My Seditious Heart
Page 102
219.Zelliot, Ambedkar’s World, 178.
220.E. M. S. Namboodiripad, History of the Indian Freedom Struggle (Trivandrum: Social Scientist Press, 1986), 492, emphasis added.
221.The text of the manifesto is reproduced in K. Satyanarayana and Susie Tharu, The Exercise of Freedom: An Introduction to Dalit Writing (New Delhi: Navayana, 2013), 62.
222.For a critical piece on the NGO–Dalit movement interface that traces it to the history of colonial and missionary activity in India, see Anand Teltumbde, “Dangerous Sedative,” Himal, April 2010: “Unsurprisingly, most Dalits in Indian NGOs are active at the field level. Dalit boys and girls appear to be doing social services for their communities, which is what Ambedkar expected educated Dalits to do, and Dalit communities therefore perceive such workers quite favourably—more favourably, certainly, than Dalit politicians, who are often seen as engaged in mere rhetoric. The NGO sector has thus become a significant employer for many Dalits studying for their humanities degree, typically capped with a postgraduate degree in social work. Further, as the prospects of public-sector jobs have decreased since the government’s neoliberal reforms of the mid-1980s and later, the promise of NGOs as employers assumed great importance.”
223.For instance, see the list of NGOs that work with the multinational mining corporation Vedanta, under fire for land-grab and several violations against the environment and Adivasi rights, at http://www.vedantaaluminium.com/ngos-govt-bodies.htm.
224.Speech on September 26, 1896, at a public meeting in Bombay where he said he was representing the “100,000 British Indians at present residing in South Africa.” See CWMG 1, 407.
225.AoC 8.2–4.
226.BAWS 1, 375.
227.AoC 5.8.
228.There are different aspects of the constitution that govern the Adivasis of the heartland (the Fifth Schedule) and those of the Northeast of India (the Sixth Schedule). As the political scientist Uday Chandra points out, “The Fifth and Sixth Schedules of the Constitution perpetuate the languages and logics of the Partially and Wholly Excluded Areas defined in the Government of India Act (1935) and the Typically and Really Backward Tracts defined by the Government of India (1918) … In the Schedule V areas, dispersed across eastern, western, and central Indian states, state governors wield special powers to prohibit or modify central or state laws, to prohibit or regulate the transfer of land by or among tribals, to regulate commercial activities, particularly by non-tribals, and to constitute tribal advisory councils to supplement state legislatures. In principle, New Delhi also reserves the right to intervene directly in the administration of these Scheduled Areas by bypassing elected state and local governments. In the Schedule VI areas, dispersed across the seven northeastern states formed out of the colonial province of Assam, state governors preside over District and Regional Councils in Autonomous Districts and Regions to ensure that state and central laws do not impinge on these administrative zones of exception.” Utay Chandra, “Liberalism and Its Other: The Politics of Primitivism in Colonial and Postcolonial Indian Law,” Law & Society Review 47, no. 1 (2013): 155.
229.Cited in BAWS 9, 70.
230.BAWS 9, 42.
231.As prime minister of a non-Congress, Janata Dal–led coalition government from December 1989 to November 1990, Vishwanath Pratap Singh (1931–2008) took the decision to implement the recommendations of the Mandal Commission, which fixed a quota for members of the Backward Classes in jobs in the public sector to redress caste discrimination. The commission, named after B. P. Mandal, a parliamentarian who headed it, had been established in 1979 by another non-Congress (Janata Party) government, headed by Morarji Desai, but the recommendations of its 1980 report—which extended the scope of reservation in public sector employment beyond Dalits and Adivasis, and allocated 27 percent to Other Backward Classes—had not been implemented for ten years. When it was implemented, the privileged castes took to the streets. They symbolically swept the streets, pretended to shine shoes and performed other “polluting” tasks to suggest that instead of becoming doctors, engineers, lawyers, or economists, the policy of reservation was now going to reduce privileged castes to doing menial tasks. A few people attempted to publicly immolate themselves, the most well-known being a Delhi University student, Rajiv Goswami, in 1990. Similar protests were repeated in 2006 when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance tried to extend reservation to the Other Backward Classes in institutes of higher education.
232.BAWS 9, 40.
233.See Visalakshi Menon, From Movement to Government: The Congress in the United Provinces, 1937–42 (New Delhi: Sage, 2003), 52–53.
234.In his 1945 indictment of the Congress and Gandhi, Ambedkar lists the names of these mock candidates in his footnotes: Guru Gosain Agamdas and Babraj Jaiwar were the two cobblers; Chunnu was the milkman; Arjun Lal the barber; Bansi Lal Chaudhari the sweeper (BAWS 9, 210).
