Smruti Koppikar - Dalit anger against the government finds expression in the Ambedkar Bhavan and Una protests // Anand Teltumbde - The Battle Within: Protest over demolition of reveals a divided Dalit community
An estimated one lakh
people assembled in central Mumbai, braving the unceasing rain, and marched
nearly five kilometres to the famous Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus on Tuesday, turning the magnificent junction into a sea of
protestors of the kind not seen before in new-age Mumbai witnessed. The numbers
were remarkable enough to rattle the Bharatiya Janata Party-led governments in
both Maharashtra and at the Centre
More impressive than
the numbers was the coalition of political and social forces that the morcha,
or protest march, brought together – Dalits cutting across political factions
and loyalties, members of the Left and Left-inspired groups and workers and
sympathisers of the Shiv Sena. The leaders of the morcha included Prakash
Ambedkar, grandson of Dalit leader BR Ambedkar and leader of the Bharatiya
Republican Party Mahasangh, Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader and Rajya
Sabha member Sitaram Yechury, Jawaharlal Nehru University student leader
Kanhaiya Kumar, who rode pillion to reach the venue in time amidst cheers, and Sena
spokesperson and Member of Parliament Sanjay Raut.
Dalits in Gujarat village have battle-cry: Let Mayawati hold Delhi
Anand Teltumbde - The Battle Within: Protest over demolition of reveals a divided Dalit community
Ghanshyam Shah: Oppression’s new face
The unlikely assembly
of leaders and the hundreds of thousands of people were out to send a message
to the political establishment of the day: The razing of the historic Ambedkar
Bhavan in Mumbai’s Dadar had incensed Ambedkarites, followers of the Dalit
leader, who saw it as symbolic of the continuing assault on Ambedkar’s ideology
by the BJP and allied forces.
Between the lines
The subtext of the
morcha was clear too. Coming a few days after Dalit leader Ramdas Athavale had
been inducted into the Modi cabinet, ostensibly to win over Dalits in
Maharashtra, where municipal elections will be held next year, and Uttar
Pradesh, which will be the stage of a hotly contested state election in early
2017. The protestors let Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Maharashtra Chief
Minister Devendra Fadnavis know that Dalits would not be fooled by such
symbolic gestures, given how the establishment continued its attack on
Ambedkar’s legacy.
Ambedkar Bhavan was a
modest structure in Mumbai where Ambedkar had conducted his work while in the
city, where he would write while not at his large table at home, and it housed
a part of his book collection. Besides these, it had the Bharat Bhushan
printing press, where he had bought and installed printing machines when
established publishers had refused to publish his writings critical of
Hinduism. The precinct also had meeting halls and the offices of Prakash
Ambedkar’s party.
The 72-year-old
Ambedkar Bhavan was owned and managed by the People’s Improvement Trust set up
by Ambedkar. It was also the place that the late Dalit student leader Rohith
Vemula’s mother and brother hadconverted to Buddhism in April under the guidance of
Prakash Ambedkar. And through that, it had come to acquire certain urgency in
the prevailing anti-Dalit climate.
During the night of
June 25-26, a large group of young men wearing Ambedkar inscribed T-shirts,
ostensibly authorised by the trust itself, had razed the Bhavan. In the
process, they destroyed many of the original articles there, including the
press. It transpired that the trust wanted to redevelop the plot with a
17-storey grand building, to be also called Ambedkar Bhavan. The local police
and municipal corporation officials were reportedly unaware of the demolition
until after it was over.
Why the demolition
mattered
The demolition was
clearly planned. The commercial exploitation of the site had trumped the
historic significance of the Ambedkar Bhavan. The unwillingness of the state
government to protect the legacy structure, especially that of chief minister
Fadnavis who had moved fast to inaugurate the memorial to Ambedkar to be built
at nearby Indu Mills, will come back to haunt it.
Ratnakar Gaikwad,
former chief secretary of Maharashtra and advisor to the trust, defended the
demolition. Gaikwad fancies himself as a Dalit leader but he had no authority
in the trust that allowed him to order or advise the demolition, according to a
Right to Information inquiry. He also happens to be Maharashtra’s information
commissioner, a post he was given after retirement. Gaikwad’s stout defence
added to the sense of injury that Dalits and Ambedkarites felt.
