Pub Date : 2020-02-01DOI: 10.1017/9781108779616.009
Dag-Erik Berg
Caste was embedded in India's social order before independence, but its current visibility is significant. Although this book has examined occurrences from each historical period that has opened a generation's eyes to the caste question, caste seems to be far more visible at the time of writing than before. The rise of the Internet and the digital revolution have made caste more visible to both Indian and international audiences. Inequalities and caste-based discrimination are not simply confined to brutal attacks in the Indian countryside, such as those in Karamchedu in 1985 and Tsundur in 1991. But these two critical cases in Andhra Pradesh throw light on why many Dalit activists from this part of India travelled to the World Conference against Racism in South Africa in 2001 to explain that casteism was the same as racism. What I have described in this book is the way in which caste represents a social phenomenon that is part of everyday social relations, informing politics and articulations of hegemony. During these nearly seventy-two years years since India gained independence, caste has become more visible and politically charged than the constitution-makers might have assumed. In this book, I have explained how Ambedkar's theory of caste indicates that there is an ontological desire to practise caste. This desire remains relevant in contemporary politics. But there are several dimensions to caste, such as stratification, hierarchy and religion, and Ambedkar incorporated them into his concept of graded inequality. This multidimensionality is significant for law. Indeed, I have pointed out how the legal approach to redressing inequalities and providing protection become subject to several changes after independence. My theoretical objective has been to provide a critical explanation of the relation between caste and law with a focus on Dalits in India's constitutional democracy, where Dalits are socially excluded (as the untouchables) and officially included (as the Scheduled Castes). In fact, following the atrocity cases, it is reasonable to suggest that Dalits are excluded because of an ontological difference – the antagonism between touchables and untouchables – that Ambedkar foregrounds in his theory of caste. Having followed the approach of the late Laclau outlined by Glynos and Howarth, I have argued that a critical explanation requires several dimensions to be delineated and compared; these involve hegemonic ideas and social and political practices.
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Pub Date : 2020-02-01DOI: 10.1017/9781108779616.003
Dag-Erik Berg
The idea of a casteless society has been important to anti-caste leaders since premodern times. Anti-caste movements gained momentum in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the so-called non-Brahmin movements in the Madras and Bombay Presidencies were vibrant by the time Ambedkar was born in 1891. Ambedkar's father, for example, was inspired by the low-caste leader Mahatma Jyotirao Phule, who also came from Maharashtra. In the twenty-first century, one could find posters of Ambedkar in many Dalit homes, for example, in rural south India and elsewhere in the country. Statues of Ambedkar have been erected in cities such as Mumbai, Hyderabad and Kanpur. Occasionally, statues are vandalized by members of other castes, and in some cases, they have had to be protected, but the proliferation of statues is nonetheless significant. Ambedkar's role as a symbol of assertion is a result of his contribution to the crafting of constitutional entitlements for the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and his relentless critique of caste. He marks a new chapter in the anti-caste project, representing constitutional entitlements and claims to universal values. In addition to his advanced scholarly thought, he created a legacy as a statesman who was instrumental in designing India's constitution with entitlements and principles such as equality. In this chapter, I focus on two topics of Ambedkar's legacy, namely his theory of caste annihilation and his contribution to the Constitution of India, 1950. The two topics must be unpacked separately if one is to understand each of them and how they relate to one another. The idea of abolishing caste is a revolutionary intellectual project of emancipation, whereas the second topic is a story about a liberal democrat who struggled but followed his vision for social reform by taking part in the negotiations and participating in the development of India's constitution. Ambedkar made a number of different contributions and was engaged in theoretical and practical battles. In a seminal essay, Professor Upendra Baxi discussed his roles and enumerated seven dimensions of Ambedkar's career. Political theory and constitutional politics, which I focus on, are two dimensions noted in Baxi's discussion, and they cannot be mixed up if one is to understand Ambedkar's different types of contributions.
