We kicked out the Brits with conviction, courage, and persistence, mostly non-violently. They left us poor, they left us with burdensome legacies including hideous bureaucracy, colonially tinted criminal law, and a huge chip on the shoulder, but they did leave us. They did a lot of damage in a few centuries, but we’ve survived a lot in 5,000 years.
In the better part of a century since Independence, we’ve been left to ourselves, and our successes and failures have been ours alone. A ship as massive and ancient as this one takes a painfully long time to course-correct towards its own vision of modernity. Some things are changing at a dizzying rate thanks to good policy, mass media, and technology. Others, old and deep-rooted, create an unconscionable drag on our progress.
Prime among those is the entrenched power pyramid made of caste, gender, and religion. Privilege accrues to a tiny apex of rich Hindu Brahmin men. Roughly 30 per cent of the population, comprising upper-caste Hindus, rules over roughly 70 per cent. We can’t blame that crazy injustice on the Brits. It has the makings of a shattering social revolution, of organised and loud resistance to mass human rights and legal violations that have no place in a modern nation.
Research scholar Rohith Vemula committed suicide on the campus of Hyderabad Central University, on January 17, after a dispute with ABVP members, and the intervention of Union minister of labour and employment, Bandaru Dattatreya, and the Union human resources development ministry. Vemula was suspended, kicked out of college housing, and his protests ignored until he took his own life, leaving a suicide note that rings with hopelessness.
The case has ripped through the media’s long-standing complacency towards the pervasive malignance of casteism — a complacency underscored by the fact that there are almost no Dalit journalists. News reports on caste atrocities haven’t amounted to any concerted scrutiny of the casual casteism that pervades families, communities, workplaces, institutions, and education. The end of Vemula’s life may have ignited not just Dalits, who constantly have to fight for their rights anyway, but those who rarely feel the outrages of casteism.
The central government can take credit for some of this momentum, thanks to its foot-in-mouth syndrome. Union HRD Minister Smriti Irani denied that caste played any role. A leaked intelligence report says that Vemula was not a Dalit, as if that makes everything better. The prime minister typically remained silent until it looked as if the media wasn’t going to let up.
The media noise, however, will eventually lose focus and move on, as it has largely moved on from the conversation about gender. The real shake-up will come from the disempowered themselves-from Dalits and women, pushing for justice. Poet Meena Kandasamy wrote in The Hindu on January 26: “Let every despicable casteist force wince when they encounter a Dalit, a Shudra, an Adivasi, a Bahujan, a woman staking claim within academia, let them realise that we have come here to end a system that has kept trying hard to put an end to us, that we have come here to cause nightmares to those who dared to snatch our dreams. Let them realise that Vedic times, the era of pouring molten lead into the ears of the Shudras who hear the sacred texts, the era of cutting the tongues of those who dared to utter the knowledge that was denied to them, are long gone. Let them understand that we have stormed these bastions to educate, to agitate, to organise; we did not come here to die. We have come to learn, but let the monsters of caste and their henchmen bear in mind that we have come here also to teach them an unforgettable lesson.”
The Constitution’s attempt to empower all Indians sometimes feels like an attempt to marshal a bear with a butterfly net. But Ms Kandasamy’s battle cry should ring through the corridors of power, where it is most unwelcome. The first freedom struggle showed that nothing is impossible for those who have natural and legal justice on their side, and can put aside their own differences to organise. That is precisely why Dalits have always been scrupulously excluded from the institutions, jobs, and social circles that might give them voice and reach. But voices have a way of erupting, and lopsided power equations have a tendency to find better balance.
As President Pranab Mukherjee said, India must “continue to complain, to demand, to rebel”. The memory of Rohith Vemula will tip one of the many spears needed in this second, much more difficult freedom struggle, from fetters of our own making.
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