To stick the BJP with the charge of fomenting Dalit hatred in its one-year-old government in Haryana is to condemn the history of social conflict not just in Haryana, but India as well.

The killings of two Dalit children in Sunped village and the mysterious death of a Dalit youth in police custody in Gohana of Haryana were again held up as signs of rising intolerance and hate being practised by the BJP regimes in the state and at the Centre. Without going into the details of the case, an impression seems to be gaining ground that the cases would have been deftly handled had there been a non-BJP regime.

There is an element of truth in this assessment, but the entire truth is a lot more complex than the facile 'blame-the-BJP game’ that’s being played with such relentless consistency these past few months. This game will be played with more relish now that Arun Shourie, a right intellectual, has chided Narendra Modi’s government for being 'Congress plus cow’.

But this play conveniently disregards centuries of Haryana’s (indeed India’s) historical, cultural and social backdrop to the oppression of Dalits. It creates a mythical India where everything was pure and pristine till Narendra Modi and the BJP came along and dirtied the waters.

The people of Haryana, especially the Dalits, elected the BJP to power for the first time in 2014 with the hope that a new dispensation would work to give them their due after decades of repeated disappointments with earlier regimes.

But this trust in the new political formation seems to have been belied within the year. Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar has proved to be just as inefficient in dealing with the atrocities against Dalits as his predecessors. That is the undeniable element of truth in the allegations against the BJP.

The whole truth is, however, completely different. To stick the BJP with the charge of fomenting Dalit hatred in its one-year-old government in Haryana is to condemn the history of social conflict not just in Haryana, but India as well. But that is the licence intellectuals, especially those on the left, give themselves easily. The two cases that hogged the limelight were projected as part of an organised pattern of atrocities against Dalits with a collusive BJP State in the background. It did not matter that they were essentially criminal in nature with caste prejudice as the undeniable background.

Yet, you would’ve hardly heard these intellectuals make a noise when the same abominations had reached a crescendo during earlier regimes because the then government wore ideological colours that the intellectuals approved of. These cases of atrocities were allowed to be buried by the political dispensation.

There had been instances of burning alive of Dalits and their hutments in Mirchpur and Kaithal during the Bhupinder Singh Hooda regime which escaped attention. Even previous chief ministers like Bhajan Lal, Devi Lal, Bansi Lal and Om Prakash Chautala were past-masters in the art of brushing such incidents of social conflict under the carpet. In that context it is right to say that Khattar failed. Failed to cover up or divert attention from such incidents, that is.

Haryana and neighbouring Punjab are the worst affected by crimes with a caste prejudice. Historically, this geographical region has always deprived basic human dignity and rights to the Dalits who form 25 per cent of the population. Though both are primarily driven by agriculture, Dalits figure lowest among the land-holding social block. In UP and Bihar they were beneficiaries of the distribution of surplus land, but that was not the case in Punjab and Haryana.

As the region gained prosperity in the wake of the green revolution and industrialisation of certain parts of these states, Dalits in the region acquired economic muscle by taking to education and skill-development. The dominance of Sikhism with its egalitarian features also acted as a safety valve for the massive social discontent among the depressed classes. However, in Hindu dominated areas of the erstwhile Punjab, a reformist movement like Arya Samaj co-opted Jats and Khatris to its fold but left Dalits untouched by it.

The assimilation of Dalits in the mainstream was never a seamless one. The fact that the social reform movements were never backed by the force of political will led to serious distortions in the social and political order of Punjab and Haryana. Can you believe that Dalit legislators of the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) are forced to surrender all their privileges (most importantly, housing) as elected representatives to the party leadership? Most of the Dalit legislators in the Jat Sikh dominated party do not live in houses allotted to them. None of these legislators can dare raise their voice against such flagrant violation of their rights in a major political party of the state! Similarly in Haryana, none of the political parties has ever come up to denounce the prevalence of the khap panchayats, which often runs counter to the law.

In an undelivered speech of 1936 at Lahore on “annihilation of caste” organized by a Hindu organization known as Jat-Pat Todak Mandal, Dr BR Ambedkar summarized this dilemma of the Indian state thus: “But as it is, even law gives each caste autonomy to regulate its membership and punish dissenters with ex-communication. Caste in the hands of the orthodox has been a powerful weapon for persecuting the reformers and for killing all reforms”.

Given the politicians’ tendency to nurture vote banks, they are least enthusiastic about taking up the reformist agenda detrimental to their interests.



In this context, it is instructive to note that last year Dalits of Haryana flocked in large numbers to the BJP, believing that the party would offer them solace. Within a short time, they have discovered no discernible differences between the BJP and other parties when it came to handling social conflicts.

Setting Dalit children on fire and snuffing out a Dalit life in police custody is nothing but continuity of a pattern. The attempt by a section of intelligentsia to link it to a party is obviously to score cheap political points. It is a manner of saying “it is so because we say so”. Much like what Ambedkar had said about Brahminism in that undelivered speech: “The Hindus are taught that the Brahmins are bhu-devas (gods on earth). The Hindus are taught that Brahmins alone can be their teachers”. And then, at another place he goes on to deliver the knock out blow to India’s intellectuals: “You may think it a pity that the intellectual class in India is simply another name for the Brahmin caste."

To single out the BJP for the rising spate of Dalit atrocities, like they’ve never happened before, is first rate intellectual Brahminism.