Author: Ajaz Ashraf

How Bhima Koregaon Became a Trope for Dalit Pride and Assertion

The national media coverage of the violence at Bhima Koregaon enhanced the historical significance of the place. Until 2018, Bhima Koregaon was not embedded in the popular consciousness outside Maharashtra.

Below is an excerpt from the recent book of Ajaz Ashraf titled Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste. Publisher: AuthorsUpFront. 

The story you are about to read does not begin with the beginning. It does not because it is difficult to identify precisely where and when the story began. The beginning is buried deep inside events that occurred centuries ago, recorded or remembered and passed down orally over generations, in what is now the state of Maharashtra in western India. As emperors came and went, empires fell and dynasties withered away, memory was continuously recast, holding out new meanings for people. The very act of remembering became a method of rewriting memory, designed to both inspire and horrify, a tool for legitimising the present or altering the future. It is this memory that both the educated and the unlettered recognise as history, regardless of whether it is documented and verified for its historicity, a task of historians.

The people’s history, or rather histories, were united by their search for answers to questions familiar to us, too. Who rules? Who frames laws? Who commands high social status? Who must toil and serve the elite? Who sits at the top of the social ladder – and who flounders at its lower rungs? Are those at the bottom doomed to languish there in perpetuity? Who is the exploiter and who the exploited? How does social change take place?

These questions were not couched in lucid ideological terms in centuries past, as is the case today. Yet, in India, these questions plumbed and probed the caste system, its rigid rules and its resistance to social change, which occurred, if at all, incrementally, at an infinitesimal pace. Quests for change were met with extreme violence, the reason why Buddhism perished in the land of its birth. Buddhism did not recognise caste, a construction of Brahminical Hinduism, and radically, for its times, offered equality to its followers. It is only a partial truth that claims that the challenge Buddhism represented was blunted through philosophical debate and co-option into Brahminical Hinduism. The story of the disappearance of Buddhism from India also involved the hounding and killing of Buddhists and the burning down or appropriation of their stupas and monasteries. The backlash compelled Buddhist monks to leave India with their sacred textsThe national media coverage of the violence at Bhima Koregaon enhanced the historical significance of the place. Until 2018, Bhima Koregaon was not embedded in the popular consciousness outside Maharashtra.

The story you are going to read is, in its essence, a clash between two worldviews over the principles of organising society.

This is the story of the outbreak of violence on January 1, 2018, at Bhima Koregaon village, around thirty kilometres from Pune, where thousands upon thousands of Dalits – the erstwhile Untouchables – had marched to pay homage at the Vijay Stambh or Victory Pillar. It was here, on January 1, 1818, that less than 900 soldiers of the 2nd battalion 1st regiment of the Bombay Native Infantry, under the command of Captain F.F. Staunton, vanquished a 25,000-strong army of Peshwa Baji Rao II, already a fugitive by then, crushing his hope of retaining his kingdom and sovereigntyDuff, James Grant, A History of The Mahrattas, Vol. III, Longan, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, London, 1826, pp 432-433. The figures of troops on both sides vary across different sources. Philip Constable, in his paper, The Marginalization of a Dalit Martial Race in Late Nineteenth – and Early – Twentieth Century Western India, estimated that at least half of the British troops were Mahars, twenty-two of whom died in what is now remembered as the Battle of Bhima Koregaon.

Bhima Koregaon Victory Pillar. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Knitin777/CC BY-SA 3.0

The significance of the battle was underscored with the British laying the foundation stone, on March 26, 1821, for an obelisk, sixty-five feet high, mounted on a stone platform about thirty-two square feet, on the spot from where the first shot in the Battle of Bhima Koregaon was said to have been fired. The names of those who died in the battle are etched on the monument. The defeated Peshwa, a hereditary institution, was a Chitpavan Brahmin by caste. The Mahars were the Untouchables. They represented the two poles of the caste hierarchy. As it was then, so it is now.

The history of the 1818 battle was recovered and reimagined in the fight for equality a century or so later. It became a trope for the fighting prowess of the Dalits, and the possibility that they could turn on its head the social order of which they were decidedly among the exploited. Every January 1, they flock to the Bhima Koregaon Victory Pillar to celebrate their triumph, drawing inspiration from the past to renew their quest to flatten the social hierarchy existing today. Yet it would be a stretch to claim that the Dalits fought fiercely and valiantly because they wished to avenge the humiliation that they endured under the Peshwas. They were the recruits of the British Indian Army that comprised not just them but also soldiers from other social groups. The aim of the British was not to liberate the Mahars but to bring as much of India under their control as possible. It is certainly a myth to frame the Battle of Bhima Koregaon as the victory of Mahars, a myth created most notably by Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, popularly known as Babasaheb Ambedkar, to inspire the Dalits to fight Brahminism.

Also read: The Myth of Bhima Koregaon Reinforces the Identities It Seeks to Transcend

Yet a caveat must be added: it is easy to conceive why the Dalits would not have been dismayed, if not delighted, at the end of the Peshwa rule even in the 19th century, as I show in the section ‘Caste History in Verse’ of Chapter 2. Nevertheless, it is possible to imagine why the Battle of Bhima Koregaon became a trope for Dalit pride and assertion. Stories about the valour of individual Mahars abound, an account of which you will read later in the book. But 1818 was arguably the first time that they were officially recognised as a group and feted for their fighting prowess. It had all the elements of being turned into a myth, in the same way, the history of Maharana Rana Pratap’s guerrilla war against the Mughals has become one. Myths serve as a psychological salve for overcoming the traumatic past for the purpose of negotiating the present. It is for this reason that some myths acquire sanctity, as is the case regarding the myth of the Mahars winning the Battle of Bhima Koregaon.

The 1818 battle as the trope of Dalit pride and assertion came under attack 200 years after Staunton’s soldiers defeated the Peshwa’s army, through yet another battle waged in and around Bhima Koregaon on January 1, 2018. This modern battle was fought not with cannons and cavalry but with stones, rods and lathis, and vituperative taunts and insulting slogans. Vehicles were smashed and burnt, and business establishments set on fire. On the one side, in the modern reprise of the Battle of Bhima Koregaon, were the Dalits, largely Ambedkarites, or those who believe in the ideology of Ambedkar. On the other side were the Marathas, allegedly egged on by Brahmin leaders, such as Sambhaji Bhide and Milind Ekbote. With a large segment of Brahmins and Marathas aligned together, the 2018 battle was subliminally perceived – by both the elite and the subaltern – as a conflict between the Brahminical and Ambedkarite worldviews. The first justifies the caste hierarchy; the second seeks to flatten it.

The caste conflict underpinning the violence at Bhima Koregaon was arguably one of the reasons why the media headlined it, for, as far as the rioting goes, the casualties were minor, in comparison to many caste and religious conflagrations that have occurred since India’s Independence. In the Bhima Koregaon violence, one person died, forty-eight were injured and properties worth Rs 9 crore were devastated.

The national media coverage of the violence at Bhima Koregaon enhanced the historical significance of the place. Until 2018, Bhima Koregaon was not embedded in the popular consciousness outside Maharashtra. But, even that state awareness about the events of 1818 was largely confined to the Dalit community, brought out vividly in a 2011 survey in Pune, which was once the capital of the Peshwas and is today a thriving hub of information technology. It was conducted among 130 members of “high-caste, neo-rich people,” all of whom said they had not heard of the Bhima Koregaon memorial. They also expressed hostility to the policy of reserving government jobs and seats in educational institutes for the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes (OBCs).

The media’s interest in Bhima Koregaon and the subsequent police investigations into the violence spotlighted the Elgar Parishad, a cultural programme held on December 31, 2017, as the cause of the rioting. Organised by two retired Justices, P.B. Sawant and B.G. Kolse Patil, at the Shaniwarwada Fort, Pune, once the seat of the Peshwas, the Elgar Parishad saw the participation of 260 civil society groups. The Elgar Parishad was styled as a challenge to the emerging new Peshwai, or the Rule of Inequality ushered in by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governments, both at the Centre and in Maharashtra. The organisers of the Elgar Parishad sought to underscore to visitors, expected to be in Pune on their way to Bhima Koregaon, the necessity of opposing Brahminical Hinduism. On December 31, speeches were made, songs sung, and a play performed. These performances mocked Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and blamed them for the ostensible revival of Brahminical Hinduism. Since the cultural programme was a no-holds-barred criticism of Brahminical Hinduism, it was perceived by many, including the Pune police, as an attack on the Brahmin community.

A reading of the songs, speeches and the play during the Elgar Parishad would show that these were critical of Brahminical Hinduism, not Brahmins, for extolling and justifying the Hindu caste hierarchy. Brahminical Hinduism is a social philosophy. All those who subscribe to the caste-based social stratification, regardless of their social background, are considered votaries of Brahminical Hinduism. Every member of the upper castes does not automatically become a follower of Brahminical Hinduism. For instance, both the late Sawant and Kolse Patil are Maratha by caste! And Marathas consider themselves Kshatriya. It is also true that several Maratha organisations, such as the Maratha Seva Sangh (MSS), are as committed to fighting Brahminical Hinduism as any.

