India After Gandhi (66 page)

The first such avenue was education. After Independence there was a great expansion in school and college education. By law, a certain portion of seats were reserved for the Scheduled Castes. By policy, different state governments endowed scholarships for children from
disadvantaged homes. Where they could they took advantage, spawning an entire generation of first-generation learners. According to one estimate, while the school population doubled in the first decade of Independence, the number of ex-Untouchables in schools swelled eight or tenfold. There were also many more Scheduled Caste students at university than ever before.
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A second avenue was government employment. By law, 15 per cent of all jobs in state and state-aided institutions were reserved for the Scheduled Castes. Again, there was a massive expansion after 1947, with new positions available in the Secretariat and in government-run schools, hospitals, factories and infrastructure projects. Although exact figures are hard to obtain, it is likely that several million jobs were created for Scheduled Castes in the state sector in the first two decades after Independence. These were permanent positions, to be retained until retirement, and with pension and health benefits. In theory, such reservation existed at all levels of government; in practice, it was the reserved posts at the lower levels that tended to be filled first and fastest. As late as 1966, while only 1.77 per cent of senior administrative posts were occupied by Indians of low-caste origin, 8.86 per cent of clerical jobs were, and as many as 17.94 per cent of posts of peons and attendants.
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There was also reservation in Parliament and state assemblies, where 15 per cent of all seats were filled by Scheduled Caste candidates. Besides, universal franchise meant that they could influence the outcome of elections in the ’unreserved category as well. In many parts, Scheduled Castes were quick to seize the opportunities the vote presented them. As one low-caste politician in Agra observed, his constituents ‘may not understand the intricacies of politics’, but they did ‘understand the power of the vote and want to use it’.
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And they understood it in all contexts – national, provincial and local. Already in the early 1950s, cases were reported of Scheduled Castes forging alliances to prevent upper-caste landlords from winning elections to village
panchayats
(councils).
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The vote was quickly perceived as a bargaining tool; for instance, in a UP village, the shoemakers told an upper-caste candidate they would support him if he agreed to shift the yard for the disposal of dead animals from their compound to a site outside the village.
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For a fair number of Scheduled Castes, affirmative action did bring genuine benefits. Now, children of farm labourers could (and did)
become members of Parliament. Those who joined the government as lowly ‘class IV’ employees could see their children become members of the elite Indian Administrative Service. But affirmative action also brought with it a new kind of stigma. Intended to end caste discrimination, it fixed the beneficiaries ever more firmly in their own, original caste. There was suspicion and resentment among the upper castes, and sometimes a tendency among the beneficiaries to look down upon, or even forget, their fellows. As one scholar somewhat cynically wrote, reservation had created ‘a mass of self-engrossed people who are quickly and easily satisfied with the small gains they can win for themselves’.
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A final avenue of mobility was economic development in general. Industrialization and urbanization meant new opportunities away from the village, even if – as in the state sector – the Scheduled Castes came to occupy only the less skilled and less lucrative positions. Living away from home helped expand the mind, as in the case of a farm labourer from UP who became a factory worker in Bombay and learnt to love the city’s museums, its collections of Gandhara art especially.
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And sometimes there were economic gains to be made. Consider the Jatavs of Agra, a caste of cobblers and shoemakers whose world changed with the growth of a market for their products in the Middle East and the Soviet Union. The Jatavs became an ‘urban yeomanry’, now able to build and buy their own houses. While many continued as self-employed shoemakers, some Jatavs were able to open factories of their own, where the wages paid to their workers were considerably in excess of what they themselves had once hoped to earn. In 1960 a master craftsman took home about Rs250 a month, a factory worker about Rs100 – even the lesser figure was many times what an unskilled labourer earned. Although the distribution of gains was by no means even, the market had helped enhance their economic as well as social status. The present state of affairs was ‘a far cry from the pre-1900 days, when most Jatavs were little more than labourers and city servants’.
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As with the Muslims, the Scheduled Castes formed an important ‘vote bank’ for the Congress. They too tended to trust the party of Mahatma Gandhi more than its rivals. In the 1957 election, for example, the
Congress won 64 out of the 76 seats reserved for Scheduled Castes in Parliament, and as many as 361 out of the 469 reserved for them in the legislative assemblies.

