Gail Omvedt & Bharat Patankar

Continued from here.

The Rise of Dalit Movements

Though attempts were begun by the dalit castes from the late 19th century to organise themselves, the various sections of the dalit liberation movement really began to take off from the 1920s, in the context of the strong social reform and anti-caste movements which were penetrating the middle-caste peasantry and the national movement which was beginning to develop a genuine mass base.

The most important of the early dalit movements were the Ad-Dharm movement in the Punjab (organised 1926); the movement under Ambedkar in Maharashtra mainly based among Mahars which had its organisational beginnings in 1924; the Nama-shudra movement in Bengal; the Adi-Dravida movement in Tamil Nadu; the Adi-Andhra movement in Andhra which had its first conference in 1917; the Adi-Karnataka movement; the Adi-Hindu movement mainly centered around Kanpur in UP; and the organising of the Pulayas and Cherumans in Kerala.[10]

In most of the cases the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms provided a spark for the organization of dalits but the crucial background was the massive economic and political upheavals of the post-war period. The movements had a linguistic-national organisational base and varied according to the specific social characteristics in different areas, but there was considerable all-India exchange of ideas and, by the 1930s, this was beginning to take the shape of all-India conferences with Ambedkar emerging as the clear national leader of the movement.

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Gail Omvedt & Bharat Patankar

[First published in February 1979. This is the first part of a pathbreaking article on the Dalit movement in the mainstream media. It was pathbreaking because mainstream discourse had until then consistently denied or tried to studiously ignore the existence of the Dalit movement and its vital role in Indian politics before independence and later- Round Table India]

This paper attempts to survey the history of dalit struggles in relation to the national movement and the communist movement, and to bring to the fore the important role the dalit movement has played in the democratic movement of the country and is going to play in the new democratic struggles in the future.

Communists have to think seriously about the theoretical basis for an immediate practical solution to the problem of caste oppression. This issue is emerging on a national scale today and is taking new forms, where the masses of caste Hindu poor peasants and even agricultural labourers are participating in attacks on dalits under the leadership of rich farmers.

The problem is one of posing a real programme for agrarian revolution; for, what the rich fanners are proposing today (and what constitutes an important basis of their appeal to poor and middle peasants) is their own solution to the agrarian problem and unemployment — a capitalist solution of giving land to the (landed) tiller and employing the rest as agricultural labourers and in small industries.

A concrete alternative has, therefore, to be put forward — a programme which does more than simply ameliorate the condition of dalits as proletarianised agricultural labourers or give them 'waste' surplus land which keeps in view the specific nature of caste relations in the rural area and the need for building a revolutionary unity between dalits and caste Hindu toilers, between agricultural labourers and poor and middle peasants.

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Dr. Udit Raj

(First published in September 2006)

The Sangh Parivar is not able to resolve the dangers looming large on the caste-based Hindu religion on its own. There is a saying that you should first try to resolve your differences on your own, and then consult your neighbours. But instead of taking recourse to either of these options, they start finding fault with Christians or Muslims — Jains and Buddhists have now become their latest targets.

On the 19th September, 2006, the Gujarat Assembly passed the Religious Freedom (Amendment) Bill stating that prior permission is required from the government before seeking conversion to any religion and as if this was not enough, Chief Minister Narendra Modi has done what has not been done anywhere else by declaring that Buddhists and Jains shall be treated as a part of Hinduism.

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Dr. Bhalchandra Mungekar

In the post colonial countries, suffering from pauperized agriculture on the one hand; and, virtual deindustrialization on the other, achieving faster rates of economic growth was naturally a preeminent objective of economic policy. For without substantially increasing, on a sustained basis, the volume of production of agricultural and industrial goods and, making available to the masses public, quasi-public and merit goods in sufficient quantities, it could have been futile to talk of creating more employment opportunities, raising levels of living of the people in general, and reducing the mass poverty.

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Gail Omvedt

(First published in September 1990)

Any caste based reservation system, in this case the Mandal Commission, has to be judged in terms of what it can do and not in terms of what it is not supposed to do—and in this case its goal is the limited but important one of ending caste monopoly in public sector jobs.

WRITING on the Mandal Commission and the 'caste war' going on around it almost seems an exercise in futility. Opinion on the subject is so nearly totally predictable from caste status that the readiness of the masses of the people to believe any written arguments must be declining rapidly.

Can one convince dalits and Shudras (a term I consider more appropriate than 'OBC' for reasons that will become clear) by writing in a journal like EPW or in any English-language paper today? They themselves (particularly dalits) have already thought the issue through on a collective basis—historically, from 1917 onwards, the same caste-groups have been involved in the reservation debate and the same arguments have been used more or less as today—and the less politically-conscious Shudra sections of the northern states are rapidly learning also.

There is a war going on in the streets (and implicitly in the polling booths) and a war of words accompanying it in the press, showing the fundamental caste-divide in India between the 'twice-born' (perhaps the most accurate term for the upper three varnas, more popularly known as the Brahman-Bania-Thakur group) and the rest (which may be termed, to use Jotirao Phule's language, as Shudras and ati-Shudras, or Bahujan and dalits), as well as the various sub-contradictions and ambiguities among these groups.

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Sukhadeo Thorat

(M.N. Roy Memorial Lecture, March 24, 2012)

I feel honored to have been invited to deliver the 2012, M.N. Roy Memorial lecture by the Indian Renaissance Institute and Indian Radical Humanist Association. M.N Roy was a great visionary, thinker and a visionary with a particular vision for India. Everybody knows about his contribution and vision.

I wish to use this occasion to reflect on the vision of 'Inclusive India'- our efforts to develop a more inclusive society, which ensures equal and due share and participation to all sections and groups, in the governance of our economy and polity and in the fruits of social and economic development in the country.

I wish to address this issue in the contemporary context. I shall discuss the meaning of social exclusion, the consequences of social exclusion and as to why we should be concerned about social exclusion, the insights from theoretical literature for remedies against discrimination and for inclusive society, and application of these insights to the Indian situation.

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