Indian
social system is influenced by Dharmashastras, which establishes the
Chaturvarna Ashram system created by Brahmins and Kshatriyas. Any
social movement defines opposition- classes or groups, generally
exploiter and exploited but dalit movement is based against the
classical notion of “purity and pollution” and the notion of
purity and pollution comes from the individual’s birth in a family
i.e. it is totally ascriptive in nature. Dalit movements challenge it
as Periyar challenged the Brahminical hegemony in cultural, social,
religious and political spheres. challenging the Brahminical notion
of hierarchy was the first step in Dalit movements through Temple
Entry Movement, social justice movement etc. These movements talked
for the enforcement of freedom, justice, liberty in the place of
ritualistic traditional system where humans are deprived of basic
rights to live decent life. Therefore, these movements were giving
the model for alternate society based on ‘modern’ and rational
values and end the oppressive social order and establish a new social
order based on libertarian values.
The
movement for the emancipation of Dalits in india in the early phase
of modern India was started by social reformers like Raja Rammohan
Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and others but the reach of these
movements were very meagre and these movements vapourised very
rapidly. Generally, dalit movements can be arranged in two paradigms;
first Ambedkar era Movement and Post Ambedkar era movement. Ambedkar
tried to bring the ‘dalit’ question at the centre stage of
freedom movements. The communal award of 1932 and subsequent revision
in it after Mahatma Gandhi’s fast paved the way for more fruitful
political actions. The main impetus in Dalit Movement came after the
independence when democratic processes took the centre stage of
Indian polity and group action became more prominent strategy to
achieve the goal.
The
scholarship on Dalit and Dalit movements relied heavily on the
concepts of 'relative deprivation', 'sanskritization' and 'social
mobility'. Sociologists finds that it is possible to discern the
dominant ideological currents of Dalit movements and there are
different trends in this domain to study these movements. Gopal Guru,
in his article Dalit Movement in Mainstream Sociology (1993),
talks about the 'liberal trend' in the study of Dalit movements. He
finds sociologists like M. S. A. Rao, Barbara Joshi, Harold Issac,
Owen Lynch, James Silverberg, Sachidanand, Anil Bhatt, Singer and
Cohen, Nanduram and Patwardhan are relating relative deprivation as
the major frame of reference for discussion on the emergence of
reform, protest and movement among the dalits(1993: 570). These
studies suggests that dalits suffer from relative deprivation because
their attempts to attain higher status or to overcome relative
deprivation is restricted by the caste groups of higher status. Here
the reference group is upper caste groups which are still socially
dominant in some regions of the country. However, the articulation of
relative deprivation among the dalits might happen with reference to
westernized middle class dalits from within the same social
situation. Therefore, Oommen states that the deprivation among Dalits
is multi faceted(1990: 255).
Social
mobility and relative deprivation can provide the picture of social
reality of a certain phase of historical juncture when Indian Society
was transforming itself from feudal ethos to modern ethos based on
mental imagery of rationalisation and logic. In this phase, if Dalits
were restricted to achieve the status then the path of protest
movement were taken like in 1930s in Maharashtra, Dalits challenged
the feudal ethos through “Sanskritization”. This attempt to
imitate upper castes values among Mahars of Maharashtra contributed
to the development of negative consciousness(Guru 1993: 570) which
according to Gramsci “may not constitute a mature and fully
developed class consciousness”. Gramsci argues that the lower
classes, historically on the defensive, can only achieve
self-awareness of the identity and class limits of their enemy(Guha
1983: 20). Therefore, Ranjit Guha says that only attacking the
material symbols of government and landlords authority can upset the
established order as the sanskritising movements are fraught with
danger by higher castes and they try to counter all the attempts made
by Dalits. Also, the present scenario of total marginalisation of
rural Dalits, Hinduisation of dalit masses and the crisis of Indian
welfare state questions the theoretical validity of relative
deprivation both as conceptualisation and as a form of
consciousness(Guru 1993: 571).
Structural
approaches to social movements covers an enormous terrain that takes
us from questions about the nature and causes of inequality to the
creation of social groupings to the causes of institutional
change(Smith and Fetner 2010: 13). The role of state in the
redistribution of resources allows groups to mobilise and articulate
grievances and organize in support of social change goals. Two
concepts that have emerged from what is largely a state-centric body
social movements research—political contexts and mobilizing
structures—provide useful analytical tools for helping scholars
analyze the ways states and other actors and structures shape social
movement dynamics. The idea of 'political context' talks about the
ways in which formal political institution and informal alignments of
relevant political actors forms the prospects for relatively
powerless groups to effectively challenge the existing order. This
context is shaped mostly by the temporal dimension as favourable
political conditions of a certain time and openness of democratic
system and division among the elites are the main conditions for
this. As Charles Tilly (1978) argues that if the windows of
opportunity for access to political system is open then the social
movements are likely to emerge. Dough McAdam’s (1982) “Political
Process Model” of social movement emergence and decline says that
shifts in the structure of political opportunities promote the
expansion of social protest and the emergence of social movements.
After
Indian Independence in 1947, Indian constitution adopted provisions
for social justice and also laws to maintain equality and equity in
the society. Ambedkar also joined the interim government and called
for social struggle through democratic methods. In his letter to the
people, which was published after his death in 1958, the principles
of democracy were elaborated and he called for Republican Party of
India to aim at a society which is free from oppression and
exploitation of one class from another (Morkhandikar 1990: 586). The
whole letter is written with a belief in liberal democracy, and its
principles like rule of law, equality of opportunity, and freedom of
individual as a goal and state as a means to achieve that goal.