When the seats reserved for Scheduled Tribe members were added, nearly one in four MPs came from underprivileged backgrounds. Yet the ministers in Jawaharlal Nehru’s Cabinet were overwhelmingly upper caste. This worried him. ‘One of my greatest difficulties’, he told a senior colleague, ‘is to find suitable non-Brahmins.’ Nehru asked the colleague to suggest candidates, but then found one himself: a Mrs Chandrasekhar from Madras, an educated Scheduled Caste whom he inducted as deputy minister.
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The ranking Scheduled Caste minister in the Union Cabinet was Jagjivan Ram from Bihar. Born into a Chamar (cobbler) home, he became the first such boy from his village to go to high school, and from there to the Banaras Hindu University. On graduation he joined the Gandhian movement, his steady work rewarded after 1947 by a series of Cabinet appointments. Among the Ministries he ran were those of Labour, Communications, Mines, and Railways. Jagjivan Ram had the reputation of being a first-class administrator, although he did not live the kind of squeaky-clean life his Gandhian background perhaps demanded of him.
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The most charismatic Scheduled Caste leader, however, remained outside the Congress. This was B. R. Ambedkar, who had joined Nehru’s Cabinet as an Independent, leaving the government in 1951 to restart his Scheduled Caste Federation. His party fared disastrously in the 1952 election, although Ambedkar himself was later elected to the Upper House. By now this longtime foe of Hinduism was seeking to find a way of leaving the ancestral fold. He had contemplated converting to Sikhism, then to Islam, then to Christianity. Ambedkar finally settled on Buddhism, a faith of Indian origin that seemed best suited to his own rationalist and egalitarian temperament.

After he left the Cabinet, Ambedkar immersed himself in literature on or about the Buddha. He became a member of the Mahabodhi Society and travelled through the Buddhist countries of south-east Asia. At a public meeting in Bombay in May 1956, Ambedkar announced that he would convert to Buddhism before the end of the year. His mammoth study
The Buddha and his Dhamma
was already in the press. Ambedkar considered holding the conversion ceremony in Bombay – where the publicity would be immense – or in the ancient Buddhist site of Sarnath.
In the event he chose Nagpur, a city in the centre of India where he had a large and devoted following. Many joined him in embracing Buddhism, in a colourful and well-attended ceremony that took place on 15 October 1956. Six weeks later Ambedkar died suddenly. He was cremated in Bombay, with an icon of the Buddha placed under his head. A million people participated in the funeral procession.
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Shortly before he died Ambedkar had decided to float a new party, the Republican Party of India. This formally came into being in 1957. Its leaders and cadre were, like Ambedkar himself, from the Mahar caste. It was also mostly Mahars who had followed their leader into Buddhism. Ambedkar was a figure of reverence among the Mahars of the Nagpur area. In his lifetime they celebrated his birthday with gusto, taking out processions holding his photograph aloft. When he came to town to speak, the factory workers would crowd in to hear him; even the ‘women went to these parades as to a wedding’. Under his inspiration the Mahars formed troupes that performed plays parodying Hindu ritual and the behaviour of the upper castes. They also sang songs in his honour: ‘From the moment that the glance of Bhim [rao Ambedkar] fell upon the poor’, began one song, ‘From that day our strengthgrew...’.
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But it was not merely in Mahar strongholds that Ambedkar was respected. All across northern India he was admired for his scholarship – he had doctoral degrees from Columbia and London universities – and for his political achievements – notably his drafting of the Constitution of India. For members of the Scheduled Castes who had a glimmer of learning themselves, for those who had been to high school or travelled outside their home village, Ambedkar was both exemplar and icon, the man who had breached the upper-caste citadel and encouraged his fellows to do likewise.

