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Fragments of a failed society

We ought to be a failed society to send our neighbours down the septic tanks to certain death or a life of filthy ignominy.

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Rajesh Ramachandran

We ought to be a failed society to send our neighbours down the septic tanks to certain death or a life of filthy ignominy. Eleven people have died in seven days this last week in septic tanks and sewers, six of them in the national capital. Their corpses, their needless deaths are exemplifiers of our pyramidal, hierarchical caste system with all its oppressive feudal facets. We believe that a certain group of people are born to carry on their head others’ waste and excreta. When the dry toilets gave way to more modern ones with flush tanks, our modernity pushed the same old unfortunate people into newer septic tanks and municipal sewer lines. The IITian Chief Minister who wielded the broom — the symbol of the sanitation workers’ servitude — to seek their votes still has not thought about a mechanised alternative to people diving into pools of excreta. Did the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi or the Centre stop him from getting the Delhi IIT or the Kharagpur IIT to design robots to clean the clogged sewers? According to the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis, one sanitation worker has died every five days since January 2017.

Sanitation workers belong to the lowest of the low rungs in the Indian caste ladder, whatever their religion be. Hindu, Sikh, Christian, or Buddhist, the sanitation workers are discriminated against, often by even other Scheduled Castes. The worst aspect of Dalit politics is that it has always been dominated by the agricultural labour or cobbler castes like Jatav, Mahar, Mala, Pulaya or Holaya, to the extent of making the children and grandchildren of sanitation workers invisible in public life. So far, Valmikis or Madigas or Thotis have not really mattered in politics or bureaucracy. The token Dalit representative of the Congress was always from castes other than sanitation workers, so was the anti-Congress Dalit messiah Dr BR Ambedkar, a Mahar. India’s first Dalit President KR Naryanan, the celebrated Congress leader Jagjivan Ram, the BSP founder Kanshi Ram, his heiress Mayawati, the first Dalit Chief Justice of India KG Balakrishnan, the first Dalit Speaker of the Lok Sabha, GMC Balayogi, Bihar strongman Ram Vilas Paswan… the list of Scheduled Caste leaders from the agricultural labour class is endless. So was the case when the BJP chose a Dalit to be President of India.

Worse is the situation in bureaucracy. Some leaders listed above pushed their children into the civil services, cornering quotas and denying opportunities to the children of manual scavengers. Now, reservation in politics and bureaucracy is just preservation of privilege for the children of empowered people. Their politics, too, is a curious extension of the colonial constructs of the separate nation and separate electorate meant to Balkanise the idea of India. Gandhi’s idea of eradication of untouchability, which he believed was more important than Independence, was to live and work with sanitation workers, impart dignity to their work and confidence in them as fellow beings, while shaming the upper castes and forcing them to clean their own toilets. The British countered this with the idea of a separate electorate and rituals like celebration of the Mahar valour during the battle of Koregaon. The greater instance of Mahar valour was the battle of Srirangapatna, when on May 4, 1799, a grenadier of the Bombay Army, possibly a Mahar soldier, shot Tipu Sultan through the temple, thus silencing the roar of the Tiger of Mysore and helping East India Company take control of the western coast.

So, while creating separate electorates and separate nations for Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Anglo-Indians and SCs, Koregaon — and not Srirangapatna — was convenient for the British rulers to create a narrative of fractured identities, mutinying against one another. This colonial narrative cannot create an equal society, but only sharper divisions. Instead of militantly agitating against the state and the Centre for continuing with the inhuman practice of pushing men and boys into sewer lines, the so-called Dalit radicals continue sharpening the edges of the colonial percepts of our fractured identities, celebrating the victory of a British contingent against an imbecile Peshwa some 200 years ago, for what? About a century ago, identity politics of the Hindutva, Islamic and Dalit varieties have all been at the behest of the British. VD Savarkar had sought mercy and was granted freedom by the British, Ambedkar was a member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council and Jinnah was a British ally and all three were opposed to the Quit India movement. So, it was no surprise that while opposing Gandhi, Ambedkar had, in 1931, praised the Hindutva proponent Savarkar as a true friend of the Dalits, “I however wish to take this opportunity of conveying to you my appreciation of the work you are doing in the field of social reform. If the Untouchables are to be part and parcel of the Hindu society… you must destroy chaturvarnya. I am glad that you are one of the very few who have realised this.” According to Ambedkar’s biographer Dhananjay Keer, in 1937 Ambedkar’s publication Janata wrote that “Savarkar’s service to the cause of the Untouchables was as decisive and great as that of Gautama Buddha himself.”

Savarkar’s followers claim that Ambedkar tried to help him while he was being tried for Gandhi’s murder. Manohar Malgonkar in The Men Who Killed Gandhi quotes the Savarkar Memorial Committee publication to claim that Ambedkar told Savarkar’s counsel in January 1949, “There is no real charge against your client; quite worthless evidence has been concocted… But take it from me there just is no case.” This may not be true at all, but it is sadly true that some Ambedkarites do celebrate East India Company’s victories and worship Mayawati’s statues, instead of forcing her to disassociate forever from Hindutva forces and to rescue manual scavengers from the sewers.

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