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Casting a cruel light
The outdated, divisive and discriminatory
practises of the caste system are still strong in India today. CLARE
DOYLE reviews a remarkable book which sheds light on the subject, and
decades of struggle against it
Bhimayana: experiences of untouchability incidents in the life of Dr
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar
Navayana Publishing, 2011, £20
BHIMAYANA IS A beautifully illustrated, simple and
sometimes amusing account of one of the ugliest and cruellest features
of Indian society, the Hindu caste system. There are 170 million in the
most oppressed caste or Dalits, referred to as ‘untouchables’, in India
today. On average, two are killed every day and three Dalit women are
raped. Every hour, two Dalits are assaulted. Every day, two Dalit houses
are burned down.
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, born 120 years ago, and the
country’s foremost Dalit fighter, has more statues erected to his memory
than either Mahatma Gandhi or Pandit Nehru, India’s first prime minister
after independence. With the former he argued publicly about measures to
overcome the plight of the lower castes. Under the latter he served as
the first law minister and chair of the constituent assembly. His
proposals for a Hindu code bill to make personal law more equitable -
for assuring equal opportunities and women’s rights in the new India –
were amended out of existence and he resigned.
Ambedkar had been given the chance to study in the
US and Britain, unlike the overwhelming majority of Dalits, even today,
in spite of education and job quotas for ‘backward and scheduled
castes’, which are supposed to provide them an equal opportunity. On the
first pages of the book, a young man of the 21st century is complaining
to a friend that the quota system for allocating jobs is holding back
his own prospects. His friend then runs through some of the most
humiliating aspects of the caste system encountered by Ambedkar and
points to newspaper cuttings to show how little has changed.
The Hindu caste system originated in ancient,
pre-capitalist society. It is a rigid, hereditary hierarchy of social
rank. But, unlike class, it is not based on particular occupations or
relationships with landowners or employers. In this order, Brahmins,
originally priests, generally have dominated professions such as
scholars, teachers, lawyers, etc, and enjoyed high status. The so-called
‘outcasts’ or ‘untouchables’ have generally been excluded from education
and training as well as access to many public assets, condemned to a
life as poor labourers, engaged in so-called ‘unclean’ work at the
bottom of the pile. While individuals have been able to achieve certain
concessions in society, these archaic distinctions have been carried on
even under ‘modern’ capitalism.
Stories from Ambedkar’s childhood and youth move
along the pages of this unique book with pictures by two Adivasi
artists, Durghabai and Subash Vyam. It was devised and written by
Srividya Natarajan and S Anand, but the artists have added their own
embellishments – pictorial and in inventions for the dialogue. There is
a parallel with the cartoon book by Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis. About a
rebellious girl in Iran, it was also made into an animated film.
Quite unexpectedly, simple pictures and direct
messages can move you to tears and anger, joy and delight. The words of
each character, including Ambedkar, are contained in speech bubbles – in
the shape of a bird for those who are soft and gentle; attached by
twisted venomous coils to those who are cruel and callous. The pages are
strewn with birds, animals, snakes and fish. The story almost literally
flows from page to page with water in various forms - streams, lakes,
ponds and water storage tanks.
Fighting for water rights
AND IT IS water over which the most glaring
discrimination is practised: the denial to Dalits of water used by all
other Hindu castes, by Muslims, Parsis and animals. The very name
Bhimayana is a skit on the Hindu’s holy book, Ramayana, the epic tale of
the life of the chief god Ram.
Bhim (Ambedkar) fought all his life against the
scourge of the caste system. In one of the early scenes in the book he
is travelling on a train in 1918 reading Democracy and Education, by
John Dewey, a tutor of his at Columbia University. Dewey was an eminent
US philosopher who, in 1937, headed a commission of inquiry into the
charges fabricated against Leon Trotsky and his supporters in the
infamous Moscow trials.
In 1920, Ambedkar launched a hard-hitting,
anti-caste newspaper. Three years later, he began organising for a mass
rebellion over access to water, the Mahad Satyagraha. It took four years
to prepare a kind of mass ‘trespass’ of 3,000 untouchables to take water
from the Chavadar tank in the Bombay area. They would be exercising
their right to do so, inscribed in law but denied in practice. The Dalit
activists called the event a ‘declaration of independence’. There were
defiant speeches: "The Dalits rallied to the cry of the French
revolution: ‘Liberty, equality and fraternity’. Twenty people were
injured when the demonstration was violently attacked".
Ambedkar was seen as a revolutionary in his own way.
Though never a Marxist, he drew the conclusion that no ruling class
gives way without a fight. He explained to those who took up the
struggle with him: "If it was not for the resistance of the rulers,
violent revolution would not be necessary!"
When the Brahmins at Mahad decided that, rather than
let Dalits drink water from the Chavadar tank, they would pollute it
with cow excrement and urine (among other things), a second Mahad
Satyagraha was organised, on 25 December 1927. This time there were
10,000 protesters. A copy of the Manusmriti, the ‘sacred’ Hindu law book
which upholds caste practice and women’s enslavement in the home, was
ceremonially burned on a pyre.
