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Just Say The Word

This apolitical Dalit front had to swim against all kinds of politics

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Just Say The Word
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In 1991, the year India embarked on the process of economic liberalisation, a handful of students at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi set out on a course of reinvention. They were Dalits. At JNU, the visible tendency had always been towards a non-caste-based politicisation. Instead, Y.S. Alone and a band of 15 students decided to proclaim and assert it: they set up the United Dalit Students Front (UDSF), the first students group at the university that was centred around caste.

To be sure, this had nothing to do with campus attitudes towards Dalits. JNU is, relatively speaking, remarkably free of caste prejudice. Even so, Dalit students find themselves subsumed by a left-lea­ning culture that is uncomfortable with caste as a category of analysis. The culture of analysis is such that Dalit problems and incidents of anti-Dalit violence would tend to be read in terms of class relations. This strict avoidance of ‘identity politics’ itself, for the Dalits, seemed  to hold a sneaking kind of bias, and they preferred to dare speak its name.

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The sharp goad for Dalits at JNU to unite was the anti-res­ervation agitation of 1990, in which Dalits found themsel­ves facing a renewed burst of caste antipathy even t­­h­ough the real issue was job quotas in gov­ernment for other backward classes (OBCs). The newly polarised  pro­testers could hardly differentiate betw­een various quotas: in their minds, all categories were undeserving. Reserv­a­tion was the subject of ridicule; and Dalits always attracted a focused ire. Out of the need to articulate the Dalit viewpoint in this charged atmosphere, Alone and the others forged the front. It has since spread beyond the JNU campus.

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The UDSF—largely comprising stud­­­­­e­nts, but also counting scores of academicians and bureaucrats on its rolls­—admits anyone belonging to a Scheduled Caste as member. But to foreground the Dalit identity, it dissociates from political aff­iliation. Members with such affiliations are not admitted to its central committee. Over the years, the UDSF has fostered debate and action. It has also served as an informal club, a secular parish, a radiating network. Unlike old boys’ clubs of IITs, IIMs or elitist colleges, there’s no badge-flaunting. No de rigueur lunches or parties. Neither does it contest college elections. “We don’t have the trappings of an alumni net­w­ork or other such formal groupings, but yes, we are members of a group and take care of each other,” says Raj Kumar, who teaches political science at Delhi University.

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Learning years A meeting of a JNU Dalit alumni association

Some of the UDSF’s activities match its functional, no-nonsense character. “Many of us have decided to plough back our resources to help those who are in need,” says Rajshekhar Vundru, a UDSF member and IAS officer. A group of the UDSF’s bureaucrat-members are helping run a school in Sagar, Haryana. Some coach Dalit applicants taking the civil services exam. The UDSF offers scholarships too. Vundru has also formed an association of Dalit IAS officers. It meets when officers face specific problems. “Our meetings become more frequent as Dalit officers become victims of a system that is generally casteist,” he says. For Vundru, the UDSF provides an easy platform to regroup and discuss issues as they crop up.

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“The front was a nursery that enabled us to become activists without aligning with the Left, the right or even the BSP. We felt truly autonomous,” says Raj Kumar. He joined the front as a student at JNU and says the training it provided prepared him for life. “It’s a training ground for Dalit activism,” he says. “We meet, though not as frequently as other alumni networks do. Our interactions are based on the community’s interests. Something binds us to the front even now.” He says he is carrying forward the ideology nurtured in him as a student at JNU: as a teacher at Delhi University, he tries to inculcate ideas of equality and progressiveness in his students.

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Umakant, one of the founder-members of the front, says in an interview to Insight, a blog written by a Dalit student, “It was at UDSF that we got the opportunity to sharpen ourselves. We learnt to articulate our views, we learnt to develop our leadership potential. The best thing at the UDSF, however, was the concept of collective leadership: it was run by a central committee consisting of 6-10 members. No single person was all­owed to take any decision. Nor could one person alone take credit (for the UDSF’s achievements).”

Santosh Suradkar, an old front hand who now teaches history at Delhi University, says, “There’s a common consciousness which binds us together. We just get together when there is a felt need for a discourse or debate on an issue. We don’t rely on formal invites for a get-together.” He says what sets the UDSF apart from other organisations is that any one individual cannot take precedence. It is a shared experience of being part of a social structure in which some communities have not got their due. They are marked for life for being born certain castes. “When Dalit students come to Delhi University and JNU, they don’t feel part of the mainstream. There is an intense feeling of isolation reinforced by language and culture. In such a situation, the front provides an outlet and a shared identity,” says Suradkar.

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In sharp contrast to the UDSF, the Dalit Chamber of Commerce (DCCI) comprises engineers, entrepreneurs, small and medium industrialists. Unlike the academician-bureaucrat members of the UDSF, they believe soc­ial disadvantage is to be overcome through the deployment of capital and generation of jobs and wealth. But even in the DCCI, there is the UDSF influence: its mentor, Chandrabhan, has since his days at JNU been a UDSF member.

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