Ajaz Ashraf is a Delhi-based journalist. 

‘Power Is Modi’s Ram, His Faith, His Trade’

Mahant Rajendra Prasad Tiwari of Varanasi worries over the disregard, even contempt, shown in reimagining India’s sacred spaces, restructuring them in the manner of malls.

Varanasi: Mughal prince Dara Shikoh granted the patta, or deed, for the supervision of the Vishwanath temple, in Varanasi, to the forefathers of mahant Rajendra Prasad Tiwari in the 17th century. Since then, over 10 generations, his family oversaw the ritual tradition of the temple until, in 1983, the Uttar Pradesh government deprived them of administrative powers. The rituals followed there are largely still those the Tiwaris determined, although alterations have been made in recent years.

Tiwari was a strident critic of the Vishwanath Temple Corridor, a pet project of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s, which was developed after demolishing several ancient temples housing an estimated 286 shivlings. These were uprooted and thrown away; many broke; only 146 could be recovered and are stored at the police station of Lanka, a locality in Varanasi, where their worship is still carried out daily.

The demolition deeply upset Tiwari, who often expressed his angst and anger at the mindless remaking of Varanasi’s sacred spaces. But that was in the past, I thought, believing Tiwari would have forgiven Modi amidst the extraordinary and orchestrated buzz over the idol consecration at the Ram Temple in Ayodhya, projected as a symbol of “Hindu civilisational resurrection”. Would he, like many, be celebrating January 22 in a special way?

“I have no attachment to today’s event, which is not a religious one. It is an event for implementing the Bharatiya Janata Party’s agenda,” Tiwari says. He promptly asks: Would I expect him to participate in a religious event sponsored by, say, a film star? Today’s event is no different, for it has been organised to feed the vanity of Modi, the superstar of Indian politics, not to cater to the society’s spiritual stirrings, he says.

Also read: Looking Into Ayodhya’s Ongoing Statue Politics

Past prime ministers, too, visited temples, most notably Lal Bahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi, but never were posters bearing their pictures found in and around temples. This has changed, rues Tiwari, for on Modi’s recent visit to the Vishwanath Temple, a cutout of his was installed at its gates. Forget this, a religious rule will be violated by organising the ceremony of pran pratishtha, or giving life to the idol, in a temple still under construction, a point recently made by the four Shankaracharyas.

Can I read the design behind the violation of the sacred rule, asks Tiwari.

It was logical to complete the construction and inaugurate the temple on Ram Navami, the day he was born, which this year falls on April 16. But, by then, the Lok Sabha election would be underway and the model code of conduct in place. “Modi wants to use Ram to gather votes. Power is Modi’s Ram, his faith, his trade,” Tiwari explains the hurry to organise the pran pratishtha.

Tiwari worries over the disregard, even contempt, shown in reimagining India’s sacred spaces, restructuring them in the manner of malls, where people go to make purchases and spend fun time, or turn them into tourist hubs. Both are attempts at commercially exploiting the sacred, not at evoking devotion for God among visitors. “It’s a mall, not Ram Temple at Ayodhya. The first such mall to be built was the Kashi Vishwanath temple. The third one will come up at Mathura,” he laughs.

Mahant Rajendra Prasad Tiwari. Photo: Special arrangement

The controversy over the consecration ceremony reflects the battle over Sanatan Dharma, the eternal order of those now known as Hindu. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is seeking to wrest from acharyas, or religious preceptors, the power to define Sanatan Dharma, its principles, its rules and, in the future, even what texts constitute the scriptures of Hindus. “This attempt to appropriate Sanatan Dharma goaded the Shankaracharyas into speaking against the January 22 inauguration,” Tiwari argues.

This battle to control Sanatan Dharma has split the acharyas. There are those who owe allegiance to the Sangh, not to the dharma. Tiwari cites the example of the Varanasi-based astrologer who chose January 22 as the auspicious day for the ceremony of pran pratishtha, although he would have known it could not be done in a half-built temple. “There will be benefits for him, as there will be for those whom the Sangh will place in the Ram Temple to carry out rituals,” he says.

Also read: Indian Civilisation Is Being Disrobed in the City of Ram

It is a tussle between the temporal and the spiritual. The Sangh wants to acquire religious power in addition to its political heft. “Once this happens, the Sangh’s control over our samaj would be complete,” he predicts. The Sangh seems set to achieve this goal, I said, given the public support for Modi. “Untruth is always more alluring than truth,” Tiwari responds. He lists the 10 values of Sanatan Dharma, such as to tell the truth, eschew arrogance and anger, cultivate forbearance, etc. “All these values are declining, none of these is embodied by Modi, who is turning us into fanatics,” he says.

Tiwari recites verses predicting that Bhagwan would send his avatar whenever the fundamental values of Sanatan Dharma erode and the Hindu society deteriorates morally. Today, though, Tiwari will hope that God bestows wisdom on people so they can distinguish untruth from truth, and comprehend that the display of devotion for Ram today is a ploy to harvest votes – and more.

Ajaz Ashraf is a Delhi-based journalist.

Why UP’s Muslims Are Identifying With Kashmiris More Than They Used to

Kashmir is a metaphor for our political orphaning, say Muslims in Uttar Pradesh.

On August 9, at around 10 am, Syed Fazlul Mannan Rahmani, the imam of Lucknow’s Teele Wali Masjid, began to receive incessant calls from journalists inquiring about an event at the mosque scheduled to express solidarity with Kashmiris. Rahmani was surprised: “What event? There is nothing planned.”

Rahmani wasn’t aware of a WhatsApp invite doing the rounds in Lucknow. The invite said: “#StandWithKashmir. Teele Wali Masjid, Lucknow. Friday, 9th August, 1 pm. Join us and Stand in Solidarity with the People of Kashmir.” Muslims are enjoined by their religion to hold congregation prayers every Friday afternoon.

When Rahmani was about to enter the mosque minutes before 1:30 pm, he was met by a man who requested him to speak on Kashmir and the abrogation of Article 370 to the congregation. Rahmani told him, “You didn’t give me prior notice. I have to think about whether I should speak on the issue at all.” Rahmani did not refer to Kashmir in his khutba or sermon.

The man who had made the request to Rahmani was Srijanyogi Adiyog, the self-styled khidmatgar of the Insani Biradri, an outfit seeking to inject humanism in socio-political life. Adiyog and seven of his comrades, had presumed that Lucknow’s Muslims would be agitated, or at least apprehensive, about the events of last week – the separation of Ladakh from J&K, its demotion from being a state to just a union territory and the lockdown in the Valley.

“Maulana Rahmani was right,” Adiyog told me. “I should have informed him in advance.” Nevertheless, after the Friday prayer, he and others met the devotees coming out of the mosque. “One of them said that he did not want to engage in politics. It sparked off a discussion between us and them on Kashmir – and politics.”

People may find it curious that Adiyog presumed Muslims would feel dismayed or agitated over the Kashmir issue. Muslims in the Hindi heartland have seldom identified with their co-religionists in Kashmir, and their movement for autonomy or even independence. The possibility of Islam uniting them is offset by linguistic and cultural differences between the Muslims of north India and those in Kashmir.

These differences have been further exacerbated because Kashmiri Muslims view their political destiny differently from how Muslims in the Hindi heartland do. The latter consider India their homeland; they or their ancestors chose India over Pakistan at the time of the Partition.

Also read: ‘Salt on Wounds’: AMU J&K Students Reject Eid Invite From Centre’s Liaison Officer

By contrast, for a large segment of Kashmiri Muslims, history is an inexorable movement of time to help them realise their quest of deciding whether to accede to India or Pakistan – or become independent.

These contradictory world views create separate interests and perceptions about the future. These, in turn, have disconnected Muslims in the Hindi heartland from those in Kashmir.

Adiyog agrees that the Muslims of Uttar Pradesh, for most part of India’s history, did not identify with the cause of Kashmiri Muslims. “But that is changing because the Muslims here have grave apprehensions about their own future.”

I spoke to 10 Muslims in Uttar Pradesh, all of them rooted in their community. They all echoed Adiyog’s views – that the fear emanating from Hindutva’s propensity to target Muslims is increasingly overshadowing regional, linguistic, caste and sectarian differences existing in the community.

Ever since the Narendra Modi government swept to power in 2014, Muslims have seen the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its affiliates rake up one issue after another to target the community. Think mob lynching, the politics over the cow, ‘love jihad, ‘ghar wapsi‘, triple talaq, recent amendments to the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, the debate over the National Register of Citizens in Assam, and the ongoing hearing in the Ayodhya dispute in the Supreme Court.

