SERIAL : 9

THE PERSISTENCE OF CASTE

The Political Economy of Atrocities

The Shaping of The Macabre Spectacle

Anand Teltumbde

After the transfer of power from the British to the Indian nationalist elite in 1947, the bourgeois-landlord state that came into being represented a compromise between the interests both of the bourgeoisie in undertaking modernization and of the landlords in preserving their control over rural India. Although under the stewardship of India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, the state gained an overridingly modernist character, it could not disturb this balance beyond a point. A modernist constitution provided it a distinct vision for establishing an egalitarian order but was restrained in implementation by the imperatives of power dynamics. Capitalism, which elsewhere catalysed the fading of feudalism, had in India adjusted itself with pre-capitalist institutions such as caste, religious bodies and tribal custom - rather than confront them, it put them skillfully to use. While it made significant inroads into the countryside - piggybacking on state policies like big dams, farm subsidies and the Green Revolution - it left pre-capitalist institutions untouched. The state’s emphasis on the spread of modern education, urbanization and industrialization had its impact but only in modifying feudal structures, not in dismantling them. These institutions, particularly caste, could thus comfortably coexist with modernization. And caste did.

Sectors less accommodative of the processes of modernization have been the traditionally subaltern caste occupations, such as weaving, pottery, leatherwork, rope-making and toddy-tapping. These were undermined and marginalized, rendering the subaltern castes vulnerable, even as capitalist development strategies like the Green Revolution empowered landowning castes, both shudra and the traditionally elite. Not only did development generate huge surpluses for these groups, it also commoditized the rural economy and, by facilitating the migration of the modernizing rural elite to urban areas, left the villages in the control of the shudra neo-rich. In the absence of any provision for protectionism in the state's development policies, these nonbrahmin, nondalit groups tended to take advantage of old and already-eroded village production relations, without meeting any of the obligations required by the mutuality on which these were based.

The ancient ideological framework of caste had been materially supported by the organization of production in the form of an interlinked two-tier structure of land relations - a framework that survived through history in all its variations. Its economic content lay in the institution of serfdom, where peasants were attached to the soil held by landed intermediaries placed between tiller and king. Of the two tiers, the upper was composed in medieval times (the earliest these relations are found detailed) of various ranks of landowning nobility - deshmukhs, mansabdars, jagirdars, etc. - going up to the Mughal emperor or regional ruler, and all standing above the village system. The lower tier, which determined intra-village relationships, lay in the balutedari (also known as the jajmani) client-patron system, under which labouring groups were assured a steady supply of work with payment in kind, usually grain, rendered in return for the produce/fixed hereditary service each caste was expected to provide to those higher in the caste order.

This system was structurally threatened by the change introduced by the British colonial regime in land administration. The British knocked off the top half of the two-tier structure and in its place either institutionalized the zamindari system of revenue-collection through landlords, or, as in the Deccan south, inaugurated the ryotwari system, wherein the cultivator paid revenue directly to the state. Land was no longer owned by the village as a whole but by individual landlords. Firmly tied to their piece of property with no obligation to the village community, the new landlords were bound to develop a worldview that saw the previous jajmani interdependence as parasitical upon agricultural produce.

This structural change coupled with the absorption of surplus rural labour (mostly of the lower shudras and untouchables) into capitalist production in urban centres shook the traditional caste system to its roots in colonial times, affecting both caste relations and conflicts. The nineteenth-century rise (discussed in the Introduction) of the shudra-led antibrahmin movement and the anticaste movement of the dalits can be traced to these developments. In postcolonial times, the zamindari system was abolished, but caste antagonism was left intact by the developmental paradigm operated by the bourgeois-landlord combine running the state. Srinivasulu captures this post-Green Revolution moment well:

The political economy of development in the post-Independence period... brought about a perceptible change in the physiognomy of social class-caste structures, giving rise to a new class of rich landlord and peasant landowners, who replaced the old zamindar class. A new generation of market-oriented upper caste and backward caste landed peasant proprietors thus emerged in place of the old upper caste landed gentry.... This broad generalization, with slight variations, captures the picture of socio-economic change in different parts of the country.

