In 2001, Omar Abdullah, a callow minister of state for external affairs, was in the global spotlight in Durban. He was India’s spokesman at the UN World Conference against Racism (WCAR) and it was not something he could have relished. A curious and a somewhat critical world was listening to him defend India’s record on opposing discrimination on any grounds, including racism, after a huge delegation of Dalit activists had, at the WCAR’s NGO forum which opened just before the governmental conference began, made a spectacular case for including caste discrimination in the conference.
It was spectacular because the Dalit caucus landed in Durban with 200 delegates — other NGOs sent between five and 10 representatives — and they made their presence felt with a popular campaign that had other delegates and journalists sporting shirts, buttons and stickers that demanded: ‘Include Caste in WCAR’.
Abdullah’s case that the Dalit propaganda was highly exaggerated and that caste-based discrimination did not in any case form part of WCAR sounded weak after the formidable campaign unleashed by the activists of the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR). The Dalit cause had arrived on the international scene and it proved to be a turning point for the Dalit movement. Eva-Maria Hardtmann, a researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University, analyses in great deal the strategy, the practices and even the materials employed by the NCDHR in Durban in a long and fascinating chapter in her book which discusses the dominant discourses on the Dalit movement since the 1990s.
In Durban, Abdullah stirred further resentment among the Dalit activists by referring to Mahatma Gandhi as the inspiration for the Indian Constitution which bars any kind of discrimination. For them — and to most Indians — it is their leader Baba Saheb Ambedkar who is regarded as the father of the constitution. Hardtmann’s book dwells for some length on this Gandhi versus Ambedkar conflict, an issue that has found many of India’s leading intellectuals taking a surprising stance on the debate.
The Dalit position is best summed up by this passage by Dalit writer V T Rajshekhar: “Many Mahatmas have come and many Mahatmas have gone. They raised a lot of dust but did not raise the level of the people. History does not take note of the dust-storms. It takes note of only earthquakes that uproot men and matters. It is concerned with social change. Did Gandhi cause any earthquake? No. He caused only dust-storms. Did he bring about any social change? No. He might have made the Birlas, his Bania jatwala, richer. He might have brought ‘independence’ to the ‘upper caste nation’. But to over 85% of India’s persecuted nationalities devoid of human rights his contribution is nil.”
The anti-Gandhi stance which turned vitriolic after the emergence of Mayawati as the Bahujan Samaj Party leader has provoked extreme reactions from the Hindu Right such as Arun Shourie’s 1997 tome, Worshipping False Gods, in which he portrays Ambedkar as anti-nationalist and a British collaborator. In the dominant narrative of Indian nationalism which is identified with the Congress Party, it is easy to put forward such distorted views, Hardtmann quotes Dalit writers, who argue that while Ambedkar might have opposed the Congress he wanted his people to play a leading role in nation-building.
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It is these strands that shape the Dalit discourse and the author weaves them deftly into the major themes that she focuses on. Moving from a small locality of Dalits in Lucknow to Ambedkarites in Britain, Hardtmann reveals the kind of discourses that are dominant in the contemporary Dalit movement and provides a fascinating anthropological insight into the concerns of the 160 million untouchables that mainstream India still treats with disdain.
In her analysis, Hardtmann presents the different and seemingly contradictory streams in the Dalit movement — Buddhist and Christian theology and the political agenda, all of which are adding to a new vibrancy to their search for social justice. There is also a minor Islamic thread which the author does not explore. Otherwise rich in detail and insights, this is an eminently readable work, with footnotes that are as unobtrusive as they can be in a work of this nature.
As always, when one comes across an excellent academic study of subjects and issues relevant to India one is left wondering why an Indian had not undertaken it.
THE DALIT MOVEMENT IN INDIA
Local Practices, Global Connections
Eva-Maria Hardtmann
Oxford University Press
263 pages; Rs 67