“The Muslims of north India have started to identify with Kashmiri Muslims because they have come to realise that their Muslimness is a pretext for the Sangh to target the community,” said Mohammad Shoaib, president of the Rihai Manch, which has widened its ambit from fighting legal cases for Muslims accused of terrorism to include those from subaltern groups facing the onslaught of the state.

“Kashmir, too, has been turned into a Hindu-Muslim issue. The Sangh has been resorting to the politics of polarisation because it wants to divert people’s attention and prevent them from mobilising on economic issues,” Shoaib said.

Also read: Ground Report: Angry Kashmir Empty on Eid as Restrictions Return to Srinagar

An academic at an engineering institute in Lucknow said, “What the BJP has done in Kashmir is aimed at demoralising Muslims all over India.” After first going on the record, he called back hours later to request that he not be named – a testament to the fear gripping Uttar Pradesh’s Muslims.

The clerics, though, seem out of sync with the predominant sentiments of the community. For instance, Maulana Rahmani backs the abrogation of Article 370, arguing that Prime Minister Narendra Modi must have taken this measure for Kashmir’s development and prosperity.

“But yes, the sudden manner in which it was done has shocked the people. The people of Kashmir should have been taken into confidence,” Rahmani said. He felt the country’s communitarian ambience has been vitiated. “India is a bouquet of flowers,” he said. “It is what gives India its beauty.”

Also in Lucknow is the Shahi Asafi Masjid, where the Shias offer prayers. On August 9, its imam, Kalbe Jawad, spoke in favour of the abrogation of Article 370 in his khutba. Jawad told me, “In my khutba, I said fear has spread in Kashmir because of Pakistan sponsoring terrorism in the state, and that Modi and [Amit] Shah have promised the restoration of statehood to J&K after some time. I told the congregation that we cannot support Kashmiris until they begin to consider themselves Indians.”

Nevertheless, in the dua (supplication) offered at the end of the congregation prayer, Jawad did ask for “Allah to help Kashmiris overcome their misery and for peace be restored to J&K.”  This was, as one person said, Jawad’s concession to the overwhelming feeling among the Shias that the Kashmiris have been wronged and should be supported.

“We don’t agree with Jawad’s perception that Kashmiris don’t think of themselves as Indian,” said Syed Zulfiquar, a human rights activist. “It seemed as though Jawad’s khutba was written at the RSS headquarters in Nagpur.”

Hussain Afsar, who is the editor of the Sunday edition of the Daily Aag as well as of its website, felt social media was a crucial factor in driving the Muslims of Uttar Pradesh to identify with Kashmiri Muslims. “There were posts about people getting an opportunity to buy land cheap in the Valley. There were filthy posts about ‘fair’ Kashmiri Muslim girls.”

As in war so in social media, the woman’s body became the site of marking victory and defeat. The imaginary enslavement of Muslim women was experienced as a deliberate humiliation of the community. “The emotion of Muslims is like a corked bottle,” Afsar said. “It is better they protest, in a democratic way, within the framework of the constitution.”

But protests against the Modi government’s measures on Kashmir will likely widen the chasm between communities and consolidate the Hindutva constituency. Shoaib, however, argued, “Can they polarise even further than what they have already done?”

Also read: This 17-Year-Old Was the First Pellet Victim of the ‘Union Territory’ of J&K

For Uttar Pradesh’s Muslims, Kashmir has become a metaphor for their bleak fate in the high noon of Hindutva. This has prompted the Muslim intelligentsia to ponder over the strategies the community should pursue for its security.

At one end of the political spectrum is Tariq Durrani, a businessman who was away in Dubai for 22 years and is now engaged in what he calls social work. He thinks Muslims should withdraw from politics.

“The more we oppose them [Hindutva forces], the more they will oppose us,” Durrani said. Muslims, he said, should draw inspiration from the Quran and engage in character-building. “The Quran asks Muslims to be of use to their society. That is what they should focus on,” Durrani said. This will turn them into social leaders and bring a moral equity hard to ignore, he said.

At the other end of the political spectrum are those who are deeply disappointed at the void in opposition politics and the absence of a platform to protest from. The engineering institute’s academic said, “What is the point of voting for the Bahujan Samaj Party, Samajwadi Party or Congress? Muslims should think of an alternative political leadership, a Muslim party.”

His view is that once the mainstream parties realise they won’t get Muslim votes, and therefore can’t win, they will become sensitive to the anguish and interests of the religious minorities. “Like Mayawati’s BSP, a Muslim party can then transfer votes to whichever party it enters into an alliance with.” In other words, the academic thinks political parties will stop taking Muslims and their votes for granted.

This has been the political line of Asaduddin Owaisi, the president of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, whose popularity in the community is rising, even among those who don’t vote for him. The academic said, “He is educated, reasonable and speaks in the constitutional language.”

Obviously, the very presence of a strong or viable Muslim party will also boost Hindutva and the BJP.  “Hindutva can’t be fought with the Hindus,” said Adiyog. He said his outfit would explain to Hindus the fear and angst of Muslims, and the Modi government’s betrayal of the Kashmiris.

Only political parties can achieve the success that Adiyog hopes for. For Uttar Pradesh’s Muslims then, the inaction of political parties has turned Kashmir into a metaphor of their political orphaning.

Ajaz Ashraf is a Delhi-based journalist.

Behind Mounting Muslim Protests, a Yearning to be Heard by the State Gone Deaf

Widespread protests against the lynching of Tabrez Ansari, which mostly failed to draw support from non-Muslims, mark a failure at the political, social and judicial levels.

The lynching of Tabrez Ansari in Jharkhand has acquired multiple meanings for Muslims. His death has come to symbolise the trauma of Muslims at the atrocities committed on them and the Indian state’s indifference to their plight. His killing represents to them the futility of reposing faith in non-BJP parties for countering the Hindutva brigade. This in turn has persuaded them of the need to express their anger and demand the enforcement of their constitutional rights.

Protests against the lynching of Ansari have been far more widespread than the impression conveyed by the media, which has either focussed on those in which the participation of people was extraordinarily high, such as the one in Malegaon, or those that sparked off communal tension or led to police action, such as in Meerut and Agra in Uttar Pradesh and Surat in Gujarat. In Ranchi, Jharkhand, an anti-lynching protest triggered an incident of confrontation between Hindus and Muslims, but did not spiral out of control.

The media have failed to capture the geographical spread of protests against the lynching. For instance, few know of protest rallies in Bhatkal and Vijayapura in Karnataka, Mau and Jaunpur in Uttar Pradesh and Mewat in Haryana. Just about every town in west Uttar Pradesh is said to have witnessed protests against the lynching of Ansari.

I spoke to four people who were among the key organisers of protests at four different places. Three features were common to their narratives, though differing in nuances. One, the protests were organised under local pressure. These were not coordinated by a national organisation, whether political or socio-religious in orientation. Two, attempts to ensure participation of Hindus in the protests mostly failed. Three, those who delivered speeches at the protest rallies spoke the language of constitutionalism.

Maulana Umrain Mahfooz Rahmani, who is one of the four secretaries of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, was among the principal architects of the massive protest rally at Malegaon on July 1. Rahmani said the anger among the community’s youth triggered apprehensions that they would take the lead if community leaders did not provide them a vent to release their emotions. It is a testament to Malegaon’s fury and dismay that a lakh of people protested.

Also read: The India in Which Tabrez Ansari Died Continues to Live

Malegaon’s was exclusively a Muslim protest, barring the participation of 100-200 Dalits. “We did invite the Hindus to protest, but perhaps the short notice was the reason why they mostly kept away. Perhaps the other reason is that secular-minded Hindus are themselves scared,” Rahmani said. He said Hindus should understand that lynching is not a Muslim issue. “Lynching diminishes India’s image worldwide, portrays disorder and chaos. In such a circumstance, do you think MNCs will establish branches here?”

Rahmani said Muslims have been abandoned and they must prepare to defend themselves. They should, for instance, pursue legal remedies against lynching rather than merely protesting, which, he said, could be exploited to polarise the society even further. But silence and inaction aren’t options either.

“Would Muslims have felt the need to protest alone had the opposition parties launched a movement against lynching?” Rahmani asked. “India no longer has a secular party. Look at the Congress; its Rajasthan government filed an FIR against Pehlu Khan [a victim of lynching].”

Hundreds of miles away from Malegaon, in Mau, Uttar Pradesh, an anti-lynching protest was organised on July 5 by the Mau Nagrik Manch, a multi-religious body. Yet the only non-Muslims who participated in the rally, which drew an estimated 5,000 people, were those on the stage, most of them belonging to the Left parties.

This wasn’t the first occasion Mau had a protest against lynching – it witnessed one on July 14, 2017. Mohammad Shahzad, a member of the Mau Nagrik Manch, said that he and a friend went around Hindu colonies for 15 days to mobilise support for the rally. “But it was to no avail. They just didn’t come for the rally,” he said.

