Marika Vicziany

The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India

Glossary 1. Who are the Untouchables? 2. The question of the Harijan atrocity 3. Religion, politics and the Untouchables from the nineteenth century to 1956 4. Public policy I: adverse discrimination and compensatory discrimination 5. Public policy II: the anti-poverty programs 6. The new Untouchable proletariat: a case study of the Faridabad stone quarries 7. Untouchable politics and Untouchable politicians since 1956 8. The question of reservation: lives and careers of some scheduled castes MPs and MLAs 9. Subordination, poverty and the state in modern India Bibliography Index.

The Untouchables: Religion, politics and the Untouchables from the nineteenth century to 1956

We have argued that the basis of much of the contemporary violence surrounding Untouchables is a conscious resistance to oppression. Consciousness of oppression may well be as old as the system of Untouchability itself, but the conditions for its development into militancy were put in place only during the period of direct British rule after the uprising of 1857. The present chapter sets out to explore this period, particularly the crucial quarter-century before Independence. This was the period dominated by Gandhi and Ambedkar. The narrative is a tangled skein of religion and politics: both Gandhi and Ambedkar ultimately committed themselves to an essentially religious solution to the task of attacking Untouchability. Gandhi was broadly consistent in his attitudes to the Untouchable question throughout his political life, though his commitment and tactics varied. The Untouchability of what Gandhi came to call ‘Harijans’ or ‘People of God’ was for him an historical corruption of Hinduism. It would be cured by caste Hindus purging themselves of the immorality that had insinuated itself into the pure body of Hinduism. Untouchables would join their fellow Hindus in a reborn equality. Ambedkar, on the other hand, moved through several distinct phases in his thinking. One of his first campaigns in the late 1920s was an effort to force Hindu temples in Maharashtra to open their doors to Untouchables. But by the time Gandhi endorsed this strategy in the 1930s, Ambedkar had abandoned it. By then Ambedkar saw Hinduism as irredeemable, as having an essential and not merely an historical association with dehumanising discrimination.

The Untouchables: Who are the Untouchables?

This book is about a grouping of some 150 million people who belong to particular castes at the very bottom of Indian society. Although caste identity is the basis on which the subject has been constructed, this is only incidentally a work about caste as a cultural phenomenon. Our main preoccupations are with subordination and poverty, class, politics (including violent politics), the state and public policy. But equally, it is not possible to understand the situation of the Untouchables by exclusive reference to broad categories of analysis that treat them as simply one of many cases of subordination within India or elsewhere. The Untouchables may be capable of comparison with other social groupings but they remain a highly distinctive cultural and moral community. Two broad propositions are fundamental to the present work. The first is that the Untouchables are among the very bottom elements of Indian society in both status and economic terms; and the second is that they have undergone a profound change in their view of themselves and the society around them. Whatever the truth of past assertions that the Untouchables accepted their own inferiority, it is our view that in recent years there has been a greatly enhanced mood of assertiveness about their human and political rights. A large part of this book will be taken up with expounding the basis of these two judgments. But before this is done, we need to justify our construction of the subject itself. It has to be said that the basis on which this work is constructed is not currently fashionable.

The Untouchables: Public policy II: the anti-poverty programs

Our consistent argument is that the condition of the Untouchables can only be adequately conceived by reference to two interlocking forms of subordination: ritual, cultural and broader social debasement on the one hand, and poverty on the other. This chapter examines thinking and programs directed specifically to the economic condition of the poor, among whom the Untouchables represent a large chunk. Our preoccupation is with the failure of measures that might have led to markedly less poverty than there is in India today, but we also consider the relative successes. We examine health and food policy, and the meaning of the phrase that ‘India can now feed itself’ the relative absence of modern social welfare; the implications of the failure to pursue land redistribution more vigorously; the inability of the Indian state to deliver fully on anything other than crisis management; and the weaknesses of the anti-poverty programs that were eventually introduced in the 1980s. We look at how different States have dealt with poverty, and how Untouchables have fared in these varying circumstances. Finally, we consider the question of the overall progress of the Untouchables. The post-Independence regime has failed to bring about a systematic redistribution of resources in favour of those at the bottom of society, and it has also failed to pursue a consistent, albeit non-radical, strategy of supplying ‘basic needs’ (health, education and simple welfare) to the poor. Supplying basic needs would not have transformed the condition of the Untouchables – the evidence from Kerala tends to prove this – but it would have made a powerful difference.