Race, caste and what it will take to make Dalit lives matter

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• Martin Luther King, Jr, described the acknowledgment of white racism as “an important confession of a harsh truth.”

• Johnson did not stand for reelection later that year, and was replaced in the White House by Richard Nixon. The new president would not hear of “national action” to curb racial discrimination and inequality.

• in several cities, the main official response to the riots was not to address the causes of black discontent but “to train and equip the police with more sophisticated weapons.”

• The Kerner report was a runaway bestseller when published, but the country clearly did not take its message to heart.

• Today, black people remain the main power behind the protests, but conspicuous alongside them in the streets and online are young white people, Hispanic people, South Asians, East Asians and many others—not to mention people from across genders, sexualities and religions.

• As the black writer Stacey Patton has asked, “Are white people protesting because they are in honest solidarity—or because it helps to soothe their own conscience or assuage their guilt?”

• Many of the global corporations now speaking out against racism have extensive operations in India, but none has ever taken a stand for the rights of Dalits.

• They pointed correctly to the hurdles, including casteist, racist and religious hatred. But when it came to placing responsibility where it really belongs, they missed the mark.

• Black people never needed to be convinced of the evils of slavery, but white people did.

• Decades of black activism forced white America to reconsider legalised segregation and secured the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination by race, colour, religion, sex or national origin.

• Black Lives Matter has forced another moment of truth upon the white-dominated country. Which is why—though it is essential to remember the black scholar Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s caution that “Americans have short memories and long appetites when it comes to racism”—this moment holds real promise.

• Even in their new faiths, which espouse human equality in the eyes of god, Dalit and Adivasi converts find that a narrow elite, often converts from higher castes, continues to shun them.

• It can be argued that the local fetish for fair skin owes a good deal to the complexes left behind by colonial rule, but this cannot be used to deflect from indigenous prejudice.

• The wicked genius of the caste system lies in what BR Ambedkar, the great Dalit thinker and leader, described as its “graded inequality.”

• It is a near-perfect guarantor of hierarchy—self-enforcing, self-expanding and self-perpetuating, with a built-in mechanism against the unity of the oppressed.

• The foundation stone itself, as Ambedkar pointed out, is the Brahminical religion, Hinduism, so centred on the varna system that it cannot survive without caste—or, put another way, that the annihilation of caste depends on the dismantling of Hinduism.

• When it first emerged in Marathi in the 1920s, “Dalit”—literally “broken people”—was reserved for the untouchable castes, but the word has taken on a wider meaning over time.

• Ambedkar often preferred other terms for the oppressed—underscoring the difference between touchables and untouchables—and it was in the 1970s, many years after his death, that the use and political gravity of “Dalit” exploded.

• Credit for this belongs to the Dalit Panthers, the radical anti-caste organisation founded in Bombay in 1972, inspired by the Black Panther Party in the United States.

• According to the 2011 census, the Scheduled Castes comprise roughly seventeen percent of the Indian population. Combine them with the Scheduled Tribes, who form another nine percent, and the Panthers’ definition of Dalit already represents a quarter of the entire country.

• Shudras are looked down upon by the dominant castes and confined to middling ranks of society and power, but are ranked above the Dalits and Adivasis, who are considered to belong to no varna at all.

• The Mandal Commission estimated that the dominant castes account for barely more than seventeen percent of the population—roughly a sixth of the total.

• In the United States, by contrast, black people account for under a sixth of the population, and white people for almost three-quarters. There, the dominant majority is being made to shed its denial of the wrongs done to the minority.

• After first organising the Dalit Shoshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti—roughly, the Dalit and exploited people’s struggle committee—in 1984 Kanshi Ram founded the Bahujan Samaj Party.

• The Bahujans—the majority, or the many—included not just the oppressed castes, but also Adivasis and converts to minority religions. By courting voters and alliances across these lines, the BSP has risen to power multiple times in Uttar Pradesh

• The precedent for this connection goes back to 1873, when Jotirao Phule, the iconic Shudra thinker and anti-caste reformer, wrote Gulamgiri­­—literally, Slavery. In the book, Phule attacked the scriptural bases of the varna system and described the condition of the oppressed castes as a kind of inherited slavery.

• Phule was writing less than a decade after the United States adopted the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery in 1865, and evidently before the country’s revised regime of racism could dampen his admiration.

• When India got its chance after Independence in 1947, it passed a constitutional ban on the practice of untouchability, but never outlawed caste itself.¹

• Ambedkar’s death in 1956 had left the Dalit cause cast adrift. Many Dalit leaders were drawn into party politics, where they succumbed to infighting or were co-opted by the ruling establishment, most prominent in the form of the Indian National Congress.

• When it came to self-defence, the Dalit Panthers put together some bands to resist dominant-caste violence, but these were typically loosely organised and barely armed. This could not compare with the uniformed organisation and the almost military discipline that became synonymous with the Black Panthers, or the gun-carrying squads they sent out to deter police violence in black neighbourhoods, exercising the right to bear arms under US law.²

• Yet the Dalit Panthers, to a greater degree than Phule and Ambedkar before them, showed the potential the black movement had to pollinate ideas and action in the struggle against caste.

• When Ambedkar resigned as the law minister in Nehru’s cabinet, in 1951, one of his complaints was that he had been frozen out of key cabinet committees, including the one on foreign policy.

• In September 1949, before the UN General Assembly, India called for UN intervention in aid of Indian South Africans. Meanwhile, Ambedkar pointed out before the Indian parliament that the “tyranny and the constant and shameless resort to violence by Hindus” made the position of Dalits “far worse than the position of Indians in South Africa.”

• In the second half of the 1940s, India gained acclaim at the UN for leading the charge against South Africa as the country’s system of apartheid hardened into law.

