Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India

Amid the unfortunate din around the authenticity of Rahul Gandhi’s faith, a video appeal from the young Dalit leader Jignesh Mevani went viral on social media. The bespectacled young man with a trademark stubble appealed for funds to support his campaign as an independent candidate in the upcoming Gujarat state elections. Mevani said neither he nor his organisation wished to draw funds from corporates or NGOs, his campaign was to be part of a people’s movement funded by the people.

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The appeal was for funds to defeat the Hindutva forces in Gujarat and to provide interim relief to the people of the country and help them prepare for a larger fight in 2019. The ultimate objective of this fight would be the annihilation of caste and the establishment of an egalitarian social order.

The appeal was poignant both in tone and substance. More so as it was released on a day a non-bailable warrant was issued against him for organising a rail roko movement a year earlier as part of the statewide protests against the flogging of four Dalit youths with iron rods at Una. The use of state force on Mevani at a time when his campaign has just acquired momentum is indicative of the fact that he represents a clear and present danger to the ruling party’s narrative of development in Gujarat. 

While Hardik Patel’s demands for jobs and educational reservations for Patidar youth have been seen to be untenable and self-indulgent, Mevani’s political discourse poses a distinct challenge.

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If Rahul Gandhi has focused on the fall out of ‘spectacular’ policies such as demonetisation, GST and Hardik Patel, on Patidar grievance, Jignesh has sought to formulate a sharper attack on the systemic failures of Gujarat’s developmental model and on the material and symbolic structures of Dalit oppression. Identity politics for him could not be divorced from fundamental livelihood issues.

Part of the reason for the intellectual depth of Mevani’s discourse is its rootedness in a long tradition of Dalit mobilisation in Gujarat. Drawing inspiration from Marx and Ambedkar, Dalit activists and organisations in Gujarat have long sought to combine questions of Dalit identity with those of livelihood.

While the resurgence of caste politics has invited adverse comment in the media, what remains unaddressed is the fact that conversations about caste and primordial affiliations resonate much more intensely in contexts where neither the market nor the state is able to secure livelihoods nor promote social harmony. What is equally worrying for the BJP-ruled government is that the broader tent of Hindutva seems to have less meaning today than it had five years ago. The project of the Hinduization of Dalits touted as among the key to BJP’s success in Gujarat remains both uneven and unfinished. 

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Notwithstanding the gestures of welcome accorded to Dalits into the larger Hindu fold, the entrenched structures of caste prejudice continue to play out in the lives of Dalit communities both in rural and urban Gujarat, despite the incremental material improvements in the lives of many. Gujarat stands fourth in the country in the number of atrocities against Dalits in the country.

Mevani and his followers are affiliated to Navsarjan the oldest NGO in Gujarat advocating Dalit rights and offering legal services to members of the community facing atrocities. Mevani articulates Navsarjan’s demands for justice for the Una victims, and urges the government to provide alternative livelihood options for landless Dalits, and finally pleads for a more committed implementation of the land re-distribution scheme initiated several years earlier. Combining the critical issue of land rights to the larger problems of discrimination and atrocities against Dalits has been Mevani’s singular contribution to the present campaign.

Mevani reminds us that the 1950s land reforms in the state of Gujarat have been skewed against the interests of Dalits and other marginal communities. 

An argument long endorsed by sociologists like Ghanshyam Shah who also argue that corrective measures such as land redistribution among landless Dalits carried out between 1962-1998 have been implemented shoddily. Most redistribution remained on paper and only a few landless groups got actual possession. The demand for land resonates deeply with the vast majority of Dalits who remain small or marginal farmers or those who survive on traditional caste-based occupations, such as scavenging, tanning or weaving.

Yet the hope for 5 acres of land for every landless Dalit remains elusive. Gujarat’s Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (Gujarat Amendment) Bill 2016, which became a law in August 2016 has, finally, removed the social impact assessment and consent clauses to facilitate ease of acquisition. The rush to implement the law was triggered by demands for lands for industrial development and more significantly for the 1,500 km Mumbai-Delhi industrial corridor. The wasteland or common grazing lands redistribution schemes also remain mired in intra-caste rivalries between Dalits and OBCs.

Mevani argues that the demands for the 5 acres of land are actually for the implementation of what is due to landless Dalits. For him, land rights on paper need to translate into actual possession. Yet, there is debate whether land by itself would address larger problems of livelihood, particularly, in the face of prolonged agricultural distress and suppression of wage incomes. For Mevani, however, the possession of land allows the imagination of alternative livelihoods particularly for those engaged in traditionally stigmatised occupations, such as scavenging or tanning.

It may well be a long and arduous battle for land and dignity for marginalised Dalits in Gujarat but Jignesh Mevani has drawn larger attention to the question of ‘inequality’ in a rapidly developing state. His invocation of the Ambedkarite notion of ‘graded inequality’ in the Hindu caste structure together with his focus on the structural inequalities generated by a neo-liberal economic regime are in essence a call for solidarities around questions of economic privation and marginalisation. 

Mevani reminds us that ‘graded inequalities’ impedes the forging of sustainable solidarities against oppression.

Little wonder then that he has been able to persuade the OBC leader Alpesh Thakore and the Patidar maverick Hardik Patel to come together in mutual recognition of the shared experience of economic hardship.

In an election in which appeals to religion and caste seem to be dominating political discourse, Mevani’s appeal for such solidarities offers hope for a return to a less divisive politics.

(Disclaimer: The author writes here in a personal capacity).