UNTOUCHABLE FREEDOM a Social History of a Dalit Community

UNTOUCHABLE FREEDOM UNTOUCHABLE FREEDOM A Social History of a Dalit Community VVVijay Prashad vi / Acknowledgements Contents Introduction of illustrations viii Chapter 1. Mehtars ix Chapter 2. Chuhras 25 Chapter 3. Sweepers 46 Chapter 4. Balmikis 65 Chapter 5. Harijans 112 Chapter 6. Citizens 135 Epilogue 166 Glossary 171 Archival Sources 173 Index 175 List of Illustrations Sweepers Outside the Town Hall 8 Entrance to Valmiki Basti 33 Gandhi in Harijan Colony (Courtesy: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library) 114 Portrait of Bhoop Singh 139 Introduction Being an Indian, I am a partisan, and I am afraid I cannot help taking a partisan view. But I have tried, and I should like you to try to consider these questions as a scientist impartially examining facts, and not as a nationalist out to prove one side of the case. Nationalism is good in its place, but it is an unreliablev friend and vanvunsafe vhistorian. (Jawaharlal Nehru, 14 December 1932).1 In the aftermath of the pogrom against the Sikhs in Delhi (1984), in which 2500 people perished in a few days, reports filled the capital of the assailants and their motives. It was clear from the very first that this was no disorganized ‘riot’ and that the organized violence visited upon Sikhs was engineered by the Congress (I) to avenge the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Of the assailants, we only heard rumours, that they came from the outskirts of the city, from those ‘urban villages’ inhabited by Jats and Gujjars as well as dalits (untouchables) resettled there during the Na- tional Emergency (1975–7). The People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) published a pamphlet, just after the carnage, which reported that ‘the Bhangis—many of them working as sweepers in the corporation— comprised the bulk of the local miscreants who attacked the Sikhs’.2 For many middle-class residents of the city, this news simply reaffirmed their stubborn conviction that the ‘low castes’, being prone to violence and devoid of any promise or potential beyond that required strict control. Nanki Bai, one of the survivors, told her interviewers in the relief camps that the metropolitan councillor in her locality ‘had the killing done by the kanjars and the bhangis’, both compensated with liquor and cash, since, in her opinion, ‘the educated can’t do this sort of thing—only the neech-log (derogatory for low-status persons) do things like this’.3 Such statements of prejudice that exempt the ‘educated’ from culpability erase the crime of the councillor and the complicity of the bulk of the middle 1Jawaharlal Nehru, Glimpses of World History (Allahabad: Kitabistan, 1939), p. 443. 2PUDR, Who are the Guilty? Report of a Joint Inquiry into the Causes and Impact of the Riots in Delhi from 31 October to 10 November (New Delhi: PUDR, 2nd edition, December 1984), p. 3. 3Uma Chakravarti and Nandita Haksar, The Delhi Riots: Three Days in the Life of a Nation (New Delhi: Lancer, 1987), p. 43. x / Untouchable Freedom class which benefits from a political system run by authoritarian parties to maintain economic, social, and political inequality. The screen between the acts of violence and the political structures that work at the behest of certain dominant classes enables the latter to disown responsibility for making violence a means to realize their agenda (as in the ‘excesses’ of the period of the National Emergency).4 The sustained exploitation of the working people produces a circumstance wherein some dalits become clients of political strongmen to act on behalf of a status quo that op- presses the bulk of the dalits. Among the dalits of Delhi, several young men of the Balmiki community seemed to lead the way in the conflagration. If the Balmikis of- fered fealty to the Congress in the early 1980s, by the end of the decade most indications showed that a set of them had begun to work closely with the Hindutva movement, first in anti-Muslim actions in Delhi and Khurja (among other places) and subsequently as part of the caravan to Ayodhya to participate in the 6 December 1992 destruction of Mir Baqi’s mosque.5 Few realized the gravity of the situation and there are as yet only rudimentary explanations for the anomalous turn taken by this dalit community as it linked its destiny to the political agencies of the estab- lished order (particularly the Hindutva ensemble, a markedly conserva- tive, misogynist and communal political bloc). If some young men did the killing, the response of much of the rest of the community ranged from tacit to active support for their actions. There is now sufficient commentary on the assertion of dalits across the country, but this does not address the counter-intuitive alliance between activist dalits (at some level committed to end the order that enforces dalithood) and the forces of Hindutva (which are committed to the defence of that very order).6 A similar entry of women activists into the Hindu right provoked several useful studies of the phenomenon and we are only now getting a glimpse 4Vijay Prashad, ‘Emergency Assessments’, Social Scientist, nos. 280–1 (Sep- tember–October 1996), p. 52. 