Census, Caste & the Dalit MovementHow Counting People Changed Who They Were

Defining ‘Hinduism’

The census reports gave a concrete definable shape to this concept of religion as community.

• ▹The term “Hinduism” was used historically to convey a wide variety of meanings: in a general sense, it meant anything “native” or “Indian”; in a narrower sense it indicated the high culture or religion of India, especially those of Aryan, Brahmanical or Vedic origin.
• ▹When in the late nineteenth century, Indians were asked to identify their religious status in the census returns, Hinduism in popular perception was still not recognisable as a religion with definable boundaries.
  • In 1881, in the column for ‘religion’, instead of ‘Hindu’, many of them mentioned their sect or caste; such problem of definition continued to haunt the census authorities at least until 1901.
• ▹This Hinduism, therefore, appears to be a colonial construct, not bound by any specific doctrinal definition or not historically attached to any community identity.

The idea of a homogenised Hinduism was constructed

• ▹As Ashis Nandy has argued, by the “cultural arrogance of post-Enlightenment Europe, which sought to define not only the ‘true’ West but also the ‘true’ East”.
• ▹The colonial ethnographic studies and census reports gave a concrete definable shape to this concept of religion as community, and a section of the westernised Indians internalised it into their collective consciousness and developed it into a self-definition.

Relationship between religious groups reconstituted

• ▹The census made religion its fundamental ethnographic category for ordering and classifying demographic and developmental data.
• ▹Each census report sought to give concrete and recognisable shape to the religious communities, by
  • discussing the numerical size of such groups,
  • their percentage to the whole population,
  • relative or absolute decline and geographic distribution,
  • indicating their majority or minority status in each region and in the country as a whole.
• ▹The break-up of literacy and occupational statistics according to religion provided an apparently objective picture of the relative or comparative material and social conditions of each religious community.
  • The result of this census taxonomy was the new concept of “religion as a community”.
• ▹Religion did no longer mean just a set of ideas, but came to be identified with “an aggregate of individuals united by formal official definition”, sharing supposedly the same characteristics, and conscious of their comparative demographic as well as socio-economic position vis-a-vis other communities.
  • This resulted into colonial competition and conflict among subcontinental religious communities.

Background created during colonial rule

• ▹Colonial rule disengaged caste system from its pre-colonial political contexts, but gave it a new lease of life by redefining and revitalising it within its new structures of knowledge, institutions and policies.
• ▹During its non-interventionist phase,
  • It created opportunities, which were “in theory caste-free”. Land became a marketable commodity; equality before law became an established principle of judicial administration; educational institutions and public employment were thrown open to talent, irrespective of caste and creed.
  • Yet the very principle of non-intervention helped maintain the pre-existing social order and reinforced the position of the privileged groups.
  • Moreover, in matters of personal law, the Hindus were governed by the dharmashastra, which upheld the privileges of caste order.
• ▹Some scholars provided a racial dimension to the concept of caste, arguing that the fair skinned higher castes represented the invading Aryans, while the darker lower castes were the non-Aryan autochthons of the land.
• ▹Official legitimacy through the decennial census classification of castes: in 1901, it was proposed to enumerate all castes and record their location in the hierarchy of castes. The public reaction and the rise of voluntary caste associations are set out in Part 1 (Competition among sub-castes).
• ▹The caste associations gradually evolved into tools of modernisation in colonial India. Their goals shifted from sacred to secular ones and, as they tried “to educate … their members in the methods and values of political democracy”.

Protective discrimination

Gradually, the colonial administration initiated a policy of “protective discrimination” in their favour, e.g.:

• ▹provision of special schools for their education and
• ▹reservation of a share of public employment for such candidates and
• ▹finally, provision for special representation of these classes in the legislative councils. This provision was initially through nomination in the Act of 1919, and then through the announcement of separate electorate in the Communal Award of 1932.

Within the Congress fold

• ▹Unlike western and southern India, the dalit movement in Bihar began relatively late.
• ▹From first half of 20th century, dalits in Bihar started to raise their voice through caste associations. But, the Dalits of Bihar remained with Congress with high hopes.
• ▹During this period, Dalit leaders from Bihar such as Jagjivan Ram and Jaglal Chaudhary had been trying to put pressure on the Congress leadership with (what they considered) legitimate and reasonable demands of Dalits.
  • They believed that Congress represented the mainstream political space and that any development of Dalits could be possible only if along with attempts to raise the sense of unity among different Dalit castes, the efforts were made to impress upon the well-intentioned great national leaders of the country.