235.BAWS 9, 210.
236.Ibid., 68.
237.Ibid., 69.
238.Tidrick, Gandhi, 255.
239.Servants of India Society member Kodanda Rao’s account cited in Jaffrelot, Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability, 66.
240.Pyarelal Nayar, The Epic Fast (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1932), 188.
241.BAWS 9, 259.
242.As Ambedkar saw it, “The increase in the number of seats for the Untouchables is no increase at all and was no recompense for the loss of separate electorates and the double vote” (BAWS 9, 90). Ambedkar himself lost twice in the polls in post-1947 India. It took more than half a century for Kanshi Ram, the founder of a predominantly Dalit party, the Bahujan Samaj Party, and his protégé Mayawati to succeed in a first-past-the-post parliamentary democracy. This happened despite the Poona Pact. Kanshi Ram worked for years, painstakingly making alliances with other subordinated castes to achieve this victory. To succeed in the elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party needed the peculiar demography of Uttar Pradesh and the support of many Other Backward Classes. For a Dalit candidate to win an election from an open seat—even in Uttar Pradesh—continues to be almost impossible.
243.See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010).
244.Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 1997), 400–3. First published 1951.
245.Eleanor Zelliot writes in Ambedkar’s World: “Ambedkar had written the manpatra (welcome address, or literally, letter of honor) for Baloo Babaji Palwankar, known as P. Baloo, upon his return from a cricket tour in England nearly twenty years earlier, and had had some part in P. Balu’s selection as a Depressed Class nominee on the Bombay Municipal Corporation in the early 1920S” (254). Baloo supported Gandhi during the Round Table Conferences and supported the Hindu Mahasabha position. Soon after the Poona Pact, in October 1933, Baloo contested as a Hindu Mahasabha candidate for the Bombay Municipality, but lost. In 1937, the Congress, in an effort to split the Untouchable vote, pitted Baloo, a Chambhar, against Ambedkar, a Mahar, who contested on the Independent Labour Party ticket, for a Bombay (East) “reserved” seat in the Bombay Legislative Assembly. Ambedkar won narrowly.
246.For an outline of Rajah’s career and how he came around to supporting Ambedkar in 1938 and 1942, see note 5 at 1.5 of “A Vindication of Caste by Mahatma Gandhi” in AoC.
247.The Gujarat Freedom of Religion Act, 2003, makes it mandatory for a person who wants to convert into another religion to seek prior permission from a district magistrate. The text of the act is available at http://www.lawsofindia.org/statelaw/2224/TheGujaratFreedomofReligionAct2003.html. An amendment bill to the Act was sent back to the Legislative Assembly by the then Gujarat governor, Nawal Kishore Sharma, for reconsideration. It was subsequently dropped by the state government. One of the provisions in the amendment bill sought to clarify that Jains and Buddhists were to be construed as denominations of Hinduism. The governor said that the amendment would be in violation of Article 25 of the Indian Constitution. See http://www.indianexpress.com/news/gujarat-wi
thdraws-freedom-of-religion-amendment-bill/282818/1. The Gujarat Animal Preservation (Amendment) Act, 2011, makes “transport of animals for slaughter” a punishable offence, widening the ambit of the original Act, which bans cow slaughter. The Amendment Act has also augmented the punishment to seven years’ rigorous imprisonment from the earlier six months. In 2012, Narendra Modi greeted Indians on Janmashtami (observed as Krishna’s birthday) with the following words: “Mahatma Gandhi and Acharya Vinoba Bhave worked tirelessly for the protection of mother cow, but this Government abandoned their teachings.” Gandhi said, “Anyone who is not ready to give his life to save the cow is not a Hindu” (interview to Goseva on September 8, 1933, in CWMG 61, 372). Earlier, in 1924, he said, “When I see a cow, it is not an animal to eat, it is a poem of pity for me and I worship it and I shall defend its worship against the whole world” (reported in Bombay Chronicle, December 30, 1924; CWMG 29, 476).
248.For a history of the terms Harijan, Dalit, and Scheduled Caste, see note 8 to the prologue of AoC.
249.BAWS 9, 126.
250.Ibid., 210.
251.Renold, “Gandhi,” 25.
252.Tidrick, Gandhi, 261.
253.BAWS 9, 125.
254.Ibid., 111.
255.Susie Tharu and K. Lalita, eds., Women Writing in India, Vol. 1:600 B.C. to the Early Twentieth Century (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 215.