• With the General Assembly still in session, BN Rau, India’s permanent representative to the UN, approached his South African counterparts to propose a compromise, with the Indian government’s permission.

• In effect, as Thakur has pointed out, India wanted a casteist solution to a racist problem. South Africa did not take this idea forward.³

• By the time of the Dalit Panthers, India had aligned firmly with the Soviet Union. This lay the ground for alliances against American imperialism—with numerous African nations, for instance—but this framework also left no room for connection between anti-racist and anti-caste struggles.

• For Indian diplomacy, Dalits as an oppressed category were not supposed to exist.

• There have been voluminous debates on the similarities and differences between race and caste. The two are not exactly alike, but they share this overriding similarity: both form the foundations of systems of discrimination, propped up by socially constructed notions of unequal human worth, where the targets of prejudice are selected on the basis of biological descent.

• The crucial choice is either to foreground these similarities, and commit to global and local action to eradicate both these heinous notions, or to fixate on the differences as a distraction, and so shield casteism from the same scrutiny and censure as racism.

• The varna system does not allow for any caste mobility—a person is meant to die in the same social rank they were born in, no matter what they achieve in life, akin to the black experience in the United States.

• In 2010, anti-caste activists won a major victory when Britain’s House of Lords passed an equality bill that recognised caste discrimination as a form of racism. The Indian government and Hindu groups protested, and in 2018 the British government announced that it no longer planned to bring the bill into law.

• THE MYTH OF A UNIVERSAL SOLIDARITY between black and “brown” people eclipses this history, and also much more. In India, the myth is exposed by the appalling treatment of black people.

• If justice for the oppressed is the true shared goal, the spokespeople of the brown world, almost exclusively from the dominant castes, must be made to confront the monster within.

• In the United States, the Indian diaspora owes a huge debt to the black struggle. The arrival of Indians in significant numbers was only possible after 1965, when a new immigration law barred discrimination by race, sex, nationality, place of birth or place of residence.

• The black novelist Toni Morrison once said that when European immigrants got to the United States, the moment “they got off the boat, the second word they learned was ‘nigger.‘”

• The diaspora sees it as a victory that Diwali is now commemorated in the White House. It does not care that this celebration of the “good” Hindu goddess Durga’s killing of the “evil” Mahishasur is deeply offensive to many Dalits and Adivasis, for whom Mahishasur is an ancestor.⁴

• Universities admit dominant-caste children and corporations hire dominant-caste workers to increase racial diversity in their ranks.

• Meanwhile, large sections of this same diaspora are hostile to India’s limited system of affirmative action for the caste-oppressed in public education and employment

• Though Gandhi opposed untouchability, he defended the caste system itself. Just like many dominant-caste thinkers today, he idealised traditional Indian society.

• During colonial rule, when Indians could elect their own representatives to provincial legislative councils, Ambedkar championed separate electorates for the oppressed castes, to guarantee their political representation and autonomy in a system where they were otherwise frozen out by the dominant castes. When the British government agreed to this, in the early 1930s, Gandhi began a fast unto death.

• Before he rose to prominence in India, Gandhi made a name for himself for confronting the British colonial government in South Africa. His quarrel there was not with the discrimination against all non-white people, but with the treatment of Indians—especially dominant-caste and passenger Indians—as inferior to the whites.

• Gandhi bought into the racist theory that white people came from a superior Aryan stock, and was convinced that the dominant castes shared the same Aryan blood too. His own writing is replete with anti-black racism—a realisation that has sparked a belated reassessment of his legacy.

• The admiration for Gandhi goes hand in hand with a lack of awareness of anti-caste thought.

• Another lesson in how those oppressed by race and caste can share inspiration is Dalit History Month, an effort to highlight the Dalit movement with events across the world every April. It is modeled on Black History Month, celebrated every February in the United States since the 1970s.

• Black people cannot be angry because they are overreacting, cannot protest because they are rioting, cannot demand a fair share of wealth because they are freeloading, cannot talk about the past because they are self-victimising. They cannot cry because they are faking, they cannot laugh because they are loud, they cannot be expressive lest they are annoying—even when their sisters and brothers are being killed in the streets. All of these are also facts of Dalit survival.

• Muslims make up less than three percent of the police country-wide, despite comprising almost 15 percent of the population.

• It is the dominant castes who need to recognise that they are carriers of a social and religious creed that cannot tolerate human equality. It is the dominant castes that need to do more to educate themselves about their privilege and violent prejudices, to organise and agitate against the caste system rather than for it

• The oppressed know that Indian institutions—temples and universities and corporations, the police and the courts and the Constitution—need drastic overhauls to root out casteism. It is the dominant castes, as they watch the institutional reforms in the United States in response to Black Lives Matter, who need to come to the same realisation.

• Black people have always known where white hatred comes from. It comes from white fear—fear of supposedly savage and unruly black bodies, which they need the police to shoot down, fear of black knowledge and success, to which they shut the door at every step.

• White fear demands black death, because without the torture and mutilation of black bodies the white public does not feel powerful and secure. The United States has raised a society based on this fear.

• Perhaps the reason Ambedkar admired him so greatly was that so much of what Du Bois said about white fear also describes dominant-caste fear, and the murderous heart Du Bois found at the centre of white culture has its equivalent at the centre of Brahminical dominant-caste culture—more commonly known as Hinduism.

Footnotes

1. But how does one “cancel” the idea of caste? Outlawing caste itself might not do any good. Wouldn’t this destroy a person’s identity as a Dalit? Or is the destruction of such an identity the objective in the first place? ↩

2. An example of policy imitation of the Black movement in the US by Dalits in India ↩

3. Vinit Thakur’s piece: https://is.gd/XlYL0T ↩

4. Political Correctness gone mad? ↩