The dalit in India - caste and social class

Social Research, Spring, 2003 by Sagarika Ghose

The logic of the Mandal recommendations was akin to letting the dalit eat a single meal at the Brahmin's table. (19) Omvedt writes:

   The reservation system was instituted not so much on the
   basis of the Constitution as on that of the decades-old elite
   resistance to restructuring public employment. It serves several
   purposes. It allows the elite to maintain the facade of a
   generous patron of Dalits while continuing to deprive them
   of mass-level education and access to resource. It provides a
   process to absorb some of their brightest members into a
   system still based more on extortion and corruption than
   true public service. Finally, it continues to block a true
   representation of the majority of the nation's population, a
   representation which the founders and leaders of the anti-caste
   movement had always seen as part of a full-scale political
   and social-economic transformation (Omvedt, 2001).

The reservations scheme has also come under strain from the process of liberalization initiated by the government a decade ago. As the state has begun to retreat from the "commanding heights" of the economy, "the hard won battle for backward castes reservations will become meaningless if the state begins to reduce the number of government posts and sheds many of its functions" (Panini, 1996: 28).

There has thus emerged a dalit demand for reservations in the growing private sector, once more angering the upper castes. The January 13, 2002, Bhopal Declaration pointed out that there is not a single dalit billionaire, businessman, or industrialist. (20) It demanded the incorporation of a United States-style "equal opportunity for all" principle in Indian industry so that dalits may escape the historical burden of performing the economy's "polluted" tasks.

The Bhopal Declaration voices a cry for the dalit to abandon the ghetto of government service and emerge as players in the private arena. For dalits to have reached a level of self-confident articulation to call for legislated entry into assets mainly all owned by the dvija is a protest against the paradox of political saliency yet social degradation that this paper has examined.

In addition to the Bhopal Declaration, the Dalit Shiksha Andolan (Dalit Education Revolution) and the Dalit Sahitya Academies (Dalit Literary Academy) are evidence of the thirst for intellectual capital and the desire to create a new "private sector dalit" by means of the English language and to create intellectual dynamism. (21)

The need to foster intellectual energy remains one of the crucial features of dalit self-criticism. "The tragedy is every young dalit intellectual's ambition is to be a civil servant ... an administrative slave of Hindu-brahminism.... [T] he dalit community has not produced a powerful socio-spiritual philosopher ... who is able to play the role of Jewish liberators" (Ilaiah, 2002:11).

In fact, the All-India Backward and Minority Employees Federation (BAMCEF), which was established in 1976, had envisioned itself as a "talent bank" for dalits. In 1976 a BAMCEF bulletin declared that "educated persons from oppressed communities are trapped in government services. About 2 million educated oppressed have joined these jobs ... but their cowardice, selfishness, inherent timidity and lack of desire of social service to their own creed ... makes them useless."