Nitish shows Paswans the Mahadalit carrot
Vandita Mishra Posted online: Monday , Apr 12, 2010 at 0848 hrs
New Delhi : The setting was apt and, by itself, the announcement was
hardly controversial. At a Dalit conference in Patna on April 4 to
mark the birth anniversary of Baba Chauharmal, revered among the
Paswans, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar declared that the state
government would begin distributing three decimals of land to landless
Paswans, a promise it has earlier made to the newly minted category of
Mahadalits in the state.
Yet Kumar's announcement has touched off an extraordinary question: If
every Dalit group in Bihar has been officially designated as
Mahadalit, or will be treated as such by the government, who is a
Dalit in Bihar? Or conversely, if all Dalits are now Mahadalits, or to
be treated as such, who is a Mahadalit?
The story so far: In 2007, the Bihar government set up the Mahadalit
Commission to identify the Mahadalits, that is, the most deprived of
the deprived, ostensibly for better targeting of schemes for their
uplift and development. According to the Commission, there were three
criteria of inclusion: literacy rates, placement in services and
social stigma.
To begin with, the Mahadalit Commission identified 18 of Bihar's 22
Dalit castes as Mahadalit. That is, all Dalit groups except four:
Jatavs and Paswans, the two most numerically dominant groups, together
accounting for more than 60 per cent of Bihar's SC population, and
Dhobis and Pasis, the two groups considered relatively better off in
terms of development parameters among Dalits.
A year later, in 2008, Pasis and Dhobis were also included in the
Mahadalit list. In 2009, the Jatavs followed them into the burgeoning
Mahadalit ranks, leaving out only the Paswans. And now, Nitish has
promised to Paswans that the government would extend to them the
special schemes it has designed for Mahadalits. So is Nitish setting
the stage for the formal induction of the Paswans into the Mahadalit
category, in the process abolishing the very distinction his
government was responsible for creating with much political fanfare in
2007?
"That situation (of all Dalits becoming Mahadalits) will not arise.
Leaders of the Paswan community have said they do not want to be
included in the Mahadalit list. They consider it a term of abuse,"
says Babban Rawat, member of the Mahadalit Commission. "There is no
question of including anyone in Mahadalits now," says K P Ramaiah,
secretary of the Commission.
But Ramaiah admits that "the facilities that are being given to
Mahadalits will also be given to Paswans". These include, apart from
the three decimals of land, job training, toilet and health
facilities, distribution of uniforms to school-going children from
Class I to V, and formation of self-help groups.
According to sources in the Commission, all the benefits to Mahadalits
will eventually be extended to Paswans "in one form or another", "with
a little variation". For instance, the Bihar Mahadalit Vikas Mission
pledges to "enrol and ensure retention of students from Mahadalit
families" by the appointment of a "Local Resource Person (Vikas Mitra)
who will be in direct consultation with the Mahadalit families and
will also ensure the implementation of other schemes". For the
Paswans, the plan is to appoint the Vikas Mitra by another name — he
will be called the Suraksha Mitra.
Sensing his opportunity, Ram Vilas Paswan, the leading claimant of the
state's Paswan vote bank, throws down a challenge: "If the Paswans
also get three decimal land, like the Mahadalits, then why create the
separate category? Will Nitish Kumar tell the people this: which of
the benefits given to Mahadalits will be denied by his government to
the Paswans?"
According to Paswan, the creation of the Mahadalit category was a ploy
to divide the Dalits. But as the groups left out of the Mahadalit
circle mounted pressure and agitations — with Paswan's own Lok
Janshakti Party taking the lead — Nitish buckled under the pressure,
and included more and more Dalit groups till only one remained outside
the boundary. On April 3, Paswan points out, he had called a Dalit
Sena Sammelan in Patna, in which a decision was taken to launch a
statewide agitation against the Nitish government. A day later, Nitish
announced the three decimal land benefit for Paswans.
Ali Anwar, a JD(U) MP and the party's chief in the Upper House,
explains the inexorable expansion of the Mahadalit category in Bihar
by drawing a parallel with the JD(U)'s "flexibility" on the Women's
Reservation Bill after Nitish publicly urged his party to reconsider
its oppositional stand. "Just as we showed flexibility on the issue of
women's reservation, we are doing the same vis-a-vis demands for
inclusion in the Mahadalit list. We are open to new facts and figures.
Why should the poor among the Paswans be discriminated against?" he
says. "We are not snatching away from one to give to the other, we are
only reaching out to more groups."
As Dalit versus Mahadalit becomes the new political battle in Bihar's
election year, the state's misfortune is specially amplified by this
tug-of-war of the deprived. While Dalits lag behind the other castes
on all socio-economic indices all across the country, Bihar's Dalits
uniformly lag behind those in other states.
With 93.3 per cent residing in rural areas, Dalits in Bihar are
overwhelmingly rural. According to the 2001 Census, the sex ratio of
Bihar's Dalit population is 923 females per 1,000 males, lower than
the national average of 936 for all Dalits. The overall literacy rate
of Bihar's Dalits is 28.5 per cent, nearly half of the 54.7 per cent
recorded for all SCs. More than three-fourth of the total Dalit
workers in Bihar are agricultural labour, far higher than the national
average of 45.6 per cent.
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