They did not turn up for the July 5 rally either. Shahzad blamed their absence on political parties which issue statements against lynching but do not mobilise people to oppose it. “With only Muslims protesting against lynching, I fear the chasm between communities will grow,” Shahzad said.

This is particularly so because Muslim youth are extremely agitated over the barbaric killings. In Mau, for instance, they did not chant the staid slogans the Manch had coined – for instance, “Khamosh hain, majboor nahin (We are silent, but not helpless).” Instead, they voiced demands for hanging those accused of lynching.

Also read: How a Fixed Gaze at the Muslim ‘Other’ Helps Political Parties

“In my own speech,” Shahzad said, “I asked the people why they are chanting slogans and applauding speakers, some of whom were a bit aggressive. I asked the crowd: Aren’t we here to mourn the death of Ansari?” From the avowed aim of expressing sorrow, the rally became the site for expressing anger and belligerence.

The third person I spoke to was Maulana Abdul Aleem Bhatkali, a member of the All India Muslim Law Board, who resides in Bhatkal, Karnataka, which witnessed thousands taking to the streets against the lynching on July 5. Organised by a local group, Majlis-e-Islah wa Tanzeem, Bhatkali said the participation of non-Muslims in the protest was negligible. “Leaders of all political parties were invited. They promised to come. But very few were noticed,” he said.

Bhatkali, too, spoke of the pressure from the community to protest against lynching. There was a rising murmur among the young that the Tanzeem should organise a protest under its banner or else they would. Even a downpour did not dissuade people from participating in the July 5 protest.

The speeches at the rally were decidedly political in nature. A media report quoted former general secretary of the Tanzeem and senior journalist Haneef Shabab as saying, “We did not kill Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. We all know who did it and we all know who worship their killers.”

Shabab subtly questioned Hindutva’s idea of citizenship, which essentially privileges Hindus over Muslims and Christians. He said, “For those who ask us to go to Pakistan, let it be very clear to them, you can kill us here, we are ready to go to qabristan [graveyard] here but we won’t go to Pakistan. This is as much our country as much as it yours.” To Shabab’s argument, Bhatkali added, “It is so inhuman to kill the weak, as Tabrez Ansari was. This will only give a bad name to Hindustan.”

Also read: Despondency Is Not an Option for Muslims in India Today

My fourth narrative came from Niyaz Ahmad Farooqi, who is the secretary of the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, a socio-religious organisation with a 100-year-old history and a pan-India footprint. The Jamiat, famously, opposed Partition and Jinnah’s two-nation theory. On June 26, a three-member team of the Jamiat flew down to Ranchi and presented a memorandum against lynching to the Jharkhand government. For an hour or so, a 100 people protested at the site.

Jamiat, which boasts the capacity to organise protests, had consciously taken the decision to keep the protest outside Raj Bhavan low-key. Farooqi explained, “Our purpose is not to create a rift between communities, particularly in the political environment prevailing currently, by displaying anger. We do not wish to speak against political parties, including the Bharatiya Janata Party.”

Farooqi said the primary target of the Jamiat’s protest is the state’s inaction against lynching. “It is painful to see Muslims getting lynched. Mobs are killing Muslims today; they will kill from another community tomorrow. The need is to create a multi-religious platform to protest against the state.”

For five years, Muslims waited patiently for the opposition to mobilise people against lynching. Perhaps they also refrained from protesting in the hope that the BJP would be voted out in the 2019 Lok Sabha election. Neither happened, and Ansari was brutally killed within a month of the Modi government coming to power. The anger of Muslims has brimmed over.

“These protests,” said M.R. Shamshad, a Supreme Court advocate who engages with Muslim-related issues, “mark a failure at the political, social and judicial levels. It is a failure at the political level because no political party has displayed the courage of conviction to initiate a movement against lynching. At the social level, the protests haven’t drawn support from non-Muslims. At the level of judiciary, trials in lynching cases are being delayed and bail is being granted to the accused.”

It won’t be wrong to say that the protests of Muslims are but a cry of anguish in isolation, a yearning to be heard by the state gone deaf, a prayer to other religious communities to oppose lynching, an expression of disappointment at the parties which take their votes but do not combat the hate politics of the Hindutva groups. In case these messages coded into their protests remain unheeded, Muslim alienation will likely deepen further.

Ajaz Ashraf is a Delhi-based journalist.

Why the Bombay HC Judgment on Maratha Reservation Is Inherently Flawed

The high court judges – and the Gaikwad Commission – have failed to realise that economic backwardness cannot be conflated with social backwardness.

There are egregious flaws in the Bombay high court judgement upholding the Maharashtra government’s decision to declare Marathas as a socially and educationally backward community and grant them reservations. These flaws have crept into the judgement because the high court has endorsed the findings of the Maharashtra State Backward Class Commission – popularly known as the Gaikwad Commission after its chairman, Justice (retd) M.G. Gaikwad – pertaining to the social backwardness of Marathas, without taking into account the conceptual confusions dogging them.

The high court judgement – delivered by Justice Ranjit More and Justice Bharati H. Dangre – prompted P.S. Krishnan, who was the first-member secretary of the National Commission for Backward Classes, to tell this author, “If the Marathas are socially backward, then any community can be proved backward. If the methodology of the Gaikwad Commission is to be followed, then any community can be shown to be backward and eligible for reservation.”

Regardless of the robustness and veracity of the Gaikwad Commission’s data, a social group’s economic backwardness does not necessarily imply that it is also socially backward.

In fact, it is not possible to quantify social status as it is not a statistical fact. Social status is a function of how others perceive a caste, whether it is ranked high or low in the social hierarchy. A group’s low social status is rooted in history, linked as it is to their traditional occupation which inhibited them from getting an education. This explains their relative absence from the modern professional class and government jobs.

Low social status often produces economic backwardness. But economic backwardness does not lead to low social status. For instance, a Brahmin taxi driver enjoys high social status, caste-wise.

Misreading the facts

Indeed, some of the Gaikwad Commission’s findings, reproduced in the Bombay high court judgement, are bereft of fundamental sociological insights and appear contradictory.

For instance, the judgement says:

“The commission noted that a large class of Maratha community in Mumbai city is leading a life of dabbewalas [or those who cook and supply tiffin to offices]. The commission found that about 4800 families are…engaged in the said occupation. Out of this 4800 families, 4,600 families i.e., 95.8% are of Marathas.”

The Gaikwad commission, the judgement says, found the customer base of dabbawalas declining, because of which some of them have been compelled to look for alternative jobs, including those classified as ‘menial’. This is undoubtedly a symptom of economic distress – but it is certainly not an indicator of low social status, if we are to go by traditional caste rules determining who can eat food cooked by whom.

For instance, meals prepared and supplied by Dalits will likely have few takers. Conversely, Brahmin cooks are sought after, particularly for weddings. From this perspective, the preponderance of Marathas among dabbalwalas, ironically, indicates their high, not low, social status.

Also read: Explainer: Significance of the Supreme Court’s Nod to Reservation in Promotions

The judgement cites the commission’s finding that says, “98.53 percent of Maratha families do not enter into inter-caste/inter-religious marriage.” Which caste in India does not frown upon such marriages? The reluctance to arrange inter-caste marriage is stronger among those pegged high in the caste hierarchy. Might not the low incidence of inter-caste marriage among the Marathas point to their high social status?

The commission is also quoted in the judgement as saying that “94 percent of the Maratha families do not enter into widow/widower remarriage in family which is the highest as compared to other castes.” Historically, the lack of widow/widower remarriages was due to the tradition of groups ranked ritually high. It wasn’t such a problem among lower castes, some of whom, though, adopted this practise in imitation of higher castes for social mobility. The Gaikwad Commission appears to have mistaken conservatism for social backwardness.

In yet another argument favouring the claim of social backwardness for the Marathas, the judgement notes:

“The commission…found that Upanayana Sanskar [sacred thread ceremony] is the sine qua non for elevation to the higher class/caste. The commission concluded that Upanayana Sanskar is not observed/performed in the Maratha community and therefore the same is considered to be Shudras.”

This observation seems needless as all Shudra communities are not necessarily deemed socially backward. Krishnan observes, “Kayasthas don’t go through the sacred thread ceremony. Aurobindo Ghosh, Subhash Chandra Bose, Biju Patnaik, they were all Kayasthas, who have a high representation in government service. Can we regard Kayasthas as socially backward? In the South, the Kammas, Reddys, Nairs, to name a few, are ‘Shudras’ under the old Varna system and do not wear the sacred thread. But, neither does the society perceive them as socially backward nor do they themselves.”

Also read: The Moral and Logical Failures of the Proposed 10% Quota for EWS

The judgement cites data from the Gaikwad commission report to establish the economic backwardness of Marathas:

“76.86% of the Maratha families are involved in own agriculture and 26.46% out of that, are also undertaking farming labour in the agricultural farms of others which is the highest of all other castes and classes.” The judgement says the commission found that the “holding of agriculturists [in Maharashtra] have decreased in the course of time because of ceiling laws as well as family partitions.”

