WAITING TO LOSE THEIR PATIENCE - The Geography of Violence

The first strong voice raised in favour of a caste majority came from Tamil Nadu. Since ‘enlightenment’ about this issue dawned here rather early, courtesy of the non-brahmin movement, the realization of a caste majority also unfolded sooner when compared to other parts of India. The intensity and scope of the violence perpetrated against the dalits of Tamil Nadu in the last fifty years is only an indicator of this ‘non-brahmin enlightenment’.

The founding of the Dravidian Association by Dr C. Natesan Mudaliar in 1912, and the launch of the ‘Non-brahmin Manifesto’ in 1916 in Madras are significant moments in Tamil Nadu’s recent political history. With these, the imaginary, dubious category of the ‘non-brahmin’ was constructed. The Justice Party, launched in 1917, formed the first non-brahmin led ministry in the 1920 provincial legislative council election. When the British administration introduced dyarchy / diarchy in pursuance of the Government of India Act of 1919, the brahmin dominated Indian National Congress boycotted the elections in protest. The Justice Party, accepting the scheme of dyarchy, contested the elections, won without facing any resistance, and formed the ministry of the former composite Madras Presidency in December 1920. The Justice ministry issued the Communal GO reserving jobs for various non-brahmin communities in 1921.

However, the Justice Party ministry’s idea of non-brahmin welfare did not include all non-brahmin castes. This category practically excluded dalits and other religious minorities. Even among non-dalit non-brahmins, only the minority ‘high’ non-brahmin castes — reddiars, naickers, mudaliars, vellalars, chettiars benefited. The composition of the first Justice Party ministry in 1920 reflected this social reality. Consequently, communities which had numerical strength and yet could not get a taste of the political pie began to stake their claims. The political mobilisation of vanniyars must be understood in this context. S. A. Nanjappan, who in 1935 spoke on the legislative council budget motion, said that despite vanniyars constituting over a thirty-lakh population, they did not get a proportionate share in government jobs. The Vanniyakula Kshatriya Mahasangam, established in 1888, presented a petition to the chief minister in 1938 on this issue.

Such being the case of the ‘lower’ order non-brahmin castes, the plight of the dalits was worse. In 1923, led by one of the foremost leaders of dalits, M.C. Rajah, a delegation of dalit representatives met the governor and submitted a petition on the injustice done to the Depressed Classes by the Justice Party ministry. Demanding 30 percent reservation in government jobs and arguing that dalit representation in elected bodies should not be based solely on winning elections, the delegation demanded a separate department to attend to the welfare of dalits.

After independence, the struggle by the BCs for reservation in the legislature and judiciary intensified. This formed one of the contexts for the coming to power of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in 1967, the first post-independence non-Congress government in Tamil Nadu. With the non-representation of Most Backward Classes (MBCs) in DMK-led regimes, one saw the alignment of the thevars with the M.G. Ramchandran led AIADMK from 1972. That a numerically strong caste could emerge as a political force in the electoral arena was first proven in Tamil Nadu politics by the vanniyars. Disgruntled with the treatment meted out to vanniyars by the Congress, vanniyar leaders S.S. Ramaswamy Padaiyatchiar and M.A. Manickavelu Nayakar broke away from the parent party and launched political outfits of their own in 1951— the Tamil Nadu Toilers Party and Commonweal Party respectively. Such was the electoral impact created by the vanniyars under these two leaders that the Congress in 1952, unable to muster a simple majority in the assembly, sought out these two leaders, who controlled twenty five councillors. The two vanniyar leaders merged their parties with the Congress. The struggle of the vanniyars, which scaled down between 1952 and 1967, regained momentum and peaked in 1987. As a result, the state government was forced to create a category called the ‘Most Backward Class’ (MBC) within the BC list. Some castes, such as the piranmalaikkallars and maravars of the thevar cluster, became the unintended beneficiaries when they too were designated MBCs. The BCs, who were already in a powerful position, received a shot in the arm thanks to the struggle of the vanniyars and the reservation gains made by the MBCs, and to the implementation of the Mandal Commission report in 1990. The non-brahmin, non-dalit bloc became even more powerful. This completes the picture of the accumulation of power by the caste majority. The dalits faced these political circumstances with the political and symbolic power derived from the Ambedkar centenary year celebrations (1991) that accompanied these developments. The qualitative changes in violence against dalits after the 1990s must be understood against this background.

