The parallels between Dalit movement in India and US’ Black movement

There have been many theories and debates around the word Dalit. One camp argues against the use of the term, while the other prefers to keep it. The argument for its non-use is that the term evokes a sense of inferiority and indicates people’s lower-caste position. Since India has gained independence and abolished untouchability, we do not need to subscribe to the idea of a lower identity. Meanwhile, the other camp believes that Dalit identity is an existential one, which cannot be wished away by negating the term or by ignoring the experience it embodies.

Dalit, in its prevalent meaning, is a caste-specific term of assertion for those once called untouchables and now officially designated the Scheduled Castes. 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. Gopal Guru considers the conceptual ability of the term dalit (lowercase) as an ontological and material logical parallel to terms such as Buddhist, Bahujan, or subaltern. According to him, they are mutually co-constitutive as “they share the same positive utopia of creating a society free from coercion, exploitation and thus, dehumanization of people”. Anand Teltumbde has observed that Ambedkar “used ‘Dalit’ as a quasi-class term”, which included “within its ambit the downtrodden and poor”. But Ambedkar often preferred other terms for the oppressed—underscoring the difference between touchables and untouchables. He, at times, used Depressed Classes—later, he disowned this term. Along with his colleague at the Round Table Conference, Rettamalai Srinivasan, he petitioned the government to replace the use of the term as it was “degrading and contemptuous”. Instead, they proposed several options, such as “Non- caste Hindus”, “Protestant Hindus” and “Nonconformist Hindus”. While the identity of untouchables underwent many changes bureaucratically, the term Depressed Classes remained in use. When Ambedkar started his political party, the All India Scheduled Caste Federation, it was also widely known and described by him and his partymen as the Dalit Federation. The term Dalit remained in circulation but did not create a pan-Indian movement until the 1970s, many years after Ambedkar’s death, when the use and political gravity of the term Dalit suddenly took off.

Credit for this belongs to the Dalit Panthers, the radical anti-caste organization which was founded in Bombay in 1972, distantly inspired by the Black Panther Party in the United States. Their legacy, though largely ignored by mainstream Indian histories, is hugely relevant today, beginning with their definition of “Dalit”. As defined in the Dalit Panthers’ Bhoomika (position document), the term embraces not just the oppressed castes, but also the Adivasis, or Scheduled Tribes, and “the working people, the landless and poor peasants, women and all those who are being exploited politically, economically and in the name of religion”. Part of this definition is explained by the Panthers’ avowal of socialism, but the acknowledgment of injustice based on gender and religious identity challenged the class-bound programmes typical of socialists and other leftists of the time.

Dhasal noted that he did not want the ostracized Dalit community to be further alienated. To bring that community to the mainstream he expanded the definition so it is inclusive of other vulnerable groups. However, the antagonistic forces” in the Dalit Panther pointed it to be an influence of communists. This led to Dhasal’s ousting which he pointed out to Naipaul during the interview with him.

If seen from a political solidarity standpoint, the term Dalit was not different from Bahujan—the subalterned majority. It was analogous to the definition of the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa that adopted black as a non-white and emancipatory identity open to diverse races arrested in the suppression of the apartheid regime.

The founders of the Dalit Panthers were ideologically divided. One group looked at the socialist camp with suspicion and discomfort, as they saw it as being close to the Maoist insurgent ideology of the Naxalites. They preferred to contemplate liberation through Buddhism, as proposed by Ambedkar. Yet the Bhoomika, it has been argued, also bore signs of Naxal influences. J.V. Pawar, one of the leaders and chroniclers of the Dalit Panthers, has said that the Bhoomika was issued by Dhasal without the approval of the Panthers’ monthly meeting. Scholars state it was written with the help of Anil Barve, a communist activist, who was later ejected from his Dalit Panther group. The Bhoomika largely adopts a left-oriented position on class oppression, caste discrimination, and the question of landless labourers. It also refers to the failure of the left parties after India’s independence to capture political power in the general elections.

As a relatively small group founded in reaction to caste-based violence and injustice, the Panthers centred their praxis and rhetoric on furthering oppressed-caste unity, organization and pride. The wider coalition suggested by this aim never eventuated under the Panthers’ watch. Yet its foresight and importance remain undiminished.

According to the criteria of economic and political exploitation, the Panthers’ understanding of “Dalit” also includes large numbers of the Adivasis, Minorities and shudras, the last-mentioned largely grouped under the Other Backward Classes (OBCs), who form the last of the four tiers of the varna hierarchy. Shudras are looked down upon by the dominant castes and are confined to the middling ranks of society and power but are ranked above the Dalits and Adivasis, who are considered to belong to no varna at all. At least one government survey has put the OBC population at 40 per cent. By the official reckoning of the Mandal Commission, which in the early 1980s wrote a landmark report on the social condition of the OBCs, only a small minority of this highly stratified group belongs to “upper” shudra castes with significant wealth and power. The rest have little of either.

Though the exact demographic weights of all these communities are debatable, there is every reason to think that Dalits, understood as the Panthers defined them, form more than three-quarters of the Indian people. The Mandal Commission estimated that the dominant castes account for barely more than 17 per cent of the population—roughly a sixth of the total. It is in this light that Indian society must be understood. The huge majority of castes and ethnic and religious minorities are held subordinate by a small religious and caste elite. 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 acknowledge the wrongs done to the minority. In India, the dominant minority holds such disproportionate privilege that it can still comfortably ignore or turn away from the damage done to the oppressed minority.