It is of course a coincidence that India’s two biggest political parties are engaged in a row over symbolic cleansing (shuddhi) rituals just at a time when a United Nations committee has yet again expressed concern over the country’s treatment of Dalits.
India bristles when international agencies point fingers at varna-based discrimination but takes no exception to the casual practice of prejudice in real and symbolic forms in everyday politics.
On August 10, two days after Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge spoke at a Ramlila ground in Haldwani, Uttarakhand, a Sangh Parivar-affiliated group carried out a purification ritual at the venue. They sprinkled ‘holy water’ around the spot where the Dalit leader had delivered his speech and performed a ‘shuddhikaran yagna’ with a ritual fire. Kharge later said in Parliament that he felt subjected to untouchability in a symbolic form. The BJP has made light of the matter, stating that it was a routine cleanup after a political event with no purport to ritual untouchability.
Indeed, political parties in India perform purification rituals as a matter of course. It is common to see supporters of a political party wash the statue of a hero with water or milk after it was ‘desecrated’ by opponents. This casual practice of symbols and customs that are redolent of ritual untouchability gives the lie to the Indian state’s protestations that it has low tolerance for varna prejudice. The fact that such practices are considered a legitimate tool of politics, and are employed by the whole spectrum of parties, underscores the fact that prejudice remains lodged in our political culture and expresses itself in codified forms, which the subject of the insult perceives but its perpetrator can always deny by feigning injured innocence or righteous indignation.
A fortnight after the insult to Kharge, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) issued its latest findings on India pointing out poor treatment of “ethnic and ethno-religious groups, indigenous and tribal peoples, including Scheduled Tribes, Scheduled Castes, particularly Dalits, and non-citizens”, citing racially motivated violence, excessive use of force, extrajudicial killings, detention without due process, torture, ill-treatment and sexual violence against them.
India has a history with UNCERD. In 1996, the UN committee formally ruled that prejudice against Dalits satisfies the definition of descent-based discrimination. That observation strengthened efforts by international human rights groups and Dalit activists to equate varna prejudice with racial discrimination.
In subsequent reviews in 2002 and 2007, CERD noted the abiding practice of ritual prejudice in India and criticised the state for trying to obfuscate data on abuse against Dalits.
Typically, the Indian government’s reaction to CERD reports has tended to be vituperative. This time too, the Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal dismissed the findings “with the contempt they deserve”. Responses like that, and the argument that caste discrimination is an internal social issue that is adequately addressed by India’s own constitutional protections, have done nothing to ward off international scrutiny. Although India lobbied to keep caste out of the text of the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism, the issue now figures prominently in the international agenda against discrimination. It has even made it into legislation abroad. Local laws in Seattle and California and universities like Harvard explicitly outlaw caste discrimination.
So, treating caste scrutiny as bad press does not help India’s case. The only solution is to make all those constitutional protections do some real work.