by VENKITESH RAMAKRISHNAN
In Ahmedabad on July 31, Dalits gather to protest against the attack on Dalit youths in Una on July 11 for skinning a dead cow. Later, Dalit and other organisations came together and organised a march to Una, which began from Ahmedabad on August 5 and was to cover a distance of 370 km by August 15. PHOTOVijay Soneji
In the Lok Sabha on August 11, during the debate on cow vigilantism and attacks against Dalits, speakers from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) sought to portray Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “shoot me, not my Dalit brothers” exhortation at a public event four days earlier as a watershed moment in the history of political solidarity expressions for the Scheduled Caste communities of India.
The NDA had lined up an impressive array of speakers—Ministers Rajnath Singh, M. Venkaiah Naidu and Arjun Ram Meghwal of the BJP and senior Minister Ram Vilas Pawan, a Dalit leader of the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP)—to make this presentation forcefully. Replying to the debate, Rajnath Singh claimed that Narendra Modi was the only Prime Minister since 1947 to have spoken openly on the problem though crimes against Dalits were a constant phenomenon in Indian society. He also contended that the highlighting of the issue in this manner itself imparted greater authority to State governments and other authorities to take stringent action against the perpetrators of crimes against Dalits. The other speakers from the NDA, too, held forth on similar lines. All of them asserted that Modi’s “shoot me, not my Dalit brothers” declaration was a path-breaking one by the topmost political leader of the country and would pave the way for greater Dalit empowerment.
However, a close look at the sequence of events that led to Modi’s admonishment of vigilante gau rakshaks exposed this to be a hollow claim. Instead, what it showed was a rattled and cynical politician who had subsumed all his social and political instincts to the compulsions of acquiring power and holding on to it by any means. It also revealed the apprehensions of “Team Modi”, led by BJP president Amit Shah, about the party’s prospects in the forthcoming electoral contests, particularly in Gujarat, Modi’s home State, and Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous State. Central to this fear is the depletion of support among Dalit communities in the wake of the onslaught against them by gau rakshaks. This depletion is a substantive shift from the inroads that the BJP made among Dalit communities in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. While this depletion is widespread, its political impact is being felt most conspicuously in Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh.
Determined resistance
The close inspection of the sequence of events leading up to Modi’s declaration also highlights the determined resistance put up by Dalit communities to atrocities and discrimination in general against them and in particular to attacks motivated by cow vigilantism. This resistance has been anchored in the unique organisational manifestations of the new politics in Gujarat which has no direct associations with conventional political organisations. However, its political impact extended to electoral gains for conventional political organisations such as the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in Uttar Pradesh and the Congress in Gujarat. Since Muslims have been at the receiving end of cow vigilantism for long, this resistance has also given rise to Dalit-Muslim unity at the social level in some regions in different States. All this has added to the apprehensions of the BJP leadership.
Besides, the timing of Modi’s “historic intervention” exposed the expediency and realpolitik behind it. On July 11, exactly a month earlier, a shocking video of seven Dalit men being beaten brutally by a group of gau rakshaks for allegedly skinning a dead cow in Gujarat’s Una district surfaced. The video showed the Dalits, tied to a car, being beaten. Inquiries into the circumstances that led to the public flogging revealed that the Dalits were also beaten as they were paraded to the police station.
The response to this incident came from different parts of Gujarat, including Una, first as small protests and later as big rallies. The protests gathered momentum a week later when a Congress councillor and four other Dalits attempted suicide in front of a police station in Gondal. From then on the protests intensified to the extent that by the last week of July their political reverberations began to be felt across Gujarat and it became increasingly clear that Chief Minister Anandiben Patel would not be able to continue in her office.
But even as these developments unfolded, Modi continued to ignore the attack and its political impact in Gujarat. Indeed, the Prime Minister has used this shut-eye approach right from the early days in the post when confronted with assaults unleashed by Hindutva organisations and groups associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS)-led Sangh Parivar.
First sign of a storm
But by the last week of July some other developments unfolded in Uttar Pradesh too. An important political strategy of the BJP in Uttar Pradesh over the past three months has been to consolidate the electoral inroads it made among Dalit communities during the Lok Sabha elections. “Mission Dalit” involved several programmes and an important event was the Dhamma Chetna Yatra under the leadership of the 87-year-old Buddhist monk and former MP Dhamma Viriyo. The veteran monk is also the leader of the Akhil Bharatiya Bhikkhu Mahasangh, a national-level organisation of Buddhist monks with considerable influence among Dalit communities.
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