After Rohith Vemula: Is the Dalit-Muslim Unity Sustainable?

After the dastardly attacks at Una, marked by the public assault of Dalits allegedly by vigilantes, a more promising unity between the Dalits and Muslims had emerged attempting to ameliorate common physical attacks.¹ However, we need to introspect if this momentary unity has the potential to convert itself into a more sustainable one, which would signify a tectonic shift in Indian politics by arresting the unchecked rise of the far-Right politics. This unity is perhaps the best guarantee India has to make its democracy vibrant and inclusive.

One needs to interrogate the nature of popular culture and public morality to get a clue as to whether or not this unity is sustainable and also to ask ourselves how to make it a more permanent feature of India’s mobilization history since this idea of the unity itself is not new. It has existed in the margins and repeatedly failed to become the cornerstone of democratic politics.

In an extremely segregated and hierarchized society like ours, politics is more or less pragmatic, while the theory of politics is normative. The subaltern groups and those who mobilize and rule in their name hardly have the social gestation to construct a politics on formidable political principles but rather have to cater to the here and now of politics that changes faster than most of us imagine or are comfortable with. The generic pragmatism of the popular culture that is common to both the governing groups as well as the governed is, in fact, the glue for popular mobilization in India.

There are however moments such as Rohith Vemula’s death and attacks in Una that compel us sometimes to revisit the template of that pragmatism. Such moments of attempting to achieve a more sustainable basis for alternative politics have to repeatedly confront what is already instituted as part of our popular culture and public morality, which is fraught with prejudice, humiliation, stigma, and the eternal urge to escape them.

Pragmatism and Prejudice

Gandhi is perhaps the best example to cite for such a phenomenon and why it is such an extensive part of our common sense that he emerged as an important figure in Indian history. The way we collectively evaluate politics and politicians is intriguing and eventually determines the political possibilities. Much of what Right-wing groups such as the BJP, RSS, and others do seem to have some sanction in this popular culture. It is intriguing to see how the BJP, which was vying for the Dalit votes in the elections in Gujarat and UP, had no compunction in arresting Jignesh, as a preventive detention, before Prime Minister Modi was to arrive in Gujarat to celebrate his birthday.² Similarly, Amit Shah announced that the promise to deposit 15 lakh rupees in the accounts of the poor across the nation was merely an election jumlebaazi.³

In hierarchized societies like ours, political power has a unique place because it is believed to be the best guarantee against the vulnerability. Whether it is Dalits or the Muslims, they depend on political power, and therefore, they understand the compulsions that accompany the process of maintaining and gaining it. The very nature of even the oppositional politics has the unmistakable imprint of this pragmatism—whether it is Dalits demanding the post of the High priest of Tirupati or feminists demanding legal rights for the sex workers only manifest how politics has had a pragmatic turn. Much of this, of course, has to do with the failures of the ‘Congress kind of’ umbrella accommodation of conflicting social groups, the centrist nature of the polity they ushered in, and the failures of the Nehruvian-developmental state. Therefore, in evaluating politics, subaltern social groups such as the Dalits, Muslims, OBCs, and others would work themselves within the limits of the prism of this pragmatism. They at times look more comfortable and forgiving towards the overt prejudice and bullying tactics of the far Right as against the covert discrimination that might continue within the Left and other forms of progressive politics. Left and progressive politics are gauged through more formidable public standards than the mainstream, and more so, Right-wing parties. The known devil is far better than an unknown one. BJP, therefore, can think of still appropriating Ambedkar in spite of Rohith Vemula’s death and attacks in Una. It is possible because they believe that resistance can be de-incentivized, because memory in politics is short-lived, and because there is a need for mobility more than a need for resistance.

It is in this context of a ‘compulsive pragmatism’ that has besieged Indian politics, more so in the last two decades, that we need to evaluate if the emergent Dalit-Muslim unity can ever become a more sustainable feature of Indian politics. The reality as it exists is that there are ensuing conflicts between the Dalits and the Muslims across the country. In India, there is the ‘problem of proximity’; the closer your living conditions, the more the incompatibility. This is not true just of Dalits and Muslims but also true of the relations between various sub-castes of the Dalits, between the Dalits and the OBCs, and between Dalits and the tribals. In a stigmatized society, the easy option to ameliorate one’s position is to distance oneself from that stigma and shift it to other vulnerable groups.

By and large, Muslims have emerged as that permanent ‘other’, distancing and targeting them comes as a relief not merely to the caste-Hindus but also to the various subaltern social groups. It is, therefore, more plausible to forge a political unity to achieve political power between the Dalits and the Muslims but much more difficult to sustain it as a social phenomenon because prejudices are bound to re-emerge once the moment of crisis is overcome. Overcoming social prejudices needs a more sustained effort and electoral dynamics, and the perpetual crisis of the vulnerability rarely allows us that kind of social gestation it requires. The task of taking on social prejudices will continue to remain a political agenda that we seem to have collectively abdicated, after the experiments that Gandhi took up during the anti-colonial struggle. Without a social agenda, there cannot possibly be anything that can be referred to as radical politics.

Electoral Politics and Compulsive Pragmatism

Radical politics of all hues is under stress, and by and large, waning. Among a maze of reasons is also the fact that we have realized, at the turn of the century, that we actually never knew how to bring about radical social change and what we knew was abysmally little. Our ideals never matched our techniques, and the techniques we knew were swallowed by the imperatives of everyday life. All idealism seems to stop at the doorstep of pragmatism, not because we always collectively will that, but because nobody seems to have the keys to get past. Best of intentions and best of political mobilizations repeatedly pale into the horizon, and what remains is a faint memory of the glorious and somewhat heroic days. Memory is mostly the future we wish for rather than history as it happened. There is an impending need to comprehend the substance of why politics, including Dalit politics, that began with an exhaustive social agenda of overcoming caste prejudices, has taken a compulsively pragmatic turn, and why, as a result, social agenda has been supplanted by ‘pure politics’.

