Throughout this week tens of thousands of Indian-Americans will gather in public squares and on street corners in cities, big or small across the United States, to celebrate the 70th Anniversary of India’s Independence.
Preparations for the annual ritual have already begun in earnest with community organizations vying with each other to draw a larger crowd in their independence day celebrations with crowd-pullers such as the presence of Bollywood Actor Ajitabh Bachchan, who is expected to be the grand marshal of the New York India Day Parade organized by the Federation of Indian Associations, or singer-turned politician Babul Supriyo of the Bharatiya Janata Part, leading the Chicago India Day Parade, or Bollywood Singer Sunidhi Chauhan who will headline the Naperville, Il., India Day Parade.
“I request all Indians to join the event … Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Jews, and especially the youth. This day we celebrate our insurmountable strength as a nation whose greatest asset is its unified diversity,” a senior FIA official said in a press statement recently.
Despite such appeals, the spirit of celebration, however, does not seem to have infected all Indian-Americans.
No Celebrations For The Oppressed
People like Sita Ram of Connecticut, a former New York cabby who now runs a gas station in Hartford, Conn. said he would not attend any such celebration.
Instead, the 57-yearold native of Phagwara, Punjab, said he and his friends from the Tri-state area would hold a demonstration outside the United Nations later this month, protesting the recent atrocities against members of the Dalit community in India.
“Earlier we used to take out the float of Babasaheb Ambedkar at the India Day Parade and would even participate briefly, but in view of what is happening in India these days to fellow Dalits, we as a community are deeply hurt and have decided to stage a protest/demonstration outside the United Nation instead of joining the I-day celebrations,” Ram, a Dalit who has embraced Buddhism, said.
He claimed there are about 500 members of the Dalit community living in the Tri-state area, many of whom are members of International Ambedkar Society, an umbrella organization of the Dalits. “Many people are expected to join the protest demonstration, the date for which will be finalized once we receive the permission from police to stage our protest to condemn violence against Dalits,” Ram said.
Outrage against pro-Hindu activists, especially “gau rakshkaks”, or cow protection squads, grew in India earlier this month after some members of the cow protection squads, chained 4 Dalit men to a car, before stripping and beating them up at a village in Gujarat’s Gir-Somnath district for skinning a dead cow.
So much was the public outcry across India over the incident that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had to issue a public statement, condemning the members of the so-called cow-protection squads.
But that does not seem to have assuaged the feelings of Dalits who blame BJP and its general Hindutwavadi prouncements for creating a climate of hatred towards members of the lower castes such as the Dalits. Their feelings of anger and disappointment have reached the shores of the United States as well.
Ram said quoting media reports that the Dalits, who were tortured, did not kill any cow at all as alleged by their tormentors, but were only skinning the animal. “In India, chamars who are members of the Dalit community traditionally skin dead animals for hides for their livelihood.
They do what upper caste Hindus have traditionally assigned them to do like skinning dead cows or buffalos. So, Dalits are doing their duties according to the laws of the upper caste Hindus. Why then, they should be tortured and beaten up. It’s a shame on the society,” Ram said.
Ram, an undergraduate in science from a Punjab university, asked what kind of independence it is that treats Dalits, who are legally called Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, so inhumanly so many decades after independence, and what kind of a government is that whose officials call on people to celebrate the country’s independence while they turn a blind eye to such atrocities.
“What will be celebrated August 15 in India and elsewhere is the country’s independence from the British Rule, but not the freedom or independence of its hundreds and thousands of people who belong to the Dalit community who are yet to be liberated from the shackles of poverty and exploitation and oppression by the upper caste,” Ram said.
The Condition Of Dalits
Dalits, who have traditionally been considered untouchables in India’s caste-ridden society, account for about 16.6 percent of India population, according to the 2011 Census figures. But data about their socio-economic condition indicate a very sorry state of the community
Dalits’ control over the resources is less than 5 percent, and close to half of the population lives under the poverty line, and 62 percent are illiterate. Among the Dalits, most of those engaged in agricultural work are landless or nearly landless agricultural laborers.
“If you look at the statistics and visit India’s rural areas, the villages where 70 percent of the population lives, you will be convinced that nothing has changed for Dalits, independence or no independence. So, I don’t see any special reason for Dalits, who are treated as second class citizens in India, to become jubilant on this Independence Day,” Suraj Yengde, an associate at the Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University, where he is finishing his PhD said in response to a question.
Boston-based Yengde, a native of Maharashtra who is simultaneously working on the peripheral identities of the global south space, with the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, noted that the problem of Dalits is not the problem of Hindus at all. “Those who claim a generalized, uniform Hindu identity are actually well aware of the non-existence of such a thing. Caste is the real identity for a Hindu,” he said in a telephone interview.
An attorney by profession from Maharashtra, Yengde said that the data and statistics show that Dalits have poor access to education, healthcare and government resources, or business capital. “I am appalled to see that Dalits are the worst-performing social group in India since the country’s independence, although some people would tell you that this is not the case and that some improvements have been made in their socio-economic status, and that in terms of upward mobility in political life, Dalits have made some progress. But I can tell you that these kind of propaganda and has not basis whatsoever, and not true at all,” he said. “Dalits have no access to the entire political system, except a little bit of political space because of reservation. And that is all,” Yengde said.
