NAGPUR: Life came full circle for Nagpur’s Pankaj Meshram last month when the I&B ministry issued a notification to media houses asking them to refrain from using the word ‘Dalit’. His struggle to get the word removed from every official communication started in 2006 when a Dalit family was lynched at Khairlanji, 80km from Nagpur, after a caste-related tussle.Meshram came close to the only surviving member of the Bhotmange family which was massacred, and understood how caste dynamics worked in that rural belt. “The SC community faces a lot of discrimination in villages and ‘Dalit’ has become a symbol of oppression. When someone calls you a Dalit, it is only in a derogatory sense,” he said.“I wrote to many departments asking them to stop using the word as it’s not mentioned in the Constitution. We are identified legally as ‘SC’ and that should be the official nomenclature. When all options were exhausted, in 2016 I filed a petition in the HC bench at Nagpur,” said Meshram.Meshram’s lawyer Shailesh Narnaware’s main argument was that the word Dalit has no legal standing.To the argument that ‘Dalit’ could be seen as empowering when used for, say, Dalit literature or movements like Dalit Panther, well-known theatre actor and director Virendra Ganvir disagreed. “Dalit is a condition, not an identity,” he said. “It’s a pathetic condition.”But there are those who don’t subscribe to this point of view. One of them, former state minister Nitin Raut, said, “Dalit, as a word, is universally accepted as the name for the community. Don’t we use ‘Bahujan’ for OBC and ‘Adivasi’ for STs? What’s wrong with Dalit?”