Prakash Ambedkar and
brother Anandraj called for a fitting response to it even as the Fadnavis
government dithered and made meaningless noises. The Shiv Sena got involved,
its leader Neelam Gorhe made her way through the rubble and said she was pained
that the government could not protect and preserve Ambedkar Bhavan though it
was spending crores to erect the memorial to him. The Sena, Fadnavis’s ally in
government, has taken delight in embarrassing him and the BJP in the last few
months.
The anti-Dalit
narrative
As the anger against
the demolition of the Ambedkar Bhavan gathered force, Ramdas Athavale was sworn
into Modi’s cabinet during an expansion earlier this month. It fanned the
flames. Here was a Dalit leader who should have been condemning the BJP
governments in the state and Centre, or better still, should have prevented the
demolition. Instead, he was supping with the government.
Around this time, the
incident in Una, Gujarat, occurred where a group of self-styled so-called gau
rakshaks, or self-styled cow protection vigilantes, publicly flogged four Dalit
leather tanners for skinning the carcasses of dead cows on July 11. Dalit
activists in Gujarat said such cow vigilantism had become common. The incident
has led to an unprecedented
Dalit uprising in the state.
In Maharashtra, there
were recorded cases of honour killings and caste atrocities in the last couple
of years. A small-budget film made on the issue, Sairat, in which
the young Dalit man and his Maratha caste lady love were killed by her family,
had turned out to be a roaring success.
In the months post the
death of Rohith Vemula, a PhD student at the University of Hyderabad who had
killed himself on January 17 to protest alleged discrimination by university
officials against Dalit students, the news media regularly told stories of caste
atrocities and assaults on Dalits across the country. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh had muddied the waters calling for a review of reservations and then
backtracking.
The dominant
narrative, therefore, was that in the era of BJP majority governments, with or
without their sanction, anti-Dalit and Hindu fundamentalist groups were
training their guns on Dalits. And the gains – however limited and debatable –
of the last few decades were being threatened. It did not take much effort for
Prakash and brother Anandraj Ambedkar to mobilise one of the largest morchas in
Mumbai in the last five years. “I was articulating what we [Ambedkarites] were
all feeling,” Prakash Ambedkar said. He has asked volunteers to do shram-daan,
or voluntary labour, to rebuild the Ambedkar Bhavan later this month.
The unlikely
assembly
The strength and tone
of the morcha, and the coalition of leaders it brought together, made such an
impact that Fadnavis announced the very next day in the state legislature that
there would be an inquiry into the demolition and that his government would
fund the reconstruction if the Ambedkar family agreed to accept the
government’s gesture. Fadnavis also told the state legislature that an inquiry
had been initiated into Gaikwad’s role.
Fadnavis was bothered
about the signals that the morcha sent out not only in Maharashtra but
nationally, especially in Uttar Pradesh, at a time that the BJP leadership
wants to impress Dalits for their electoral worth. The young first-time chief
minister has been Modi’s and Shah’s poster-boy chief minister. He could not
afford to rile the Central leadership, especially at a time when the party was
orchestrating to send the correct positive signals. The aftermath of Vemula’s
suicide lingered, the Una incident was an embarrassment to the party, and this
mammoth morcha had the ability to take down Fadnavis’s stock with the BJP
leadership.
The massive morcha led
to political alignments that neither Fadnavis nor his leaders could have
expected. It united the anti-BJP forces – and included its ally, the Shiv Sena
on its side for what it was worth. What other issues such as the untrammelled
price rise and the series of corruption charges against Fadnavis’ council of
ministers had not managed to achieve, the razing of Ambedkar Bhavan had: it had
brought the opposition parties together and allowed them to challenge the BJP
government in one voice.
