[Reader-list] Annihilation by Caste Lessons from Budaun and Beyond epw

[Asit Das]

Annihilation by CasteLessons from Budaun and Beyond epw
Vol - XLIX No. 25, June 21, 2014 | Kalpana Kannabiran
<http://www.epw.in/authors/kalpana-kannabiran>


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Budaun is not an isolated story. It illustrates the vulnerability and
disentitlement of dalit-bahujan groups everywhere.

Kalpana Kannabiran (kalpana.kannabiran at gmail.com) is director of the
Council for Social Development, Hyderabad, an ICSSR-funded institute.
The murder of two children in Budaun, Uttar Pradesh, forces us to
re-examine our understanding of aggravated assault, murder, sexual assault,
atrocity, annihilation (ital)by (ital) caste and structural violence that
is constitutive of the rogue state – not an exceptional state, but the
rogue state as the norm in a caste ridden society. This is not an isolated
story. These children were not victims of exceptional violence and
brutality. Rather, routine heightened violence and torture of the worst
kind are constitutive of caste society, with the condonation (indeed tacit
acce­ptance of the necessity) of such violence written into inaction and
equivocation at every level.

My raging grief is about the loss, the deaths of these children, both
girls; but there are accounts of a boy killed here as well not so long ago
after being brutalised; it is about the unspeakable torture they were
subjected to, of which sexual assault was part; it is about our collective
inability as people committed to the annihilation of caste, to make any
difference in a context where caste atrocity is at best a spectacle for
consumption and speculation; where images of children who have been
brutally assaulted and murdered are traded by the media in ­unthinkable
ways and their experience negated by the rogue state. Where does one begin
to roll this back?

Although the writing on the Budaun violence has opened out several
discussions – from eliminating open defecation to increasing helplines to
castigating the Government of Uttar Pradesh. I think this is an issue that
goes far beyond the sexual politics of the Samajwadi Party (SP), or the
tasks before the toilet ambassadors of the Ministry of Rural Development.
Can we forget that Mathura was sexually assaulted in the toilet of a
­police station? While unarguably women need access to secure basic
facilities, this issue is quite separate from their vulnerability to sexual
assault. Days have rolled into years and years into decades with us
speaking out about the sexual politics of each of our political parties and
their treatment of sexual assault. The only difference perhaps is that the
SP has perfected the art and woven it densely into statecraft.

*‘Legal’ Atrocities*

Early reports of the Budaun murders suggested the victims were dalit
children. Later reports identified their caste as a backward caste. The
question see­med to circulate around whether these murders were situated
within the legal definition of “atrocity” in the Scheduled Castes and
Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 [hereafter PoA Act].
Of course they were not, because the children who had been killed did not
belong to a scheduled caste. So although the PoA Act is the single
legislation that attempts to address targeted assault based on caste, the
technicality of classification put these murders and aggravated sexual
assaults in the cate­gory of a lesser crime. But was it a lesser crime?

Related to this is the question of whether sexual assault and murder of
women and children should be understood in terms that are common and
unmindful of class or social category. Is it material to our understanding
that these children belonged to a “lower caste” than the perpetrators? Is
it accidental that the perpetrators belonged to the local dominant caste,
and shared social location with the police and indeed the party in
government? Is it coincidental that a policeman from the dominant caste was
one of the perpetrators?

Should we, in the light of the facts of this case, revisit the category of
“dalit” – re-examining what “broken people” means in a context where caste
dominance renders entire groups powerless and vulnerable to grievous hurt
and murder (which includes sexual assault in several instances) even though
they may not belong to a “scheduled caste”?
Discussions on amendments to criminal law in the deliberations of the
Justice Verma Committee, and in the discussions around the protests that
followed the assault and murder of a young woman in Delhi in December 2012,
saw dalit groups and anti-caste intellectuals raising the question of the
inequality of protest. Why did the country not come to a standstill after
the Khairlanji massacre, which in sheer terms of numbers ass­aulted and
killed was far graver? The Delhi victim had demonstrated resistance that
earned her the sobriquet “Brave­­heart”. The Bhotmange family in
Khair­lanji too had paid dearly for demonstrating their resistance. Both
belon­ged to working class families. On both sides there was pain and
suffering and loss. The Delhi victim’ s suffering led to the immediate
constitution of a committee, legislation in her name, and trial and
convictions at the speed of light. Despite the Bhotmange family’s
suffering, aggravated sexual assault as part of targeted caste violence was
not included in the new expanded definition of sexual assault, and justice
continues to elude the sole survivor. My intention is to demonstrate that
all are not equal either in public perception or in the criminal justice
system in India. Given the heightened protest against the murderous assault
on the young woman in Delhi, followed by lightning response in revamping
criminal justice for women, why has the “climate of deterrence” not spread
to other locales?