But fragmentation of land is true of most agricultural communities, not all of whom are socially backward.  This is because ownership of land is a significant determinant of social status. With 78.86% of Maratha families owning land, they cannot possibly be suffering from social backwardness of a severe nature. What is more relevant is to determine which caste possesses what percentage of land in a village or taluka. The more land a caste possesses in a village or taluka, the higher its status is likely to be.

Historically, the Marathas were not just agriculturists. They were rulers – Shivaji for instance – and constituted a formidable phalanx in the army of the Peshwas and British colonial rulers. Even today, they dominate the powerful sugar cooperatives in the state and politics. Ten out Maharashtra’s 18 chief ministers since 1960 have been Marathas. The silent marches the community undertook for demanding reservation – 57 just between August 2016 and December 2016, in which 15-20 lakh persons participated, according to the judgement – are an expression of its redoubtable clout in desperate times.

It’s not all about economics

Their desperation has risen from the agrarian distress that Maharashtra, like other parts of India, has been reeling under. Citing a Gokhale Institute of Economics report that found “40% of total farmers who committed suicide were Marathas”, the judgement notes, “This report is a reflection of the agrarian crisis in the State and since most of the Marathas are agriculturists, it brings forth the financial distress faced by the community. In the backdrop of the said scenario, the youth of this community is looking towards reservation as a solution to their progress and march towards cities…”

The Gaikwad commission’s data do indeed paint a dismal economic picture of the Marathas. For instance, the judgement says, “On the basis of data and survey it [Gaikwad Commission] has arrived at the conclusion that 37% families belonging to Marathas are below the poverty line compared to the State rural average of 24.20%.”

A social group caught in the throes of economic crisis does not become socially backward. As Krishnan explained, “There will always be rich and poor people in a community. [A group could also witness a downward mobility.] But that can’t become a determinant for declaring it socially backward.” Nor is reservation a tool for removing poverty or arresting the economic decline of a social group. “Economic decline and agrarian distress can be tackled by a slew of measures appropriate to the agriculture sector, which does not include reservation.”

Also read: Explainer: The 1993 SC Judgment Capping Quotas at 50%, Disallowing Them for the Poor

These nuances were lost on the Gaikwad commission, whose data the judgement cites to establish that the Marathas are inadequately represented in government jobs. Detailing the representation of the Maratha community in services under the state, the judgement says:

“…the proportion of Maratha class employees against the filled post as on 31st August, 2018 is 18.95% in Grade-A, 15.22% in Grade-B, 19.56% in Grade-C and 18.23% in Grade-D. The combined average proportion of Maratha employees in all the four grades is found to be…19.05% against the filled posts.”

These figures should make us think the Marathas have a healthy presence in the state services. But not the Gaikwad commission, which the judgement says, “arrived at the conclusion that in none of the four grades, the strength of Maratha Class employees is touching the proportion to their population in the State which, based on various sources, is estimated to be 30%.” The commission seems to be arguing for proportionality – representation of a caste according to its population – in services, not adequate representation.

The Marathas are adequately represented even in the elite services – Indian Administrative Service, Indian Police Service and Indian Foreign Service – if we are to go by the judgement:

“The Commission also called for information about the officers in All India Cadres i.e. IAS, IPS and IFS cadres. The Commission found that so far as IAS cadre is concerned, out of unreserved posts, Marathas occupy 15.52% and other open category occupies 84.48% posts. In IPS cadre, out of total unreserved posts Marathas occupy 28% and other open category occupies 72% posts. So far as IFS is concerned, out of total unreserved posts, the Marathas occupy 17.97% and other open category occupies 82.03%.”

These data establish that the status of Marathas as an agriculture caste has not been a barrier for them to compete in government services. It undermines the community’s claim of being a social backward community.

Both the commission and the judges seem to mistake adequate representation for proportionality. This is one of the reasons why the judges have chosen to remove the Supreme Court-mandated 50% cap on reservation. Their judgement says as much:

“We hold and declare that the limit of reservation should not exceed 50%. However, in exceptional circumstances and extraordinary situations, this limit can be crossed subject to availability of quantifiable and contemporaneous data reflecting backwardness, inadequacy of representation and without affecting the efficiency in representation.”

It is debatable whether the backwardness of Marathas is so acute and pressing that it constitutes an “extraordinary situation”. No doubt, the Bombay high court judgement will be challenged in the Supreme Court, which is already grappling with the issue of whether the Modi government was right in removing the 50% cap on reservation to grant 10% quota for the so-called Economically Weaker Sections.

The Bombay high court judgement is yet another indicator of India turning the reservation policy upside down and moving towards proportional representation of castes in jobs and education. Can India completely knock out the idea of competition devoid of identity? I think not.

Why Hindutva’s Dark Fantasy About India’s Muslims Could Become Real

Without any evidence, India’s Muslims were labelled anti-Hindu and religiously radical since 2014. But the next five years may result in the materialisation of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In 1948, American sociologist Robert K. Merton propounded the theory of self-fulfilling prophecies. This is the lens through which the Muslim community’s apprehension of having to negotiate the rule of Prime Minister Narendra Modi for another five years needs to be seen. “The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning,” Merton wrote, “a false definition of the situation evoking a new behaviour which makes the original false conception come true.”

India’s Muslims were tagged as anti-Hindu and religiously radical during Modi’s first term as prime minister, with barely any evidence to justify the labels. They now fear that some among them might make choices that will bring to reality the “false definition” of their community.

This will, in turn, take India to the next stage in Merton’s paradigm. “This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy,” he wrote, “perpetuates a reign of error. For  the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning—such are the perversities of social logic.”

Yet the thought of the “reign of error” emerging in India has had Muslim commentators beseech Muslims to not abandon hope. In doing so, they recognise, even though subliminally, that hope in the Muslim community is hanging by a thread.

Also Read: Is It Still Possible To Strive For Yet Another India?

This is quite understandable. In the last five years, 44 Muslims were lynched in the name of the cow, inter-faith couples were harassed, threats were issued to convert the religious minorities to Hinduism, history books rewritten to demonise Muslim rulers, and cities were renamed to efface all past Muslim association. Not only that, an attempt was made to redefine the secular basis of Indian citizenship, evident from the framing of the Citizenship Amendment Bill. The othering of Muslims became an everyday phenomenon.

It is a testament to the forbearance of ordinary Muslims that they did not take to the streets in response to these outright provocations. Perhaps they were petrified of the state, an increasingly Hinduised one, coming down hard on them. Or maybe they hoped they could combine with those Hindus who are opposed to Hindutva and vote the BJP out of power in 2019.

The sheer magnitude of Modi’s victory

This hope of Muslims has been shattered not just because Modi has won a second term as prime minister, but because of the sheer magnitude of his victory. For all the misery his policies have inflicted on the people, the BJP increased its seats from 282 in 2014 to 303 in 2019 and its vote-share climbed from 31% to 37.5%.  These figures have been widely accepted as evidence of the growing allure among a section 0f  Hindus for Hindutva, which is anchored in demonising Muslims to consolidate the majority community.

That is why the hope of Muslims has segued into apprehension about the future. This emotion will be bolstered as Modi and the BJP resort to polarisation in their quest to win the next few assembly elections. Besides, there are enough contentious issues pending from Modi’s first term – the Ayodhya dispute, the criminalisation of triple talaq and the finalisation of the National Register for Citizens in Assam.

There is very little to suggest that the BJP’s mammoth victory has appeased those Hindus who harbour untenable grievances, both historical and contemporary. In the week the election results were announced there were instances of Hindutva bullies enacting their darkled fantasies about Muslims in Madhya Pradesh, Haryana and Bihar.

All such actions in the future will be justified, as were those in the past, on the basis of a false definition of Muslims as being disrespectful of Hindus, their inexplicable religiosity and radicalism, their innate disloyalty to the nation, their propensity for violence. These actions will engender fear among Muslims, who will search for coping mechanisms.

Actions arising from this false definition of Muslims will drive some among them to adopt, as Merton predicted, a new form of behaviour.

Lynchings, hate crime, encounter killings, communal deaths are no longer trigger words in India – they have become as commonplace as the next ‘jumla’ that the ruling power drops down our throat. Credit: Reuters

An upsurge in lynchings and hate crimes was reported over the past five years. Credit: Reuters

Seeking refuge abroad

Many among the thin crust of middle class Muslims will explore the option of going abroad. Those working in the Middle East, which does not grant citizenship rights to expatriates, will push westward – to Canada, for instance. There will be knee-jerk reactions, such as a friend’s friend, married to a Hindu, thinking about renaming her child to erase all traces of his Muslimness in the wake of the BJP’s victory. Mostly, though, middle class Muslims will draw succour from their cosmopolitan bubble, stung occasionally by some of their friends engaging in Hindutva stereotyping of their community.

