When Caste Conflicts Create A Stink
Living in the badlands of Uttar Pradesh, one sees how easy it is for the smallest issue to become a raging controversy just by giving it caste overtones. Once, I overheard my husband talking to a labourer who had been beaten up by a rival. What is his name? He asked. The weaver told him the caste of his assailant. I asked later why ascertaining the assailants caste was more important than ascertaining the extent of his injuries. Caste is the root of most disputes here, he replied, deriding my naiveté. And caste is such an emotionally charged issue that all such conflicts become virtually impossible to settle.
Take the case of the centrally-located HashimpurRroad in Allahabad. This road is divided into two parts the first goes to the Anand Bhawan and the Allahabad University and is lined with rich homes and big hospitals. The other half, towards the Hashimpur village, is inhabited by poor, scheduled caste households. 700 people are crammed together into an area which is just about enough for 30 families . They dont have access to a single toilet. Children can be seen, squatting by the road side, and the stench of human excreta fills the air. Hordes of pigs walk around, looking for delectable morsels of goo, adding to the general ambience of the area.
The reason for this filth is a conflict between the villagers and the rich residents of the Hashimpur Road. It all began when Kanshi Ram made a speech on the Hashimpur crossing seven years ago. He told the villagers that they were being oppressed by the higher castes. One of the points he made was that the villagers had no toilet and had to travel over a furlough to answer the call of nature. This sparked feelings of resentment against the high caste residents of the Hashimpur Road. The villagers decided henceforth to ease themselves only on the Hashimpur Road. As a mark of special resentment, they now encourage their children to squat as close to the posh houses as possible.
The result is that residents of the Hashimpur Road often have to shoo away kids on their driveways when they leave for work in the morning. But whenever they do so, they have to contend with defiant parents. Its a public place. You cant stop us, they say. One resident recounts, Once when I chastised a child for defecating outside my house, the villagers said that I should be grateful that they did not use my compound for the purpose. I felt intimidated by their sheer numbers and quietly went inside.
Others say that no one can harm the villagers because they have political backing. A corporator of the Allahabad Municipal Corporation, Nayan Srivastava, lives adjacent to the village. He keeps mum about the filth as he belongs to the BJP, and needs to be on the right side of the villagers.The mayor of Allahabad, who belongs to the Samajwadi Party, has not done anything either. The villagers, strengthened both by political support and a numerical majority, now reign supreme here.
Apart from vitiating the atmosphere, the villagers have taken illegal electricity connections directly from the main line. The Hashimpur Road residents get inflated electricity bills and suffer frequent power cuts as a result. But many feel that it is this politically-motivated casteism rather than human waste that has fouled things up for this neighbourhood.