DR RAJ KUMAR HANS'S A MEETING WITH THE AMBEDKARITES OF BAY AREA, CALIFORNIA

Report & Pictures by Prem Chumber (Ambedkartimes.com)

Some eminent Ambedkarites met at the Union City of Bay Area after a Punjabi Literary Meet on 25th April. Dr Raj Kumar Hans, Professor of History at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and a Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study at Shimla was already introduced to the select Ambedkarite intellectuals and activists of the area. The spirited hour-long exchanges resulted in the full-fledged 3-hours long intensive discussion three days later on 28th April at Mr. Amrik Chand Lakha’s impressive office in Fremont of California. Mr. Lakha is a successful Certified Public Accountant and a proud Ambedkarite. This meeting was specially organized in honor of Dr Hans who is on a missionary trip to America to give lectures and discuss challenges faced by the Dalit movement on several functions organized by local Shri Guru Ravi Dass Sabha in New York and California to celebrate Dr B. R. Ambedkar’s 119th Birthday. His visit is sponsored and facilitated by Shri Guru Ravi Dass Sabha of New York.

After introductions the meeting was addressed by Prof Hans where he thanked the organizers and began with a positive note that Dalits have come a long way in the last hundred years, thanks to extraordinary role played by Baba Sahib. It is no coincidence that Chief Justice of Supreme Court, UGC Chairman, Speaker of the Lok Sabha happened to be coming from Dalit families. There are a growing number of bureaucrats and other high officials as well as an increasing number of white-collar Dalits, but Prof Hans chose to highlight the problems afflicting Dalits of the world. He talked in terms of paradoxes saying if Ambedkar tried to bring all the erstwhile untouchable communities together by introducing the powerful concept of ‘Dalit’, the irony was that even after 54 years of his death, the Dalits continue to be divided on religious and Brahminical caste lines. Rather than breaking castes, Dalits are caught up in perpetuating caste divisions even among themselves. This only shows the stranglehold of Brahminical ideology on the masses despite long waves of anti-Brahminical movements including Sikhism. The biggest challenge for Dalit intellectuals and activists is to free themselves from the deadweight of caste first and then launch a movement to eradicate ‘caste’ altogether as was advocated by Ambedkar in his seminal tract ‘Annihilation of Caste’.

The second problem is the way the national parties have succeeded in diffusing the Dalit unity by incorporating the potential Dalit leaders and thereby exhausting their energies from addressing the issues pertaining to their communities. In this respect he admired the role of Sahib Kanshi Ram who doggedly pursued the Ambedkarite mission of ‘Dalit Power’. It is another irony that whereas in Punjab there was a powerful autonomous movement of Ad Dharm conceived and perfected by Ghadri Baba Babu Mangu Ram Mugowalia, the revolutionary thinker and organizer, one fails to understand why Baba Sahib did not think of this powerhouse for all the Dalits of India when the movement was at its peak and Dr Ambedkar had already decided to convert. Paradoxically Sahib Kanshi Ram who hailed from Punjab, where Dalits constitute 30 percent of the total population, did not succeed in striking the roots of Dalit politics but his inclusive strategy borne the fruits for Uttar Pradesh. Is it that Dalits of UP are more conscious than their counterparts in Punjab or there are problems of divisions along religious lines that have weakened the Punjabi Dalits. At times a religion that played an empowering role for Dalits has also played debilitating role in keeping the Dalits servile ideologically as well as politically.

To a reformative question if supporting poor Dalit children would help the community Prof Hans pointed out that it is a systemic problem and piecemeal engineering would not help. The Indian State has progressively withdrawn itself from public welfare schemes such as education and health. The government schools are deliberately left to rot so that the children of Dalits, Adivasis and other poor of the country do not move up educationally, economically and socially whereas the ‘Swarna’ people send their children to better organized private schools. Privatization has been deliberately promoted to keep the disadvantaged of the country away from the successful avenues and better jobs. Here Dalit political leaders in different parties as a pressure group can play a positive role in pushing the government to ameliorate the educational health but they hardly move as they are overpowered by majority of upper-caste MPs and ministers. Hence, the importance to have one national party of Dalits like the BSP and create a Dalit Power House. But this is easy said than done.

Prof Hans also highlighted the role of organic intellectuals in not only to retrieve our past that is buried beneath the deadweight of elitist academic practices but also in chalking out the roadmap for the future of Dalits in India. Here the role of the community leaders especially in the West who has made good economically by their sheer hard work and entrepreneurship becomes very important. They can mobilize funds to support such intellectuals in India who otherwise face several impediments. He also gave an example from his own experience that being oriented in the elitist-controlled educational system, he did not see the relevance of doing work on Dalit pasts but once he decided he has been able to bring to surface amazing result. He said he is working on literary movement of Punjabi Dalits and his finding take the Dalit literary creativity back to 1700. And there have been powerfully philosophical poets in the nineteenth and twentieth century who remained unknown even when they were known to some intellectuals from the upper-castes but they deliberately avoided talking about them. Sadhu Daya Singh Arif (1894-1946) who hailed from a Dalit family had produced master poetry at a young age that his ‘Jindagi Bilas’ published in 1917 became the most published, read and listened after Waris Shah’s ‘Heer’ as it saw more than 750,000 thousands copies over sixty years. He had become a household name through width and breadth of the undivided Punjab yet he does not get mentioned in the histories of Punjabi literature in the last 80 years. How is it possible? Were the historians of Punjabi literature blind or deaf to the mass popularity of Arif? The systematic neglect even of the best known and popular poets and writers was nothing but due to caste prejudices, Prof Hans pointed out. Even the well-informed including O. P. Balley, Balvir Thind, Paramjit Bhutta, Ram Murti Saroay, Azad Jullundhary and Prem Kumar Chumber in the meeting were amazed at these facts and acknowledged the responsibility of Dalit scholars and community leaders to support such projects rather than wasting their hard-earned money on meaningless pursuits. Others who also participated quite fruitfully included Prem Kumar Chumber, Sukh Ram Chander, Surinder Sony, Kranthi Zappita, R. K. Sherwal, Rakesh Chander, Ramesh Jadhav, Randhir Suman and Ram Saran. The meeting ended on a positive note as it had begun but obviously with clarity coming through the deliberations.

Posted on May 16, 2010