The Stink Of Savanur
By Anand Teltumbde
27 September, 2010
Countercurrents.org
On 20 July 2010, some manual scavengers of Savanur, a small town in
Haveri district of north Karnataka performed a novel act in protest
against their helplessness. They smeared themselves with human excreta
in public before the municipal council office. The stink of it
strangely attracted many, including Pramod Muthalik of the notorious
Sriram Sene, the militant Hindutva outfit to the Bhangi Colony and
thrown up numerous issues of consequence.
The Shame of India
India that prides on being one of the high growth economies and
emerging super power has many persistent shames. Certainly, the manual
scavenging, a euphemism for some people carrying shit of others for
living is the topmost. India enacted a special act, as it usually
does, way back in 1993, the Employment of Manual Scavengers and
Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act providing for
imprisonment up to one year and a fine of Rs. 2,000 or both to those
practicing it. Actually, it well constituted a crime under the
existing but much dreaded Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes
(Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989. The only impact these Acts had
was to send the authorities into denial mode while huge funds were
being consumed with the shifting target to end the obnoxious practice.
Recently, the Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment Mukul Wasnik
admitted in the Rajya Sabha that manual scavenging should have been
eradicated two years ago, but now the target had been fixed for March
2010. Well, the government may have sung self congratulatory requiem
to this top shame on 1 April, making fool of people. But soon after
three months, Savanur stink again exposed the lie and brought the
issue to the fore.
The Savanur Protest
The issue was simple, so at least the people in Municipal Council of
Savnur thought and ignored it. But it spelt virtual death to Dalits.
They were suddenly asked by the Municipal Council to evict the land
they lived on for generations just to construct a commercial complex
there. The orders in terms of law were illegal but who would contest
the authorities. The Dalits kept on pleading but their plea fell on
deaf years. On the contrary, to pressure them the Municipal
authorities cut off their water connection. Poor Dalits who belonged
to the Bhangi sub caste, would be forbidden to take water from any
other source because of their untouchability. Buying it was out of
question as they barely subsided on a pittance thrown to them for
cleaning dry latrines. What may appear simple to others was thus a
death knell for them, which drove them to the desperate act of daubing
themselves with human excreta. The sensational act attracted media and
thereby swarms of politicians. The ministers came, held meetings,
issued orders and at least temporarily saved the Bhangis from
devastation. As it happens, the action taken may prove to be mere wash
up as suspected by the PUCL (Karnataka) fact finding (preliminary)
report on the incident. (http://www.puclkarnataka.org)
Hypocrisy, Thy Name India
Although the method of this protest was novel, there was nothing
unusual about it. The people who did it, only showed their routine
predicament to the public, which just pretended not to notice. When it
comes to Dalits, the Indian State as well as civil society always
recoils into a denial mode. The hypocritical attitude of the
government is best exposed in the international forums where it
vehemently opposes caste even being discussed. India always
enthusiastically showed up as fighter against racism, colonialism and
apartheid being observed elsewhere but when the UN Conference at
Durban sought to include caste in its agenda, the government
spiritedly opposed it with indefensible alibi like caste is not race
or it is its internal matter, or worse, there is no caste
discrimination in India. While caste may not be race in technical
terms but as the descent based discrimination, there is no functional
difference between the two, which is what the Durban conference
contended. Indian elite in its cocoon always tend to believe that
caste is a thing of past. The hypocrisy no where gets better exposed
than in the case of manual scavenging. While it enacted the law
against it in 1993, most states had not adopted it until 2003 saying
that they did not have any manual scavengers. With all flip-flops in
face of the contrary evidence brought up by various surveys, which
still maintain that the number of manual scavengers are well over 1.3
million, the government is about to declare the issue as dead.
Even Shit Gathers Vultures
The swiftness with which the authorities acted puzzled many. Within 24
hours the Irrigation Minister Basavarj Bommai, who happens to be local
legislator held a special meeting in Savanur to discuss the issue,
which decided among others not to evict the 13 Bhangi families from
the present place till alternative arrangements are made; to allot
them Ashraya plots; to provide basic amenities with immediate effect
and to provide them employment as sweepers under contractor. For the
next couple of days there was a continuous flow of politicians to the
Bhangi colony which culminated in the visit of Pramod Muthalik himself
closeting with Bhangis. The mystery lay in the demographic composition
of Savanur which has about 60 percent Muslim population and its
Municipal Council having predominance of the Congress, commanding 15
members out of total 23, leaving just three for the BJP. Karnataka is
a happening place under the present Sangh Parivar dispensation. There
is a campaign of sorts to lure Dalits into the Hindutva fold in the
communal divide being engineered in the State. Recently, the Pejawar
swamy Vishwesha Teertha from the Hindutva camp toured the Dalit colony
in Mysore and hosted the Madiga swamy Maadaara Channaiah visiting the
Brahmin colony in response to convince latter that the Dalits should
shun conversion to other faiths. The Sangh Parivar obviously saw a
great opportunity in communalizing the Savanur issue to its own
advantage in its communal design. Who knows what is in store for
Savanur in future!
Disturbing Desperation
There is something menacing about the mode of protest of the Bhangis
of Savanur. The Dalit protest is historically characterized by
denunciation of the markers of their humiliating social status. Dr
Ambedkar had exhorted his followers to give up dragging dead animals,
eating their meat, discard caste indicative ornaments and practices
and even later launched a famous struggle against Mahar watans,
considered special rights of Dalits by others. Strangely, the Dalit
protest here used the very marker of their dehumanization. While it
sought to forcefully project their plight, it has also tacitly marked
their helplessness and separation from the mainstream Dalit movement.
Bhangis have been a miniscule minority among Dalits and are considered
untouchable even by other Dalits. As a result, they have always lived
in their own ghettoes. This bespeaks of a big malady of the dalit
movement, purportedly aimed at annihilation of castes, but
paradoxically using caste as its cementing force. It has failed to
realize despite persistent failure over six decades to keep its folks
together, that caste is no such a force; it rather is a divisive force
that splinters what looks together. Although desperation in Savanur
act is confined to the Bhangis, in some measure, it indicates the
state of generic Dalits, as it is perceived by the others. If the
Dalit movement as for instance in the heyday of the Dalit Sangharsh
Samiti in Karnataka was strong, such an act would have been
inconceivable.
Savanur prompts the entire Dalit movement to rethink its strategy in
face of repeated experience with failure to constitute 'Dalit'. It is
high time Dalits realized that their caste centric outlook to oppose
caste is not only theoretically and morally incorrect but also is
strategically and empirically wrong. It is high time they shunned the
caste idiom and regrouped themselves as a class.
Dr Anand Teltumbde is writer, political analyst and human rights
activist with CPDR, Mumbai.
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