The fact of political power in Tamil Nadu resting with the caste majority facilitates the exercise of both societal violence and state violence against dalits. This can be seen in various incidents, starting from the Mudukulathur riots in 1957 and continuing on to the Thamiraparani massacre (1999, 123–129) and the most recent violence in Kalapatti near Coimbatore (2004, 303–306) & Paramakudi (2011). Parliamentary democracy has given dalits certain safeguards on paper. These legal safeguards have been constantly disregarded and violated by civil society. The caste Hindus, who have reduced the rule of majority to the rule of a caste majority, have consigned another aspect of democracy—equality—to the dustbin. Just as the assemblies and parliament have been rendered expanded versions of the caste panchayats that we find in villages, the police and military too have become mercenaries of caste Hindus. In Tamil Nadu, such a state of affairs became obvious after the DMK came to power in 1967. Following the 1957 Mudukulathur riots, Muthuramalinga Thevar was arrested by the Kamaraj government. Certain actions initiated by the police contained the riots. However, when anti-dalit violence was unleashed in Kilvenmani (1968, 29), Villupuram (1978), Kodiyankulam (1995, 5–11), Melavalavu (1997, 83–86), Gundupatti (1998, 87–94) and  hamiraparani (1999, 123– 129), the police abetted the crimes as perpetrators. Both the AIADMK and DMK have been united in the unleashing of violence on dalits. C.N. Annadurai was chief minister for a very short while (1967–69). Most people in Tamil Nadu may even have forgotten about his rule, but the dalits cannot, since it was in 1968 that the Kilvenmani massacre happened. In Dalits in Dravidian Land, the reports of the various incidents of violence that dalits have been subjected to in Tamil Nadu in the last ten years have been compiled. We see that the violence has gradually shifted from the southern districts to the northern districts over these ten years. Of late, such violence is unfolding in the western districts as well. Seen as a whole, this gives us an idea about the geography of caste violence. We can also see that this violence assumes certain patterns. Even when a small development or incident leading to the empowerment of dalits takes place, casteist forces are at the forefront of efforts to quash it. The instruments of the state cooperate with these forces. The judiciary too plays its part.

The dalits in this article:

Most often, dalit issues do not figure in the media. Even when they do, such news relates only to atrocities against dalits. However, the news reports of S. Viswanathan collected in this article cannot be categorised thus. He dwells upon various dimensions of the issues that concern dalits. Besides aspects such as land, education, reservation and administration, gender is factored in as a component integral to his understanding of the issue. Viswanathan’s leftist perspective underlines his writing. Owing to his political inclination, several CPI(M) and some CPI voices find a significant place in these reports, giving the impression that the left in Tamil Nadu has contributed in a major way to dalit issues. The mishandling of the caste question by the left parties demands a study in itself. There has been a belated dawning of caste consciousness on the part of marxists in India: ‘India has of course become independent, but those two other issues, of class in Britain and caste in India (the hereditary division of labour as Marx puts it) are yet to be resolved; and the resolution of the class question in India doubtless passes, even today, through the caste question.’53 These words have, however, not been translated into deeds. The left in Tamil Nadu has not taken any notable initiatives to contain caste clashes. It is well known that dalits were the affected party in the Mudukulathur riots (1957).

The then Congress government headed by K. Kamaraj played a relatively non-partisan role in containing the clashes between thevars and dalits. But what role did the Communist Party play? Party leader P. Ramamurthy who stopped short of visiting Mudukulathur and turned back from Paramakudi suggested that if chief minister Kamaraj and All India Forward Bloc (AIFB) leader Muthuramalinga Thevar visited the riot affected area, normalcy would return. Ramamurthy was unmindful of the fact that Thevar was one of the instigators of the violence in Mudukulathur. At that point the thevars were seeking to portray what happened in Mudukulathur as not a caste clash, but rather a result of police highhandedness in which the thevars were the most affected. When P.N. Dattar, minister of state in the union home ministry, visited the affected area twenty days after the carnage, Communist Party leader K.T.K. Thangamani, who accompanied him, said, ‘The police shot at the maravars and threw them into flames,’ and showed the minister a burnt bone as proof. Dattar, in turn, wondered, ‘The bone seems hot even after twenty days!’ On 28 December 1957, a no-confidence motion was introduced in the assembly against the Kamaraj government claiming that the state had oppressed the mukkulathor community. This was moved by Communist Party leader of the house, M. Kalyanasundaram, and seconded by Sashivarna Thevar, MLA (AIFB) from Mudukulathur. The sympathy of the Communist Party then was clearly not with the dalits. When the Kilvenmani carnage happened in 1968, the communists preferred to see it merely as a class/workers’ issue, though all the forty-four agricultural labourers charred to death were dalits. Today, the CPI(M) has fenced the Kilvenmani memorial and declared it private property, rendering it out of bounds for dalit party leaders. There has not been any substantive change in the position or attitude of the left parties till now. When violence was unleashed on dalits during the 1999 parliamentary poll in the Chidambaram (reserved) constituency, the CPI(M) merely issued statements condemning the violence. The left’s historical role in dealing with dalit issues in Tamil Nadu has to be seen in this light.

