In a news cycle powered by faux outrage, did you notice how little anger there was over the account of 14 Dalit workers locked up and tortured in a coffee estate in Karnataka’s Chikkamagaluru? Among them was a pregnant woman beaten so viciously that she lost her baby.
The brutalisation of Dalits and Adivasis is on the rise in India. The government’s numbers reinforce that. The Karnataka horror was preceded by a similar case of enslavement in Jharkhand, where Sunita Devi, a tribal woman, was hit with iron rods and even made to lick urine off the floor. The perpetrator was allegedly Seema Patra, a now-suspended state Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader who earlier held a party post in the women’s wing.
Yet, what has obsessed the media and dominated the political discourse is the resignation of Rajendra Pal Gautam, the erstwhile minister for social welfare in the Arvind Kejriwal-led Delhi government.
The reason? He was on stage at a mass conversion meet where BR Ambedkar’s vows were chanted by those present, including Gautam, as they embraced Buddhism and “renounced” Hinduism. The 22 “vows” are a reference to another conversion meeting held more than 60 years ago in Nagpur on October 15. That is when Babasaheb — the architect of India’s Constitution, the man whose portraits mark a presence on the walls of every government office, the disruptive intellectual whose ubiquitous blue statue is present in almost every small town of this country — along with 365,000 other Dalits, took an oath to leave Hinduism. They pledged their renunciation and became Buddhists, declaring they would no longer worship Brahma, Vishnu or Mahesh.
As the BJP’s Dalit leaders have pointed out, these declarations are not an assault on Hinduism but a protest against casteism. While there is no derogatory word about any Hindu deity, there is, of course, a rejection of a belief system based on the reality of their social oppression.
While conversions have always been a politically volatile subject, what has unfolded since Gautam’s event is farcical. He has been summoned by the police and interrogated as if he is a petty criminal.
In election season, the BJP quickly pounced on the conversions as evidence of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)’s anti-Hindu slant. Hoardings with Kejriwal wearing a skull cap — shorthand for being pro-Muslim — surfaced in Gujarat, where the party is trying to grow roots ahead of the assembly elections. As a result, Gautam has been hounded out of office. And far from standing by him, the AAP has effectively dumped its most prominent Dalit face.
Gautam has since pointed out — and nobody has a counter to this — that the “vows’ at the heart of the debate are, in fact, part of the 17-volume series of the collected works of Ambedkar, published by a government-run foundation. In other words, Gautam is being punished for following a man supposedly revered by Indian politicians across party lines.
The attempt to criminalise conversions has been building up. Several states, including Karnataka, have legislated in this direction, passing anti-conversion laws rooted in the argument that luring or coercing someone into changing faith should be punishable by law.
While Article 25 specifically gives citizens the right to profess, practise and propagate religion, states have imposed “reasonable restrictions” on this right by arguing that the choices are not always freely made. The Supreme Court also upheld the legal validity of these state interventions. In the 1977 Rev. Stainislaus vs State Of Madhya Pradesh case, then chief justice AN Ray led a five-judge bench to conclude that “the Article (25) does not grant the right to convert other persons to one’s own religion but to transmit or spread one’s religion by an exposition of its tenets.”
The rhetoric of politics can, of course, make mincemeat of these legal nuances. And that is what has happened in the Gautam case. In an interview with me, he asked the inconvenient question: “If we are Hindu, why do you hate us so much — aap itni nafrat kyon karte hain?” — referencing caste atrocities.
The BJP’s political project would naturally prefer to subsume caste hierarchies within a larger, consolidated Hindu identity. Its ambitions to court the Dalit voter in the North Indian heartland have met with success, especially among non-Jatav Dalits. The consecutive wins in Uttar Pradesh underline how a combination of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity, Hindutva, welfare measures such as free rations and the near demise of parties such as the Bahujan Samaj Party, have enabled this, even though the party performed better in reserved seats in 2017 than in 2022.
With Gujarat elections around the corner, expect competitive politics to dominate the noise and the news cycle. And expect little conversation about the actual plight of marginalised communities.
Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and author The views expressed are personal