256.Ambedkar, Ambedkar: Autobiographical Notes, 25.
257.Manusmriti X: 123. See Wendy Doniger and Brian K. Smith, trans., The Laws of Manu (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1991).
258.Harijan, November 28, 1936, in CWMG 70, 126–28.
259.Reported by the columnist Rajiv Shah in his Times of India blog of December 1, 2012, http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/true-lies/entry/modi-s-spiritual-potion-to-woo-karmayogis. Shah says five thousand copies of Karmayogi were printed with funding from the public sector unit, Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation, and that later he was told, by the Gujarat Information Department that it had, on instructions from Modi, withdrawn the book from circulation. Two years later, addressing nine-thousand-odd Safai Karmacharis (sanitation workers), Modi said, “A priest cleans a temple every day before prayers, you also clean the city like a temple. You and the temple priest work alike.” See Shah’s blog of January 23, 2013, http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/true-lies/entry/modi-s-postal-ballot-confusion?sortBy=AGREE&th=1.
260.CWMG 70, 76–77.
261.See “A Note on the Poona Pact” in B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (New York: Verso, 2014), 357–76.
262.Dilip Menon, The Blindness of Insight: Essays on Caste in Modern India (Pondicherry: Navayana, 2006), 20.
263.This assimilation finds its way into the constitution. Explanation II of Article 25(2)(b) of the constitution was the first time in independent India when the law categorized Buddhists, Sikhs, and Jains as “Hindu,” even if “only” for the purpose of “providing social welfare and reform or the throwing open of Hindu religious institutions of a public character to all classes and sections of Hindus.” Later, codified Hindu personal law, like the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, and so on reinforced this position, as these statutes were applied to Buddhists, Sikhs, and Jains. Pertinently, under Indian law an atheist is automatically classified as a Hindu. The judiciary has been sending out mixed signals, sometimes recognising the “independent character” of these religions, and at other times, asserting that the “Sikhs and Jains, in fact, have throughout been treated as part of the wider Hindu community which has different sects, sub-sects, faiths, modes of worship and religious philosophies” (Bal Patil & Anr vs Union Of India & Ors, August 8, 2005). For Buddhists, Sikhs, and Jains, the struggle for recognition continues. There has been some success; for example, the Anand Marriage (Amendment) Act, 2012, freed Sikhs from the Hindu Marriage Act. On January 20, 2014, the Union Cabinet approved the notification of Jains as a minority community at the national level. Also see note 247 on the Gujarat Freedom of Religion Act.
264.See Ramachandra Guha, “What Hindus Can and Should be Proud Of,” The Hindu, July 23, 2013.
265.While NGOs and news reports suggest a toll of two thousand persons (see “A Decade of Shame” by Anupama Katakam, Frontline, March 9, 2012), then Union Minister of State for Home, Shriprakash Jaiswal (of the Congress Party), told Parliament on May 11, 2005, that 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus were killed in the riots; 2,548 were injured and 223 persons were missing. See “Gujarat Riot Death Toll Revealed,” BBC News, May 11, 2005.
266.“Peoples Tribunal Highlights Misuse of POTA”, Hindu, March 18, 2004. See also “Human Rights Watch asks Centre to Repeal POTA,” Press Trust of India, September 8, 2002.
267.See “Blood under Saffron: The Myth of Dalit-Muslim Confrontation,” Round Table India, July 23, 2013, http://goo.gl/7DU9uH.
268.See Ross Colvin and Sruthi Gottipati, “Interview with BJP Leader Narendra Modi,” Reuters, July 12, 2013, http://blogs.reuters.com/india/2013/07/12/interview-with-bjp-leader-narendra-modi/.
269.See “Dalit Leader Buries the Hatchet with RSS,” Times of India, August 31, 2006.
270.See Zelliot, Ambedkar’s World, especially chapter 5, “Political Development, 1935–56.” For an account of Jogendranath Mandal’s life and work, see Dwaipayan Sen, “A Politics Subsumed,” Himal, April 2010.
271.PTI News Service, March 20, 1955, cited in Zelliot, Ambedkar’s World, 193.
272.See Gordon Weiss, The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers (London: The Bodley Head, 2011).
273.For an account of how Ambedkar’s Buddhism is an attempt to reconstruct the world, see Surendra Jondhale and Johannes Beltz, Reconstructing the World: B. R. Ambedkar and Buddhism in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004). For an alternative history of Buddhism in India, see Gail Omvedt, Buddhism in India: Challenging Brahmanism and Caste (New Delhi: Sage, 2003).
