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October 23 - October 26, 2024
In order to detach caste from the political economy, from conditions of enslavement in which most Dalits lived and worked, in order to elide the questions of entitlement, land reforms and the redistribution of wealth, Hindu reformers cleverly narrowed the question of caste to the issue of untouchability. They framed it as an erroneous religious and cultural practice that needed to be reformed.
In order to discourage them from converting to Christianity, Lala Mulk Raj Bhalla, a Hindu reformer of the Punjabi Khatri caste, re-baptised them in 1910, and they came to collectively be called Balmikis.
Is this why valmiki jayanti is important?
In his history of the Balmiki workers of Delhi, the scholar Vijay Prashad says when Gandhi staged his visits to the Balmiki Colony on Mandir Marg (formerly Reading Road) in 1946, he refused to eat with the community: ‘You can offer me goat’s milk,’ he said, ‘but I will pay for it. If you are keen that I should take food prepared by you, you can come here and cook my food for me’ . . . Balmiki elders recount tales of Gandhi’s hypocrisy, but only with a sense of uneasiness. When a dalit gave Gandhi nuts, he fed them to his goat, saying that he would eat them later, in the goat’s milk. Most of
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Hypocrisy ki bhi seema hoi hai...
Around this time, Ambedkar started his first journal, Mook Nayak (Leader of the Voiceless). Tilak’s newspaper, Kesari, refused to carry even a paid advertisement announcing the publication of Mook Nayak.
One of the leaders of the Vaikom Satyagraha was George Joseph, a Syrian Christian, and an admirer of Gandhi. Gandhi, on his part, disapproved of a ‘non-Hindu’ intervening in what he believed to be an ‘internal matter’ of the Hindus.194 (The same logic had not applied three years before, when he ‘led’ the Khilafat Movement.)
Let not the people of Vykom or any other place fear that Mahatmaji wants caste abolished. Mahatmaji does not want the caste system abolished but holds that untouchability should be abolished . . . Mahatmaji does not want you to dine with Thiyas or Pulayas. What he wants is that we must be prepared to touch or go near other human beings as you go near a cow or a horse . . . Mahatmaji wants you to look upon so-called untouchables as you do at the cow and the dog and other harmless creatures.
Wow! But this is so brazen that it needs multiple citations
the roads were realigned so that they were no longer within ‘polluting’ distance from the temple.
The contentious portion of the road remained closed to Christians and Muslims as well as avarnas (Untouchables) who continued to have no right to enter the temple.
Twelve years later, in November 1936, the maharaja of Travancore issued the first Temple Entry Proclamation in India.198
TBR
(V.D. Savarkar, out of jail by now, was one of the supporters of the Mahad Satyagraha.)
Suprising
The orthodox Hindus of Mahad approached the sub-judge of the town and got a temporary legal injunction against the Untouchables using the tank.
Would be intwresting to read the arguments and the judgement
(Like the judge who, almost eighty years later, wrote the Khairlanji verdict.)
TBR
mainstream parliamentary politics
What is parliamentary politics?
Today, Adivasis are the barricade against the pitiless march of modern capitalism. Their very existence poses the most radical questions about modernity and ‘progress’—the ideas that Ambedkar embraced as one of the ways out of the caste system. Unfortunately, by viewing the Adivasi community through the lens of Western liberalism, Ambedkar’s writing, which is otherwise so relevant in today’s context, suddenly becomes dated.
Very important discussion about land acquisition via violent means
Tribes like the Ho, the Oraon, the Kols, the Santhals, the Mundas and the Gonds did not wish to be ‘civilized’ or ‘assimilated’.
Today, they are the armed, militant end of a spectrum of struggles. They are waging nothing short of a civil war against the Indian state which has signed over Adivasi homelands to infrastructure and mining corporations.
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‘Physically speaking the Hindus are a C3 people. They are a race of pygmies and dwarfs, stunted in stature and wanting in stamina.’
His views on Adivasis had serious consequences. In 1950, the Indian Constitution made the state the custodian of Adivasi homelands, thereby ratifying British colonial policy. The Adivasi population became squatters on their own land. By denying them their traditional rights to forest produce, it criminalized a whole way of life. It gave them the right to vote, but snatched away their livelihood and dignity.
