By Daipayan Halder, TwoCircles.net
My maid is a Modi fan. She is a Maharashtrian, a Dalit (she told me so, I had no way of knowing) and an avid Muslim hater (I knew this morning). She had gone to hear Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi (the same man who had been variously called the ‘Butcher of Gujarat’ and a ‘mass murderer’ for his alleged support to post-Godhra Hindu rioters) rave about his third consecutive Gujarat victory and rant against Muslim anti-socials who need to be shown their place at Shivaji Park the Sunday before last Sunday. She came back convinced. “Them, Mollahs need a thrash or two from time to time,” she told me while mopping the floor, “and Modi will ensure that”.
“What have you got against Muslims?” I ask, hiding my shock behind a smile. “They are all wrong,” is all she offers. A few hours later at the morning edit meet, I broach the topic. “These people are the worst fanatics,” said Shark Tooth. “Why do you dig so infra-dig? No fun in reporting the under-class,” said the Kicker King. “Did you check the alliteration in The Telegraph’s lead headline?” “Times had a great lay-out today,” offered the Quark Queen. Modi and the maid got buried in mainstream mayhem.
But the mind wandered. Why would a Dalit woman fancy a Hindutva alpha-male? Why would a Dalit hate a Muslim? Subalterns both, in the Indian context, victims of a Brahminical social order; why would they be on opposite sides? In his Husband of a fanatic, Amitava Kumar wrote on the origin of such hate. In a sleepy village in rural Bihar, Kumar and his neighbour were playing in the garden when they spotted a lizard on the wall. The friend picked up a stone and took aim. “Why kill a harmless lizard?” Kumar asked. “It’s a Muslim. My dadi told me they morph into lizards for their crime.” Years later, while writing his seminal book on the Hindu-Muslim divide, Kumar recalled the incident. How hate is passed on from one generation to the other, to unsuspecting and impressionable minds. And, fault-lines widen.
I don’t know whether Kumar’s young friend was a Dalit. But an interesting aspect of the caste and communal faultline is that there is no unity among the deprived. Dalits hate Muslims and higher dalits hate lower dalits (there is a hierarchy among the dalits also, with manual scavengers being among the lowest of the low). I can’t fathom the reason for this. Shouldn’t Dalits be sympathetic towards Muslims in India, considering many Dalits embraced Islam and indeed other faiths to escape the curse of caste? Many Muslims in India are in fact lower-caste Hindus who had converted. It is ironic then that when Babri Masjid was demolished, the kar sevaks who listened to the brahminical top order of the right-wing BJP and brought down the controversial masjid, were lower-caste Hindus. In a sense, the BJP had succeeded in uniting brother against brother.
Dalit icon BR Ambedkar had written about Dalit-Muslim unity, while that is a far cry, Dalits continue to hate Muslims and vote for upper caste Hindu right-wing parties. The once mercurial Namdeo Dhasal, who had founded the Dalit Panthers movement in Maharashtra in 1972 to unite Dalit youth against social and economic oppression, has now joined the right-wing, Muslim-bashing Shiv Sena. Many Dalit intellectuals see this as an act of supreme betrayal.
Dalit Panthers after all had come up as one of the most promising organisation for dalit rights and their path was that of alliance with the other oppressed sections of society. They broadened the definition of dalits to include workers, minorities, adivasis and women. This indicated the line of alliance to be followed. This last concerted effort fell to pieces with different leaders of dalit movement getting co-opted by one or the other political power or personality.
In What More Than This Can Be, Dhasal wrote:
I am a common man of this contemporary history
I have put down the head guard out of self-humility
I wish to embrace deeply my innermost being
That will end up the essence,
Do not shed the innocent skin of this grammar
After all this heinous world belongs to human beings
Power is not in words but in the desire
This fever-stricken, exaggerated pretension
Will bother the deep relations
Clear away the self-chosen inhuman path
Seasons come and go
Who are you waiting for?
But that was then. Dhasal today belongs to the same party that targets Muslims in Mumbai since their very formation.
It serves the Hindu right-wing well that that they can co-opt Dalits (from the under-class to which my maid belongs) to intellectuals (Dhasal). And as long, Dalits join hands with upper castes to fight Muslims,. the brahminical social order and the caste hierarchy it endorses will be alive and kicking. Now who will explain this to my maid!
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Daipayan Halder is working in the Indian print media for the past six years. He can be contacted at [email protected]. “This article first published on Subaltern Studies (http://subalternstudies.com)”