At the morcha, when
Kanhaiya Kumar worked the crowd against the government with his speech and the
famous “azaadi”
chant, the anti-establishment symbolism of his persona as the young man who
challenged the Prime Minister, effortlessly carried over. The Ambedkar Bhavan
was “emerging as an anti-BJP space” and the government could not tolerate it,
he pointed out.All this sent out
unflattering signals about Fadnavis’ own political assessment in Maharashtra…iead more:
Anand Teltumbde - The Battle Within: Protest over demolition of reveals a divided Dalit community
The massive turnout on
July 19 to protest the demolition of the iconic Ambedkar Bhavan, associated
with Babasaheb Ambedkar, in Dadar, Mumbai has finally shown the prowess of the
Dalit masses to the upper class of the Dalits that overtly or covertly
supported the demolition and also to the ruling dispensation that has
fraudulently sheltered them. Braving the monsoon downpour, people filled the
space between Byculla and Mumbai CST, choking that part of the city for over
six hours demanding the arrest of Ratnakar Gaikwad, retired chief secretary of
Maharashtra and current chief information commissioner.
According to reports,
in the wee hours of June 25, hundreds of people masquerading as Ambedkarites
came with two backhoes and demolished the Ambedkar Bhavan and Ambedkar’s press
in Dadar on behalf of the Peoples’ Improvement Trust. It was a daredevilish
act, inconceivable, unless it was backed by the state. The structures were directly
connected with Babasaheb, who had bought the land on which they stood in the
1940s. While Ambedkar Bhavan, an inverted U-shaped single-storey structure, was
constructed in the 1990s by the trust he had founded, the Buddha Bhushan
Printing Press was owned by him and stood there as the tenant of the trust. He
had paid a rent of Rs 50 per month for the land it occupied, which was
continued by his son until it was stopped sometime in the 1970s through a legal
process. The press was of historical importance, having served not only as the
press wherefrom Janata and Prabuddha Bharat, two of Ambedkar’s important
papers, were printed and published, but also as a centre of the Ambedkarite
movement from the 1940s. It continued so even after Ambedkar’s death.
While the masses of
Dalits have protested against this demolition all over the country, the
classes, comprising well-off Dalits, among them senior bureaucrats,
politicians, businessmen and so on, and their counterparts in the Dalit
diaspora, overtly or covertly supported Gaikwad for his grandiose plan to
construct a 17-storey Ambedkar Bhavan with provisions for a five-storeyed car
park, a vipassana centre and various offices there.
The existing Ambedkar
Bhavan was a hub of Dalit and progressive activists and masses. The classes
were repelled by its spartan look and aspired to rebuild the area with
club-like spaces, where they could park their cars and network with other
“civilised” people. Ambedkar for them is just an abstract identity marker,
which, bedecked with all superlatives, lent them pride. They would not like to
remember any other Ambedkar, particularly the one who publicly declared that
the educated people had cheated him, or who, at the fag end of his life, wept
over the realisation that whatever he had done benefitted only a small section
of educated Dalits in cities and that he could not do anything for the rural
Dalits.
This class divide had
surfaced immediately after the death of Ambedkar and manifested in the
Republican Party of India, which split in the aftermath of the
constitutionalism versus mass struggle debate. The former was described as the
Ambedkarite method while the latter was considered the communist path. The
clash between B.C. Kamble and B.D. Gaikwad, as practitioners of these methods,
respectively, reflected this incipient class division. This division went on
expanding with the accrual of gains through reservations to an increasingly
small section of beneficiaries over the years. As the thin layer of better-off
urban Dalits at the time of the beginning of the Dalit movement expanded in the
later years, the divide between the haves and have-nots among the Dalits
widened.
This class of haves, still insecure in the larger society, used its
caste identity as protective cover. It not only distanced itself from the Dalit
masses, but wantonly acted against their interests so as to be acceptable to
its larger class. Still the masses largely followed them as their role models.
Being visible and vocal, their interests became the political focal point to
the detriment of ordinary Dalits. This class, however, has been oblivious of
the woes of the masses. It would never speak about increasing atrocities on
Dalits, never relate with their increasing deprivation and never empathise with
their struggles. They would promote individualistic vipasana but not the
radical social activism of Buddhism that Ambedkar envisaged. It exhibits an
Ambedkar emptied of radical content.
The protest march of
July 19, hopefully, seeds this class consciousness among the Dalit masses.
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