HYDERABAD: Third in his books on violence, Manoj Mitta takes his journalistic experience and legal qualifications to analyse some of the reformation laws and impunity that exist in caste violence cases in India in this book.
“Despite the special law, (Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989), why is there so much caste violence in India? Why is there so much impunity, a gap between rhetoric and reality within the judicial system vis-a-vis this subject?” asks Mitta. Citing the example of the Laxmanpur Bathe massacre, Mitta explained how all convicts were acquitted by Patna High court by “dismissing the credibility of the witnesses.”
The book throws light on the struggles of pioneers who tried to bring reforms, including Savitribai Phule, B R Ambedkar, Periyar and Vithalbhai Patel among others. “There are serious issues, faultlines and references to cultural and religious connotations in legal documents. I referred to the Constituent Assembly debates related to the abolition of untouchability, where Ambedkar participated in 1954 as a Rajya Sabha member.
His suggestions were considered to be radical. Slowly they were accepted in letter but not in spirit, as the later instances of impunity prove. Those debates led me to some of the references dating back to the colonial period,” said Mitta.
He said that the volumes of archival material he unearthed through those debates included previously unseen legislative and judicial records pertaining to different aspects of caste, going all the way back two centuries. “It was all hidden in plain sight for everybody to see. Surprisingly no academic engaged with these archives before even despite them being accessible to all,” Mitta said.
He mentioned that in 1918, Vithalbhai Patel, brother of Sardar Vallabhai Patel had introduced a bill to legalise inter-caste marriages in India and to ensure that their children are considered legitimate.
“He received a lot of pushback from an array of big leaders like Madan Mohan Malaviya, who said it would hurt our religious sentiments and Surendra Nath Banerjea. Even someone like Gandhi had reservations about it. He was a different man back then. All these leaders were very much part of Congress as the right-wing we know today didn’t exist at that time,” said Mitta.
In 1948, when reintroduced by Thakur Das Bhargava, a member of the constituent assembly from East Punjab and enacted in 1949. “Then the bill was accepted and the response was different. It wasn’t like what Vithalbhai had to go through. But this does not suggest that the leaders had a change of heart. It was just that they did not have the colonial regime to blame anymore,” Mitta added.
He concluded by saying that the kind of atrocities that were seen post Independence, after the abolition of untouchability, were not there earlier. The notion of purity and pollution was practised in the worst form, with the mere sight of a Dalit not being acceptable to the upper castes.
With this, the moderator Amir Ullah Khan pointed out that only five per cent of marriages in India are inter-caste. The panellist Subhashini Ali said that 30 per cent of all murders in India are caste-based violence. She encouraged the audience members to buy and read the book.
“It is an important book, not only for caste but in the view of the Uniform Civil Code that the present Centre government is advocating. The general feeling in the Hindu community, as far as human rights are concerned, is that they are superior to others,” she said. “It is the practices among upper caste Hindus, highlighting caste privilege that were meant to reform in those times. Whenever such an attempt is made, it is said that Hinduism is being threatened as if Hinduism is all about caste and its hierarchies,” Subhashini said.
Secondly, she added that the idea of marriage being sacrosanct and women being subservient to men is used to uphold caste privilege. “Caste is an atrocious and barbaric part underpinning our society. The greatest defenders pretend it doesn’t exist any more,” she added.
Another panellist, Mohan Guruswamy explained his experiences in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar embedded in the everyday lives of people and a denial of the existence of racial and caste bias which doesn’t enter our discourse. “We are very different people as we go down caste and class hierarchy. There is a clear racial bias. As I noticed in UP, caste is visible in the bodies of the people.”
Sujatha Surepally added to the discussion, saying that in practice, the law protects the perpetrators more than the victims.
“Every time an act of violence happens, the police do not register an FIR unless there are protests and dharnas. Even then, the case will not be filed under the PoA because most police officers do not know what it includes,” she suggested that the book should be translated into local languages and distributed to people in the form of booklets to make the knowledge accessible. She highlighted that escaping caste is not possible as long practices like inter-caste marriages are not encouraged, that too, not among upper castes but between savarnas and Dalits.