Posted on 24 May 2011
THE FINANCIAL WORLD
Anand Teltumbde
The false Dalit of capital
Anand Teltumbde says dalit business chambers will fail just as black
trade bodies have
Illustration: Tim Tim Rose
THE SIMPLEST way to assess any development from the standpoint of the
oppressed people is to observe the reaction of the adversary camp. On
the eve of opening of the Mumbai chapter of the Dalit Indian Chamber
of Commerce and Industry (Dicci) on May 28, there was excitement in
the business world that almost every business paper covered the news
prominently. The big corporate houses, like Tatas and Finolex, had
already sponsored a Dicci show, DEEP Expo, in Pune last year, that
supposedly showcased 200-odd Dalits, where mainstream business
chambers had participated.
In contrast, Dalits who generally celebrate the slightest identitarian
accomplishment have been surprisingly nonchalant. They have totally
ignored Dicci, which has been around for the past five years. Going by
the thumb-rule assessment with the above criteria, one may not be
wrong in suspecting if Dicci may have anything to do with anyone but
Dalits. In fact, it appears to be of particular interest to the
capitalist camp and the neo-liberal state.
The basic point Dicci makes is that Dalits have arrived, which,
although grossly wrong, is of profound political importance. The Dalit
entrepreneur is not a recent breed. They have been part of the Dalit
struggle, which flowered in the liberal spaces created during colonial
times. Likewise, there have been rich individuals too among Dalits.
But they have been insignificant to Dalit community.
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If one takes into account the profile of a majority of Dalits, one is
immediately struck with the incongruity of the concept. Dalits are
predominantly rural people, almost 81 per cent of them live in rural
areas; approximately 50 per cent of them being landless labourers, 24
per cent as marginal and small farmers and the remaining 26 per cent
engaged with non-farm vocations. Of the 19 per cent who live in urban
areas, more than 85 per cent live in slums. Thanks to the policy of
reservation, a political system that ensures flow of tribute to the
political class and the entrepreneurial drive of a few, over the past
60 years not more than 10 per cent of Dalits may be taken as having
"arrived".
The pro-elite, neo-liberal policy paradigm over the past two decades
has reversed the wheel of progress for 90 per cent of Dalits, who have
been facing multidimensional crises. The health statistics place them
as the near-famished community; with rampant commercialisation of
education, they have been cut off from the quality education; what
little land they had is being taken away. With growing power asymmetry
in villages between them and non-Dalits, the number of atrocities on
them are galloping. To such people, the propaganda about Dicci by a
handful of individuals should surely cause annoyance. Unfortunately,
thanks to their pseudo-representatives, they no more have an organised
expression. But, even their silence speaks.
The proponents of Dicci state that the US has hundreds of
African-American chambers of commerce to help the African-American
people do business. Notwithstanding the differences in these two
societies and two communities, no one will deny that there is much
that can be mutually emulated. Although, the civil rights struggle of
Dalits precedes the civil rights movement in the US by a full quarter
of a century, Dalits have keenly noted the progress the Blacks made
and tried to emulate them. In the 1960s, it was the Black literature
movement that was emulated to create Dalit literature. A while later,
the Black Panthers were emulated to form the Dalit Panthers in India.
Like Dalits, the larger Black community has been uninterested in it,
leaving it to be the game of their handful elites. But, unlike Dalits,
there have been concurrent assessment of this phenomenon of individual
success by the Black scholars, which cohere to the point that the
wealth of few African- Americans has made very little contribution to
the plight of African-Americans in general.
Black capitalism has a chequered history, starting from pre-Civil War
period; many prominent Blacks like Booker T Washington upholding it
with active support from the big bourgeoisie like Andrew Carnegie and
at the same time many Black leaders opposing it. The masses, however,
were consistently kept away from these games of their rich. In the
recent times, Black capitalism is associated with presidency of
Richard Nixon (1968-1974), who viewed an uncontrolled Black Power
movement of the 1960s as a major threat to the internal security of
the United States and also found it fitting in his "Machiavellian"
political scheme to incorporate Blacks into the "anti-Communist"
system as part of his Cold War strategy.
Despite this active support from the US establishment that Nixon
galvanised, the state of Black capitalism in the 1980s was far from
encouraging, as noted by writer Manning Marable. He saw Black
capitalism as three distinct constituencies: the proletarian
periphery; the intermediate Black petty entrepreneurs; and the Black
corporate core. The first one comprised over four-fifths of all
Black-owned US firms, 82.7 per cent of the total number. He noted
several common characteristics among these 1,91,235 enterprises:
almost all were sole proprietorships, unincorporated firms owned by a
single Black individual; most were started by Black blue-collar or
marginally white-collar employees; the firms were under-capitalised
from the outset and at least 75 per cent of them become bankrupt
within three years. The corporate core of Black capitalism comprised
just 1,060 Black businesses, led by Black Enterprise magazine's top
100 firms. Even this constituted a drop in the corporate ocean. As
Manning observed, white corporations allow Black companies to exist
for symbolic value.
As in the case of Black capitalism, Dalit capitalism should not be
seen as the development promoting Dalit entrepreneurship or wealth
generation among them; rather, they should be seen as subverting the
logic of contemporary political economy. It firstly serves the purpose
of both, the Indian state and the big bourgeoisie, insofar as the mass
of potentially threatening community of Dalits is incorporated into
their creed. One does not have to go back to ideological making of
Dalit, for instance by BR Ambedkar, who termed capitalism to be one of
their enemy duo, the other being Brahminism. The state, which
systematically ignores the demands of the crisis-ridden Dalit masses,
had put up a red carpet to the upstart Dalit bourgeoisie and
proactively wanted to know what it could do for them. The corporate
interests are varied, ranging from the emergence of the sizable Dalit
middle-class market to making the Dalit enterprises subservient to
their supply chains and control Dalit proletariat. Politically, the
move will have huge diversionary potential, further marginalising the
agenda of the Dalits. No one grudges wealth generation among Dalits,
but let no one associate it with the economic progress of Dalits.
Anand Teltumbde is a writer and civil rights activist.
tanandraj@gmail.com
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