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Pub Date : 2020-02-01DOI: 10.1017/9781108779616.005
Dag-Erik Berg
Three cases of caste-based violence, occurring in coastal Andhra, are central to the postcolonial history of Andhra Dalits. The first case occurred in the village of Kanchikacherla (Krishna district) on 24 February 1968; a boy was tied to a post in the middle of the village, beaten and then burnt alive. Another extremely grave instance took place in Karamchedu village (Prakasam district) on 22 July 1985, resulting in the deaths of six Dalits, while the third, with eight fatalities, was in Tsundur village (Guntur district) on 6 August 1991. These brutal events were all carried out by local dominant castes as comprehensive attacks on Dalits in the most prosperous part of the Telugu-speaking regions, which was Andhra Pradesh state until 2014. While the event in Kanchikacherla was central for the first generation of activists during the postcolonial period in this state, the cases in Karamchedu and Tsundur have shaped the second generation. These events occurred a generation or two earlier to Rohith Vemula's suicide at the University of Hyderabad. The history of the Dalit movement in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana has included many important episodes and many different forms of protests. The history of anti-caste mobilizations in Madras, Bombay and other regions at the beginning of the twentieth century is well known. At that time, there were active Dalit leaders in coastal Andhra as well as in Hyderabad city. There had been a radical reform movement concerned with issues such as gender, dowry and untouchability in coastal Andhra run by members of the regional elite in the nineteenth century. But the identity- and caste-based mobilization among Andhra Dalits gained momentum in the early 1920s. The Dalits’ social reform movements emerged at the same time as a strong regional movement in Andhra, which mobilized separation of the Telugu-speaking areas of Madras Presidency. The Dalit movements had a different trajectory and source of inspiration, naming themselves ‘Adi-Andhra’ in 1917 in Vijayawada city (coastal Andhra) and ‘Adi- Hindu’ in 1922 in Hyderabad. They named their organizations with the prefix ‘Adi’ to indicate that they were original inhabitants – indigenous sons of the soil. The Adi-Andhra Mahasabha (great assembly of the natives of Andhra) had counterparts in other regions in colonial India, and these early Dalit movements identified themselves with a wider subaltern critique of the Aryan invasion.
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Pub Date : 2020-02-01DOI: 10.1017/9781108779616.006
Dag-Erik Berg
The postcolonial history of India involves many of these brutal cases of organized caste-based violence in the rural landscape. The attacks in Andhra Pradesh, in Karamchedu in Prakasam district (1985) and in Tsundur village in the neighbouring Guntur district (1991), represent two brutal instances, although several other atrocities took place before, between and after Karamchedu and Tsundur. At a national level, the early and well-known incidents that occurred during this grim postcolonial trend happened in Kilvenmani village in the Thanjavur district in southern Tamil Nadu, where forty-four Dalits were burnt to death in December 1968. But the cases in Thanjavur and coastal Andhra suggest that modern agricultural technology provided the material basis for the social changes in these villages that led to extreme brutality. As Paul Brass indicates, it is useful to be cautious when explaining violence in the agrarian context simply by referring to a ‘Green revolution’ rather than to more historical explanations. In fact, it is also important to underline caste as a factor in this context. Some of the cases that happened at the same time as the brutal assault in Kilvenmani are not simply cases of violence in a feudal agrarian structure. Caste relations are embedded in the agrarian mode of production, and the term ‘feudalism’ appears inadequate to explain casteism and violence. It is useful to revisit the ontological difference that Ambedkar emphasized exists between touchables and untouchables, between ‘some bodies’ and ‘nobodies’, to understand how the desire to ‘teach Dalits a lesson’ could play out. Cases of amorous encounters and upward mobility represent possibilities that transgress basic ideas about differences in an ontology of caste. The incident that took place in Kanchikacherla village on 24 February 1968 in Krishna district could be viewed in this context. On that day, Kotesu, a ‘Harijan boy’, was burnt alive. Kotesu had been charged with stealing two pots and a tumbler, and a group of seven people had tied him to a post in the village, beaten him and later burnt him. While the accusation of theft resonates with a stereotype about Dalits being less trustworthy people, Kotesu's parents had another explanation; they thought that Kotesu was having a love affair with the landlord's daughter.
