A casteist remark and a Dalit woman CM

My first personal encounter with the caste system was as a junior reporter with The Statesman, when I went with a photographer to a village in Uttar Pradesh to investigate a ‘Dalit atrocity’. The Dalit family lived in a mud and thatch hut and as they talked about what happened they made some tea for us. I drank mine happily and noticed that my Brahmin photographer did not touch his. The Dalit family noticed, too, but said nothing.

On the way back to Delhi he said, ‘I just couldn’t do it . . . I couldn’t drink that tea. I don’t know how you could.’ ‘Shame on you!’ I told him, and asked how he would feel if I refused to drink tea in his house because I considered him beneath me in a class sense. It had not occurred to him.

In the years that have gone by since that first incident, I have mellowed and become generally a tolerant sort of creature, but casteism still makes my hackles rise. Not just because it repels me to think of any human being as sub-human but because it debilitates India in our understanding what basic humanity means. And, cleanliness. It is my belief that one reason why Indians of exalted caste and class have still not learned to use a public toilet and leave it clean is because they believe that some Dalit will come and clean after them.

With the greatest respect, may I say here that Gandhiji was on the wrong track when he tried to address the caste question? In his time, there were villages in India which forced those of the Shudra caste to scream as they walked so that their shadow may not pollute a Brahmin, and yet, all he did was change the name from Shudra to Harijan and start cleaning toilets himself to show that it was not a despicable task. It is a despicable task.

Nobody should have to do it. He would have done India a much greater service if he had started a movement for modern sanitation instead. In Indian cities, flush toilets and public transport have sort of solved the problem but there are still no famous Dalit lawyers, teachers, doctors, cricketers, movie stars or businessmen.

In the villages, things are much, much worse. Dalit women continue to be raped and paraded naked whenever some upper caste man feels offended. Literacy rates for Dalit women are a shame on India at 23 per cent. In some states there are almost no Dalit women who can write their name. In Bihar literacy is as low as 7.07 per cent, in Rajasthan 8.31 per cent and in Uttar Pradesh 10.69 per cent. We need not one Mayawati, but one hundred million for things to change.

One reason why this column totally opposes affirmative action of any kind for our so-called other backward castes is because it takes attention away from the far more important question of discrimination against our former untouchables. Another reason why this OBC business should never have been given such importance is because the most casteist castes in rural India today are the OBC castes. Backward, semi-literate peasants like Tikait who think they can say what they like and do what they like against those of lesser caste because that is how it has always been.

Well, luckily he did not get away with it this time. Luckily, the state of Uttar Pradesh has a Dalit woman as chief minister and even if Mayawati fails to deliver on the promise that idea contains, just by being there she has done enough. It is my humble opinion that the reason why we hear so much about her ‘corruption’ is also a matter of caste. How many Dalit journalists do you know?