Countrywide condemnation of the recent incident of RSS-led state-sponsored cow-vigilantism against dalit youths in Una and the dalit upsurge that erupted in its wake as much within Gujarat as across the country has pushed the BJP on the back-foot and Gujarat Chief Minister Anandiben Patel has had to resign. With the crucial UP elections round the corner, the BJP’s desperation is quite palpable. In a similar damage-control exercise, the party has already shunted Smriti Irani out of the education ministry, cries for whose resignation had been rending the air since the institutional murder of young dalit scholar Rohith Vemula in mid-January this year.
It is significant that even though dalits do not have much numerical strength in Gujarat except in Surendranagar district, it is the assertion of dalit power which has brought the powerful BJP government in Gujarat down to its knees. Since Advani’s rathyatra, the Sangh brigade has treated Gujarat as the safest laboratory for its Hindutva fascist project. Within Gujarat, they have got away with the 2002 post-Godhra genocide and the subsequent string of fake encounters and all kinds of state-sponsored social atrocities even as the Modi government has been discredited and indicted on an international scale. Modi’s May 2014 victory has been propagated as a validation of the ‘Gujarat model’ whether in terms of the Adani-Ambani paradigm of corporate plunder or the macabre display of Hindutva offensive. In a remarkable turnaround, we now have a powerful resistance challenging the Hindutva project right within its strongest citadel.
The Gujarat protests have found a powerful resonance across the country, most particularly in neighbouring Maharashtra, where dalits have been protesting the demolition of a building intimately associated with the life and legacy of Ambedkar. The BJP talks of building Ambedkar memorials and museums, while its government in Maharashtra unleashes the bulldozers of state-power to demolish an Ambedkar heritage building. Together the incidents of Mumbai and Una have ignited a powerful dalit resistance. On July 31, dalit organisations and other progressive forces of Gujarat organised a huge rally in Ahmedabad and came out with a charter of struggle that strikes at the root of the Brahminical order and an action call of a people’s march from Ahmedbad that would reach Una on the eve of the forthcoming Independence Day.
Unlike the LJP-BSP model of dalit politics which has reduced the dalit agenda to one of power-sharing with champions of the Brahminical order, utterly neglecting, nay rejecting, the radical socio-economic vision of Ambedkar and his revolutionary call for annihilation of castes, the ongoing dalit resistance has the potential to reignite the radical vision of Ambedkar and resurrect the agenda of emancipation from the social regimentation of the Brahiminical order championed by the RSS and the BJP. In Gujarat, it has also made it clear that the Una incident does not just mark an administrative failure on the part of Anandiben Patel as CM, but it epitomises the crisis of legitimacy of the Gujarat government itself. The movement for justice for the Una victims of the Sangh brigade’s politics of social persecution and terror politics has therefore demanded the resignation of the entire government and the holding of fresh elections as early as possible. Anandiben’s symbolic resignation is not enough, the whole government must go.
Before Una, the Muslim community had been at the receiving end of the BJP’s aggressive politics in the name of cow-protection. Before Bihar elections we had seen the brutal midnight lynching of Mohammad Ikhlaq in Dadri near Delhi, and after the BJP’s politics of cow-vigilantism met with a roaring rebuff by the Bihar electorate, we saw Latehar happen in Jharkhand where two young Muslim men were killed and their bodies left hanging from a tree. Taking advantage of the SP government’s ambivalence and inaction, the BJP has also continued to justify and invoke the Dadri lynching as an ‘exemplary lesson’. Muslim organisations have therefore wholeheartedly welcomed the post-Una dalit resistance and contrary to the Sanghi conspiracy of co-opting dalits and using them as cogs in the Hindutva wheel and pitting them against Muslims, we now see welcome signs of a developing bond of unity and cooperation linking the two segments of the Indian society who are being simultaneously attacked by the Sangh brigade.
As we approach the historic month of August that saw India rise and ask the British colonialists to ‘Quit India’ in 1942 and witnessed the eventual departure of the colonial rulers five years later, Una holds a mirror to the real state of our freedom after nearly seven decades. The shared dreams of a truly free and democratic India with equal rights and opportunities for all that had inspired millions of Indians to give their all in the freedom movement are today being haunted by a renewed spectre of bondage and regimentation. After a quarter century of uninterrupted pursuit of the neoliberal agenda of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation we find every notion of sovereignty and self-reliance being subjected to a FDI-driven ‘Make in India’ regime where the resources and rights of the Indian people are being trampled underfoot by a predatory ‘company raj’ with the fullest backing of the Indian state. And with the installation of the Modi government at the Centre, an emboldened RSS now seeks to dictate the terms of our social existence with intrusive policing in every sphere of life, from dress and food to education and culture.
Against this backdrop, the spirit and strength of resistance displayed by Gujarat dalits in their historic July 31 Ahmedabad rally reflects the shared urge and resolve of all sections of the people of India who are fighting for democracy and dignity, for real freedom from all kinds of oppression and injustice. Let the resignation of Anandiben Patel mark the beginning of the end of the Modi regime and the entire RSS project of subjecting India to a retrograde and repressive Brahiminical order in the name of Hindutva.