Sociologist Hugo Gorringe in his recent book Panthers in Parliament makes one such attempt to understand the pragmatic turn and gives us a closer look at why political movements that begin in radical registers, with a sense of impatience towards questions of routine and insidious modes of injustice, are soon consumed by those very processes of routine and normalization.

Gorringe offers a fine account of how the Liberation Panthers (Viduthalai Chiruthaigal) of Tamil Nadu led by Thirumavalavan converted itself in the 1990s into the Liberation Panther Party (Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi-VCK), after decades of boycott of elections, as they believed that polls represented the same casteist practices as the rest of the social processes. However, they reverted their decision once they mobilized a sizeable support among the Dalits of Tamil Nadu, in order to realize the dream of gaining political power to affect social change.

In fact, this in many ways was what Ambedkar had also suggested to the Dalits that without seizing political power, overcoming caste discrimination would always remain a distant goal.

However, whenever Dalits, including for instance the experiment of the BSP, have forged a political party, they seem to moderate their goals, minimize their strategies, and eventually lose their potential to mobilize. This is true of many other political mobilizations, and not just the Dalits. India Against Corruption movement, led by Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal too exploded onto the social scene, and many well-meaning social activists and academics believed this was a turning point in Indian politics, only to be disappointed by the shape it took, especially after it converted into a political party.

Gorringe lucidly explains how ‘social mobilization and protest is time-consuming, risky, and costly’⁴ and cannot be self-sustaining for too long. Individuals involved tend to lose steam, energy, and also their determination. The enthusiasm for the ‘take-off’ phase of the movements gives way to stagnation, ideas become clichéd, and slogans begin to sound repetitive.

In order to keep the issue alive against such odds, political movements become bureaucratic and depend heavily on front-ranking leaders. The leaders, in turn, become cautious not to lose their charisma and not to make big-time mistakes in their strategies; they also feel the compulsion to keep a distance from followers in order to manage the expectations and various conflicting demands.

All of these, in turn, lead to disappointments, accusations, and defections and failure to encourage and nurture second-rank leaders. There is also the human element of insecurity and temptation to give into ‘image traps’ that the leaders are first given, then trapped into, and then virulently critiqued for. In this game of ‘rise and fall’, individuals seem to be cogs in the wheel with the very little capacity to maneuver the challenges of mass politics.

Pragmatism and Populism

Gorringe’s account, in spite of his denial, almost sounds like there is an element of inevitability in the way protest politics in their attempts at institutionalization and mainstreaming are invariably prone to alienation, bureaucratization, compromise, de-radicalization, and co-option. Gorringe makes the best of attempts to provide for a sympathetic reading of the compulsions involved in forging and nurturing protest politics. Further, when a movement converts into a political party, there is the compelling need to enlarge its social base and mass support. In order to do that, it is understandable that they need to either dilute or neglect their core demands. BSP that began with core Dalit issues, spread to Bahujan, to include OBCs and Muslims, and finally ended up with the slogan of Sarvajan that ironically gave a significant place to Brahmins against whom it began its initial political mobilization. In due course, the party lost its ability to look as radical and maintain its mass appeal. The materiality of the symbolism of converting a vertical caste order into a horizontal one gives way to ‘empty symbolism’. It blurs the difference between the vertical and horizontal caste orders to end up with circular arguments as to how symbolism is itself the new radicalism.

A stress on collective action and resistance can give way to negotiation and interest articulation. One might well argue about what the use of protest politics is, if it doesn’t, at some stage, serve the interests of the disadvantaged. Protest works around the question of justice that is universal, while interests are particular. Particularity always has the capacity to degenerate into sectarianism, but one might again always meaningfully ask, why should the disadvantaged carry the burden of the universal?

Between the universalism of idealism and pragmatism of particularism, protest politics always tends to swing towards the latter, as universalism is more cognitive and particularism is more experiential in nature. Protest politics of various kinds, including those of the Left and revolutionary kind, have struggled to find a way out. Rigid idealism, as in the case of the Left, tends to become dogmatic, while rugged pragmatism tends to become corrupt, manipulative, and self-serving. The fact that we have realized that we do not know what is radical change, much less how to usher in one, should serve as an occasion to begin some fresh thinking. We should ensure that such fresh thinking, if blocked by rugged pragmatism and the contingencies of the immediate agendas such as the unity between the Dalits and the Muslims, will remain at best momentary and at worst electoral slogans to conjure up a majority required for electoral success. Right-wing populism that is based on creating ‘us versus them’ kind of broad social divisions to consolidate an authentic Hindu unity found the emergent possibility of the unity between the Dalits and the Muslims to be perhaps the gravest challenge in the four years that they have ruled. In the events preceding Rohith Vemula’s suicide in the University of Hyderabad, the contentious issue was the support that ASA extended to some of the issues that concerned Kashmiri Muslims. This challenged the very core of the idea of nationalism as the Right understood. After the string of protests following Rohith’s death, the agenda of Dalit-Muslim unity came to the fore for a short while; however, as I tried to argue, long politics of various hues had taken a pragmatic turn for a socially radical agenda of this kind to fructify into anything substantial. The question that should interest us is what then is the link between the pragmatic turn in politics and the rise of Right-wing populism. How do pragmatism and populism feed on each other? Right-wing populism furthers the template of universal brotherhood, fraternity, and humanitarianism as the quintessential public morality, while aggressively pursuing sectarianism and pragmatism in its everyday politics. Politics of resistance whether that of the Dalits or the Left seem to survive and occupy the space created by the new pragmatic order undermining alternative ideals of equality and fraternity.