When I wrote in this column last week that instead of a caste census, we need to consider an end to caste reservations, I expected controversy and a debate. What I did not expect was a hashtag demanding my arrest and an attack on my personal life. What I did not expect was that I would be ordered to ‘go to Pakistan’ or that I would be charged with being anti-Dalit and a believer in untouchability. This last charge offended me most because having grown up in a Sikh family I was taught to think of untouchability and the caste system as against the fundamental tenets of Sikhism.
The attack on me was so venomous and my timeline on X so filled with threats and dire warnings that I began to investigate the leaders of it. I found some Congress Party workers who believed I was attacking Rahul Gandhi since he is the latest champion of a caste census. But the malevolent ones belonged to another gang. It was this lot that demanded my arrest and charged me with spreading hatred. When I investigated who they were, they seemed all to belong to a category of educated people who make a living out of advocacy and ‘sympathy’ for Dalits and the Dalit cause. It is they who need to explain why, despite their active support and their rage on behalf of Dalit communities, they have not succeeded in ensuring fundamental things like ensuring that Dalit children have access to decent schools. The kind of schools in which they are not treated as inferior. Or why Dalit communities across rural India continue to be confined to living in squalid conditions on the edge of villages.
Since the Chief Minister of Bihar has already ordered a caste census, may I suggest that he travel in his own state and see how the mouse-catcher (musahar) community lives. I have seen hopeless poverty elsewhere, but my worst memories are of a Bhumihaar dominant village in Jehanabad district that seemed clean and prosperous until I was led across a railway track to the ‘musahar’ quarter. Here in mud hovels lived people without dignity, respect, or hope. In the stunted bodies and bleached hair of children in pitiful rags were signs of severe malnutrition.
Extreme poverty and casteism have long been the material that our political leaders use to create their vote banks but why have the Dalit groups who attacked me last week not done more? Is it because their compassion is fake or because they have learned how to exploit these most deprived of India’s citizens just like politicians? A leading member of the gang that demanded my arrest, challenged me after a torrent of abuse and threats, to what he called a ‘debate’. It did not surprise me much to discover that this great advocate for Dalits was ensconced safely somewhere in the United States. He probably thrives as a professor of Dalit studies in an American university instead of fighting for Dalit rights in India’s villages. When I refused to react to his insults, he tweeted to his troops that they had achieved one thing, and this was that I would not dare write about ending caste reservations again. He was wrong.
The reaction that my last column evoked has convinced me that the time has come to examine how well reservations have worked or if they have worked at all. I got some support last week from people who said they did not agree with the attack on me but were for ‘affirmative action’. So am I. What I question is whether the affirmative action that reservations provide has worked or whether there is not a need now to think of a better way to provide affirmative action to communities who have been deprived of basic human rights and treated like dirt for centuries. In Dalit communities that I have visited I have seen a desperate need to provide children with daily nutritious meals through a service like Akshaya Patra. I have also seen a need for good schools and healthcare.
If these things have not happened already, could it because these most vulnerable of our citizens have been let down not just by their political leaders but by self-appointed Dalit spokesmen? In New York city I know of many, many very dodgy NGOs who have shifted base to Manhattan because it is so much more comfortable to bang on about the evils of the Indian caste system and human trafficking from an apartment with a nice view of Central Park.
My point in last week’s column was that reservations have benefited politicians and Dalit advocacy groups more than it has the people for whom they were created. The vile, malicious abuse I faced from exactly these groups has convinced me more than ever that affirmative action of a new kind is needed. Reservations have created a class of people who continue the evil, inhuman exploitation that lower-caste Indians have faced for too long. Much, much more can be done.
But not by those who make an easy living out of the misery of others, or politicians who rely on extreme poverty and deprivation to create vote banks they need at election time out of desperate people. For those who tried to shut me up with their malevolence, let me say I shall continue to speak out. You do not scare me.
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