Delhi based jazz club in trouble over casteist remarks

The Piano Man is a popular jazz club located at B 6- Commercial Complex, Safdarjung Enclave New Delhi 110029 known for hosting jazz events in the capital city of India owned by Arjun Sagar Gupta. Recently, the club hosted a music band event called "Bhangijumping".

Bhangi is a scheduled caste community forced into manual scavenging and sweeping work in India. The word bhangi is considered a slur used to describe ‘dirty addicts’ and forward castes use it on each other as an insult, as well as use it towards the Bhangi community to dehumanise them and reduce their identity to something associated with ‘filth’.

When brought to the club owner's notice, he offered a passively aggressive clarification defending the name as a form of ‘artistic expression’.

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Dalits protested and boycotted the jazz club on their (now deleted) FB events page managed by Piano Man and voiced their outrage.

Responding to which the friends of the band hurled abuses and mocked them for protesting despite several Dalits taking the time to explain why the word bhangi is a slur and why the name "bhangi jumping" [killing themselves] is an offensive name equating to hate speech against Dalits. The owner of Piano Man did nothing to intervene, stop the abuses or mockery and in fact 'liked' the offensive comments made against Dalits on the FB page.

Dalit Bahujans who boycotted the club after being mocked were called "small minded" and "aggressive" in the Arjun Sagar Gupta's 'clarification note'. They were also told that all of them -Dalit Bahujans- are not welcome inside the premises of Piano Man.

Piano Man called themselves 'vehement supporters of artistic freedom' completely undermining the social and legal connotations of using casteist slurs, that were used to oppress and humiliate Dalit Bahujans and Adivasis, even while claiming that the Dalits were not welcome in the premise.

After a series of exchanges via social media, the owner issued a public apology. However, right after the apology was acknowledged, the friends of the owner of Piano Man inflicted Dalits and the entire community with casteist slurs. Statements like "Chamar bhangi sale", "gutter saaf karne wali" (Chamar Bhangi, the ones who clean manholes) and "Go back to cleaning toilets now", "Ambedkar ki najayaaz aulad," (Ambedkar’s bastards) were used on Facebook. The people who hurled these slurs and 'liked' the comments at Dalit Bahujans protesting this event on the Club's FB page, and were all connected to Arjun Sagar Gupta as they appeared as his 'friend' on his FB profile.

The Club took no action neither did they acknowledge these slurs, but once people started sharing the photo of the slurs, they were promptly deleted. The women Dalit Bahujans were stalked online and then slutshamed and sexually harassed.

Another facebook friend of Arjun Gupta who came across as his close associate from the comments demanded a 'private screening' of 'bhangijumping' and once again belittled the trauma of Dalits and accused them as aggressors.

The community demands booking the offenders under the Prevention of Atrocities Act, 1989 to safeguard the modesty of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe in India and shutting down the club.

The offenders are identified as Varun Bansal, Anshuman Kukreti, Siddharth Wadhwa, Akshay Kapoor, Naval Chopra and Arjun Sagar Gupta for perpetuating, promoting, inciting and participating in casteist discrimination and passing casteist slurs, harassing, belittling and traumatising the Dalit Bahujan community in India.