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Pub Date : 2020-02-01DOI: 10.1017/9781108779616.008
Dag-Erik Berg
As an integral part of India's modernity, caste is not simply a phenomenon in rural areas or in extreme cases of caste-related violence. It is part of everyday life in modern institutions, where it represents a contingent element in social relations. Caste is, overall, subject to several types of conflicts, ranging from public debates and democratic interaction to humiliation and outright exclusion. In practice, caste is manifested in different ways; it is often identified in terms of politics of inequality, which involves large clusters of castes as well as caste-based discrimination. On the one hand, inequality and struggles for material resources animate caste-based mobilization that presses for new entitlements to reserved quotas. This mobilization comprises radically different groups, from the powerful landowning Jats in north India to the destitute Madigas in Telugu-speaking regions in south India. On the other hand, there is even caste-based discrimination in higher education institutions, which has become more visible in recent years. According to modernization theory, religion will lose its relevance and tradition will be replaced with a new set of values which are specifically modern. The American political scientists Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph argued in the 1960s that this opposition between modernity and tradition, which was prominent in the European Enlightenment and in Marx's writings, was inadequate. Although they thought that the opposition was heuristically useful, their idea was that modernity and tradition infiltrated each other and that caste was used as an instrument for political mobilization. Their seminal argument is modest and outdated today, and their approach does not quite explain the force with which caste has played out in modern institutions such as higher education institutions. The controversies regarding caste in higher education and public employment are important when examining why caste seems to be reproduced and even to gain a new intensity in contemporary India. The mechanism of oppression in the Dalit situation is not confined to rural areas. Context matters. But the ontological drive of caste appears to be an integral part of modernity that plays out in different ways, as case studies on the higher education sector suggest. The politics of reservation policies involves groups and goes beyond electoral politics, but reservation policies also affect elections. The two most central controversies regarding caste-based reservation in India were related to the implementation of the Mandal Commission Report .
作为印度现代化不可或缺的一部分，种姓不仅仅是农村地区的一种现象，也不仅仅是与种姓有关的暴力的极端案例。它是现代制度中日常生活的一部分，代表着社会关系中的一个偶然因素。总的来说，种姓受到几种冲突的影响，从公开辩论和民主互动到羞辱和彻底的排斥。在实践中，种姓以不同的方式表现出来;它通常被认为是政治上的不平等，涉及大量的种姓群体以及基于种姓的歧视。一方面，不平等和对物质资源的争夺推动了基于种姓的动员，促使人们争取保留配额的新权利。这场动员包括了完全不同的群体，从印度北部强大的土地所有者贾特人到印度南部泰卢格语地区贫困的马迪加人。另一方面，高等教育机构甚至存在基于种姓的歧视，这在近年来变得更加明显。根据现代化理论，宗教将失去其相关性，传统将被一套新的具有现代性的价值观所取代。20世纪60年代，美国政治学家劳埃德和苏珊娜·鲁道夫(Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph)认为，在欧洲启蒙运动和马克思著作中突出的现代性与传统之间的对立是不够的。尽管他们认为反对是有益的，但他们的想法是，现代和传统相互渗透，种姓被用作政治动员的工具。他们的开创性论点在今天看来是谦虚和过时的，他们的方法并不能完全解释种姓制度在高等教育机构等现代机构中发挥的作用。关于高等教育和公共就业中的种姓制度的争议，在研究为什么种姓制度似乎在当代印度重现，甚至获得新的强度时，是很重要的。达利特处境中的压迫机制并不局限于农村地区。环境很重要。但种姓的本体论驱动似乎是现代性的一个组成部分，以不同的方式发挥作用，正如对高等教育部门的案例研究所表明的那样。保留政策的政治是团体政治，是超越选举政治的政治，但保留政策也会影响选举。关于印度基于种姓的保留制度的两个最主要的争议与曼达尔委员会报告的执行有关。
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Pub Date : 2020-02-01DOI: 10.1017/9781108779616.004
Dag-Erik Berg
