One social group, apart from the Muslims, that suffered violent attacks under the current regime was that of the Dalits. Amartya Sen, in an interview on a television channel observed that, ‘Dalits and minorities have become victims of organized killing and the government has to take responsibility. Mobocracy and despotism make people live in fear. It is a terrible thing to happen, whether or not it affects the economy. The central issue is that of liberty and democracy.’1 Dalits came under sustained attack through a series of incidents that began with the suicide of a student, Rohith Vemula, in the University of Hyderabad in January 2016; later, in June 2016, seven Dalits were flogged in Una, Gujarat by alleged cow vigilantes for skinning a dead cow. In May 2017, UP’s Saharanpur Thakurs clashed with the Dalits, soon after Yogi was elected as the chief minister of the state. In January2018, at Bhima Koragaon, Marathas attacked a peaceful demonstration of the Dalits. In March 2018 came a UGC order tinkering with the Scheduled Caste-Scheduled Tribe (SC-ST) appointments in universities.
After the Rohith Vemula incident where the Ambedkar Student’s Association (ASA) supported the cause of Kashmiris’ right to protest for their human rights, the issue of Dalit-Muslim unity gathered renewed interest and possibility. If secular-associational politics are to stall the creation of a majoritarian polity, then solidarity between various social groups, including the Dalits and Muslims, becomes an imperative. However, social dynamics in the post-independence period, census and enumeration, and modes of mobilization for elections have only re-instituted popular prejudices of communities against each other. It is suggested in the essays in this section that majoritarianism in India is shaping, not only from the sustained mobilization by the Right but also due to what I refer to as ‘secular sectarianism’ practised by the Dalit-Bahujans, Muslims, Left, and other progressive sections of the society.
The idea of fraternity that Ambedkar emphasized, alongside liberty and equality, seems to be in direct conflict with the kind of pragmatism that has come to signify the current protest politics. Pragmatism expressed as ‘violent indifference’ to other social groups, reduces everyone to, as Rohith Vemula observed in his letter, their ‘immediate identity’. This allows marginalized and subaltern social groups such as the Dalits to be available to be mobilized by the Right, even if the vision of the Right continues to reinforce a traditional hierarchical caste ordering. Such possibilities were witnessed during incidents following the arrest of the Dera Sacha leader for sexual assault. Similarly, incidents such as threats issued by the Vaishya community to the Dalit-Bahujan intellectual Kancha Illiah after he republished his booklet titled Vaishyas Are Social Smugglers2 did not garner the larger attention of the society. The question that needs to be debated is whether or not social mobility of subaltern groups like the Dalits will succeed in bringing forth a new ethic of fraternity, as against attempting to achieve mobility through pragmatism and Social Darwinism that disallows substantive distinction between the populism of the Right and oppositional politics of the subaltern. This also will throw light on how various segments of the subalterns will relate to each other, including the question of unity between the Left and the Dalits, which has been a longstanding one.
Among the various questions of history that the Right has foregrounded, one of the issues that needs attention is what I refer to as the ‘Problem of Retrieval’. Is there a possibility of retrieving the philosophical aspects of ancient Indian philosophy without reducing all of it exclusively to its Brahmanic tradition? Brahamanism has been a social system that perpetuated social inequalities through scriptural sanction. Does a philosophy that emerged in such a social context of caste system get reduced or remain stagnant to that specific historical context, or is there a way we could collectively retrieve certain aspects of the philosophy that continue to inform us about our past and present in a more meaningful way? Unlike the Greeks and other European philosophies that justified racial and gendered inequalities and continue to be studied separating them from those aspects, Indian philosophy did not get the attention it deserved and perhaps got reduced to the Brahamanic tradition, which in itself was an oriental reading of philosophy outside of Europe. Populist politics under the current regime foregrounded this aspect of retrieving ‘our own’ traditional-ancient knowledge systems; however, the issue was raised as not one of history or philosophy but one of a ‘glorious’ or even a ‘superior’ past. References ranging from advanced aerial technology in ancient India to various kinds of advanced medical practices were claimed in the course of the current rightwing populist regime. These were illegitimate claims for a legitimate cause. It will be of long-standing relevance in Indian politics as to how the populist project that wishes to create a new and authentic and a unified Hindu society will negotiate its past that was Brahmanical but perhaps cannot be reduced only to that.