However, the faults of the left cannot be extended to this article. Viswanathan’s marxist grounding yields several positive dividends. He focuses attention on the basic economic issues concerning dalits. Be it the Karanai land struggle, the Koothirambakkam conversion issue or the Tamil Nadu government’s wasteland development programme, Viswanathan offers a historical reading of these issues with an eye for the economic aspects involved. Unlike the conventional left, Viswanathan takes a pro-dalit stand on the reservation issue, especially the questions of reservation in promotions and backlog clearance.

The year 1995, marks the beginning of contemporary dalit upsurge in Tamil Nadu. It was around this time, in the southern districts of the state that a dalit consciousness spread. According to Human Rights Watch, between July 1995 and July 1996, there were several clashes between dalits and thevars in the southern districts leading to several deaths and to the arrest of several dalit youth under the National Security Act and the Tamil Nadu Goondas Act. According to a government report, in 1996 there was a 34 percent increase in caste clashes in the southern districts of Tamil Nadu when compared to the previous year. There were clashes in 282 places, of which 238 clashes were between dalits and BCs. An important aspect of these clashes was the fact that the dalits had begun to retaliate. Even during the Mudukulathur riots, the dalits had hit back. But today the retaliation is more explicit.

Viswanathan has not only recorded most of the incidents of violence between 1995 and 2004—the manner in which they spread from the southern to the northern districts but has also chronicled the emergence of the dalit parties during this period. Reading these reports, we also witness the birth and growth of the Dr. K. Krishnasamy led Puthiya Tamizhagam. Viswanathan records the politics and the new social alliances that the emerging dalit parties espoused and also documents how these alliances were broken. The manner in which hindutva politics was interwoven with the Ramanathapuram caste clashes of 1998 by Shanmugaiah Pandian (of Thevarkula Koottamaippu) and the manner in which this was used to break the dalit–Muslim alliance was missed by most journalists.

The panchayati raj system, whose role in the spread of democracy in India is held to be crucial, seems to have only added to the misery of the dalits. Ambedkar’s view that the strengthening of the village system will only lead to the strengthening of the caste system continues to ring true. Despite reservation in the panchayat system, no real change has been brought about in the village power structure. Caste Hindus do not allow for even a small change in the power equations of a village. The Melavalavu massacre, the deadlock in Keerippatti and Paappapatti, the auctioning of panchayat posts to prevent grassroots democracy and the forced resignations of elected panchayat leaders only reinforce this perception despite a few individual dalit successes at the panchayat level.

Dalits who are subjected to violence by caste Hindus in civil society also have to reckon with the violence of the state, as seen in Gundupatti, Thamiraparani, Vittukkatti and Sankaralingapuram. This article record the fact that the Venkatachalam Commission (appointed by the Supreme Court to inquire into the atrocities in Chidambaranar–Tuticorin district) had suggested that nine police officials be barred from functioning in dalit-dominated areas. The Thinniyam incident, where dalits were made to consume excreta, went unreported in the English-language national media, except in Frontline.

Today, dalits run several publications of their own. News that does not make it to the mainstream media gets recorded in these. However, the political and social conditions in Tamil Nadu, especially concerning dalits, have not been well represented to those living outside the state. Intellectuals living outside Tamil Nadu imagine that the dalits and the BCs here are living in harmony. This is the image that has been created by Dravidian intellectuals conversant with English. However, the ground reality is quite the

opposite.

Through these reports, we need to understand not just the qualitative changes in the violence against dalits, but also the connections between these changes and how the caste Hindus have captured the state machinery which unleashes this violence. These articles, though written within the constraints and needs of a newsmagazine, transcend such limitations and serve as historical documents.

Marx declares: ‘Workers of the world unite, for you have nothing to lose but your chains.’ For the oppressed dalits today, it is the words of a little known poet, Keorapetse Kgositsile, that ring more true:

Blessed are the dehumanised

For they have nothing to lose

But their patience.