During the independence movement, the key concerns that emerged regarding ameliorating the situation for untouchable castes were temple entry and access to public places. Access to public spaces and facilities, such as the water tank in Mahad, was important to Ambedkar's movement in the 1920s. Ambedkar led temple entry movements such as the one in Pune in 1929, but he seemed to have lost interest in this strategy by the early 1930s. In fact, it was Gandhi who gained prominence in the movement that wanted to establish temple entry for untouchable castes during the independence movement. The constituent assembly later adopted an article that abolished untouchability and prohibited and criminalized its practices (Article 17). The article represents a strategy for addressing the problem of untouchability in the independent Indian state. In Gandhi's perspective, temple access represented an idea of holism and a vision of accommodating everyone, including every caste within the Hindu fold. He wanted to harmonize society and integrate untouchables into the Hindu social order in ways that corresponded with the adaptation of the rites and customs of the superior castes. Gandhi was one of the several social reformers within the Hindu fold, and the focus on temple access for untouchables represented an element of social reform in the nationalist movement. But the idea of temple entry introduced the idea of religious inclusion into the public sphere. It represented a discourse that did not entirely correspond with the basic problems of exclusion that the Dalits encountered. This early approach was unhelpful in relation to curbing the caste-based violence that frequently happened to Dalits. Caste-based violence was a legal anomaly, and it resulted in several changes in law and terminology during the postcolonial period. In this chapter, I argue that the focus on temple access in this early approach to caste was inadequate to address caste-based oppression. The hegemonic narrative at the time of the independence focused on untouchability and access to temples, but this approach underwent changes because gaining entry to temples would not solve the persistent trend of caste-based violence. New discourses created legal changes. These changes could be viewed as learning processes that concerned how the Dalit problem of enduring oppression could be conceptualized. It became clear that a concept such as civil rights and the idea of temple entry misrepresented the basic problems of Dalits, especially caste-based violence.
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Pub Date : 2020-02-01DOI: 10.1017/9781108779616.007
Dag-Erik Berg
The creation of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act (PoA Act), 1989, was a milestone in the development of the legal protection of groups that had experienced frequent humiliation and largescale violence during the postcolonial period. And yet the law does not effectively translate into justice in practice: it is not simply a question of legal design and implementation achieving this. To explain how law can be used, it would be helpful to focus on how law and order are two different things, which may even serve different goals. Foucault argues that the expression of law and order is a ‘hybridized monster’, and that it is better to speak of ‘law or order’ because the two phenomena are incompatible and can be compared to the choice of having either milk or lemon in a cup of tea. Separating the two terms, law and order, offers an opportunity to examine how law may not be part of the ways in which an institutional order operates. Once an atrocity occurs, institutions may respond in ways that differ from the route set out in official law. Thus, although the PoA Act is a piece of legislation that should be obeyed, local state institutions may in practice comply with the interests of locally dominant castes instead. This is more than a question of delayed justice. The attack in Tsundur occurred on 6 August 1991, but it was only on August 2007 that the trial court delivered its judgment and sentenced many of the accused. However, processes that take place after a crime has been committed involve crucial questions concerning practical institutional barriers, which aggravate vulnerabilities and the difficulties of securing evidence and the truth about atrocities. This chapter brings the institutional barriers related to law and order more into focus by examining how caste-related attacks are addressed by institutions of law, that is, the local state and courts. Focusing on the attacks on Dalits in Tsundur village in Andhra Pradesh in 1991 and in Khairlanji in Maharashtra in 2006, I point out how institutions such as police stations and courts are vulnerable to making mistakes and being subjected to direct exploitation.
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