Sandeep Chavan, an IIT Bombay-trained computer engineer from Maharashtra who divides his time between Boston and Bombay, gave an example of the highly-trumpeted government programs for the community’s development.
He said not much has changed in terms of facilities for education in government schools in villages where the majority of the children are from poor families and are of Dalit background. Citing the example of a school in a village near Hyderabad where he was born and raised and had his schooling, he said the school remains more or less the same since he want there some 20 years ago in terms of facilities for learning, number of trained teachers to impart lessons, and most importantly in terms of attitude of higher caste Hindus for Dalit kids who attend the school.
He said nobody seems to be concerned that the school, or for that matter other schools in rural areas of India, do not even have proper toilets for girl students, not to talk about computers or other facilities for education. “The sufferers are everybody, but mostly students from the Dalit community as most children in such schools are from our community only. I was very lucky in the sense that my parents were able to spend some money to later send me to a better private school and then to Bombay, there I got admission in IIT. But I would say that my case is more an exception than a rule,” Chavan said in response to a question.
Both he and Yengde agreed that there is no reason for the community to feel proud about the country’s independence and ritually rejoice over it, adding that when the Dalits experience real social and economic progress and are treated as equal citizens in India, only then Dalits will come forward to take part in spontaneous celebrations over India’s independence. “Nobody will have to call upon us to join such celebrations once we are treated as equal citizens of India.”
Yengde argued that politicians’ claims about Dalits’ progress are basically hollow and are not borne out by facts. He said that liberalization and reforms of India’s economy that are often touted as a poster of the beginning of India’s march towards development have not changed the conditions of Dalits. “If it had changed their plight, why then the Dalits continue to work as landless laborers? Actually, the reforms were not meant to reform the economic status of our people. People talk about ‘Prosperous India, “Innovative India”, or ‘Shining India’, but there are no Dalits in all those ‘Indias’. That is a real pity,” he said.
The point was highlighted during the centennial commemoration of Ambedkar at the Columbia University in June 1913. There, the speakers brought to the attention of the 100-odd members of the audience about the urgent need to bring the marginalized section of the India’s population under development umbrella. Professor Angana Chatterjee of the University of California, Berkeley, mentioned the point forcefully without making a reference to Ambedkar. Reading out from her paper on ‘Subaltern Counter-memory’, she noted that while the benefits of development and the political and economic decisions made as a nation have enhanced the quality of life for many in India, these very indicators of development tell “a discouraging story of persistent inequities leading to the brutalization of marginalized groups.”
“Basic human rights,” she said, “such as the rights to life and livelihood, health care, education, and freedom of expression, still linger outside the grasp of India’s disenfranchised.”
Historical Legacy
While all agree that Dalits’ problems need to be addressed without delay, many say that it is easier said than done because of vested interests and apparent apathy of political parties for a lasting solution. Critics of the Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, allege that the recent spate in violence against Dalits is a direct sequel to the rise of radical Hindu supremacist elements within the party which is said to be tied to the Sangha Parivar. But some Dalit-history experts in the U.S. argue that the exploitation and oppression of Dalits predates the coming to power of the current BJP government in 2014.
“The lower castes in India have suffered exploitation for thousands of years. In fact, in post-independence period, the Dalits have suffered virtually under all governments, but what is happening under the new BJP government now is that the frequency of attacks on the members of the community has increased. I think more than the law and the Constitution, upper caste Hindus seemingly have more faith in texts like Manu Smriti, an ancient legal text on Hinduism that was one of the first Sanskrit texts translated during the British rule of India in 1794, and used to formulate the Hindu law by the colonial government” Dr. Muni Subramani, an Indian-American neuroscientist and clinical neurophysiologist, said. Subramani, who is a Buddhist from the Dalit community, however, admitted that such violence and atrocities generally do not often take place in major metropolitan cities.
Within a few years after independence, India had earmarked for Dalits and other disadvantaged castes about 23 percent of government jobs and seats in public universities to ameliorate their condition. The reservations apply today to many more groups accounting for about 50 percent of such jobs and seats. But such measures have not led to change in mindset, or led to a society where all are viewed as equal.
A telling example of the state of affairs in India was the case earlier this year of Rohith Vemula, a 26-year-old Ph.D. student from the Dalit community at the University of Hyderabad, who committed suicide because of persistent caste discrimination although he was a brilliant scholar. Vemula left a suicide note in which he wrote: “The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind.”
Subramani said that while there is no doubt that aggressive campaigns by the likes of the RSS and VHP about “Hindu superiority” have fanned anti-Dalit sentiment, there are more fundamental reasons for such traditional bias against Dalits in the minds of upper caste Hindus.
“I think over centuries, generations after generations of upper caste Hindus have been taught to look down upon Dalits as inferior human beings, whose touch and spoil the lives of a Brahmin, or an upper caste person. Thus, it is difficult for them to treat a Dalit as a normal, regular person,” Subramani, who spent several years in research at University of Connecticut and Yale, said in an interview.
“Such bias is deeply ingrained in their beliefs and attitudes. It’s in their brain. From a medial-scientific perspective, the problems lie in the minds and brains of people who have these anti-Dalit beliefs inculcated in them by generations of upper caste Hindus, and reinforced and passed on from father-to-son for centuries. I think both heredity and social environment are to be blamed,” Subramani said.
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