Open Forum
New Delhi, 13 September 2018
Nomenclature Dalit
NAME DOES MATTER
By Dr S.Saraswathi
(Former Director, ICSSR, New Delhi)
Following a Bombay High Court order, the
Union Information and Broadcasting Ministry has issued an advisory to all
private satellite channels asking them to refrain from using the term “Dalit”. It
is follow up of an advisory from the Union Ministry of Social Justice to all
State governments in March this year that they should use the term “Scheduled
Castes” in official communication, and not “Dalit”, which is not a Constitutionally
accepted name.
Opinion even within the government seems to
be divided on this sensitive issue. “What is in a name?” -- is a meaningless
query. Everything is in a name and that is why we are keen on changing names and
some States even set up a separate department to handle name changing activity.
The leader of the Republican Party of India
and Union Minister Ramdas Athawale, as per press reports, may be approaching
the Supreme Court against the directive of the Bombay High Court. He has the
backing of a number of activists and civil society organisations, who are
opposed to any change in the usage of the name “Dalit”.
To them, ‘Dalit’ connotes much more than a
group of castes, and indicates a community that is fighting for equal status. It
symbolises a long struggle going on for social elevation, which cannot be conveyed
in the term “Scheduled Castes”, which denotes nothing more than an official
list of castes eligible for preferential treatment for certain purposes under
the Constitution.
It all started after the Gwalior Bench of
Madhya Pradesh High Court on 23rd January this year banned the usage
of the term “Dalit” especially in official communications of governments. In
dealing with a PIL, the court held that only Constitutionally accepted
terminologies should be used and “Dalit” is not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution.
Politicians and the general public obviously
never bothered to define the name “Dalit” -- the former perhaps deliberately to
keep room for politics by keeping terms vague and undefined and the latter by
sheer ignorance and indifference. The name has come into common use after the
1970s.
The name is Samskrit in origin meaning
divided, split, broken, scattered, crushed connotes a state of weakness,
poverty, and humiliation. Significantly, the term is being used not only to
refer to some castes, but also applied in various fields like Dalit Litrature,
Dalit poets, Dalit Scholars, Dalit Parties, Dalit Culture and so on to make
confusion most confounded.
Since 1900, several names have come into use
in the census operations to denote classes considered as “untouchables” in the
old order collectively. Adi Dravidas, Adi Andhras, and Adi Karnataka – names
showing their antiquity in the land – were coined in southern India where the
Non-Brahmin Movement took firm roots. Officially, the term Depressed Classes,
was used as a collective name and continued in official use between 1920 and
1935, without specific definition of the term, but broadly on the criterion of
“untouchability”.
Enumeration of population under this category
was done in 1921 and 1931. The list of castes classified as “depressed” in the
Census of 1931 was renamed as “Scheduled Classes” for purposes of franchise in
1935 for whom seats were reserved in the Legislative Councils and the Assembly.
While census included only “untouchables” as
depressed classes, official welfare programmes were extended to several
deprived communities not officially recognized as “depressed”. After the
Government of India Act of 1935 that listed “Scheduled Classes”, the turn under
Reservation Policy, then called “Communal GO” in the then Madras Presidency was
restricted to them, while ameliorative schemes were given to bigger group of
Depressed Classes. Blurring of the line between the two categories was
deliberately created.
Gandhiji, in the thick of Constitutional
Reforms forced in the 1930s, when the question of caste divisions assumed
vigor, christened those considered as “untouchables” in the old social order as
“Harijans” (meaning “children of God”). The term received instantaneous
rejection by Ambedkar and several other political leaders from these
communities as giving an impression that they were lowly and helpless. One of
the arguments was that it was the right of the castes concerned to choose their
name and others had no right to give them a label.
At that time, Ambedkar explained their state
as “dalithood” which was defined as “a kind of life conditions which characterize
the exploitation, suppression, and marginalization by the social, economic,
cultural, and political domination of the upper castes’ Brahmanical ideology”. Dalitism is a derivative from this.
Twenty-five years after Independence, a more
radical movement was started by two activists in Maharashtra – Namdev Dasal and
J.V.Pawar – who formed the Dalit Panthers in 1972. Taking the example of Black
Panthers of America, they led a fight for their rights to equality and equal
status. They proclaimed that their goal was not simply “a little place in a
Brahmin alley, but the rule of the whole country”.
Dalit Panthers issued a manifesto in 1973 in
which the nomenclature “Dalit” was defined as
“members of the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, neo-Buddhists, the
working people, landless and poor peasants, women and all those who have been
exploited politically, economically, and in the name of religion”.
Thus, the coverage under the name “Dalit”
expanded to include besides the former “untouchable” castes, many other castes
and classes backward by social, economic,
educational, occupational, and ritual status, thus ignoring caste
distinction and inequality between them and helping emergence of a “majority”
bound by a sense of deprivation. Caste and class were intertwined but not
fully.
In 1977, Dalit Panthers were disbanded, but
by that time the movement had spread and became the patron of the concept of “social
justice”. The enlarged “Dalit” category by then became a useful political
group.
Bahujan Samaj Party was formed in this context by
Kanshi Ram (1934-2006) in 1978. Pertinent is the claim of being “bahujan” (meaning
majority) – a numerical status important in democracy. It is politically advantageous for Dalits to
claim majority by number so that their minority status in power and positions
will look all the more striking and unjust.
Hence, the trend has always been to expand
the coverage under the term “Dalit”. The BSP claims to represent Scheduled Castes, Scheduled
Tribes, Other Backward Classes, and Religious Minorities like Sikhs, Muslims,
Christians, Parsis, and Buddhists with focus on uplifting the “downtrodden”. As
a political party, its interests lie in expanding its clientele to enlarge its
social base.
In this historical background, critics are
prone to read in the advisory to replace the name “Dalit” by “Schedule Castes”
an attempt to reverse the movement for empowerment of these marginalised groups
overlooking the reality that usage of the term “Dalit’ can be and has been
stretched or contracted as convenient.
If officially recognised Scheduled Castes
wish to adopt the label “Dalit”, it has to be done officially by an amendment
of the Constitution. It should exclude “Scheduled Tribes” and all other
Backward Classes. Loose application of the name for political and social
advantages or even in the media to refer generally to backward classes must end
once official definition is adopted. Only then, misuse of the term “Dalit” like
“weaker sections” in the 1960s will vanish.---INFA
(Copyright, India
News & Feature Alliance)
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