Dalits look West: Education, capitalism can shape future, as can defiance

Dalits want more. And if they don’t get it in India, they will go abroad to get it. This is the message of the Dalits Quit India Party (DQIP), launched by the public intellectual and a shining light in Dalit political thought, Chandra Bhan Prasad. Not yet registered as a political party, the grouping is nevertheless going to be a powerful force in shaping the trajectory of Dalit thought. 

Babasaheb B R Ambedkar’s central message to Dalits was: Education. Indeed, one of his most famous words of advice was “educate, agitate, organise; have faith in yourselves”. Ambedkar was the first untouchable in India to earn a PhD and study abroad, thanks to a scholarship from the Maharaja of Baroda, which enabled him to complete a PhD at both Columbia University and the London School of Economics (LSE), in addition to a law degree. 

Mr Prasad’s inspiration is partially drawn from the farmers’ agitation and the support it got from non-resident Indians (NRIs). He says the days when Dalits were content with degrees from nondescript Indian universities are gone. Now, they must be ambitious and confident: Send their children abroad to study, and not just any foreign university but Ivy League institutions like Harvard and Columbia, or the LSE. The children must be able to speak perfect English, must develop STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) skills, and eventually aim to become part of faculty in foreign universities. Their ambitions must be boundless. 

The theoretical underpinning to Mr Prasad’s conviction is that the Dalits suffer from want of elite formation and, as a result, there is no social moderator/agency for them. Kanshiram’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) did have that potential. But Kanshiram took the movement towards Periyar rather than Ambedkar, steering focus on the immiserisation of the Dalits, himself living in poverty and deprivation, to strike a chord with his followers. In many parts of India, his Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation turned into individual-centric organisations of blind followers. As a result, when one left, the organisation collapsed. The final blow was the track shift from the Bahujan to Sarva Jan, leading to the rise of militant leaders like Chandrashekhar Azad and his Bhim Army. 

Mr Prasad concedes that foreign educational qualifications alone are not a remedy and there is “discrimination everywhere”. A 2016 Equality Labs survey — the only one so far — of 1,200 individuals of South Asian descent in the United States found in a report (released in 2018) that 26 per cent said they had experienced a physical assault because of their caste, while 59 per cent reported caste-based derogatory jokes or remarks directed at them. More than half said they were afraid of being outed as Dalit. Some hid their caste, others confronted or embraced it as a badge of honour. “When I’m at Harvard I actually want to be recognised as an “untouchable” because I want people to know,” Kanishka Elupula, doctoral student at Harvard University, told researchers from the Pulitzer Centre during a 2019 project on caste in America. Cases of caste discrimination registered in American courts have been reported especially from California, home to the tech industry. 

At home in India, various devices have been offered as caste “mediation”. The Maharashtra government — the only state government in India to do so — has instituted scholarships that pay tuition fees, stipend, and living expenses to Dalit students who have secured admission in a foreign university. A National Council for Affirmative Action was instituted by the Confederation of Indian Industry in 2010, headed by the late J J Irani. Progress on this front appears to have been patchy, judging by annual reports. There is still no Dalit in top management at a big company, although Dalit matrimony websites are full of prospective brides and grooms who are employed in “MNCs”. Dalit-led enterprises are flourishing under the rubric of the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and many state governments have tweaked procurement policies to give the balance of advantage to Dalit contractors. 

But how much can Dalit NRI mobilisation translate into political — and social — heft in India? Hard to say. After all, diaspora activity has advanced many causes. On the other hand, violence against Dalits is unceasing and the conviction rate, at around 25 per cent (according to the National Crime Records Bureau data), is still very low. In the Dalit context, education — and capitalism — continues to be one way forward. Defiance is another.