Caste: ‘Theft of imagination’

Illustration/Uday Mohite

In A landmark ruling last Thursday, a Supreme Court Constitution Bench, including the Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud, held that Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) can be sub-classified by States, to provide reservation quotas for the less privileged among them. This is by way of evidence-based affirmative action. Four judges also favoured excluding the "creamy layer", or relatively economically better off, from the SCs and STs. Justice Pankaj Mithal also recommended that SC/ST reservation be limited to the first generation, if they reach a higher status through reservation. The ruling will open a can of worms, and refocus attention on the long standing demand for a caste-based census, which the government is fiercely resisting. India's last declared caste census was in 1931; the 2011 census figures were not officially made public. But a Pew survey found that an overwhelming 68 per cent of India's population were marginalised castes in 2021.

Affirmative action reform and implementation is long overdue in India, where there is increasing discrimination and violence against SCs/Dalits/STs. Yet, caste discrimination is international: a United Nations report said at least 250 million people worldwide faced caste discrimination, across religions, in 2016. In the US, Seattle was the first US jurisdiction to ban caste discrimination in February 2023. The California Assembly passed an anti-caste discrimination bill last August, but its governor vetoed it. Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Dalit American Founder-Executive Director of Equality Labs, a Dalit rights group based in Oakland, California, is one of the key leaders of the movement to end caste in the US (and India), including this initiative. Her sustained advocacy included a hunger strike, along with others. She refers to an Indian National Human Rights Commission report, which reveals that there is a crime against a Dalit every 18 minutes; and 67 per cent of Dalit women have experienced sexual violence. Dalits do not have free access to drinking water, to the temple, to eat with others, or even to enter a police station or get mail delivery. And imagine, the average life of a Dalit woman is just 39 years. In the US, her Equality Labs has created a landmark report, Caste in the United States, that emphatically confirmed the presence of caste discrimination in the US, and was a key basis for the legal action. Caste violence takes many forms, she observes, including murder, suicide, sexual violence, cyber hatred, and equally devastatingly, "the theft of the imagination." So Equality Labs also conducts Unlearning Caste Supremacy workshops.

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Thenmozhi Soundararajan is what one might call a new Dalit, a far cry from the stereotype of a diffident figure hovering in the background for scraps. She's a feisty Dalit activist and feminist who has come out as Dalit, is outspoken, driven by a vision of caste equity, and yes, is attractive; her insta handle is @dalitdiva. It's a good time to revisit her book The Trauma of Caste: A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing and Abolition (North Atlantic Books, California, 2022, Rs 699), that exposes caste oppression in the US and South Asia. She aligns the movement for freedom of Dalits with the movement for emancipation of Blacks, calling it "caste abolition". Through the Women of Color Resource Center, and others, she has built solidarities with BIPOC feminists, including Blacks, Latinx, Asian, Indigenous and non-binary people, and learnt the power of being the Other, of owning that power.

Of course her movement has been severely opposed, and she has been abused by caste supremacists, who deny that caste and discrimination exist, forbid the use of those words, falsely claim that caste is a colonial institution, and worse. As a way forward, she recommends "debrahminization" - not eliminating Brahmins, but - she quotes activist Prachi Patankar--by supporting Dalit-Bahujan leadership and anti-caste movements. Yet, she astutely observes that you cannot be violent with another, without that violent power showing up in your own family, relationships, home and body. "Because to ‘other' another is to lose your own humanity," she writes. Above all, she sums up, "Our dhamma is the duty to be free."

Meenakshi Shedde is India and South Asia Delegate to the Berlin International Film Festival, National Award-winning critic, curator to festivals worldwide and journalist.
Reach her at meenakshi.shedde@mid-day.com