*From Delhi to Budaun*

For the Delhi victim,1 education was a struggle – a working class father
who dared to dream for his daughter. Her expe­rience of sexual violence and
murder however was unrelated to that struggle. The struggle that is
memorialised is the struggle against the perpetrators of the assault that
took her life. For the Bhotmange family, the struggle that led to their
annihilation was a struggle aga­inst caste domination in the belly of the
beast, so to speak, by challenging its supremacy through education and
small attempts at building family assets in their native village. This
critical difference, in my view, must guide our understanding of the
socio-political basis of sexual violence, assault and murder. While all
murders result in loss of life and human suffering, targeted murder against
members belonging to a social group that is vulnerable is more serious
because it reflects a systemic pattern that systematically reinforces power
and subjugates entire communities through violence.

What is the relevance of this comparison above to the assault and murder of
the two children of Budaun? We know from Ambedkar and from bearing witness
to countless incidents of caste violence that “[c]astes form a graded
system of sovereignties, high and low…”2 and power is asserted through
violence along the ladder of graded inequalities. Bec­ause “caste is
impregnable,”3 the sexual appropriation of women – through endo­gamous
marriage, bondage and female servitude, and habitual assault on women of
dependent castes form part of the commonsense of the caste system. This
also is the way in which resistance is policed, endlessly, in eerily
repetitive, timeless fashion: “the worst evil of this code of ordinances is
that the laws it contains must be the same yesterday, today, and forever.”4
Age has never been a bar for sexual assault. And impunity is guaranteed to
perpetrators of targeted assault – through police complicity/­calculated
inaction (as the case may be); through prosecutorial negligence; thro­ugh
judicial misdemeanor and through the disabling of justice claims in
constitutional courts with easy recourse to ­legal technicalities. There
are startling par­allels between Khairlanji and Budaun.

Increasingly, the true import of the words of anti-caste philosophers hits
us rudely with each passing day. With the annihilation of caste not
happening, what we are witnessing is annihilation by caste. In a country
ruled by caste in the constitutional era, annihilation by caste is a
self-perpetuating patriarchal project that reinvents itself constantly,
stalking the powerless and those that resist, blocking their flight from
caste generation after generation. The creation of an atmosphere of terror
and sexual ­terrorism is the means through which an entire people are kept
subjugated. This is not the place to recount the horrific methods of terror
deployed by the dominant castes.

Notwithstanding the technical inapplicability of the PoA Act to the Budaun
murders, what is telling is the extreme vulnerability of dalit-bahujan
communities – in a state with the most powerful political mobilisation that
rose to occupy state power. Far from being an indication of the
ineffectiveness of dalit-bahujan mobilisation in UP, it is rather a sign of
the encrusted power of the dominant castes and an indication of how
Sisyphean the struggle is. It is neither inappropriate nor inaccurate to
characterise this as an attack on dalit children – in the context of caste
atrocity the term dalit encompasses the dalit-bahujan experience of caste
discrimination.

And that is really at the heart of the contradictions that Budaun throws up
– there is a commonality of experience in disentitlement and vulnerability
across dalit-bahujan groups that quotidian separations in administration
and law negate. But those are the limits of the law. There are also
shifting gradations of status, class and power within this large category,
these contestations absorbing the ideology and methods of caste in inter
caste relations. Is it methodologically possible to offer protection and
legal redress to victims across the ladder of graded inequalities and
graded exclusions except through blanket criminal law provisions? And yet,
viewing assaults such as these in terms of the Indian Penal Code alone
reduces the gravity of the offence by removing the targeted nature of the
assault from consideration and defining it outside the purview of caste
atrocity.

*The Rogue State*

And finally we come to the rogue state. How many times have we seen this?
Karamchedu, Chunduru, Khairlanji, Bud­aun, Mathura, Rameeza, Bhanwari –
different states at different times, different courts of different
jurisdictions, and the story is the same. Despite the constitutional ban on
untouchability and protections against discrimination based on caste, the
patriarchal caste order constitutes the state. Democracy lies trapped in
the clutches of the two-headed state – the hibernating constitutional
order, and the live and throbbing rogue state that actively participates in
the project of annihilating by caste across lines of party and ideology –
caste is the unifying ideology and the fundamental logic of governance.

The road that we leave behind is soaked in the blood of victims and built
through generations of servitude, and the road that lies ahead is blocked
by caste. This takes me to the heart of Ambedkar’s assertion that the only
road to freedom, life and indeed humanity is the annihilation of caste –
for us all, because violence and the habit of impunity dehumanises the
dominant – not only the perpetrators and their cohorts but also the
nonchalant bystanders and the distant, studiously indifferent viewers – and
annihilates entire classes of vulnerable peoples in full public view with
impunity.

*Notes*

1)  I am reluctant to call her Nirbhaya, because that was the name of a
kerosene stove that kept bursting whimsically and killing newly married
middle class women in the late 1970s and early 1980s – the Nirbhaya deaths
of another kind and time.
2)  B R Ambedkar, The Annihilation of Caste, 21: 18.
http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/ambedkar/web/accessedon 16 June
2014.
3)  B R Ambedkar, The Annihilation of Caste, 22: 25.
http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/ambedkar/web/accessedon 16 June
2014.
4)  B R Ambedkar, The Annihilation of Caste, 23: 4.
http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/ambedkar/web/accessedon 16 June
2014.