Dharmapuri 2012: Worse Than Kilvenmani By Dr Anand Teltumbde
11 November, 2012
(Dr Anand Teltumbde is a writer, political analyst and civil rights activist with CPDR, Mumbai.)
My friend Prof C
Lakshmanan called me today from the ground zero in Dharmapuri narrating
in his choked voice the horrific state of things in three villages -
Natham, Anna Nagar and Kondampatti, where nearly 500 houses of Dalits
were looted and burnt by the Vanniyar (an OBC caste) mob on 7 November.
Lakshmanan was part of a fact finding team that had just reached the
site of devastation. I had known of it from a sms I received from an
activist on 8 November and subsequently from the scanty reports from
newspapers. And still I felt shaken to the bones.
The immediate cause for the caste violence was the
love marriage between a Parayar boy, Ilavarasan, 23 and a Vanniyar girl,
Divya, 20 that took place a month ago. The girl’s family approached the
police, and the police counseled both parties that the marriage was
valid. Meanwhile the Vanniyars from 30 villages had a meeting and
discussed the matter. They held a ‘kangaroo’ court at Nayakkankottai
village the previous week and directed the Dalit family to return the
woman on Wednesday but Divya refused to obey and made it clear that she
would live with Ilavarasan. Dharmapuri SP Asra Garg knew about this all
and said that the police were searching for those who took part in it.
On 6 November 2012, the girl’s father G Nagarajan (48) suddenly died at
his residence in Sellankottai, not far from the Natham Dalit colony. The
Vanniyars claimed that he died because he could not digest that his
daughter married a Parayar guy. But Dalits felt that he was murdered by
Vanniyars to have an alibi for action against them. The memory of the
recent shock at the statement of Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) MLA J Guru,
who heads the Vanniyar Sangam, the first avatar of the PMK, at a
community meeting forbidding the inter-caste marriages, had not yet
faded. This public meeting inspired the OBCs across Tamil Nadu to decide
against the OBC girls marring Dalit boys, whatever the consequences.
Also, the Kongu Vellala Goundergal Peravai, which claims to represent
the community, issued advertisements in newspapers calling a meeting of
community members to oppose inter-caste marriages and launched a
campaign against it. All this is well known to the state. Therefore the
incident should be seen in the context of such a casteist build up in
the recent past.
The autopsy on the body of Nagarajan was delayed
reportedly because of frequent power cuts, and the body was handed over
to his relatives only on Thursday evening. Around the same time, a mob
of over 2,500 people attacked Dalit houses in Natham, Anna Nagar and
Kondampatti. The Administration, anticipating trouble, had stationed a
300 strong police posse in the villages but it is simply said they were
outnumbered by the mob. This weird logic for police inaction has gone
unquestioned so far even though there is no evidence that the police
ever resisted the attackers. It could have been plausible if there were
some injuries on the police side but there was none. The police
proffering this absurd logic perhaps want to say that there should be as
many policemen as the population of the country to maintain law and
order. The truth was, as the Dalits reported, that the police remained
mute spectators as they normally did, when the mob looted valuables and
then set the houses on fire. There were only old people, women and
children in houses, all young people having gone to work in Begaluru and
Thirupur. They fled to fields and forests or nearby villages. It was
all well planned, despite the police knowing it. The miscreants had
blocked the roads with huge trees felled across, so that the fire
tenders did not reach the villages. The orgy went over nearly for five
hours and ended by 9.30 pm by which time everything was reduced to
ashes. The Police claimed that the situation was brought under control
after an additional 1,000 personnel were deployed and more than 90
people arrested. Cases had been registered against 210 others. If there
were only 300 culprits to be charged, the question remains how the
police were outnumbered. The chief minister announced compensation of Rs
50,000 to each family that lost houses and belongings and issued usual
sterile statements that a severe action would be taken against those
responsible for the violence.
It is notable that this violence has occurred in
hamlets which used to have a strong presence of the left movement.
Dharmapuri district was once the headquarters of the naxalite movement
in Tamil Nadu. It is revealing that as the naxalite movement is on
decline, casteism has raised its ugly head in the district. Vanniyars
and Dalits economically are not very different but it is the prowess of
the poisonous castes that they violently clashed many times
notwithstanding the enlightened statements and actions of their leader
S. Ramadoss. It may be said to his credit and also of Thol
Tirumavalavan, the leader of Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi, a Dalit
party in North Tamil Nadu that there is a bit of communal amity between
Dalits and OBCs in North compared to South tamil Nadu. But the upsurge
of obscurantist and rank casteist forces from among the Vanniyars amply
show that such patch up across castes do not mean the demise of the
caste consciousness. It just means its temporary suppression. The best
insurance against this poison is to annihilate it altogether with
alternate idiom of class. Difficult though it may sound to very many
well meaning people too, there does not seem to be any other solution to
the problem.