Adivasis went unrepresented.
Adivasis unrepresented at round table conference
A Scheme of Political Safeguards for the Protection of the Depressed Classes in the Future Constitution of a Self-Governing India.
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the Congress fielded mock candidates who were Untouchables—two cobblers, a barber, a milkman and a sweeper. The idea was that no self-respecting, privileged-caste Hindu would want to be part of an institution where he or she was put on a par with Untouchables.
‘Who will go to the Legislatures? Only barbers, cobblers, potters and sweepers.’ In the processions, one man would utter the question as part of the slogan and the whole crowd would repeat as answer the second part of the slogan.
TBR find out original hindi version
He waited for a month. When he did not get his way, Gandhi began his fast from prison. This fast was completely against his own maxims of satyagraha. It was barefaced blackmail, nothing less manipulative than the threat of committing public suicide.
On the great occasion of the Poona Pact, contradicting the stand he took at the Round Table Conference, Gandhi was quite willing to accept Ambedkar’s signature on the pact as the representative of the Untouchables.
From a Dalit point of view, Gandhi’s assassination could appear to be more a fratricidal killing than an assassination by an ideological opponent.
Mahatma Mandir in Gandhinagar, a spanking new convention hall whose foundation contains sand brought in special urns from each of Gujarat’s 18,000 villages, many of which continue to practise egregious forms of untouchability.
The Poona Pact was meant to defuse or at least delay the political awakening of Untouchables.
So, while the Doctor was searching for a more lasting cure, the Saint journeyed across India distributing a placebo.
Writergiri at display
Guruvayur temple
TBR wht is the status today?
‘This will show,’ Ambedkar writes in his Autobiographical Notes, ‘that a person who is Untouchable to a Hindu, is also Untouchable to a Mohammedan.’
‘The Ideal Bhangi’:
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But that is not all. My ideal Bhangi would know the quality of night soil and urine. He would keep a close watch on these and give timely warning to the individual concerned . . .
Shit alert
‘Such an ideal Bhangi, while deriving his livelihood from his occupation, would approach it only as a sacred duty. In other words, he would not dream of amassing wealth out of it.’
they have certainly not the intelligence to distinguish between Jesus and Mohammed and Nanak and so on . . .
Would you, Dr Mott, preach the Gospel to a cow? Well, some of the untouchables are worse than cows in understanding. I mean they can no more distinguish between the relative merits of Islam and Hinduism and Christianity than a cow.
Twitter pe bolta toh cancel ho jaata
Though Ambedkar had a formidable intellect, he didn’t have the sense of timing, the duplicity, the craftiness and the ability to be unscrupulous—qualities that a good politician needs.
The Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan was gaining traction, and for a while caste identity became less important that the Hindu–Muslim issue.
Keep hinduism fighting external enemies...
After the pogrom, 287 people were arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA). Of them, 286 were Muslim and one was a Sikh.266 Most of them are still in prison.
The massacres of Muslims occurred in several cities and villages in Gujarat. However, Solanki points out that not a single massacre took place in bastis where Dalits and Muslims lived together.
It was extraordinary that, through all the chaos and prejudice, the first law ministers of both India and Pakistan were Dalits.
In 1954, Ambedkar contested his last election as a Scheduled Castes Federation candidate and lost.
Yet the response to temple entry probably taught him how much people long to belong to a spiritual community, and how inadequate a charter of civil rights or a Constitution is to address those needs.
Ambedkar did not have enough money to print his major work on Buddhism, The Buddha and His Dhamma, before he died.275 He wore suits, yes. But he died in debt.
Though they call the age we are living through the Kali Yuga,276 Ram Rajya could be just around the corner.
Writer strikes again...
Gandhi’s approach to big dams is revealed in a letter dated 5 April 1924, in which he advised villagers who faced displacement by the Mulshi Dam, being built by the Tatas to generate electricity for their Bombay mills, to give up their protest
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There has been some success; for example, the Anand Marriage (Amendment) Act, 2012, freed Sikhs from the Hindu Marriage Act. On 20 January 2014, the Union Cabinet approved the notification of Jains as a minority community at the national level.
‘Even those who are of evil birth, women, Vaishyas and Shudras, having sought refuge in me will attain supreme liberation’
