By Krishna Jha
We are almost living in a holocaust situation. One crime is committed against a Dalit every 18 minutes. Thirteen Dalits get murdered every week, 27 atrocities against Dalits are committed every day. According to India’s crime record bureau, some 45,935 cases are recorded each year and the number speaks about those incidents that were reported. In the abyss of dark anonymity, they are all buried. Violence against Dalit is a tragic and yet daily occurrence. In India, around ten Dalit women face molestation each day. It begins even when they are innocent kids. They are not allowed to sit in the class in first row. Especially in rural areas the issue of caste is raised very rarely.
In fact, the issue has to be raised regularly and consistently. It has to be kept in mind that issue is not connected with rousing the backward caste against the forward. It is an issue which reflects the need for raising human and democratic consciousness. The entire caste complex has to be annihilated, and the campaign should not involve only people from Dalit and backward castes but the entire democratically conscious sections of society. This battle has to be spread. The entire society has to be involved in this struggle. The caste complex is a basic challenge to democracy in our country, and the battle has to be fought by all those who want Indian democracy to blossom and move towards socialism, with equality and justice for all.
The vast multitude of masses that come to this category are not among the exploiters, they are victims themselves – of social and economic exploitations. But it does not mean that all of them are liberated from caste complex. A section of them have their own sensibilities of higher and lower castes and preserve strong caste prejudices. A meeting point has to be found for merging battles against caste and class based exploitations. Caste and democratic affiliations have no meeting point.
Casteism in fact requires to be exposed at every level and in every possible manner. With utter disrespect for any sense of human dignity, untouchability is practiced, and yet the struggle against casteism has to be dialectical. As Com SG Sardesai had said that a class approach has to be dialectical, instead of being sectarian, since democratic unity is imperative and that encompasses the entire society, irrespective of their caste status. He further explained that we even support rich peasant demands as against the monopoly bourgeoisie, Indian and in other countries. There are instances of massive struggles getting launched against big land holding on the economic issues of wages, loans and interest rates. Similarly, the battle against caste has to be dialectical so that the caste-based exploitative issues are taken up with wide support.
It desperately needs new ways of agitations and struggles to keep the masses united. Com Nana Patil had once said, “You cannot fight the landlords and the money lenders without uniting with the harijans. The Red Flag movement is of the toilers and exploited. This Red Flag can never tolerate ‘untouchability’.” He then added, “We cannot mechanically repeat what was said years back. We have to learn from that approach.”
On the issue of reservation, much debated since it was formulated, it needs deeper consideration. Our approach being pragmatic, we cannot afford to be away from realities of life that are unimaginably painful. To resolve the deadlock, one has to be applying the theory keeping in mind the specific conditions of the minorities, Dalits, tribals and backward castes that have to be protected through reservation in every possible contexts. It may be mentioned here that in our country, the economic deprivation is not the sole cause of sufferings.
It is the grim shadows of feudalism that keep haunting them. Their cultural and social life is under the control of values which should have no place in a democratic society. Here we need the provision of reservation. But we cannot use it as a scapegoat. Discrimination continues, and it has to be uprooted from the basic structure of the society itself. The Harijans, with the insecurities that prevent them from joining the same status as others, cannot become one with the rest of the society without reservation which in itself is not enough, though could be recognized as the first step.
It is imperative to add here that in our country, there are efforts made in a big way to destroy democratic consciousness. What we have here as a system is rule of Finance Capital, with a system that is almost autocratic, with chains all over. That makes reservation imperative. To refuse reservation would exclusively mean advantage to reactionary forces and to the vested interests. In the face of the onslaught of these forces, we need to protect a larger and deprived section of the masses from the adverse tendencies that are settling down.
A basic essential in such situation is that we have to be aware of rightist and Manuwadi onslaught led by RSS. There is a rise in casteist violence which has emerged as a weapon to destroy the national unity, create a chaotic situation, let anarchy prevail, and finally get the reactionary dictatorship to rule the roost. Casteism has always played a role of weapon in destabilizing the country, and the destructive national as well as international agencies have always been supportive of them. (IPA Service)
U.S. Consumer Confidence Edges Up In July, But Inflation Fears Still Lurking 