Dalits who convert face the brunt

A trip through Bhandara district reveals that Khairlanji is just a symptom  of a chronic problem

BHANDARA: It’s a small building housing the middle school of Surewada village, some 10 km from Bhandara town, off the Raipur highway.  But in April 2007, a controversy in the classroom here — the teachers, allegedly sprinkled cow-urine on some dalit students  to purify the school — had the entire village divided sharply along the caste-lines for months.

A year later, the village is trying to forget the bitterness the incident spread, even as a Sessions court in Bhandara  acquitted all the accused teachers in July 2008.

“The matter was the outcome of misunderstanding,” insists Charan Waghmare, a social worker, who  pursued the court case in favour of the accused teachers. “The incident was blown out of proportion,” he says. Waghmare says the teachers had conducted a puja in the school  when it got a new headmistress. The puja-water was sprinkled in all the classrooms.

Despite reconciliation efforts, the polarization in Surewada was so sharp that the OBCs and Buddhists snapped all their ties  for about a year. “We did not attend their marriages, and they did come to ours,” says a villager. Things have slumped back to normalcy though,  says the newly elected Sarpanch Sheelabai Hazare.

Surewada case is one in a series of incidents that have stoked tension between dalits, particularly the Buddhists, and OBCs  across Vidarbha, far more glaringly after the Khairlanji incident.

Sadly though, the subtle divide has led to more isolation of Buddhists (mostly the Mahar community) even within the scheduled  caste fraternity.

Pimpalgaon Kohali, another village about 80 km from Bhandara, saw Buddhists buy their own tractor last year when the OBCs  refused to till their farms. “We were not allowed to shop; we were not offered any work,” says Bhaiyyalal Motghare, a  villager.
“The entire dalit basti was erased from the BPL list (below poverty line), but we fought to bring back our names  into it,” he informs.

Things have eased a bit off late, but only just. The village saw the dominant  OBCs turn against the Buddhists, when one of the farmers from the latter community registered a case under Atrocity Act  against a farmer from the former community during a village get-together. Intriguingly though, the other dalit communities have also distanced themselves from the Buddhists across the villages, while siding with the dominant OBCs.

Explains social activist and Buddhist scholar Dr Rupa Kulkarni, “Dalits, who accept and remain in the caste-system  don’t get apprehended by the OBCs.” But Ambedkarites (or the scheduled caste communities, mostly the Mahars, who converted to  Buddhism) face the wrath from the dominant caste-Hindus and also the Hindu dalits for their denial to be part of a rigid  Hindu caste-hierarchy.

Also, as Planning Commission member Dr Bhalchandra Mungekar explains, upper caste Hindus don’t take kindly to  the economic prosperity of Dalit families. The Bhotmange family faced the ire in Khairlanji because of their progress, he  says, and because of the land that the family owned in the village. Nana Patole, local Congress MLA differs: “Bhandara is  peaceful, but it has been portrayed very badly after the Khairlanji incident and villagers are the ultimate sufferers.” He  says certain groups are resorting to blowing up trivial issues to cement their leadership through the  agenda of divisive politics. “The Atrocity Act should be very strongly enforced so that no one oppresses the poor dalits, but no one should misuse the provisions of the law thereby vitiating  the harmony,” he says. But Asit Bagade, a Republican Party activist, says the non-dalit communities have to take initiative to bridge the divide,  for, it’s they who foment the trouble.