Yet a uniformity of responses will unite Muslims across class and caste. More than ever before, Muslims will ascribe every job or promotion denied or layoff to the socio-cultural ambience fostered by Hindutva’s increasing domination.  They will find it challenging to explain to their children the hatred directed against them.

Also Read: The Metaphors in Modi’s Victory Speech Give a Peek Into His Plans for ‘New India’

The new form of behaviour occasioned by the false definition of Muslims will express itself in other ways as well – the massive mandate that the BJP has won will strengthen all those community leaders who never tire of reminding Muslims about the chasm existing between them and the others. Many Muslims will be tempted to turn inwards, to their religion and institutions. Some will be nudged by their discontent to seek a channel of expression; they will become increasingly susceptible to radicalisation, to a politics focused on identity and on the idea of matching the stridency of Hindutva hotheads. Some will sport the markers of identity to indulge in a symbolic display of assertion and fearlessness.

The working of Merton’s self-fulfilling prophecy is best illustrated through a cousin’s story of his college days in Ara, Bihar. In the 1980s and early 1990s, every time India beat Pakistan, his Hindu classmates would tease their Muslim counterparts with remarks such as, ‘Why are you all so sad? Better luck next time.” When Pakistan beat India, they would be asked whether they burst crackers and distributed sweets. Their avowals to the contrary were dismissed outright. The cousin said those taunts led to some of his Muslim friends supporting Pakistan until they passed out of college.

An old stereotype

Indeed, the stereotyping of Muslims as inveterate and implacable opponents of Hindus is as old as the national movement. Yet, the self-fulfilling prophecy never acquired such sinister tones as it did after 2014 because there were important national leaders who challenged the “false definition of the situation.” Mahatma Gandhi opposed it, as did Jawaharlal Nehru, through state policies he pursued as India’s first prime minister. Subsequently, a chain of leaders carried forward the Nehruvian tradition.

This false definition of Muslims, however, has taken deep root over the last five years largely because it has received the ruling party’s support. That is why the media headlined, presumably in relief, what Modi told the newly elected National Democratic Alliance MPs last Sunday: “Minorities have been deceived in the country through an imaginary fear created for the purpose of votebank politics. We have to pierce through this deception. We have to gain trust.”

That a prime minister who has resorted to communal rhetoric and polarisation before every state assembly poll and the recent Lok Sabha election should describe the fear of religious minorities as imaginary boggles the mind. Denied even the authenticity of their fear, the Muslims will likely get trapped in the unfolding of what Merton called “the perversity of social logic.”

Ajaz Ashraf is a Delhi-based journalist.

UP’s Mahagathbandhan is Not Down and Out

The fact that the grand alliance has held on to its social base in 2019 will enable it to exploit the contradictions inherent in the base stitched together by the BJP.

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s success in stemming the anticipated decline in Uttar Pradesh, where its tally of 62 seats is just nine less than what it won in 2014, has had political pundits sound the death knell of the mahagathbandhan, or grand alliance, comprising the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD).

These pundits, however, gloss over the contradictions inherent in the enormous social base that the BJP has crafted for itself. The most backward class will soon be at loggerheads with the dominant groups among the Other Backward Classes, and both will soon discover the BJP’s predilection for the upper castes.

The mahagathbandhan will be in a position to exploit these contradictions once they come to the fore, because its social base hasn’t been swamped by the BJP. The alliance’s social base, in the main, draws on the support of Dalits, Yadavs and Muslims.

The post-poll survey of the Lokniti-CSDS (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies) shows that 75% of Jatavs, 42% of non-Jatavs, 60% of Yadavs and 73% of Muslims voted for the mahagathbandhan.

In 2014, when the BSP, SP and RLD fought separately, the Lokniti-CSDS data shows that only 68% of Jatavs and 29% of non-Jatav Dalits supported the BSP. And only 53% of Yadavs voted for the SP. The Muslims were split among different parties in 2014, with the SP securing the lion’s share – 58% of their votes.

Also read | Explained: The BJP’s Stunning Performance in Uttar Pradesh

These comparative figures suggest that the alliance in 2019 consolidated the social base of its constituents better than what each could achieve on its own in 2014. It tripled its seats in the Lok Sabha, from five in 2014 to 15 in 2019. This compares favourably with the one seat each the Congress bagged in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Bihar, where its other partners failed to open their account. The Congress drew a blank in Rajasthan and Haryana.

The mahagathbandhan in Uttar Pradesh underperformed because it was popularly perceived to represent the Jatav subcaste among Dalits and the Yadav caste among the OBCs. It triggered a reaction among non-Jatav Dalits and non-Yadav OBCs, which swung behind the BJP. Neither the Dalits nor the OBCs are homogeneous groups, but it is also true that the BJP accentuated the degrees of separateness and differences among them for political mobilisation.

BJP’s political project – dividing OBCs and Dalits

The BJP began its project of dividing the OBCs and Dalits in 2001, when the then Uttar Pradesh chief minister, Rajnath Singh, appointed the Hukum Singh Committee to rationalise the reservation structure in government services. The committee divided the OBCs into backward, more backward and most backward classes. The government rightly justified the subcategorisation on the grounds that the benefits of reservation should be distributed as equitably as possible among all groups in the OBC and Scheduled Caste categories.

Among the OBCs, only one caste – Yadav – was deemed backwards and granted 5% reservation in jobs. The committee’s view was that the Yadavs, who constituted nearly 20% of Uttar Pradesh’s OBC population, had a 33% share in jobs reserved for the OBCs.

Likewise, the committee split the Scheduled Castes into Group A and Group B. The Jatavs were the only Dalit subcaste placed in Group A and given 10% reservation. The committee said the Jatavs were 56% of UP’s Dalit population and accounted for 33% of jobs reserved for the Scheduled Castes.

Even though the committee’s report was not implemented, its logic of separating Jatavs and Yadavs from the others was invoked to demonise and isolate them in the political realm thereon. It was said that the Yadavs and Jatavs had appropriated the biggest slice of the reservation cake because their patrons – BSP and SP – did not rationalise the reservation structure during the years they were in power in Uttar Pradesh, particularly from 2007, when the BSP came to power, followed by the SP in 2012. This was an important reason why most backward castes voted for the BJP in significant numbers in 2014.

Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath. Credit: PTI

Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath. Credit: PTI

Yogi’s quest: consolidating the base of most backward castes

In his quest to consolidate them, BJP chief minister Adityanath appointed a social justice committee headed by retired Allahabad high court judge, Raghvendra Kumar, in May 2018. His report was submitted late last year. Although it was not made public, selective portions of it were leaked to the press in the months leading to the election.

According to the leaked portions of the report, the Kumar committee, too, has divided the OBCs into three categories. However, the Kumar committee has placed the Jats, Kurmis, Sonars and a few small castes alongside the Yadavs in the backward class category, which has been assigned 7% reservation.

The more backward class, which has been allocated 11% reservation, consists of castes such as the Gujjars, Mauryas, Prajapatis, Telis and Lodhs. The most backward class, which comprises castes such as the Nishad, Rajbhar and Kashyap, have been given 9% reservation. The Kumar committee is supposed to have sub-categorised the Scheduled Castes as well, but the details of it are not known.

BJP’s caste conundrum

The Kumar report, however, has the potential of tearing apart the enormous social base that the BJP has stitched together. Its implementation will anger castes such as the Yadavs, Kurmis and Jats, who will be eligible to compete for just 7% of jobs and not 27%, as they currently do.

According to the Hukum Singh Committee, the Kurmis had a 12.49% share of government jobs and the Jats 6.85% in 2001. The Lodhs accounted for 4.17% of jobs and the Gujjars 2.07%. Sub-categorisation will see them competing for fewer jobs than before. All of them are landowning castes, concentrated in pockets, and numerous. The BJP will find it risky to alienate them.

Also read | How BJP Held off the Mahagathbandhan in Uttar Pradesh

At the same time, the BJP will also find it difficult to engage in dilatory tactics. This is because it has won the support of the most backward castes on the promise of sub-categorising the OBCs. An inordinate delay in implementing the Kumar report will be hard for the BJP government to justify, particularly against the backdrop of the Modi government introducing 10% reservation for the economically weaker sections among social groups outside the reservation pool until now. These groups largely comprise the upper castes.

Should Adityanath implement the Kumar report, he will anger the dominant groups among the OBCs. In case he does not, he will alienate the most backward castes. It is here that the mahagathbandhan’s success in preserving its social base assumes importance – it gave as many as 19 tickets to non-Yadav OBCs, who will work to rally their castes against the BJP.

Yet another contradiction will emerge once the Supreme Court decides whether the 10% reservation for economically weaker sections violates the constitution. In case it is upheld, the mahagathbandhan will likely ask for proportional representation or distribution of jobs according to the population of Dalits, OBCs and the higher castes. It will do so because the Lok Sabha election has underscored to it the futility of courting the upper castes – it gave 20 tickets to the upper castes, who, nevertheless, overwhelmingly voted for the BJP.

