By Dipak Barkhade
Hyderabad: Since 2014, the cases of atrocities against Dalit-Bahujans have been on the rise in India. It can be said that the Sanskritization of certain sections among Dalit-Bahujans is giving rise to a Nazi-style mentality. The sociopolitical change does not seem limited to the cultural realm of Hinduism now. It is slowly being appropriated into the entire structural domain.
This observation can be demonstrated in the recent incident of violence against Asif, a 14-year-old Muslim boy in the Ghaziabad area of the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The video of the assault – which went viral on social media – showed Asif being beaten by a man, who was later identified by the Ghaziabad police as Shringi Nandan Yadav. Yadav is from Bhagalpur in Bihar state and belongs to the dominant OBC community. Asif was beaten after he entered a Hindu temple to quench his thirst.
The mainstream Manuwadi media and Savarna liberal media are always desperate to take note of the atrocities on Dalit-Bahujans in a particular fashion. The reporting of such cases does not favor the oppressed. On googling about the said incident, most of their reports write, “Muslim boy beaten” as a token. The dominant media informs the public about such incidents in a sensational manner.
The Dalit-Bahujans are not simple consumers of everyday violence against the members of their communities. The logic of capital at the hand of high-castes may not necessarily humanize the living issues of the oppressed. The serious Dalit-Bahujan media offers Ambedkarite imagination. It aims to look at the status of the oppressed. It attempts to enter into the world of the marginalized more than to a world of mere causality.
The experience and feeling of Dalit-Bahujan is at the center of sociopolitical discourse. The Ambedkarite imagination of speaking about Dalit-Bahujans provides a counter-response to the upper-caste Hindu media. When invoked, it inspires Dalit-Bahujans to unlearn the long instilled impact of dominant representations of them. In this regard, the demand for reservation for the socioeconomically challenged sections in Muslims and Christians is one of the objectives in Dalit-Bahujan discourse on identity.
Reservation is not based on the premises of economic inequalities. It is important to note that certain sections (here, Asif’s family) in the Muslim community suffer the stigma of identity and forms of discrimination. His socioeconomic status reflects Dalitness.
In a government report on Dalit Muslim and Christian communities, Satish Deshpande and Geetika Bapna argue that, “There is a strong case for according Schedule Caste status to Dalit Muslims and Christians” (emphasis not mine). This demands a question: What is the situation of households like Asif’s in comparison to other households in his own community? Let me highlight the situation of Asif and his family which reflects Dalitness in a Muslim household.
Asif belongs to the Muslim community. His family had migrated from Bulandshahar in Uttar Pradesh. His father, Anwar (name changed) is a daily wage-laborer. They live in an ordinary rented room. Asif himself is a rag-picker. He is deprived of education due to poverty. His innocence can be perceived in his face on being questioned for entering into the temple and beaten hatefully by the accused.
For his young age, it is beyond his senses to reflect serious objections but confusion on facing inhumanity for simply drinking water in a temple premise. Against such a socioeconomic status, why is it necessary to demand affirmative action for Dalit Muslims from a ‘Dalit within Dalit’ perspective?
I briefly answer this question from my personal account and highlight the possible side of the solution.
Our home is situated in the small town of Selamba in the Narmada district of Gujarat. We belong to an ethnolinguistic caste minority in the Dalit community. We are doubly marginalized: the neighbors practice untouchability with us and do not recognize our ethnic language and culture in the mainstream. We are upwardly mobile Dalits.
We live in the middle of a town among the majority of high-castes. However, from time to time, it is seen that we can mingle with the members of our own ethnolinguistic caste minority. Our members live in the sapchidi (subsidy) areas or the caste-ghettos. We celebrate the events with them together in a rural space. Our ethnic language and culture bind us together. We can say that there is recognition of Dalits within Dalits in the particular case of my town. However, this form of social relation contradicts in urban space where the members of my ethnolinguistic caste minority are assimilated in the mainstream Gujarati culture, which is largely Brahmanical.
Deshpande and Bapna show that “caste inequality among the Muslims” is comparatively lower “within religion” than the Christians and Sikhs. But as far as the Dalitness of religious minorities within and without is concerned, the minors like Asif “are at the bottom of the hierarchy of consumption in both rural and urban India.”
The identity of minors is not monolithic. It carries multiple shades of expression. There are multiple Muslim subjectivities. Asif is more than what is being reported in the dominant media. He is more than a Muslim body. The elite media ascribes the Muslim body through given categories. Quite often, this representation limits it to the markers of Muslim identity. While growing up what Asif would feel about his identity in his own terms should become more important.
Once understood the fact that the Dalit Muslims and Dalit Christian might be found relatively discriminated against and distanced in their own communities, there is no doubt that the high-castes would treat them inhumanly. In the case of Asif, the priest of the temple expressed his Islamophobia in a naturalized sense. It implies the level of impunity the high-castes enjoy in the cow belt.
On a positive note, the middle-class Muslim men and women have accepted Ambedkar unlike before the anti-CAA protests. It can be said that the identity of Dalit-Bahujans in the context of violence cannot be reduced to a singular narrative. The resistance among Dalit-Bahujans, including by religious minorities against fascists elements, is under crystallization. It is being practiced in constitutional means.
The members of the Muslim community must keep both agitational and constructive politics on track for the well-being of the downtrodden with an Ambedkarite approach.
(Dipak Barkhade is a PhD research scholar at the Center for Comparative Literature, University of Hyderabad. This article appeared in twocircles.net on March 22, 2021)