A newspaper story from January 2008, copied into the
Bhimayana, shows that nothing has changed. When Dalits, aided by human
rights organisations, took direct action to claim access to the waters
of a pond in Chakwara, near Jaipur, and bathed in it, they were set
upon. Local Hindus bombarded them with sticks and stones. The police
waded in with tear-gas and live ammunition. "The caste Hindus", writes
the newspaper, Tehelka, "have started to shit and dump garbage in the
pond. Recently, some men dug up the village sewer and directed it to the
pond water". The right to use the water was granted, but the water was
unusable!
A life of struggle
AT VARIOUS STAGES in his life, Ambedkar came up
against the humiliations and deprivations that Dalits experience to this
day – discrimination in schools, transport and hospitals, even among
barbers. The only time he began to feel equal and be treated equally was
when he was studying abroad. In his home country, even as an eminent
lawyer, he was refused lodgings on the basis of his origins, not only by
a Hindu friend but by Parsis and Christians too. A Hindu ‘friend’ says
that if he gives him accommodation, his servants will leave! There
follows an account from The Hindu (5 May 2008) of students in New Delhi
training for the civil service being beaten up by a landlord and his
family when they came to know they were Dalits.
In the book, Ambedkar shows how, even though Muslims
are maltreated, even persecuted, by the majority Hindus, they operate
their own kind of hierarchical system, including looking down on and
discriminating against Dalits. He laments, they "teach equality but
practice the caste system".
Ambedkar’s militant anti-casteism brought him into
conflict with Mahatma Gandhi. He was angry that Gandhi only saw
discrimination when he was out of his country, in apartheid South Africa
in the 1930s. Ghandi’s solution at that time was not to fight to abolish
apartheid but to campaign for a separate category for Asians, superior
to black people. This was eventually established. The pacifist
campaigner against British rule in India was less aware of the brutality
inherent in the caste system in his country.
Ambedkar’s approach to injustice was in many ways
revolutionary and linked to the general struggle of all workers and poor
against inequality and exploitation. In an echo of Karl Marx’s comments
to his daughter that "happiness is to struggle", the Dalit leader
maintained, "the battle to me is a matter of joy". "Educate, agitate and
organise: have faith in yourself", he urged. But his solutions were
limited. He advocated that political representatives for Dalits should
be Dalits exclusively, and be voted in by a Dalit-only electorate. This
would appear to consolidate separateness rather than overcome it, but it
was an understandable attempt to get a greater hearing for the views of
the most oppressed in society. It was aimed at getting a certain
political independence from politicians who came from other castes and
continually ignored the plight of the Dalits.
Ambedkar did not turn to the class struggle as a way
of uniting the oppressed against their oppressors, or to the ideas of
socialism. At the end of his life, however, he did finally repudiate
Hinduism. "It was not my fault I was born an untouchable", he said, "but
I am determined I will not die a Hindu". Incredibly, he turned to
another mystical explanation of the world, Buddhism. In 1956, a few
months before his death, half-a-million people converted with him, the
biggest known mass conversion in history. Unfortunately, Buddhism, while
appearing to Ambedkar to be more honestly egalitarian, has been used in
Sri Lanka, where it is the state religion, as a cover for one of the
most bloody oppressions of a national minority in the world – against
the Tamil-speaking people of the island.
Each of the book’s chapters shows that the worst
anti-Dalit discriminations are far from eliminated from Indian society.
The denial to Dalits of medical care continues. A special kind of
‘honour killing’ persists: persecuting, beating and killing women and
their male relatives simply because they are Dalits.
The election of some prominent Dalits to high office
has not led to the elimination of discrimination against the
untouchables. A Brahmin-Dalit alliance swept the Bahujan Samaj Party to
power in Uttar Pradesh in May 2007. Its leader, the Dalit woman,
Mayawati, became chief minister. Dripping with gold and jewels she is as
rich and corrupt as any upper-caste politician in a similar position. In
her state, almost 80 million people live below the poverty line, 40% of
the total population.
The Bhimayana carries a 2007 account of two Dalit
women in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, who died after being thrown out of
hospital as soon as they had given birth to their babies. Doctors are
not meant to do life-saving examinations on Dalit patients because of
their untouchability. Discrimination of this kind brings back memories
of what happened in the southern states of America when the great jazz
singer, Bessie Smith, was injured in a car crash. Because of the colour
bar operating at the time, doctors were not ‘allowed’ to treat her until
all whites had been seen to. By that time she had died, of treatable
injuries.
