitlements but plenty of duties. The pollution–purity matrix is correlated to an
elaborate system of caste-based, ancestral occupation. In “Castes in India”, a paper he wrote for a
Columbia University seminar in 1916, Ambedkar defined a caste as an endogamous unit, an “enclosed class”. On another occasion, he described the system as an “ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt.”
¹⁶