Three recent incidents reminded me of the gur-chana story I heard some 25 years ago. I used to know this bright and outspoken Dalit student, who cleared a competitive exam and joined as an officer. I met him shortly after his marriage to a girl from a relatively privileged family, who was keen to shed the “SC” tag and blend into the “normal” society of officers. So was he, perhaps. Before I could comment on his tempered self, he sheepishly said, “Adjustment kar liya hai, sir”. I marvelled at the elasticity of this very Indian expression that covers anything from accommodation to assimilation to submission.
So I was startled to see an Ambedkar portrait in their drawing room when I visited him after a couple of years. He saw the question in my eyes and before I could ask, narrated a story. The day their firstborn started walking, he and his wife shared their joy with their neighbours in the Officers’ Colony by distributing gur-chana, as was their custom. In the evening, while taking a walk, the couple noticed that more than one neighbour had thrown their gur-chana in the waste heap outside their houses. No one said a thing, no caste slur was uttered. Yet, in an instant they knew the sociological truth: Yeh jati hai ki jatee nahin. The tag they wanted to shed wouldn’t leave them. So they embraced it.
I have narrated this story umpteen times to make three simple points. One, caste is not our past; it is very much our present lived reality. And it threatens to remain a part of our future. Two, it is not limited to the rural or traditional pockets of “backwardness”; caste wears new masks in modern sections of our society. Rarely does caste-based oppression and injustice announce itself as such. It comes wrapped in layers that need to be peeled off. Three, caste is sticky; eliminating its effects is tricky. Education and jobs are necessary for countering caste inequalities, but they are not sufficient.
All three lessons came back to me last week, following three incidents — the lynching of Hariom Valmiki in Rae Bareli, the suicide of IPS officer Y Puran Kumar in Chandigarh and the attempt to hurl a shoe at CJI B R Gavai inside his courtroom.
There is nothing to connect these three very different occurrences, directed at three persons of very different standing, except that all of them happen to be Dalit. The fact of the victims being Dalit does not, by itself, put all these cases in the category of caste-based oppression. As per media reports, Hariom was lynched not because he was a Dalit but because he could not offer coherent answers to the crowd that suspected him of being a thief. Supposedly, Justice Gavai’s attacker did not invoke his caste, but his alleged affront to Hinduism. And, as per bureaucratic whispers, Puran Kumar fell to intra-office rivalry more than the caste-based discrimination he mentioned in his suicide note. This is what the dominant common sense would have us believe.
We must peel off this deceptive layer by asking a counterfactual question: What if the persons in question were not Dalits? Would they have met the same fate? What if Hariom, surrounded by a crowd that suspected him of being a thief, had shouted that he is a Thakur? He may not have escaped some humiliation and beating. But would he have been beaten to death, with no one coming to his rescue? Would his body be left to rot, to be discovered by the police next day? Would the police and administration delay action for as long as they did? Hariom suffered this fate not because he was suspected to be a petty criminal, nor because he was mentally challenged, but because he was a Valmiki.
Or, take the case of what happened in CJI Gavai’s court. You cannot rule out a deranged person doing something like this in any court, irrespective of the social background of the judge. But would an otherwise “balanced” lawyer do this in the CJI’s court if there was nothing in his eyes that lowered the stature of his position? Was the invocation of affront to the “Sanatan” by him limited only to religious tradition? Or, was there a sub-text of caste Hindu supremacy in what he said? In other words, was he reacting not just to what was said, but also to who said it? N Sukumar characterises it as “casteist manifestation of hatred” that has been normalised in our times.
What if an incident like this had happened in the court of CJI D Y Chandrachud, and the offender was a Muslim? Would the entire country respond as placidly as it did in this instance? Would the Home Ministry and the national security establishment respond the way they did? Would TV channels not feast on this for days on end? Would we have seen the offender getting away with a series of soft interviews? Can we imagine social-media campaigns to support and glorify the offender, as happened in this case? Justice Gavai may occupy the highest judicial position in the constitutional order but it appears that that does not alter his position in the social order.
Finally, let us ask: What if Puran Kumar was not a Dalit? Again, rivalry among officers and persecution of the inconvenient voices is not unheard of in the world of babudom. But Kumar’s final note narrates a story of isolation, of marginalisation by successive bosses. Was it just the isolation of a dissenting voice or was there an element of social marginalisation? Would he have faced this had he been surrounded by a social network of officers of his own community? He himself identified the root cause of his persecution as caste discrimination. While there is widespread concern and coverage of the incident, including a letter of support from the IAS association and a belated and perfunctory letter from the IPS fraternity, there is little acknowledgment of and discussion on the caste angle of this incident. As Sumeet Mhaskar and Prabodhan Pol pointed out in this newspaper, this incident proves once again that the “casteless bureaucrat is a myth”.
The gur-chana story I heard resulted in the installation of Babasaheb’s image.
Would these three stories result in the re-installation of Babasaheb’s resolve for annihilation of caste?
The writer is member, Swaraj India, and national convenor of Bharat Jodo Abhiyaan
