How the Bengal of Bhadraloks has failed to accommodate Dalit aspirations

When a 50-year-old Dalit woman offered puja at a Shiva temple at a quintessential Bengal village on March 12, an esoteric truth about the state, meticulously kept hidden for decades, was unmasked.

Tension was palpable as the much-awaited moment to break centuries-old shackle drew close. Gidhagram village in East Burdwan district, some 150 kilometres north-west of Kolkata, was fortified by strong contingents of police and Rapid Action Force (RAF) to prevent any untoward incident. Sub-divisional officer (SDO) Ahinsa Jain herself was present on the spot to oversee the development.

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The multi-caste village has a population of over 5,000 people. It was a historic day for its around 550 Dalit residents concentrated mostly is the village’s Daspara locality, which is more like a ghetto.

All eyes were on Gidheshwar Shiva temple, located over a rock. According to local legend it was the site of the epic battle between Ravan and Jatayu. The temple, refurbished with a fresh coat of saffron paint, is believed to be over 200 years old. The current structure was however built in 1997.

Until that day Dalit families, associated with cobbling, were never allowed to set foot inside the temple — an ignominious tradition continued without any ado for centuries in a state that pretended to be casteless.

West Bengal’s former Communist chief minister Jyoti Basu in his reply to the Mandal Commission in 1980, had haughtily stated that in his state there were only two castes: rich and poor.

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For decades the state had been in denial about the existence of caste-hegemony, dismissing it as a north Indian phenomenon.

The caste-Hindu political elites primarily drawn from Brahmans, Baidyas and Kayasthas dominated the state’s socio-political space. So much so that none outside the social grouping, euphemistically termed the Bhadralok, attained the position of the chief minister in the state that has a 23.51 per cent Scheduled Caste population. Bengal is home to over 10 per cent of India’s entire Dalit population.

Only four members of the SC community got berths in Mamata Banerjee’s 43-member cabinet that took the oath of office on May 10, 2021.

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The community also faces disparities in jobs and education despite 22 per cent reservation. The literacy rate for the community is 69.4 per cent, according to the 2011 Census, as against the state average of 77.08 per cent. At 25.9 per cent, the gross enrolment ratio (GER) for SC students in higher education too is slightly below the state average of 27 per cent.

Notably, during a meeting of I.N.D.I alliance partners in Mumbai, Mamata Banerjee opposed the idea of a caste census, probably fearing a caste census in Bengal may expose the truth beyond the binary caste structure of rich and poor.

But even the statistics at hand cannot capture the real picture of deprivation as there is discrimination even within the SC communities, claimed Ram Prasad Das, general secretary of the Ravidassia Mahasangha.

The representation of underrepresented groups among the SC in jobs will be mere two to three per cent, he claimed. “We are planning to conduct a survey to project the actual picture,” Das added. It has demanded of the state government for sub-classification of reservation among SC communities of the state.

West Bengal has 60 sub-castes among the SC. Two dominating sub-castes among them are Rajbongshis and Namasudras. There is a historical context to it. The two communities were at the forefront of the social movement that started among the Dalits in undivided Bengal in mid-nineteenth century.

Perhaps, in that historical fact also lay the root cause for the SC movement never becoming powerful in post-independence Bengal.

“When the Scheduled Caste political movement started in Bengal, the Namasudras and Rajbongshis provided the majority of its leaders and supplied its main support base. For both these communities, their close geographical location was a major factor behind successful social mobilisation, and both lost this spatial capacity as a result of partition,” wrote Sekhar Bandyopadhyay and Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury in a research paper published by the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group.

The partition turned many of the two dominating SC communities into refugees, making their Dalit identity secondary to their new status that pushed them to a different struggle. So, Dalit identity soon got subsumed in refugee identity. This prevented any opportunity for mobilization that could have led to identity assertion.

The recent demand for citizenship status by the Matua-Namasudra community that prompted the BJP to enact the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in 2019 was rooted in that partition-induced identity.

Another factor that weakened the caste-based aspiration in the state was the alignment of the two dominating SC communities with the 1946 Communist-led share-croppers’ movement, known as the Tebhaga, pointed out Bandyopadhyay and Basu Ray Chaudhury.

“In this poor peasants’ movement, class had clearly overtaken caste as a mobilising force and divided the identity politics of the Rajbongshis and the Namasudras,” they argued.

In the later stage, the identity mobilisation among the Rajbongshis took ethnic turn over their demand for a separate Kamtapur state.

Things, however, started changing as subaltern groups among the Dalits started climbing up the social ladder.

The incident at Gidhagram village is indicative of the change. This time it is initiated by the marginalised among the Dalits.

When a 50-year-old Mamata Das and four others climbed the 16 steps to enter the temple with the help of district administration, it was Bengal’s own Mandal-moment.

“We have been now getting several reports of such discrimination from Cooch Behar to Kakdwip (from the northern to southern tip of the state). I have written a letter to the chief minister after the Gidhagram protest listing ten places where such discriminations have been continuing for years without much public knowledge,” Das told The Federal.

He said the new-found assertion of Dalit rights as was witnessed in Gidhagram is the result of social-mobilisation Mahasangha is doing since its inception in 2019.

Hopefully, the caste-questions will no longer be undermined as was done in the past, particularly during the Left Front regime, and was epitomised by Basu’s dismissive claim about the state being casteless.