Beef, Brahmins, and Broken Men: An Annotated Critical Selection from The Untouchables

1 By Dalit-Bahujan, I mean the Dalit Untouchables (officially Scheduled Castes at 17 per cent of the population), the Backward and Other Backward Classes formerly categorized as Shudra (55 per cent), and the indigenous population of Tribals (8 per cent), together comprising seventy per cent, and thus constituting a staggering oppressed majority. The conceptual term ‘Bahujan’ is attributed to Gautama Buddha, who used it in the credo ‘bahujana hitaya, bahujana sukhaya’ that emphasized the welfare of the majority or of everyone. It was Jotirao Phule (1827–1890), an intellectual and political forebear of Ambedkar, who used Bahujan with the valency it has today. The term entered contemporary popular discourse when Kanshi Ram founded the Bahujan Samaj Party in 1984. Well before the BSP, Kanshi Ram in 1978 established the Backward and Minority Communities Employees Federation (BAMCEF). I had theorized this category in my 1996 work, Why I am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture and Political Economy.

2 Till 1990, it was only the Schedules Castes and the Schedules Tribes (as Dalits and Adivasis are termed in state parlance) who together comprise 22.5 per cent of the population, who could avail of reservation in the education and job sectors. In 1990, the Mandal Commission extended 27 per cent to the Backward Classes and Other Backward Classes, as erstwhile Shudra communities (who comprise nearly fifty per cent of the population) are officially known. This led to massive protests by the entitled castes. Though often the lesser educated BC and OBC castes are at loggerheads with the better educated but more impoverished Dalits in rural India, the implementation of the Mandal Commission in some ways brought them together since the very idea of affirmative action had come under attack from reactionary forces in society led by a largely Brahmin-controlled media. Often the Dalits and Shudras, when they came together under the theoretical framework of Dalit-Bahujan, heralded a coalition of solidarities. This mode of conducting politics is often reflected in the names of student organizations such as the Dalit Adivasi Bahujan Minority Students’ Association (DABMSA) mentioned earlier.

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