274.BAWS 11, 322.
275.BAWS 17, part 2, 444–45. On September 14, 1956, Ambedkar wrote in a letter to Prime Minister Nehru: “The cost of printing is very heavy and will come to about Rs 20,000. This is beyond my capacity, and I am, therefore, canvassing help from all quarters. I wonder if the Government of India could purchase 500 copies for distribution among the various libraries and among the many scholars whom it is inviting during the course of this year for the celebration of Buddha’s 2,500 years’ anniversary.” Nehru did not help him. The book was published posthumously.
276.Brahminic Hinduism believes in cosmic time that has neither beginning nor end and alternates between cycles of creation and cessation. Each Mahayuga consists of four yuga—Krta or Satya Yuga (the golden age), followed by Treta, Dwapara, and Kali. Each era, shorter than the previous one, is said to be more degenerate and depraved than the preceding one. In Kali Yuga, there is disregard for varnashrama dharma—the Shudras and Untouchables wrest power—and chaos reigns, leading to complete destruction. About Kali Yuga, the Bhagavad Gita says (IX: 32): “Even those who are of evil birth, women, Vaishyas and Shudras, having sought refuge in me will attain supreme liberation.” Bibek Debroy, trans., The Bhagavad Gita (New Delhi: Penguin, 2005), 137.
MY SEDITIOUS HEART
1.Dr. Gokarakonda Naga Saibaba s/o G. Satayanarayana Murthy v. State of Maharashtra, Criminal Application No. 785 (2015).
2.B. R. Ambedkar, The Annihilation of Caste, ed. S. Anand (London: Verso, 2014), 241–42.
3.Mohd Haroon & Ors. v. Union of India & Anr., Writ Petition (Criminal) No. 155 (2013), 2.
4.Sruthisagar Yamunan, “IIT-Madras Derecognises Student Group,” Hindu, May 28, 2015, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/iitmadras-derecognises-student-group/article7256712.ece.
5.“My Birth Is My Fatal Accident: Full Text of Dalit Student Rohith’s Suicide Letter, Indian Express, January 19, 2016, http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/dalit-student-suicide-full-text-of-suicide-letter-hyderabad/.
6.Dalit Panthers, �
��Dalit Panthers Manifesto” (Bombay, 1973), quoted in Barbara R. Joshi, ed., Untouchable!: Voices of the Dalit Liberation Movement (London: Zed Books, 1986), p. 145. For further discussion, see Roy, “The Doctor and the Saint,” 668–787.
7.“The Case against Afza,” Hindu, February 10, 2013, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/the-case-against-afzal/article4397845.ece.
8.Mohammad Ali, “BJP MP Sakshi Maharaj Courts Controversy over JNU Unrest,” Hindu, February 15, 2016, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/bjp-mp-sakshi-maharaj-courts-controversy-over-jnu-unrest/article8237932.ece; Abhinav Malhotra, “Sakshi Maharaj Demands Strict Action against Those behind JNU Incident,” February 14, 2016, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kanpur/Sakshi-Maharaj-demands-strict-action-against-those-behind-JNU-incident/articleshow/50979831.cms.
9.Samreena Mushtaq, Essar Batool, Natasha Rather, Munaza Rashid, and Ifrah Butt, Do You Remember Kunan Poshpura? The Story of a Mass Rape (New Delhi: Zubaan Books, 2016).
10.“From the Delhi HC Order Granting Bail to Kanhaiya: ‘Those Shouting Anti-National Slogans May Not Be Able to Withstand Siachen for an Hour,’” Indian Express, March 3, 2016, http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/jnu-row-from-the-high-court-order-granting-bail-to-kanhaiya-those-shouting-anti-national-slogans-may-not-be-able-to-withstand-siachen-for-an-hour/.
INDEX
9/11/1973 coup (Chile), 192–93
9/11/2001 attacks (US), 197, 225, 228, 270, 294, 376, 392, 447, 454, 457, 803–4; Islamophobia and, 473; War on Terror and, xx–xxii, 126–37, 139, 145–46, 190–92, 201, 207–9, 243, 255, 461, 656
11/26/2008 attacks (Mumbai), 447–48, 452–56, 460, 462, 465, 486, 493, 806–7
1857 Mutiny (First War on Independence), 570, 705
Aaj Tak, 388
Aam Aadmi Party (India), 810
ABC News, 243, 255
Abhinav Bharat, 459
Abu Ghraib, 353, 438
The Accused, 855
Achhut, 687
Adani, Gautam, 678