Praful Bidwai
The Hindi word ‘Dalit’ has entered the international lexicon in recent years as an evocative reminder of the unique cruelty and injustice of India’s caste system. Dalits (meaning the broken) who comprise roughly 15 percent of the country’s billion plus population, are the true Wretched of the Indian Earth: dirt poor, discriminated against, disadvantaged in social and educational terms, and demonised as “impure” by virtue of birth, and hence untouchable.
No comparable group barring African slaves during the colonial era has faced the magnitude of oppression and discrimination the Dalits suffer to this day. “And certainly no group has suffered such intense discrimination on grounds of its birth in the lowest order of the social hierarchy for 2,000 years,” says Rajiv Bhargava, a political scientist based at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies here.
To be Dalit in India means to live on the margins of society (literally, often outside the village boundary); to face unequal and humiliating treatment at the hands of caste Hindus; to be denied access to community and public resources, including water; to suffer from malnutrition and illiteracy at rates twice higher than the national average; and worst of all, to have to internalise the idea that injustice and discrimination are your fate, your karma, ordained by God.
“However, there is also the opposite side to this victimhood and horrifying story of suffering”, says Gopal Guru, a political scientist at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, himself a Dalit. “And that lies in a bitter, hard struggle by the Dalits for dignity, for their constitutional and legal rights, for equality, and for social and political empowerment.”
This side of Dalit existence has had increasing exposure to the global and Indian public. Sustained Dalit activism before, during and after the 2001 United Nations-sponsored World Congress against Racism at Durban, South Africa, has put the Dalit issue on the world agenda.
However, nothing could be as dramatic an expression of the Dalit struggle for self-emancipation as their political self-organisation, which culminated last week in an unambiguous, emphatic victory for a Dalit-dominated party in the legislature of Uttar Pradesh.
With a population of 170 million, Uttar Pradesh is India’s largest state and the world’s seventh largest political entity. It now has a government led by Mayawati (51), herself a Dalit and a single woman. Mayawati, who grew up in a slum and had to struggle hard to acquire an education, now heads the ruling Bahujan Samaj Party (party of the broad masses, excluding the elite castes).
Even Mayawati’s opponents concede this is history in the making. Unlike other Dalits who rose to the top within elite services (such as former president K.R. Narayanan and the present Chief Justice of India, K.G. Balakrishnan), Mayawati has won a mass mandate, through grassroots campaigning which created and expanded her support-base.
The BSP won a clear majority of 206 seats in the 403-member Uttar Pradesh Assembly -- a feat which no other party has accomplished for one-and-a-half decades. This became possible only because many non-Dalits voted for the BSP, besides Dalits who form 21 percent of Uttar Pradesh’s population.
About one-half of the BSP’s aggregate vote, adding up to 30.5 percent of the state’s total, came from non-Dalits. Astonishingly (for many Indians too), a significant chunk of Brahmins (priestly caste), who are at the very opposite end of the caste hierarchy from the Dalits, voted for the BSP.
“Clearly, many upper-caste people in Uttar Pradesh voted for the BSP not because they have turned against casteism or suddenly begun respecting equal rights for Dalits,” says Bhargava. “They endorsed it out of shrewd social and political calculation. But the fact that they chose to back the BSP and Mayawati instead of the more familiar upper-caste leaders and parties, speaks of the sea-change that has occurred in this highly politicised state, where even the illiterate can hold forth on parties and programmes”.
Mayawati has, for the first time, built a broad multi-caste multi-class social coalition, which inverts the pyramid long known to Indian politics. The pyramid is dominated by the privileged upper castes, but held up from below by underprivileged and plebeian layers, who alone have the numbers.
For instance, the Indian National Congress, which has ruled India for four-and-a-half decades of its 60 year-long Independent existence, once successfully built a rainbow coalition comprising the upper castes, Dalits and Muslims, which helped it garner the 30 to 40 percent vote that put it into power in the first-past-the-post system. The coalition distributed patronage to the minority groups and co-opted their leaders, but it was always dominated by the upper castes.
Mayawati has done the very opposite in UP. She offered political representation to the upper castes, but incorporated them into her coalition on terms set by the BSP, with its Dalit-focused agenda.
In the seven-phase election in UP, spread over five weeks, which concluded on May 11, the BSP fielded as many as 139 upper caste candidates (of a total of 403), including 86 Brahmins. It also gave tickets to 61 Muslims and 110 low or lower-middle castes called the Other Backward Classes (OBCs). Only 93 of its candidates were Dalits.
This Grand Experiment produced spectacular results. Their impact has been all the more dramatic because it was unanticipated by the media. Most opinion polls, conducted before and during the elections, severely underestimated the BSP’s likely performance. Not one of them forecast a majority for it. The highest rating anyone gave it was in the range of 152 to 168 seats (maximum), at least 38 seats (or 23 percent) short of achievement.
At any rate, even Mayawati’s critics in the media, of whom there are plenty, now recall the statement by former Indian Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, himself a Brahmin, after Mayawati’s emergence as a major leader in the 1990s. He said she represents “a miracle of democracy”. But now Maywati has herself pulled off a democratic miracle for the Dalits and for the vast majority of Indians who are underprivileged and disadvantaged.
The BSP’s victory will not redress the terrible situation of Dalits even in Uttar Pradesh, marked by extremely high indices of deprivation, social backwardness, landlessness, grinding poverty, and lack of access to education. However, it is likely to have a huge political impact on Dalits and other underprivileged groups in the whole country.
It will certainly reinforce an important trend under which political empowerment of a deprived group becomes an instrument for the gradual redresssal of social and educational backwardness through affirmative action. In India, 15 percent of all government jobs and admissions in educational institutions have been reserved for Dalits since 1950. Another 7 percent are reserved for indigenous tribals (Adivasis). This has indisputably resulted in better social opportunities.
Affirmative action has recently been extended to the OBCs too -- in the face of stiff opposition from the upper-caste elite which continues to corner plum jobs and seats in educational institutions. This process, which started in the South, has gradually but inexorably spread to other states. The “BSP model” will influence Indian politics by highlighting the issues of equity and redistributive justice in this terribly unequal society.
“This will be an antidote to the completely irrational euphoria about GDP growth that has gripped the middle class”, says Bhargava. “Growth, typically jobless and inequality-enhancing, has little meaning for the mass of the population. The equity agenda is a healthy and much-needed corrective.” Guru is somewhat sceptical about the BSP’s willingness to promote the causes of empowerment of the underprivileged and redistribution of the fruits of growth. But if it does so, he adds, “it will have contributed to India’s long-term social transformation’’.