Stalinist failures
THE CASTE ISSUE is deep-rooted and complicated. It
is not sufficient to do as the ‘communist’ parties of India do. They
declare that casteism cannot be eliminated until classes are eliminated,
which would only be in a communist society. They do not put forward
policies to combat caste prejudice and discrimination in capitalist
society in the course of building the socialist movement. Worse still,
they have stopped even trying to establish genuine socialism, let alone
communism. On the contrary, by 2007 they were scandalously involved in
the murderous events in Nandigram, West Bengal.
The Communist Party of India (Marxist) had been in
control of that state for more than three decades, partly because of its
early popular land reform measures. It had not, however, pursued an
uncompromising struggle against capitalism and landlordism across the
state or on an all-India basis. It was the CPI(M) administration which
ordered armed gangs of police and party thugs to move in against poor
farmers in Nandigram and clear them from their land to make way for
multinational corporations. Fourteen people were killed, many injured,
hundreds made homeless and deprived of their livelihoods. This and other
anti-working class and poor policies have now lost them political
control in poverty-stricken West Bengal, as well as in Kerala in recent
elections.
The Stalinists have argued that there must be a
stage of industrialising society through developing capitalism. Then,
the basis can be laid for socialism and communism. That was the policy
of the Mensheviks who, in Russia in 1917, opposed the Bolsheviks’
strategy of taking power into the hands of the workers and peasants to
build a socialist society. But the ideas of socialism seem now to have
been sidelined along with any pretence of taking up a struggle against
caste discrimination. They have not been able to develop a programme
that would link up the just demands of the Dalits and their struggle for
emancipation with the demands of organised workers, peasants and other
poor people for a transformation of society along socialist lines. This
failure, even in the middle of the last century, is also what drove
Ambedkar and other Dalit activists away from what they saw as Marxism
and communism – in reality, Stalinism.
Marx’s idea of communism was a society in which no
private ownership of major industry, land and banks would exist. Under a
democratically-run plan for the economy and society, all that is
produced can be distributed according to people’s needs and without any
discrimination or privilege. In the transition towards such a society,
even if the working class took power tomorrow, not only would the
economy have to be completely transformed along socialist lines, but
many vestiges of capitalist society would remain in the form of
reactionary ideas, prejudices and chauvinistic attitudes and practices.
Steps would have to be taken with the aim of eliminating all forms of
discrimination without worsening the rights and conditions of others.
Against all discrimination
EVEN UNDER CAPITALISM, during boom periods, some
measures like quotas and positive discrimination can have an effect in
providing better opportunities for women, ethnic minorities, Dalits,
etc. But they are limited and open to misuse. The elimination of
inequality, exploitation and injustice needs always to be linked to the
need to change society along socialist lines. But long before a truly
communist society can be established, socialists must take up and fight
against every form of discrimination.
The workers’ movement, in the battles over wages,
conditions, housing and prices must inscribe on its banner the unity of
all workers and oppressed, regardless of nationality, caste, sex or
religion. It must aim for the equal treatment of all workers and poor:
for full and fair access to education, healthcare and other social
facilities, jobs and housing.
Ambedkar’s words about Indian democracy still ring
true: it is "only a top dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially
undemocratic". Great advances can be achieved through struggle. But they
can only be maintained for any length of time where all natural and
human resources are massively expanded on the basis of nationalisation
and planning under the democratic control and management of workers and
poor people’s elected representatives.
‘Superabundance’ is the basis for genuine socialism
and is vital to enable all to receive what is needed for a fulfilling
and useful life. Until then, there will be many and varied conflicts
over scarce resources. This is shown in the Bhimayana when it comes to
quotas on jobs. A system of quotas can ease the situation for those who
are most discriminated against in terms of jobs, education, housing and
even in politics and on governing bodies. It is an attempt to redress
the bias against them, the lack of opportunities and inadequate
representation by politicians of their grievances and interests.
Socialists support all steps towards equality in
society, but not at the expense of other exploited layers. There is
always a risk of positive discrimination measures being used by
individuals to better themselves, regardless of what happens to others.
In today’s corrupt, capitalist India, some Dalit
political figures have been elevated into privileged positions where
they have pursued their own interests and turned a blind eye to the
problem of caste. They have adopted the lifestyle and approach of the
caste oppressors. This has happened where caste-based parties have made
compromises with capitalist politicians and business interests to gain
power and influence, but then have not used their positions to further
the interests of the most downtrodden people but only to feather their
own nests.
Socialists will take up and combat all forms of
oppression, exploitation and discrimination. Where today, as described
in the Bhimayana, a resource such as water is denied to Dalits, an
uproar has to be created and mass protests organised in the manner of
Ambedkar’s Satyagrahas but involving as many organised workers from
different backgrounds as possible to give weight and a perspective to
the struggle.
The rottenness of the caste system must be exposed
at every turn, along with the incapacity of capitalism to provide even
the basic necessities for the world’s inhabitants. It is a system that
deserves only to be swept away through mass resistance and the organised
struggle of workers and poor people behind a programme of socialism that
can end the horrors of class and caste oppression once and for all. |