The Tamil Nadu Untouchability Eradication Front
floated by the CPM has been doing a good work in Tamil Nadu. It sent its
team to Dharmapuri and raised very sensible demands as not even the
established Dalit Party has done. Indeed, the issue in Dharmapuri is to
rehabilitate Dalits properly. It is shame that the ruling parties who
are the trend setter in shamelessly distributing television sets and
laptops and household appliances, announce pittance of Rs. 50,000 as
compensation taking alibi of the SC/ST Act, which otherwise is observed
more in its violation. The said compensation is meant for the sufferance
of atrocity and not for the loss of property. It is the obligation of
the government which has failed to protect Dalits to compensate for
their losses in addition to compensation for the agony that they have
undergone. The Front’s demands that the Government should build decent
houses for the victims, it should provide compensation for actual losses
suffered; provide for due police protection; restore their documents;
and take care of their children’s education are therefore most
endorsable. It may be tempting to advise the Front as an outfit of the
communist party that they should now scale up their efforts and think in
terms of uniting people on class lines while creatively taking up
anti-caste fights.
The incident is reminiscent of the massacre in
Kilvenmeni more than four decades ago although there has not been any
loss of life in Dharmapuri. On 25 December 1968 the goons of the
landlords had similarly torched a Dalit hamlet there and killed 44
hapless Dalits, mostly women and children, inaugurating what I call a
new genre of atrocities in the post-independent India. One could
sensibly analyze and attribute it to the changes in political economy
that befell the countryside because of the capitalist strategy of
development followed by the so called Nehruvian socialist regime with
half-baked land reforms and green revolution. This strategy created a
class of rich farmers out of the erstwhile shudra caste (read today’s
BC/OBC) peasants as an important ally of and political buffer for the
ruling classes at the centre and transformed Dalits to be pure
proletariat dependent on the wage labour, sans security of the jajmani
system. This class of rich farmers assumed the baton of Brahmanism, the
upper caste landlords having left villages to nearby towns smelling
greening pastures there. This class, enriched and empowered in a flash
lacked in cultural sophistication of the traditional upper castes, had
numbers at its command using its caste ties. The contradictions of new
agrarian economy between them and Dalits as wage labourers, often
manifesting through faultlines of castes, resulted in caste atrocities
in a carnival mode. Kilvenmani was the inaugural piece which would be
followed by many of its kind later.
Kilvenmani took a toll of 44 lives of poor Dalits.
Those days Dalits did not have much to lose than their lives. In 2012,
two generations after Kilvenmani, the state of society is not the same.
The villages in 1960s may have had a few pucca houses belonging to a
landlord and his kin but today they have many, even belonging to Dalits,
not necessarily signifying increasing equality but surely elevated
cultural levels, thanks to the spread of education and more so, the
television reach. The relative gap between Dalits and others may have
gone up but surely Dalits do not look their dilapidated selves as their
parents. They have striven hard to better their and their children’s
lives. Most Dalits in Dharmapuri slogged in the construction industry in
Bangalore and sweat shops of Thirupur and had invested their earnings
to have better houses for their families left behind. Their houses and
their contents objectified their lives. Not only theirs but also of
their families. Destruction of this investment is equivalent to the
destruction of all Dalits in those burnt houses. The Dalit property and
not Dalit lives therefore came handy for inflicting maximum damage in
order to ‘teach lesson’ to the defiant Dalits, which is the basic
objective behind caste atrocities.
In this sense, Dharmapuri should be taken as worse
than Kilvenmani. In 1960s, the Dalit movement could be said to be in
making. Today it is in unmaking. The representational logic has come
full circle. Despite having had always a houseful Dalit representation
in parliament and legislature assemblies and having produced a sizable
middle class that has reached every nook and corner of the governance
structure, it has been of little use to Dalit masses who have been left
behind. Neoliberalism has already sung a requiem to its representational
logic. The intellectuals who should fearlessly put forth truth before
people are engaged in befuddling reality with ‘cartoon controversies’.
Dharmapuri cries out for answers to these and many such questions.
Dr Anand Teltumbde is a writer, political analyst and civil rights activist with CPDR, Mumbai.
கருத்துகள் இல்லை:
கருத்துரையிடுக