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THE PERSISTENCE OF CASTE

A HISTORICAL OUTLINE

Anand Teltumbde

These developments have healed four decades of sagging national morale and boosted the middle classes’ confidence in their oft-invoked 'culture, custom and tradition', which are ultimately nothing but euphemisms for the caste system. The new syndromes of 'India Shining', an ill-advised election slogan coined by the rightwing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in 2003-04, and the excitement over a prospective 'India as superpower' daydream reflect this newfound confidence. The new generation middle and upper classes, whether in India or abroad, are devoid of a sense of shame about India's past and appear, rather, to vehemently justify it in all aspects, including the caste system.

In relation to the lower classes, an almost opposite set of globalization processes has worked to strengthen caste. These classes, irrespective of location, are rooted in a rural background and are predominantly comprised of shudras and dalits, besides huge numbers from the religious minorities. Globalization has brought them a crisis of livelihood and an erosion of confidence. There has been a massive loss of jobs due to the closure of small-scale industries and thereby a direct loss of income. Indirectly, various downsizing strategies, such as business process reengineering, outsourcing, contractization, etc., entailed an informalization of jobs and therefore huge reductions in income. For the rural masses, the withdrawal of state subsidies and protections created an agrarian crisis best manifested in the shocking number of farmer suicides in the years since India's economic liberalization. Moreover, due to a contraction of welfare services, these classes have suffered a loss of security. This all-round crisis of life and livelihood has driven people to cling to primal identities such as caste and religion. Among Hindus, their communal identity has tended to manifest itself in nationalist stridency, while in caste terms, it easily manifests in antidalit prejudice and behaviour.

Globalization, as a market-centric ideology, entails varying uncertainty for all classes. It has turned the world into a veritable casino where all familiar correlations between action and outcome have collapsed. Such a situation psychologically impels a person to seek support from the supernatural, from gods and godmen. Prior to globalization, such beliefs and practices were considered characteristic of the irrational and the weak-minded. People kept their faith to their private selves lest they be ridiculed in public. This is no longer so. There is a renewed fervour in temple building, with new gods to propitiate discovered almost daily. A huge market for divinity has developed all over the world and particularly in India, long stereotyped as spiritualism's ancient source. The implication of this trend is grave for caste for insofar as it is rooted in Hindu scripture and is believed to be of divine origin, any revival of faith concurrently reinforces caste as well.

Globalization has thus variously strengthened caste, though this has not happened necessarily in terms of classical identities. Globalization dehistoricizes identities but cannot erase them, except by creating hybrid ones. In the context of caste, its impact can be seen in the growth of a non-ritualistic caste identity that has erased certain caste divisions and grossly aggravated others. It is these that underlie the phenomenon of caste atrocities, the concentrated expression of contemporary casteism. The process of the formation of this identity and its effects form the subject of the next chapter.

Conclusion

Atrocities can be taken as the best proxy measure of the present-day manifestation of caste, for they mirror the lived reality of what caste in modern India means. A major antidalit atrocity invariably involves the state, the media and civil society. The dynamics unleashed in its wake bring forth the true character of its agents while exposing the causal matrix behind the act. Indeed, there is no better way of comprehending the complex reality of living caste than examining the various aspects of atrocity dynamics.

The present volume seeks to do this in the wake of a lynching that killed four members of a family in Khairlanji, a village in Maharashtra, in September 2006. Analyzing context and crime, it seeks to locate this event in the political economy of the development process India has followed after Independence. It then documents and examines the circumstances of the event's occurrence, the reactions it created, the way it was packaged and unpackaged, the roles played by the agents above named, and its aftermath in court in a verdict that refused it its essence as a caste atrocity. The outcome of the discussion variously contradicts prevailing notions about caste, the state and civil society in India and dalits themselves. By interrogating these many myths and posing new questions, it hopes to contribute to an understanding of caste's contemporary reality.

CASTE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Khairlanji. An obscure village in Mohadi taluk, a little-known subdivision of Bhandara district in Maharashtra, western India. Suddenly, in 2006, it became another addition to a series of place names that have become synonymous with caste crimes of great violence in post-Independence India - Keezhvenmani (in Tamil Nadu state; forty-four dalits burnt alive in 1968), Belchi (in the state of Bihar; fourteen dalits burnt alive in 1977), Morichjhanpi (an island in the Sundarban mangrove forest of West Bengal where hundreds of dalit refugees from Bangladesh were massacred during a government eviction drive in l978), Karamchedu (Andhra Pradesh; six dalits murdered, three dalit women raped and many more wounded in 1984), Chunduru (also Andhra Pradesh; nine dalits slaughtered and their bodies dumped in a canal in 1991), Melavalavu (Tamil Nadu; an elected dalit panchayat leader and five dalits murdered in 1997), Kambalapalli (in the state of Karnataka; six dalits burnt alive in 2000) and Jhajjar (in Haryana state, adjoining the capital, New Delhi, where five dalits were lynched outside a police station in 2002). The incidents listed here will never figure in any history of contemporary India. Most Indians may never even have heard of these places. Four years later, Khairlanji, too, has been almost forgotten, just like the scores of such abominations that take place every year, each slipping out of memory in turn.

Khairlanji ignited dalit anger and spawned protest across Maharashtra and beyond the state's borders - spontaneous street demonstrations started by ordinary people, sans leaders. But it did not catapult to the national stage all at once. The horror that devastated the world of a dalit farmer named Bhaiyalal Bhotmange on 29 September 2006 came to light only a month later. Bhotmange's entire family - his wife, Surekha (40), his sons, Roshan (21) and Sudhir (19), and his daughter, Priyanka (17) - were killed by a mob of caste Hindus, neighbours from their own village. This was not simple murder; it was the worst display of collective, premeditated sadism that could shame humanity anywhere - gang-rape, torture and unspeakable public humiliation, culminating in four lives extinguished in the village square with utmost ferocity.

Yet all this was camouflaged by the administration and ignored by the media for over a month. When the facts around the Khairlanji murders began to emerge, they were at first portrayed as the violent end to an illicit relationship between Surekha and a man named Siddharth Gajbhiye, for which not only the mother but her children had to pay with their lives. The lynching was made out to be not a criminal act but an expression of the 'moral outrage' of 'simple villagers' who could not tolerate such 'immorality' in their midst. The atrocity was projected by the locals, and initially also by the media, in such a manner as to elicit a certain leniency from the majority of Indians towards the perpetrators. The logic is similar to the orchestration of public sympathy when 'instant justice' is meted out in police 'encounters', the name the Indian establishment informally gives the countless extrajudicial killings of alleged criminals, usually said to be attempting to flee. In almost all such cases, the police are commended and the targets condemned, without anyone caring to know the facts. Khairlanji was similarly packaged as an act of public-spirited 'moral justice', and the real crime could well have been buried and eventually forgotten. But for the indignant interventions of a few citizens and independent activists- who foregrounded the facts against all odds -the truth about Khairlanji would perhaps never have been exposed.