The Awakening

by vaidehi sachin

I am proud of my reporter Gautam korde.It was quite surprising to see all Dalit leaders supporting this boy. Most of them were speechless because, none could encash this subject yet for their political motives. Reformation was always a problem for the downtrodden that, even a death was challenging. I am proud of my reporter for making such an interesting move to restore the dignity of his own community.
Thousands of people belonging to lower castes and tribal, converted to Buddhism in India in a hope that they would finally be ejected out of a discriminating religion which categorizes men into higher and lower merely based on which families they are born into. It was a futile hope. In India, you can never shake off your caste identities even if you change your religion.
There are Dalits who are lower caste Hindus, and then there are Muslim Dalits, Christian Dalits and even Sikh Dalits. Identities like Christian Dalits sound like misnomers as Christianity does not have any notion of caste but when a Dalit converts into Christianity he takes his caste along with him. There is even an attempt to legitimize these identities when politicians demand reservation for converted Dalits. Casteism is a social problem and caste identities are so deeply ingrained in rural India that even if a person converts to a different religion, he can not escape his caste.
People in his village, his neighbourhood and social circle would always know what caste he belonged to. I said rural India because it is the village which is really the den of caste based discrimination. Cities are a product of migrating people and often in cities caste identities tend to evaporate. Even if it does not totally become irrelevant, it blurs as cities are melting pots of all lineages. Cities provide certain amount of anonymity and a loosely coupled social fabric which makes caste based identities less visible. Cities are also about economic activities and ability of a person to contribute fiscally takes precedence over his caste background. I am not saying that cities are about equality but a Dalit person is less likely to be identified by his caste and stopped from entering a Hindu temple in a city than he is in his own village. As India becomes more urbanized, would caste identities become irrelevant? This is something best left to time.
Ambedkar, the first Dalit leader of modern India and author of our constitution, realized a fact that caste in India is difficult to escape when he was stopped from entering a temple in Nasik in 1930. So dismayed was he with the incident that he proclaimed that though he was born a Hindu, he would never die in that discriminating religion. Eventually, few months before he died, he converted en-mass with his followers to Buddhism. What has been happening in Punjab is also a stark reminder of how deep-rooted casteism is in the Indian society.
Sikhism as a religion was created during the dark period of Hinduism when it was under threat from Mogul (arab-muslim) invaders and from its own ritualistic distortions and corruptions. The main teachings of Sikhism were based on equality and outright rejection of caste. So it is quite ironical that in today's rural Punjab, large number of backwards and Dalit Sikhs feels discriminated and left out by mainstream Sikhism.
The Dera phenomenon which has gathered momentum in rural Punjab is a reaction to this very fact. People, who have felt marginalized by the high body of Sikhism, flock to Deras to get their fix of religion. The recent violence in Punjab between Dera followers and Akali Sikhs can be understood in this light as a power struggle between those who control the religion and those who feel left out and seek alternatives. It is a classic case of a social group (Sikh) conflict when members of a group desert it to form another group.
The mass conversion of Dalits and tribals can perhaps be termed as political stunt by certain Dalit politicians of Maharashtra but it is important to see it from another perspective which is that of emergence and assertiveness of Dalits as a political force in India. The fact that previously a Dalit party, BSP, won elections with majority seats in most populous state of India and a Dalit is now a chief minister is an indication of this fact.
What is unique about this new found political awareness is the fact that instead of being used as a pawn and vote bank in political equations by national parties, BSP has forged its own alliances to seize the power, signaling a shift in political maturity of the party. How interesting is it that BSP, a party of Dalits and lower castes has forged alliance with higher caste and even fielded high caste candidates to seize the power, taking most of the national parties by complete surprise. What it does to the political landscape in India and how it would change the social profile of Dalits would make an engaging spectacle. Unfortunately, as the political parties and leaders became big, the differences and power greed resulted in these parties having to face tragic refusal from their own community. Everyone of them fought for dignity of living, education, reservations, scholarships, and so on but none of them ever realized that they don’t have their own space as crematorium.
Both Hinduism and Buddhism originated in the Indian subcontinent and share a very long but rather peculiar and uncomfortable relation, which in many ways is comparable to that of Judaism and Christianity. The Buddha was born in a Hindu family, just as Christ was born in a Jewish family. Some people still argue that Buddhism is an offshoot of Hinduism and the Buddha was a part of the Hindu pantheon, a view which is not acceptable to many Buddhists. It is however widely accepted that Buddhism gained popularity in India because it released the people from the oppression of tradition and orthodoxy.
The teachings of the Buddha created hope and aspiration for those who had otherwise no hope of salvation and freedom of choice in a society that was dominated by caste system, predominance of ritual form of worship and the exclusive status of the privileged classes which the Vedic religion upheld as inviolable and indisputable. Despite the fundamental differences between both the religions, Hinduism and Buddhism influenced each other in many ways. The Buddhist notion of non-injury and compassion toward all living beings took deep roots in the Indian soil. Mahayana Buddhism even took a cue from the traditional Indian methods of devotional worship. Technically speaking, Hinduism is not a religion but a group of religious and sectarian movements that share some fundamentals and in some respects, identical beliefs, regional variations, history, tradition and practices peculiar to the land and the times in which they originated and evolved.
In contrast, Buddhism is a well established and organized religion having a set of beliefs and practices, commonly known as the Dhamma, based on the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. Thousands of low-caste Hindus groups to converted to Buddhism in an apparent revolt against India's caste system. It’s high time when they should be given provision to have their own space where they can rest their bodies in peace.