Therefore, he called for 'democratisation of democracy' which is also
seen in the work Untouchable Citizens: Dalit Movement and
Democratisation in Tamil Nadu of Hugo Gorringe. Gorringe(2005)
gives three arguments in support of his work and the first is dalits
were deprived of basic rights in Tamil Nadu and how their movement is
asserting pride, dignity and honour and although poverty among dalits
is one of the constraints for their mobilisation. Second is how
dalits have put pressure on non-Brahmin parties like Dravid Munnetra
Kargham to accept the fact that Dalits are main oppressed in the
caste system and third is Dalit political activism is reconfiguring
the political system by contributing to 'deepening of Indian
democracy”.
So,
Post-Ambedkar phase of Dalit politics gave thrust for democratic
politics and inclusion of Dalits in the political system of the
country. The system for electing representatives from constituencies
in the India is “First-Past-the-post”, in which, candidate
getting the highest number of votes are chosen as winner. So, Indian
democracy became the 'number game' and groups started to assert their
dominance in the political arena. Christophe Jaffrelot calls the rise
of other backward Castes as 'silent revolution'. In Uttar Pradesh,
Kanshiram tried to mobilize dalits under one identity and later on
this social engineering resulted Dalit chief minister in the state.
The BSP's first step in the politics was establishment of an
“independent dalit political leadership” instead of a “dependent
political leadership”(Kumar 2003a). Other political parties which
were also taking the cause of dalit emancipation had high caste
leadership and a politics of patronage was visible in the working of
this movement. The formation of “independent dalit political
leadership” made these parties strategies for garnering dalit votes
redundant.
The
Bahujan Samaj Party under the leadership of Kanshiram has brought the
most significant change in the psyche of dalit masses by providing
umbrella identity, futuristic visions, myths, social ideology and
political strategy to become one of the most significant player in
the game of power politics in contemporary India (Kumar, 2002, Page
168-69). The politics of Kanshiram had deep philosophical imprints of
previous dalit movements and he understood dalits as a community
which is racially subjugated, economically exploited, culturally
marginalised and politically untouchable in the realms of power.
Therefore, his strategy was to capture power from elites to
emancipate dalits as Jaffrelot(2006) has put in his work. As a
torchbearer in Ambedkarite social struggle in the political arena of
contemporary india, he gave the idea of revolution on the basis of
social engineering. He coined the term “bahujan” and made it one
of the most imaginative political categories. Bahujan identity is the
political alliance between the politically deprived castes of Indian
history under the leadership of most deprived caste group i.e.
“dalits”. It profess through the meta narrative of “guru-killi”
that it is the master key to end all the exploitation and made
“dalitness” the core value of the party.
The
victory in subsequents election in UP have shown the reach of the
idea of bahujan among the deprived communities of modern India and it
also showed that they are second to none of any political outfits.
The victory had a revolutionary spirit to change the political power
game in the other parts of the country. But, this movement after some
time turned into petite-bourgeois politics and these were the results
of the limitations inherent in most of the dalit movements. The BSP
was successful in providing leadership to multi-caste,
multi-religious political alliance but lacked in providing social
milieu for dalits in the state. The political socialisation of dalits
had limited impact on their social conditions. A critical examination
of Dalit movements shows that most of these movement’s are
antagonistic to each other and that is one of the reason why the
strategy was not able to convert itself to any potential outputs.The
politics of caste is carried out with the baggages of the paste and
if we create a imaginative category where multiple caste groups are
its members then the problem starts with the unequal baggage of the
history with different caste groups and give birth to conflict among
them. The notion of purity and pollution has hierarchied the society
in such a way that the quality and quantity of exploitation is
different for different caste groups depending on their social
position spatially and temporally.
Therefore,
BSP was able to provide political leadership by displacing political
elites but it could not transform its movement in the direction of
transformation of social status of dalits. The capturing of power in
politics in India requires alliances from other caste group based
parties, which are, generally, against the whole ethos of dalit
movements. Such alliances, under the power, does not remain under one
caste group and but remains under many additional power blocks with a
capacity to bargain. Thus, Political power face strong challenge from
the “civil society” in the transformation to ideal
socio-political order.Political socialisation is the first step to
gain inputs from society about the needs of the people. Political,
social, and economic domains are interconnected public paradigm and
through political socialisation, the state can understand the needs
and aspirations of the society. These needs should be evaluated on
rational basis to provide social justice to every individual of the
society.
The
victory of BSP in the elections were projected by media as the
victory of the coalition of Brahmin and Dalits but the moot question
was why Brahmins of UP supported BSP ? Vivek Kumar finds that when
Brahmins became sure of the victory of BSP then they supported and
BSP accepted this support to increase the base of their ideological
campaign. This coalition of Brahmin and Dalits was further improved
by Mayawati in the subsequent elections. She gave more number of
tickets to Brahmins in the subsequent elections and also organized
the “Brahmin Maha Rally” on June 9, 2005. Mostly, she tried to
get the support of poor people in upper castes. Also, BSP got some
support base in Muslim population of UP. BSP always tried to bring
out minority in its definition of “Bahujan”.
These
political alliances in Mayawati reign destroyed the basic question of
dalit emancipation and subalternity of the dalit movement. In order
to regain power in the state, She gave a new imaginative community of
“sarvjan” where antagonistic castes came under one umbrella and
the “dalitness” of the movement lost its imperative. The
political culture in the state of UP, ridden by a conservative,
orthodox and regressive social practices, converted leaders to ‘new’
political elites. Brahminism is not only the attribute of certain
castes; in contemporary India, it also became the attribute of
certain class. The neo-buddhist movement, therefore, wanted to create
a secular, alternative community identity so that the antagonistic
trends in Dalit movements can be discarded and annihilation of caste
becomes possible. The case made by Ambedkar through conversion of all
identities into one “Buddhist” identity could have played better
role in the mobilization process of dalits.