The tactics of demonising and othering social groups have given a huge mandate to the BJP, which will, sooner than later, have to pay a price for it.

Ajaz Ashraf is a Delhi-based journalist.

Mayawati and Dimple Yadav Shared a Socially Transformative Moment on Stage

By embracing each other as family, the two women refuted the hierarchy of status based on caste.

For that brief moment during the joint rally of the Bahujan Samaj Party, the Samajwadi Party and the Rashtriya Lok Dal in Kannauj, Uttar Pradesh, on April 25, the nation glimpsed the possibility of political alliances influencing social transformation.

The moment had the spontaneity of the unexpected – BSP leader Mayawati placed her hand on the head of Dimple Yadav, the mahagathbandhan candidate in Kannauj, to bless her. Dimple, who is the wife of SP leader Akhilesh Yadav, promptly bent down and touched Mayawati’s feet.

In her subsequent speech in Kannauj, Mayawati said she treated Dimple as her daughter-in-law. She explained, “It is all because Akhilesh Yadav gives me so much respect, just like the elder in the family. I, too, have a very special bonding with his wife…”

The two women’s reciprocal gestures symbolise the flattening of caste hierarchy and the sweeping aside of traditional norms determining social relations. For once, age and seniority were understood to be the principles that determine hierarchy.

It might be said that the young always touch elders’ feet. Mayawati is 17 years older than Akhilesh and 16 years older than Dimple. Yet Dimple touching Mayawati’s feet is iconoclastic. This is because caste, not age, is the determinant of India’s social hierarchy. Akhilesh belongs to the Yadav caste, an OBC group which is, in the traditional caste system, ranked far higher than the Dalits.

According to the traditional system, a Dalit, whether old or young, is expected to demonstrate deference and subservience to those supposedly ‘higher’ in status. Dimple is a Rajput, yet, in accordance with the Indian tradition, her marriage to Akhilesh has her inherit his caste. In accepting Mayawati’s seniority, the Yadav couple refuted the hierarchy of status based on caste.

Also read: Will Caste Faultlines Help BJP in UP’s Awadh Region?

The Kannauj episode reflects the realisation among subaltern parties that they must resolve the differences among their social bases before they can hope to counter ‘upper’-caste hegemony. The SP enjoys the overwhelming backing of the Yadavs, who hire labour, largely comprising Dalits, to work on their fields. To keep their cost of production low, the land-owning Yadavs are accused of suppressing Dalits demanding higher wages.

The Yadav-Dalit conflict at the grassroots level was the principal reason why the earlier SP-BSP alliance collapsed just two years after coming to power in Uttar Pradesh in 1993. With Mulayam Singh Yadav as chief minister, the Yadavs felt emboldened to launch a string of attacks against the Dalits.

Under pressure from Dalits angry with the treatment meted out to them, the BSP decided to pull support from the Mulayam government. But the decision was leaked to Mulayam’s supporters, who, on June 2, 1995, attacked the State Guest House in Lucknow where Mayawati and her MLAs were meeting. For the next 24 years, the SP and the BSP became implacable political foes.

In touching Mayawati’s feet and seeking her blessings, Dimple conveyed the Yadav family’s remorse and apology for the 1995 attack. It was also a message to the Yadavs that they must resolve their differences with the Dalits on the ground, just as the dynasty of Mulayam has chosen to let bygones be bygones. Or else they are doomed to remain out of power.

By adopting Dimple as her daughter-in-law, Mayawati has sought to dispel the apprehension among her supporters that the Yadavs will find it unbecoming  to vote for a Dalit leader’s party. Kannauj, thus, saw the symbolical merger of the family of Akhilesh and Dimple with that of Mayawati, who is now cast in the matriarch’s role. It makes all of them equal in social status, which arises from their subalternity.

Mayawati’s acceptance of Dimple as her daughter-in-law is a symbolical enactment of inter-caste kinship, which Dr B.R. Ambedkar prescribed in The Annihilation of Caste as the best method for demolishing caste. “It is a common experience that inter-dining has not succeeded in killing the spirit of caste and consciousness of caste. I am convinced that the real remedy is inter-[caste] marriage,” Ambedkar wrote.

Also read: Why Phase 2 Won’t Be Easy Going for the Mahagathbandhan in UP

Ambedkar thought inter-caste marriage could lead to fusion of blood and, therefore, foster a feeling of kinship powerful enough to trump the separatism that caste promotes. “Where society is already well knit by other ties, marriage is an ordinary incident of life. But where society is cut asunder, marriage as a binding force becomes a matter of urgent necessity,” he wrote.  This is precisely what the symbolic ‘marriage’ in Kannauj sought to achieve.

It is apt to recall the example of Bihar, where the animosity between the Yadavs and Muslims dated to the late 19th century. Their relationship became relatively amiable because of former Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav forging the M-Y, or Muslim-Yadav, political alliance. Bihar’s experience shows why the April 25 rally in Kannauj could mark a turning point in Uttar Pradesh’s politics.

Ajaz Ashraf is a Delhi-based journalist.

Who Will Speak up for Maaysha, Sudha Bharadwaj’s Daughter?

Opposition leaders will not take up her mother’s cause because they fear it could alienate voters.

Nobody is going to speak up for Maaysha as her link to the Indian political class is, at best, tenuous. Maaysha who? She is the 21-year-old daughter of Sudha Bharadwaj, who was among the five human rights activists and lawyers arrested on August 28 in connection with the violence at Bhima Koregaon on January 1, 2018. After weeks of house arrest, they were, barring one, packed off to jail.

For the next two weeks, Maaysha cried and cried for her mother, into the pillow and before the mirror in the bathroom. It was as if she was asking, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the saddest of them all?” For the present, though, Maaysha hopes she will get to celebrate her birthday on February 21 with her mother.

Also Read: ‘If You Try to Be Safe and in the Middle, You Will Never Succeed’

Maaysha’s best bet is to bank upon providence.

That is because her mother does not belong to the class of banking honchos who have been named in the CBI’s FIR in the ICICI bank case. As is well known, the case pertains to former MD and CEO Chanda Kochhar, her husband Deepak and Videocon Group’s Venugopal Dhoot colluding to allegedly cheat the ICICI bank of Rs 1,730 crore. Apart from them, the FIR also named some of the bigwigs of the banking sector.

It prompted Union minister Arun Jaitley to write a blog, dubbing it as an instance of “investigative adventurism”. He went on to explain:

Investigative adventurism involves casting the net too wide including people with no mens rea or even having an intention to commit an offence, relying on presumptions and surmises with no legally admissible evidence.

A day after Jaitley’s blog appeared, it was presumably deemed to be in the national interest to banish Sudhanshu Dhar Mishra, the officer who signed the FIR in the ICICI case, from the CBI.

It is presumably also in the national interest to retain the officers in Pune who are investigating whether Maaysha’s mother and her friends had suggested to Maoists to foment armed rebellion against the government. Yet another example of investigative adventurism?

Justice D.Y. Chandrachud noted in his dissenting opinion in the Supreme Court judgement on the petition requesting a special investigation team to carry out a probe against the accused in the Bhima Koregaon violence: “I find that the allegation…is taking liberties with the truth.”

But then, liberties with truth can be taken because Maaysha’s mother is not a swish banker. At this, Maaysha will take umbrage. Her mother had both class and academic credentials. She is the daughter of the late economist Krishna Bharadwaj, studied mathematics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and then went to Cambridge University. A cushy job in the banking sector could have been for the taking.

But Maaysha’s mother committed what is considered a cardinal error in today’s India – she chose to battle for the rights of workers in Chhattisgarh. She acquired a law degree to fight court cases in which the poor had been implicated. Maaysha and her mother roughed it out in labour camps. And Maaysha, for a few years, went to a government school, which is where bankers never send their children.

Poor Maaysha, she does not know the nature of the Indian political class, whose members believe altruism is just a rhetorical flourish to camouflage the human instinct to accumulate wealth and power. That is why they are contemptuous of those who opt for downward mobility, as Maaysha’s mother certainly did. Her work potentially threatened to alter the status quo, the preservation of which is the unstated agenda of any government.

That is why, Maaysha, no minister will speak for your mother.

Maaysha will perhaps hope the opposition will come to the rescue of her mother. Maybe she will search the internet to read how Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi coped with the assassination of their grandmother and father. It is very likely she will stumble upon Rahul telling a TV interviewer in 2014:

In my life, I have seen my grandmother die, I have seen my father die, I have seen my grandmother go to jail and I have actually been through a tremendous amount of pain as a child.”

He also said, “The system everyday… everyday hurts people and I have felt the pain the system can cause.”

Maaysha is hurting as Rahul did in his childhood.

Maaysha, too, will want to emulate Priyanka, who, in 2008, went over to the Vellore prison to meet Nalini, a member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam death squad responsible for the assassination of her father. To Nalini, Priyanka was quoted saying, “My father was a good person. He was very soft. Why did you do this?”

