[Reader-list] The one-eyed twice-borns

[Navayana Publishing]

*The one-eyed twice-borns*

* Tehelka,
<http://www.tehelka.com/story_main31.asp?filename=op230607the_one.asp>Jun 23
, 2007*

*Confronting the extremist fringe of the Right comes easy to the
liberal-secular set but it ignores the more widespread casteist slurs by
other sections of society*

*S. Anand*

Two recent incidents, seemingly unrelated, demonstrate how the "secular"
common sense can react in shockingly contrasting ways. The first, much
publicised case from MS University, Vadodara, involves Chandramohan
Srimantula's paintings, the rightwing opposition to his work, and the
subsequent rallying of the secular-liberal intelligentsia around the victim.
About the same time, at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New
Delhi, a case of blatant victimisation of a postgraduate student, Sukhbir
Singh Badhal, was reported. The case came to light through the findings of a
three-member committee inquiring into caste discrimination at AIIMS headed
by University Grants Commission chairman Sukhdeo Thorat. Badhal's case was
highlighted by The Times of India (May 13, 2007) and followed up by cnn-ibn.
Badhal had stood first in a selection examination in lab medicine, but he
was superseded by the second-ranker in the appointment to the coveted post
of senior resident at the department of lab medicine.

Like Chandramohan, a Lalit Kala award winner, Badhal had distinguished
himself in his field. Both were wronged. In both cases, the deans of the
departments concerned — Shivaji Panikkar at msu and RC Deka at AIIMS — stood
up for their students whereas the respective managements not only justified
their maltreatment but actively participated in their persecution. Where the
similarity begins, it also ends. While Chandramohan's victimisation outraged
a cross-section of voices — artists, academics, writers, actors, public
intellectuals, lawyers, concerned citizens — there was no one to take up
Badhal's cause. While a Free Chandramohan Committee quickly came into
existence, a Help Badhal Committee did not materialise. Crucial here is the
fact that Badhal happens to be a Dalit, and a Dalit who could stake a
rightful claim to an institutional position without taking recourse to
reservation. He had topped in the General category.

In Chandramohan's case, the very obvious villainy of the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad and the Bajrang Dal provided an ideal foil for the righteous though
predictable indignation of the Left-liberal-secularists against the loony
Right. Many times in the past they have appeared to feed off each other, and
seem to unwittingly participate in a theatrical ritual where words and
phrases such as "artistic freedom, cultural freedom, land of Khajuraho and
Tantra, freedom of expression, moral policing, cultural intolerance/
hijack", etc, cross swords with "Western ideas, Hindu culture, hurting the
sentiments of the majority, desecration of gods", and so on. These tiresome
expressions, in turn, occupy placards, editorials, television bytes and SMS
polls.

In this secular theatre, Chandramohan and not Badhal would appear "the good
victim". This phrase was used in another illuminating context by Gary Younge
(The Nation, April 19, 2007) while comparing Rosa Parks' case in Alabama,
1955, with that of Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old who too had a few months
earlier refused to get up and offer her seat to a white man. But unlike
Parks, Colvin was too dark, too poor; and worse, an unwed mother. Colvin
being the trigger for the boycott that spurred the civil rights movement
would have been unacceptable. Parks, however, was seen by Martin Luther King
Jr as a woman of family values, someone who had "character, integrity and
Christian commitment". Strategists of movements, argues Younge, need a good
victim and wait for one if they have to. In India, this plays out a little
differently. There are people whose victimhood, however grievous and morally
grounded, does not qualify as campaign-worthy for the rest of civil society.

AIIMS is a high-profile institution headed by P. Venugopal, an unabashed
opponent of reservation who has done little to hide his prejudices against
Dalits and other oppressed sections of society. (A white man in a similar
position at Harvard Medical School would not have so zealously paraded his
prejudices as Venugopal has.) Badhal, with his indisputable academic
"merit", represents an attack on the new sense of victimhood claimed by the
entrenched classes and castes, the likes of Venugopal and his
no-less-tactful supporters in the media. When news of Badhal's victimisation
broke, we did not see any outrage from the usual interlocutors who launched
email signature campaigns and organised protest meetings in support of
Chandramohan. Badhal's, for that matter, is not an isolated case. Reports of
Dalit and Adivasi students being hounded at AIIMS surfaced in April and
September 2006. One student, Umakant Nagar, had reported that an "abusive
and threatening" message had been inscribed on the door of his room forcing
him to shift out. In due course, 29 students — all Dalits and Adivasis —
were forced to shift hostels. But such ghettoisation and segregation at
AIIMS — justified by Venugopal and his ad-hoc appointees — did not become a
campaign issue for the secular-liberals.

More recently, Ajay Kumar Singh, an mbbs student at AIIMS, testified at the
Indian People's Tribunal on Untouchability organised by the National Council
for Dalit Human Rights. His account of systematic abuse by the AIIMS
administration appeared in Tehelka (June 2, 2007) in which he describes how
the privileged caste students and management at AIIMS had joined hands to
make sure he does not get his medical degree.

This selective indifference is not so inscrutable. It could be argued,
perhaps rationally, that Badhal's being a Dalit is not the sole factor, and
that the secular-liberals who show up at these protests relate more easily
to a case of denial of freedom of an artist's expression than to a case of
denial of a job to an otherwise qualified candidate. The latter comes across
as a dull, drab case in comparison with one like Chandramohan's. It is
likely that most of those who identified with the Baroda student-artist were
in fact offended by the encroachment by unenlightened lumpens on the turf of
art. Art becomes a good cause to fight for and Chandramohan the perfect
victim. However, the reason why most players who took to the streets for
Chandramohan did not deem it necessary to react to Badhal goes a little
deeper than the attractiveness that "art" provides.

When students in elite institutions across the country (led by iits, iims,
AIIMS) protested the suggested reservation for the Other Backward Classes in
Central colleges, and demonstrated their protest in the most vulgar and
demeaning manner — by sweeping roads, polishing shoes and selling vegetables
— the same secular-liberal intelligentsia that jumps at the opportunity that
a Chandramohan or a Husain provides, remained completely indifferent.
Perhaps they decided that the protesting students could not be denied their
rightful freedom to express their contempt towards the labouring castes.

It is this silence — 'indifferentism' as Ambedkar had prophetically termed
the caste Hindu/liberal attitude to anti-caste concerns — that continues to
echo for Badhal.

What happened to Badhal was unconstitutional, as much as what happened to
Chandramohan. msu Vice-Chancellor Manoj Soni, Narendra Modi's rss-backed
appointee, is quite easily the ugly villain compared to Venugopal; unlike
Soni, the AIIMS director does not have any direct Hindutva connection. We
are left with a scenario where confronting the obvious wrongs of the
overzealous Hindutva brigade seems an acceptable national-secular pastime,
whereas taking on the casteist non-Hindutva demons who have prowled this
society for far longer, becomes nobody's burden. When only Dalits are forced
to bear the burden of articulating Dalit issues they are dubbed sectarian;
the casual betrayal of Dalits by the rest of society passes for secularism.
While everyday secularism in India is animated by concerns for issues that
relate to religion, and especially the religious Right, issues concerned
with caste discrimination leave them cold. Such secularism fails to
acknowledge, forget understand, that for civil society to come to real terms
with the Modis, Sonis, Goradias and Togadias, it has to first take a
position on invisibilised everyday caste discrimination. In the hierarchy of
wickedness, Venugopal must share space with Soni and Modi. We can no longer
afford to choose to free Chandramohan from Soni and yet allow Venugopal to
hold Badhal a prisoner of caste.

* The writer is publisher, Navayana
anand.navayana at gmail.com*

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