Savarna Terror Erupts In Kerala
By J Devika
(with inputs from Mythri Prasad Aleyamma)
14 December, 2009
Kafila
I admit, this title sounds sensationalist. But one can hardly avoid
resorting to it when confronted with utterly stupefying news of
attacks on dalit colonies almost next door to Kerala's capital city
and nerve centre of Malayalee politics, and that too, by a minor
anti-political force that has a legacy of anti-South Indian hatred —
the Siva Sena. And of course when one is confronted with the hard,
stony silence of almost all sections of the media about this. The
mystery of the murder of an elderly, innocent morning-walker in
Varkala, a town close to Thiruvananthapuram (of which I wrote in an
earlier post) still remains a mystery; the police story is so full of
holes that it looks like a sieve. But the Guardians of our Free Press
are still lapping police versions and not conducting independent
investigation. Activists who have dared to do so have been heckled and
hounded, even senior and respected human rights activists like
B.R.P.Bhaskar, by the Siva Sena, and their protests have been ignored.
Meanwhile violence continues to be unleashed against the supporters of
the group that has been accused of murder, the Dalit Human Rights
Movement (DHRM).
The title, then, is meant to shake up those (if any) who may be under
the impression that the time of troubles is past now that the Chengara
land struggle did win some concessions, and that peace reigns in this
sweet season of Christmas and IFFK between the savarna gods and the
people they have condemned to be sinners in God's Own Country. In
fact, the effort seems to be towards ensuring that the will of the
dalits should be broken decisively — so that another Chengara may
never threaten the savarna elite of Kerala.
Not that such repression is new. For some time now, we have seen the
agents of new forms of urban crime take over the dalit colonies of
Kerala and build close links with political forces, on the right and
left, and this nexus has worked well to terrorise the inhabitants of
these settlements, especially those who dare to question. This process
was precisely what remained unseen when, a few years back, members of
sex workers' organisations were driven out of the Bangladesh Colony in
Kozhikode city in northern Kerala. On the surface it appeared to be
'moral cleansing' but it was actually the eviction of those residents
of the colony — sex workers who had gained a public identity through
the sex workers' organisation — who had dared to question the rise of
dangerous crime and drug dealings there. There is also plenty of
report (all this, strangely enough, is rarely converted into news) of
violence against dalits in colonies all over Kerala where people have
left the CPM fold to join the Kerala Pulaya Maha Sabha or the BSP.
But the violence being unleashed against the DHRM by the Siva Sena and
the police differs because it appears to be a direct attack on the
dalit effort to construct the dalit subject afresh in Kerala, breaking
away decisively from the available dominant models in Kerala's history
of social reformism and political mobilization. Activists who have
been regularly visiting the colonies where the DHRM has been working
reported that the Ambedkarite and Neo-Buddhist-inspired DHRM has been
seeking not only to end alcoholism and drug-consumption in these
settlements, but also working to create new models of community and
family life radically at odds with the highly individualized and
atomistic nuclear family unit-model dominant in Kerala. From these
accounts, it appears that the DHRM aims at nothing less than the
transformation of dalit subjectivity, through an array of new
practices, including a new dress-code and this separatism has provoked
much violence. Their practice of group singing, cooking for each
others' family, their introduction of a unisex dress code of jeans and
black t-shirts with Ambedkar's image have led to the circulation of
horrendous stories about sexual excess. In fact, the opposition to the
dress code is strongly reminiscent of the savarna anger against lower
caste women's appropriation of the savarna upper-cloth in early-mid
19th century South Travancore! They have broken from models of
marriage, refusing to call it 'vivaham'(which is a sacrament) and
referring to it as 'cheral' (joining); they view it as an instrument
of breaking down inter-caste differences among the dalits. They also
destabilize given caste identities, referring to members of the pulaya
or kurava caste not with the usual 'pulayanmar' (the pulayas) or
'kuravanmar' (the kuravas), but as 'pulayaraakkappettavar' ('those who
have been made pulayas') and 'kuravaraakkappettavar'('those who have
been made kuravas'). They have refused the dominant mode in which the
dalits have been inducted into the present neo-liberal welfarist
regime in Kerala — as the passive recipient of welfare informed by the
ideology of self-help by remaining sceptical of the virtues of
State-sponsored microfinance. No wonder that the panchayat, the
police, the Siva Sena, and other major political forces, have all
ganged up to strangle the DHRM.
And the Siva Sena is not alone; just the other day, savarna terror has
been unleashed at Kattappana in the Idukki district. Here, a memorial
had been erected many years back to Ambedkar by a dalit on a small
piece of land he had received. Recently, dalit youth in the locality
gathered to renovate the memorial which had fallen into disrepair in
preparation for celebrations on December 6. The panchayat, however,
claimed that the land belongs to it — and erected a barbed wire fence
around it. Dalit youth broke through the fence on December 6 and
garlanded the Ambedkar statue. The retaliation was swift: cases were
slapped on several dalits including the wife and college-going
daughter of the owner of the land, apparently on the complaint that
dalits were squatting on government land. The CPM-run panchayat then
demolished the memorial with a JCB, and carted off the Ambedkar statue
in a waste-collection van before a watching crowd! It appears beyond
doubt that the murderous enmity towards the dalits stems directly from
their efforts to create cultural capital for themselves — and of
course the dominant media is yet to find anything significantly
newsworthy in this.
I think there are important lessons to be learned from these
experiences. On the one hand, any serious effort to shape resistant
subjectivities in Kerala that work against the dominant
individualising logic of neoliberal welfare and depoliticisation,
which do garner some success are bound to face vehement attacks. Dalit
identity politics and dalit public intellectuals have managed to carve
for themselves some space, however limited, in Kerala's political
public. It is important for movements like the DHRM to build active
links with these forces — strategically, the effort to start from the
scratch, which the DHRM has undertaken, needs the support of the
existing sources of strength in Kerala's oppositional civil society.
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