Dalit-Muslim unity rattles Hindutva Idiots

by Guest Sat Sep 10, 2016 10:35 am

What has completely unnerved the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is the spectre of Dalit-Muslim unity and a potential fissure in the Hindu fold. The varna values cherished by the RSS are increasingly in the line of target of modern Dalits.

The coming together of Dalits and Muslims marks a new departure for both groups. This unity is arguably precipitated by the similarities in the socio-economic marginalisation faced by both communities in Gujarat. Muslims have found themselves ghettoised and on the margins for decades as communal fires raged in unending cycles. The Gujarat Dalit had till date not joined any protests. “The RSS and BJP took Dalits for granted in Gujarat. They were perceived as placid, unable to mount a challenge and happy to be co-opted into the Hindutava project with any crumbs that were thrown their way,” says a political analyst and veteran Dalit watcher from Lucknow University.

When they became the target of gau rakshaks, Dalits in Gujarat suddenly realised that they shared their plight with the Muslims, a large number of whom are Dalit converts, such as the weavers (julahas). The huge losses in the leather industry, traditionally manned by Dalits and Muslims, is another telling testimony of their shared pain. The protesting 30 Dalit organisations reached out to the large weavers’ network and attempted to forge an alliance. Mevani was one of the prime movers. It is still a loose alliance, at best, as the Muslims currently don’t have any leaders to give the alliance a more organised form.

Meanwhile, the germ of this alliance has intrigued Mayawati enough to make it a talking point in her UP poll campaign; additionally, the BSP has given a record number of tickets to Muslims.

Narendra Modi’s reluctant attack on the gau rakshaks reflected the growing unease in the BJP. The Prime Minister had insisted that the so-called gau rakshaks could attack him but not the Dalits. This is a strange statement to make for an elected executive with enormous powers at his command. Modi did not say a word about the attacks on Muslims, not even offering them this token palliative. The mother ship RSS, too, has issued a gag order to the hotheads of the larger parivar in view of electoral exigencies.

The emergence of Dalit-Muslim unity is a terrifying prospect for the RSS. Senior BJP leader and former RSS pracharak P Murlidhar Rao warned the Dalit communities that the “unity between the two is not sustainable and it has been historically proven that whenever these two communities get together, Dalits get wiped out”. He went on to cite the example of Pakistan. “Look at Pakistan. Where are the Dalits there? Dalits are part of Indian ethnicity. Dalits are part of India since the beginning,” he said at a function organised by Bharat Niti, a policy advocacy platform of the BJP and RSS on Dalit entrepreneurship.

The RSS’s unease has been growing from the time of Vemula’s suicide. His poignant suicide note, which declared that “my birth was my tragic accident’’, and the huge resonance it found, even leading to his family embracing Buddhism, had sent shockwaves across the RSS. When defence minister (MoS) VK Singh compared two dead Dalit children to dogs, the discomfort was greatly evident among the senior BJP leaders in UP.

They were as disturbed by Irani’s act of wagging her finger at Mayawati and, in true soap opera fashion, offering to cut off her head even as she misled Parliament on the facts of Vemula’s suicide. This, in fact, put paid to Irani’s dream of being the BJP’s UP CM face. It was also one of the reasons for her ouster from the HRD ministry.

As the genie of “controlled polarisation” comes uncorked from the bottle, those responsible for it don’t quite know how to control it any more. The former BJP minister-turned-trenchant Modi critic Arun Shourie made a prescient and candid observation on the Dalit protest movement and the government’s handling of it. “One of the instruments is headline management. So something bad happens in Kashmir; something bad happens in Gujarat such as the Dalits doing this protest, withdrawing cooperation; what does the government do? You plant another story or stories. Everybody runs these because you have a tutored media. Next morning you are not concerned about Kashmir or Gujarat, you are congratulating yourself on your success in diverting the media’s attention. It compounds the problem. It means that you will not pay attention to the fire that you have set. You don’t think there is a disaster there, you are busy celebrating a success. Your obsession is the media, not the situation.”

The RSS finds itself in a cleft — it cannot countenance any divisions in the Hindu Samaj, and yet it cannot be seen to compromise on the issue of cow protection. Ram Madhav, BJP general secretary, insisted that condemning all gau rakshaks alike was a move loaded with negativity. “Gau rakshaks is not a pejorative term. Even the PM only mentioned the fake ones trying to use the term for criminal activity,” he said. And this, precisely, is the problem.

The gau rakshaks continue attacking Dalits and Muslims even after Modi’s comments. It’s an uncontrolled polarisation that flies in the face of the stated wishes of the strong leader.

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/cover/the-death-of-a-cow-the-birth-of-a-movement/article9086013.ece