An Indian dilemma

A Rap on Race, a dialogue between the American author James Baldwin and the anthropologist Margaret Mead, was a remarkable book exploring the meaning of Race in America. Baldwin is black, a negro, very American and a man who has explored what it means to be gay and black in America. He points out that congenital marks become stigmas of deviancy and deficiency and a great source of discrimination and suffering. Baldwin also shows that radicalism and liberalism become forms of political correctness, styles of piety where white people, no matter how sensitive, do not understand what it means to be black in USA. At the end of what is a profound, even beautiful conversation between a great writer and a famous anthropologist, Baldwin tells Mead flatly that she does not understand his situation. There is a sheer canyon of an incommensurability of understanding between them.

The starkness of Baldwin’s honesty is impressive. Reading Rohit Vemula’s letter, I was reminded of this major dialogue. Reading the media reports and commentaries I realised that no one touched the core of the issue.

Suicides, I realise, are a source of sentimentality. They become moments of singularity, where the attention around the individual is heightened. Rohit becomes an overfocused figure and everything about him, from his looks to his background, becomes the focus of a hyper-analysis. Yet two things haunted the controversy. When Dalits wrote about similar experiences, there was a poetry and a pain to it. Socialism, the great sociologist, Emile Durkheim said, was a cry of grief uttered by an animal in pain. He did not deny the poignancy of pain but pain as an utterance was not yet science. Durkheim’s comments on socialism are relevant to the Dalit situation.

Between the scream and the silence stands sociology as a need to explain and understand the situation.

Unfortunately suicide letters confound the situation even further. A letter becomes more than forensic exercise, it becomes a lens, a mirror into the last few minutes, the daily feelings of an individual but overplays the poignancy of an individual to understand the dynamics of a society. I was asking myself, “what if Rohit had not written a letter?” Would the response still have the same romantic strain or think of another situation where Rohit had written a letter in broken English without any reference to Carl Sagan? Would our literary liberals, including me, have been as absorbed in the situation? In fact I even got a letter from one elite academic saying unlike other Dalits, Rohit was a merit scholar and that the analysis was misplaced. Suicide letters as texts can heat up a situation but eventually it helps dissipate it. It becomes a scandal around a one person event and as attention fades, the wider social and psychological dimensions lose out.

Think of another response to Rohit’s situation. Political parties and analysts unleashed the blame game. Committees of inquiry get established and a politics of default or neglect becomes the placebo of these reports. Then there is a search for scapegoats where everyone from the scholarship clerk to the vice chancellor are open targets. Once this drama is over, the HRD ministry and the party will produce reports exonerating themselves. The whole process is to bureaucratise the event, to reduce the problem to the negligence of a clerk or some other functionary. The fraudulence of the blame game lies in the fact that it can reduce such an event to the fault of one person. Once you catch the clerk or manager and punish him, normalcy is restored and the game is over.

In fact the controversy over Rohit reminded me of a brilliant strategy by Dalit activists to embarrass or in fact shame the Indian government. A few years ago Dalit scholars argued that caste was an extension of racism and that the Indian regime should be treated as racist. Indians then would become a focus of UN investigation. To foil the move the government of India showed that caste and race were grammatically different. Bureaucratically they also managed to signal that while race was a global problem like colonialism, caste was unique and internal to India. The controversy died down but a great opportunity for an ethics of responsibility was lost. Blame games and scapegoating create the noise of politics but disguise the social truth of events. The truth is the fate of a Dalit is tied to the future of caste and the future of caste to the fate of India. It is time we recognise the Dalit condition as an Indian problem and an Indian responsibility. We have factionalised and fragmented the Dalit problem for too long. In fact our Indian attitude to the Dalit situation reminds one of a similar situation caught in a great classic of race by the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal.

Gunnar Myrdal in his American Dilemma pointed out that the race problem is not a black man’s problem, or a Negro problem but the white man’s problem, a nation’s problem to be addressed nationally. The American dilemma is the dilemma of race. You cannot fragment it as an urban problem, a slum problem, a problem of the South. In a similar way the Dalit problem is an Indian problem and we have to address it as a nation and as a civilisation.

There is another tendency that one notices today that tries to say that caste is not a Brahminic problem. It is now a battle between Dalits and OBCs and that the electoral surge for power by OBC has savaged the Dalit. All of this might be empirically true. The power of the OBCs is obvious and Tamil Nadu politics is an obvious example of the concessions being made to them. Even the recent Jallikattu controversy was generated by the urge to placate an OBC constituency. But electoral mathematics apart, there is a deeper societal problem which cannot be reduced to psephological arithmetic. 

Reducing the Rohit problem to a university problem, or a caste problem, a disciplinary problem, or an ideological battle of left and right will not do. It is time to face it head on. The answer to Rohit Vemula’s letter in a true ethical sense is to define it not as one young man’s suffering but as a society’s responsibility. Only then do the commentaries of writers like Meena Kandaswamy, Kalpana Kannabiran and Sukhdeo Thorat and others make sense. It is a case of conscience. Once we recognize caste as the Indian dilemma, more holistic solutions will follow. Fragmentary solutions are ways of fragmenting the problem and a way of evading it. This then is the moral of Rohit’s letter. He could have quoted John Donne’s poem. “No man is an island entire of itself... And therefore never send to know for whom/the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” 

The author is professor at Jindal School of Government and Public Policy