Impact of the Congress Harijan movement under Gandhiji was also felt in Bihar

• ▹All India Anti-Untouchability League was established in 1932.
• ▹Gandhi undertook ‘Harijan Yatra’ in Bihar in April–May 1934.
• ▹When a massive earthquake hit Bihar in 1934, Gandhiji linked the natural calamity of the earthquake and the social calamity of untouchability.

Sharing power in national parties

• ▹In the post-Independence decades, Dalit leaders in the Congress and Janata Party got to share power as representatives of a caste or community.
• ▹When Babu Jagjivan Ram was the labour minister in the central government, a Labour Act was passed according to which the minimum wages got fixed for labourers.
  • He founded ‘All India Backward Classes Federation’, one of the biggest organisations of the downtrodden people. It works for the interest of backward classes.
• ▹Dalit leaders such as Bhola Paswan Shastri and Ram Sundar Das rose from the grass roots to become chief ministers in Bihar. Both Shastri and Das belonged to mainstream national parties.

Land struggles and grassroots organisations

• ▹The Naxalite movement, which attracted a large number of landless peasants, was the vehicle of Dalit assertion till the 1980s, but the rise of caste and social justice politics led to its marginalisation.
  • The new middle- and upper-class Dalits wedded the slogan of social justice with reservation and employment. This too weakened the Naxalite and communist mobilisations, which were focussed on the issue of land.
• ▹Bihar Dalit Development Organization (Bihar Dalit Vikas Samiti) was founded in Bihar by Jose Kananaikil in 1982.
  • It worked for village level mobilization of Dalit men and women, solidarity building, the educational and economic empowerment of Dalits, and the elimination of caste discrimination.

Caste-based parties after the 1980s

Dalit politicians, who were working in national parties, started to form caste-based parties after the 1980s.

• ▹Dalit assertions came to be mostly centred around the electoral politics of Dalit-Bahujan political groups and parties.
• ▹The phase of social justice politics in Bihar gave these leaders the capacity and space to float their outfits and, thereby, negotiate better bargains with bigger parties.
• ▹For instance, Ram Vilas Paswan, who was a leading figure in the anti-Emergency movement and the Janata party, founded his own party — the Lok Janshakti Party — in 2000.
• ▹As Mahadalit politics found resonance in recent years, leaders like Jitan Ram Manjhi, a member of the most marginalised Musahar caste, split from the Janata Dal (United) to form the Hindustani Awam Morcha.
• ▹Similarly, Vikassheel Nishad Party by Mukesh Sahani.

Weaknesses of Dalit politics in Bihar

• ▹In Bihar, there is absence of a Dalit ideological campaign which was the case in some other parts of India under the inspiring leadership of Ambedkar.
• ▹Further, Dalit politics in Bihar continues to be dependent on mainstream parties. It has mainly been a politics of negotiation for a “good deal” from mainstream political parties in terms of seats in a pre-poll alliance, and share in the government. In return, the transfer of caste and community votes was promised.
  • Most of the Dalit leaders of Bihar command support of only their caste and subcaste members. Leaders such as Ram Vilas Paswan, Shyam Rajak and Jitan Ram Manjhi claim that they can transfer votes of their caste.
  • However, previous poll results indicate that these leaders cannot transfer more than 40 per cent of caste votes.
• ▹The Ambedkarite radical consciousness is weaker in the Dalit politics of Bihar and Dalit assertion at the grass roots continues to be weak.
  • Traditionally in Bihar, dalit social mobilisation arose in a few urban pockets and did not penetrate into rural areas. In rural areas, Dalit organisation was weak because Dalits, substantially dependent on the landed elite, were less likely to turn to political parties on their own.
  • So, historically, Dalits were not fully mobilized; their symbols were missing in electoral mobilisation, and parties did not recruit Dalit party workers.
  • Lately, dalit parties benefited from this absence, and all this changed with their arrival. Dalits came to be mobilised through their symbols and Dalit localities now had presence of political party workers.