Since the 1960s, prominent cases of atrocities have involved organized attacks on dalits by caste Hindus mostly of the shudra category, mobilized on caste lines to attack specific dalit groups. These atrocities were overwhelmingly committed by neo-rich, landowning, Backward Class (BC) castes, their mainly agricultural wealth directly traceable to state land reform policies, the Green Revolution and the concomitant processes leading to commodification and a money economy in the countryside. In many places, the occurrence of atrocities appears to contradict normal sociological expectation that the countryside undergoing capitalist transformation of its production base correspondingly displays capitalist relations - and certainly does not manifest as the exemplar of intense feudal expression. In Andhra Pradesh, atrocities have occurred in the relatively prosperous deltaic districts of Prakasam and Guntur, not in the poorer, dry-land region of Telangana. In Haryana, likewise, the Jhajjar-Panipat-Sonepat belt, where five dalits were lynched in 2002, is notable for its capitalist agriculture and upcoming industry. Even Khairlanji happened not in the dry land belt of the districts of the Vidarbha region, famous today for crop failure and farmer suicides, but in the relatively prosperous Bhandara district, known for its flourishing irrigation network. It appears therefore that it is the prosperous sections of the countryside - which had witnessed agrarian transformation over the course of a century - that have become the site of barbaric antidalit crime.

In order to understand this phenomenon, one has to understand the dynamics of the specific processes at work during this transition. As analysis clearly shows, there has been a massive growth of commercial agriculture (very visible in the case of coastal Andhra Pradesh and Haryana, and to a lesser extent in Bhandara and elsewhere), leading to an increased marketable surplus in the region. This found its way into a variety of economic activities in nearby urban centres, creating a surplus-seeking class of the rural neo-rich who have also acquired a new urban face as entrepreneurs. While the processes of agrarian development have thus enriched a section of the landowning rich, the benefits of agrarian prosperity have not percolated to the landless agrarian poor. Indeed, the economic conditions of most labourers worsened, with wages remaining lower than those legally prescribed and the terms and conditions of tenancy and large-scale indebtedness to landowners playing a crucial role in keeping lower agrarian labour in a state of bondage.

Identity Politics and the New Oppressors

The afterglow of the Congress party's prominence in the Indian freedom movement carried it through three uninterrupted decades in power at the centre, although the aura had begun wearing off much earlier, in the mid-1960s. The rhetoric of building a new India had initially enabled the party to maintain political hegemony over all oppressed groups. This however was threatened as the party's insufficiently sincere, half-heartedly implemented policies in favour of the underprivileged rendered hollow such slogans as Garibi Hatao (Eradicate Poverty) and its promises of an egalitarian India. Unrealized aspiration and increasing crises created general resentment, which gave rise on the one hand to new, regional political parties composed of emergent classes from within the shudra groups, and, on the other, to movements such as naxalism and the Dalit Panthers. These developments brought the state under increasing pressure, to which it responded with totalitarian suppression whose culmination was in the Emergency of June 1975 to March 1977. This backfired for the Congress, for resistance widened the political sphere, and politics became more competitive. Given caste's centrality to Indian society, however, politicians began to rely for votes on identities more than on ideology or proposals for development alternatives. An entirely new use was found for caste, now imparted an infinite manipulability. In the first-past-the-post system, even small caste groups could have a disproportionate impact on electoral results - especially if they vote as a bloc, as it often happens in India, whether freely or by force.

The process of shudra consolidation occurred over two decades until the 1970s as the economic empowerment of the landowning shudra castes slowly raised their political aspirations. These castes did not have as much of a ritualistic hierarchy among themselves as the higher groups did and, propelled by economic empowerment, were able to consolidate themselves into a peasant-proprietor constituency, bracketing together all BC communities across the country. These groups saw that the ruling Congress was dominated by the pre-Independence-era privileged castes (brahmins, trader banias, land-owning thakurs). They thus shifted allegiance to anti-Congress, regional political formations and became their support base. In the north, the newly empowered and numerically dominant BCs - yadavs, kurmis and koeris - grew into a formidable social force, found today in the many variations of the erstwhile Janata Party. In the south, too, the emergence of similar blocs could be noticed in Andhra Pradesh (the Telugu Desam Party) and Tamil Nadu (the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam). In Maharashtra, they were represented by maratha power (Nationalist Congress Party and Shiv Sena).

From the 1970s, shudra aggregations have wrested political power in almost every Indian state and brought the hitherto Brahmin-dominated parties to their knees. This they did either through their own 'regional' outfits or by taking over the major political parties (the Congress and subsequently the Bharatiya Janata Party, the latter dominated today by Backward Class individuals like Narendra Modi in Gujarat and B.S. Yeddyurappa in Karnataka). Soon, their success reached the centre through coalition rule - an amalgam, in fact, of various shudra groups. Shudra power was inaugurated with the formation of the Janata Party that dealt the Congress its first national-level electoral defeat at the end of the Emergency in 1977. They have not looked back since.