5Pradip K. Datta, et al., ‘Understanding Communal Violence: Nizamuddin Riots’, Economic and Political Weekly, 10 November 1990; Uma Chakravarty, et al., ‘Khurja Riots, 1990–91: Understanding the Conjuncture’, Economic and Political Weekly, 2 May 1992 and my own research during the 1992–4 period. 6Achin Vanaik, The Furies of Indian Communalism (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 320–1. Introduction / xi of the reasons why some women ally themselves to a programmatically misogynist political formation.7 In an ahistorical view of the dalits as a unified entity that should be opposed to Hindu supremacy in an unproblematic way, this alliance makes little sense. On the other hand, a social history of the Balmikis reveals the institutional roots of the alliance in the colonial municipality where these dalits were hired as clients of Hindu overseers who exercised inordinate control over their lives. This institutional connection was given an ideological framework in the 1930s when these dalits, hired exclusively into the municipality as sweepers, adopted and refined an anti-Muslim Hindu identity proffered in the first instance by militant Hindus. These dalits, in other words, have a long history within the ensemble of Hindutva, even if it did not inform the politics of many of them until recently. That is, most of the Balmikis, until the emergence of the BJP in 1980 tended to live their political lives within the Congress, even as they remained wedded to a contradictory Hindu faith (with its anti-Muslim undertones and its humanist overtones) in their private domains. The 1980s enabled many Balmikis to commit themselves to the Hindutva project, particularly since it seemed to promise them the emancipation held off for five decades. One of the indications of this emancipation was the Vishwa Hindu Parishad pledge to erect a temple to Valmiki (the sage of the Balmikis) within the Babri Masjid–Ram Janmabhoomi complex (this commitment, like many oth- ers made by the Hindutva ensemble to the dalits, comes and goes). HINDUTVA AND BALMIKI CONSCIOUSNESS In the Saugwan home in Old Delhi on 28 March 1993, Tara Chand ended an emotional conversation with the plaintive refrain, hum aur kya kar sakte the (what else could we have done)? He, his friends, and family had just finished collectively telling me about a fracas of 18 June 1978. In their version, a young Muslim boy from the neighbourhood urinated in the narrow alleyway that led into their Kalan Mahal locality. Some Balmikis asked the boy not to use the drain as a latrine, since, as Madan Lal emphasized, ‘both our women walk on this road’. The ‘road’ is a tight lane with houses on one side and a high wall on the other, with surface drains along its edge to bear the refuse from the homes to the sewer. The conflict was less about the urine and more about the affront to the dignity of the women by public urination. The Muslim boy was beaten by several Balmikis as a prelude to an evening of mayhem. Several Mus- 7Women and the Hindu Right. Eds Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1995). xii / Untouchable Freedom lim families up the lane told me a different story, that the filth of the Balmikis led to a fight rather than the act of one boy. In highly tense times (1993), it was hard not to emphasize one’s own innocence in sec- tarian struggles. Both Balmikis and Muslim families, however, recounted the story with great sadness, since they operated as mutual allies over time. Speaking of her Muslim neighbours, Kamala Devi said that they have daya (compassion), ‘if you fall in a drain, they will stop and pick you up. A Hindu won’t’. The 1978 incident, in which no lives were lost, marks a change in the relations between working-class Muslims and Balmikis across north In- dia. Their structural and spatial proximity allowed them to entertain some similar views on similar dilemmas. Investigators of the May 1987 riots in Old Delhi met a dalit worker from Churiwalan who said that dalits used to play cards with their Muslim neighbours. But now, that would be over. Old residents of the area regretted that the past custom of holding occasional meetings of the elders of both the communities in the localities was no longer followed, resulting in widening the distance between the two.8 In the aftermath of the 1987 riot, links between Muslims and Balmikis appeared to diminish.

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