Ambedkar’s slogan for his followers was: ‘Educate, Agitate, Organize’. He setup a People’s Education Society that ran schools and at least two good colleges. Scheduled Caste members who went to these or others schools came inevitably to regard Ambedkar as their mentor. Among the Scheduled Caste intelligentsia, books or pamphlets by Ambedkar became required reading, lovingly passed on from hand to hand.
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Thus the son of a dock worker, sent by government scholarship to the Siddharth College in Bombay, began contributing to magazines and participating in debates – where ‘the topic of all these writings and speeches was always Babasaheb [Ambedkar] and his Dalit movement’.
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The presence of B. R. Ambedkar underlines a quite profound
difference between the Scheduled Castes and the other minority with whom I have here compared them. For the Muslims had no seats reserved for them in the Secretariat or in Parliament. Nor, in independent India, did they have a leader of Ambedkar’s stature to inspire and move them – while he was alive or long after he was gone.

In March 1949 a group of Scheduled Caste members from the villages around Delhi walked to Mahatma Gandhi’s memorial in the city. They had been thrown out of their homes by Jat landowners angered that these previously bonded servants had the cheek to take part in local elections and graze their cattle on the village commons. There, in the very heart of the capital, these outcasts began a hunger strike. By sitting on a memorial to the Father of the Nation, and by using the methods of protest forged by him, they attracted wide attention, including solicitous visits by prominent Gandhians and Cabinet ministers.
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Turn next to a case from urban India, to a newly elected Scheduled Caste MP who applied for membership of the Bar Association in his home town, Sitapur. His application was kept pending for four months, after which he was told that he could join but not use the washroom, and be served only by a Muslim servant. The MP brought the matter to the attention of the prime minister, who intervened to have him admitted without any preconditions.
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Elsewhere, the Scheduled Castes who asserted themselves were not so fortunate. The sociologist N. D. Kamble collated hundreds of examples of ‘atrocities’ perpetrated on Scheduled Castes in independent India. Here are a few choice if that is the word – instances taken from Kamble’s research:

April 1951: A labour camp in Matunga, Bombay. A group of factory workers stages a play on Ambedkar’s birthday. Upper-caste young men break up the performance, assault the actors, and damage the stage.

June 1951: A village in Himachal Pradesh.

A conference of Scheduled Castes is attacked by Rajput landlords. The SCs are beaten up with sticks, their leaders tied up with ropes and confined to a cattle pound.

July 1951: A rural school in the Jalgaon district of Bombay State. A Brahmin teacher abuses Ambedkar for introducing the Hindu Code Bill in Parliament. A SC boy protests, whereupon he is beaten and removed from the school.

June 1952: A village in the Madurai district of Madras State. ASC youth asks for tea in a glass at a local shop. Tradition entitles him only to a disposable coconut shell. When he persists, he is kicked and hit on the head by caste Hindus.

June 1957: A village in the Parbani district of Madhya Bharat. Newly converted Buddhists refuse to flay carcasses of dead cattle. They are boycotted by the Hindu landlords, denied other work, and threatened with physical reprisals.

May 1959: A village in the Ahmednagar district of Bombay State. A Buddhist marriage party is not allowed to enter the hamlet through the village gates. When they persist, caste Hindus attack them with stones and swords.

October 1960: A village in the Aurangabad District of Maharashtra. Caste Hindus enter the Scheduled Caste hamlet and break a statue of the Buddha into tiny pieces.
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What these cases and the many more like them – reveal is a system that was in quite profound turmoil. All across India the winds of democratic politics had made the Scheduled Castes more willing to demand their rights. Aided by reservation in schools, offices, factories, and legislatures, inspired by the example of their great leader B. R. Ambedkar and encouraged by the constitutional provisions in favour of social equality, many among them were inclined to abandon the old road of deference in favour of the more rocky path of defiance. This in turn provoked a sometimes nasty reaction from those who persisted in thinking of themselves as social superiors.