That is what Maaysha too thinks of her mother – she is sensitive and caring. She too will want to ask the police: Why did you then send her to prison?

Also Read: “I Haven’t Earned Money, I Have Earned People”: Sudha Bharadwaj’s Daughter Pens Emotional Note

Maaysha’s hope must have been kindled because opposition leaders are no longer silent as they were when one Aam Aadmi Party MLA after another in Delhi was picked up on charges that have largely come unstuck in court. They have started to speak out against the government because they fear it wants to implicate them in false cases and throw them behind bars.

Really, Maaysha shouldn’t get her hopes up. Neither the Gandhis nor other opposition leaders will likely take up her mother’s cause. That is because she and her friends have been dubbed as ‘Urban Naxals’, a term the BJP has invented to depict that the liberal-left is conspiring to trigger a communist revolution. Opposition leaders fear that their support for Maaysha’s mother could alienate voters.

They lack the conviction to educate voters. In India’s new political culture, if a party is accused of being pro-minority, its leaders go into a tizzy, visiting temples. If a Muslim is killed in the name of the cow, there are promises made to initiate commercial production of cow urine. In his classic novel Raag Darbari, Shrilal Shukla wrote, “The Opposition keeps on talking nonsense, and the leadership quietly plays its own game.”

Shukla wrote the novel in 1968. It is 2019. And so it goes.

Ajaz Ashraf is a Delhi-based journalist.

JNU Sedition Case: A Forgetful Nation Enables the State’s Brutality

The media headlined the arrest of ten human rights activists and lawyers in 2018. They soon faded from the national consciousness, allowing the state to swoop on JNU students.

The inability of citizens to imagine the plight of undertrials subjected to prolonged incarceration and trial normalises the Indian state’s excesses. It presumably knows that even its most unconscionable action might shock people, but they will gradually lose interest in it.

This logic of forgetfulness is why the Delhi police and their political masters have chosen to chargesheet Jawaharlal Nehru University students for sedition three years after they allegedly shouted anti-India slogans. There can’t be a bigger farce than that.

Unfortunately, the hue and cry over the chargesheet will peter out as it did over the arrest of ten human rights activists and lawyers last year. Then too, as now, media headlined the state swooping down on the activists to pluck them out of their nests. Stories tracked the twists and turns of court proceedings involving them. Their educational and work profiles were etched out to underscore the implausibility of the group being engaged in a plot to fan violence for destabilising the government.

Also Read: Activists’ Arrests: The Exceptional Has Been Made the New Normal

The ten activists have now more or less disappeared from the media – and, therefore, from the national consciousness as well. Only one of them continues to be free, but only just, getting interim protection from arrest every passing month. The other nine languish in prison, condemned to fight the battle of freedom on their own. The nation has, quite literally, moved on to other things, such as the formation of electoral alliances before the 2019 general elections.

It has to be a strange democracy where people who wage battles for the rights of the marginalised are forgotten in the heat and dust of an impending election. The forgetting has normalised their incarceration – and what might still follow.

(From left) Sudhir Dhawale, Surendra Gadling, Shoma Sen, Mahesh Raut and Rona Wilson.

The consequences of the arrest of nine activists

That is why the chargesheeting of JNU students is an appropriate backdrop for imagining the consequences that the arrest of nine activists has had on them and their families.

Indeed, it is easy to gather evidence from the internet on how the Indian state callously disrupts lives and crafts absences in families. Visit lawyer-activist Sudha Bharadwaj’s twitter handle to see her posts of August 27, 2018. The last of these was a BBC blog detailing the problems arising from the proximity between the judiciary and the executive.

Thereafter, Bharadwaj’s life on social media freezes, the way humans do in real life with death. It was because she was arrested on August 28, along with four human rights activists – Gautam Navlakha, Arun Ferreira, Vernon Gonsalves and Varavara Rao – all of whom were accused of fomenting violence in Bhima Koregaon in January 2018 and for having links with the Maoists.

Watch: Activist Arrests: Where Is the Evidence?

Incarceration marks not only the death of social life, but also squashes the right to transmit meanings we read in our social existence. To understand how, visit the Facebook page of Rona Wilson, who was arrested along with four others – Shoma Sen, Surendra Gadling, Mahesh Raut and Sudhir Dhawale – on June 6, 2018 for fomenting the Bhima Koregaon violence of 2018.

In an April 16, 2018 Facebook post, the last on Wilson’s timeline, there is a cartoon of parents bidding goodbye to their child, who is going to school. The child is dressed in a cow costume. The caption says, “Not a fancy dress competition, she feels much safer in this.” It is a telling swipe at cow vigilante groups.

Nine of the ten activists who were arrested – only Navlakha is still free – continue to languish in jail. Their absence from their families is poignantly captured in social media; at times, though, there are hints to their rage. On November 22, 2018, Sagar Abraham-Gonsalves, son of Vernon Gonsalves, wished his mother on her birthday on his Facebook page.

The strength, courage and positivity which you have shown during these very trying past few months has taken my admiration to a whole new level altogether.

Sagar was, obviously, alluding to his mother having to endure the burden of sorrow at Vernon’s absence from the family. On January 4, Sagar’s cat, Cleopatra, died. In an obit to the cat, Sagar wrote, “You lived life on your own terms without being dependent on the people around you.” Just like the Gonsalves family.

Film-maker Koel Sen is the daughter of Shoma Sen, the Nagpur-based English professor who was among the five arrested on June 6. On January 8, Koel posted the photo of the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen with his plea: Stand by those jailed for activism. Questions arise: Does the circle of support of jailed activists stretch beyond their friends? Is it possible to demonstrate support through silence? In what other ways can citizens support those imprisoned for their activism?

At least Koel seems to tide over her travails by taking humourous potshots at the state’s lack of proportion. On December 11, 2018, she posted photos with the caption:

At the Supreme Court with Senior Supreme Court Advocate Indira Jaising as a part of the team of lawyers defending Maa and the other arrested activists June 6 onwards. The 5000 page chargesheet’s translation is now 8000 pages long, and this here is a trolley carrying only one part of the three sets!! There was a car full of chargesheets only!!

Others, however, have tears as their only solace. Take Maaysha, daughter of Bharadwaj, who wrote an open letter after she met her mother in the court in November. She said:

I met her outside when she was in a police bus. I cried then. I saw that two family members of another person who had been arrested were crying! That time my mom told me that they had treated her good which means they didn’t beat her or anything like that but she told me that one of the persons called Arun [Ferreira] got beaten up by police! I got shocked, scared and upset because I thought maybe they treated her badly and she is not telling me.

The five activists arrested in connection with the Bhima Koregaon violence: Arun Ferreira, Sudha Bharadwaj, Varavara Rao, Gautam Navlakha and Vernon Gonsalves.

Violent treatment in jail

Ferreira was repeatedly slapped during the interrogation and had to be admitted to hospital for treatment. This is not the first time he had been through such travails. In 2007, he was arrested on the charge that he was the communications chief of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and was planning to bomb Deeksha Bhoomi in Nagpur, where Dr B.R. Ambedkar converted to Buddhism. He was acquitted in 2012. Likewise, Gonsalves was arrested in 2007 by the Maharashtra anti-terror squad for being a top “Naxalite” and possessing explosives. He, too, was acquitted in 2013.

Ferreira wrote Colours of the Cage to detail the torture he underwent in jail. He wrote in the book:

To make me more amenable to their demands, they stretched out my body completely… My arms were tied to a window grille high above the ground while two policemen stood on my outstretched thighs to keep me pinned to the floor.”

In 2007, it was not the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance in power, but the United Progressive Alliance, which the Congress headed. Between the prime ministership of Manmohan Singh and that of Narendra Modi, the state’s brutality seems a constant. It is only, perhaps, that the ironies have now become grimmer.

Here are two examples of grim ironies. When five human rights activists were arrested on June 6, 2018,  Ferreira and Gonsalves teamed up to write a piece against the state, accusing it of engaging in “sinister sensationalism.” Three months later, both were summarily tossed into jail.

In March 2018, Bhardwaj and Gadling wrote a letter, published in the Economic and Political Weekly, demanding the release of Upendra Nayak, an Odisha-based lawyer-activist who had been arrested under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. Nayak, their letter said, is known to fight for innocent Adivasis accused of being Maoists. Bharadwaj and Gadling, obviously, did not know that months later they too would be arrested under the same law.

Between the prime ministership of Manmohan Singh and that of Narendra Modi, the state’s brutality seems a constant. Credit: PTI

It is almost a certainty that such grim ironies will continue to stalk the nation until the media and people devise a mechanism to ensure that the fog of forgetfulness does not shroud the state’s brutality.

So how do we, to quote Amartya Sen, stand by those who ensure democracy is not reduced to psephocracy, a term which has people voting every five years without challenging the state against subverting their rights? Without an answer to this question, we are headed for a certain social death.

Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist based in Delhi.