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| Aditi Phadnis: Caste in stone |
| Aditi Phadnis / New Delhi Jul 11, 2009, 00:30 IST |
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Mayawati's statues are taking away from the good work she's doing.
The outrage over Mayawati’s acts of self-glorification such as building statues of Kanshi Ram and B R Ambedkar and herself, appropriating public spaces for a personal and political project, has obscured some important decisions taken by her in the last few months. The Ambedkar parks, museums in Noida and elsewhere, have been lambasted not just on grounds of aesthetics, but also because they have levelled hundreds of trees to create vast expanses of concrete, choking up the city’s lungs. A 30-feet high wall is coming up around the Lucknow home of the Chief Minister, on a road that is barely 25 feet broad.
But the fact is, Mayawati has done two things lately which haven’t got the attention they deserve. First, in this academic session, four engineering colleges will be set up in UP, where 75 per cent of the seats will be reserved for Dalits. The land has already been allotted for these colleges and for now, the classes are being held in other institutions, However, the work is on at full speed and before the academic years ends, the students will move to their new premises. Imagine what this will do to a class of people who thought they were condemned to doing menial labour, and if they were exceptionally lucky, they would, at the most, get a government job.
Six months ago, she announced that a fourth of all government tenders would be reserved for Dalits. This is another way to begin the process of capital formation among the Dalits. Combine the two developments and a new sensibility is likely to emerge in a few years: Of a Dalit entrepreneur, a person whose social identity, so far, used to be defined by a government job.
This is what makes you wonder that if Mayawati has been so sensible about some things, then why not about the others ? Some years ago, Mulayam Singh Yadav tried to create a Muslims vote bank for himself basically with a Muslim-under-threat campaign. What he did not reckon with was the Hindu retaliation — after all, the police could not be present in every small hamlet and shanty to protect the Muslim when his property and family were being attacked.
Similarly, Mayawati is encouraging assertion by the Dalits, without ensuring their protection or safety. The number of attacks on Dalits, and worst of all, on Dalits girls, has gone up cosiderably in the last few months. Two days ago, a little Dalit girl was raped and murdered in Chitrakoot. In Muzaffarnagar, two Dalit youth were arrested and one of them killed in police custody. In Kanpur there have been two cases of atrocities against Dalits in the past two days. All this is retaliation — caste-Hindus taking their anger against Mayawati, out on any Dalit they can find anywhere. The Supreme Court ordered that Dalits participate in the mid-day meals scheme. This creates no problem so long as Dalit women confine themselves to collecting firewood or cleaning utensils — but if they start cooking the meals, well, then upper-caste children will simply not eat the food. It is to circumvent this that the former Women and Child Development Minister, Renuka Choudhary, launched a campaign for providing packaged od. If under the NREGA, a caste-Hindu labourer gets 60 or 80 per cent of the wages he has been promised, then a Dalit gets 40 or 50 per cent. In UP, their job cards are the property of the gram panchayat head — they don’t even get the physical possession of the card. In many cases where banks disburse the wages through supposedly caste-neutral channels, the bank administration conspires with the panchayat chief to appropriate a ‘fee’ from the Dalits.
Mayawati has done nothing to ensure land rights for Dalits, the central problem of their existence. But she can’t open all fronts simultaneously. What she can do, to take the project of finding Dalits a new identity — not just defined by their social status but by their entrepreneurial status — is to do some thinking to provide two elements to the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) that it lacks at present. The first: BSP has no foreign policy. For a party that aspires for the prime ministership, how can it not offer its voters a foreign policy? Beyond an ill-considered and gratuitous attack on the US’ Iran policy in the run-up to the elections, Mayawati has said nothing on India’s external relations. Second, the party has no coherent policy on industrial development and land. This is simply not tenable. The problem with the Dalit leadership is that it neither has the time nor the interest to go beyond social-civil rights issues of dignity. With her technical-education initiative, there is an indication that Mayawati is addressing this. She needs to do more lateral thinking.
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