Thaindian News

By Smita Prakash

Patna, Nov.18 (ANI): So long as this question is asked in India, there is no India shining, India emerging, or as President Obama said in New Delhi, a week ago - India emerged. I am in village Gaunpura, an hour’s drive from Patna. But to get to this village was an adventure in itself. The highway from Patna is perfectly laid; the traffic is orderly as compared to Punjab or Haryana. Then we turn into towns.

There is filth everywhere. Rotting mounds of garbage, which has probably never been cleared. It just keeps piling up, layer upon layer. The gutters are overflowing. Man and pig cohabit. The stench is unbearable. I walk gingerly placing one foot ahead of the other avoiding animal faeces. I look around, nobody other than I have a cloth covering his or her nose. It appears worse than many similar towns that I have been to, in the rest of India. This seems to be the same Bihar I have visited earlier. Same problem of a lack of civic facilities here too, just like before, and just like in UP, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh. Any state for that matter.

The people seem oblivious to the smell and the filth around them. And amidst all this decay, there stands a bright red pandal (decorative tent) with a garishly attired statue of the Mother Goddess. It is the most important festival of Chatt and people of all castes are allowed, by tradition, to participate in the festivities. Tradition and modernity, vulgar modernity, mingle outrageously. ‘Munni badnaam hui’, a raucous song from the latest Bollywood film ‘Dabbang’ blares from loud speakers. I take my pictures like any big city dweller, searching for colour in India but finding squalor instead. Arvind Adiga’s The White Tiger comes to mind. The stark contrast between rural and semi-urban India on the one hand, and the glass skyscrapers of Gurgaon, Haryana, on the other. Yes, Rahul Gandhi is probably right; there are two Indias, and more.

My destination is a Mahadalit village. Now, the term Dalit has roots in Sanskrit where the root ‘dal’ means ‘to split, crack, open’. Dalit has thus come to mean things or persons who are cut, split, broken or torn asunder, scattered or crushed and destroyed. The present usage of the term Dalit goes back to the nineteenth century, when Marathi social reformer, Mahatma Jyotirao Phule used it to describe outcastes and untouchables as the oppressed and the broken victims of our caste-ridden society.

But I’m deeply fascinated by the term Mahadalit at many levels. That there is a term called Mahadalit. Although it can be literally translated as “Mega Dalits”, what does it really mean - the blessed among the Dalits or the most depressed section among the Dalits? I am told it is the latter — the most deprived of the deprived.

Mahadalit is a term created with great political fanfare in 2007, when the Nitish Kumar Government set up the Mahadalit Commission to identify Mahadalits, ostensibly for a better targeting of schemes for their uplift and development.

According to the Commission, there were three criteria of inclusion: literacy rates, placement in services and social stigma. The Commission identified 18 of Bihar’s 22 Dalit castes as Mahadalit. The four groups that were excluded were: Jatavs and Paswans, together accounting for more than 60 per cent of Bihar’s Scheduled Caste (SC) population; and Dhobis and Pasis, the two groups considered relatively better off among Dalits. In 2008, Pasis and Dhobis were also included in the Mahadalit list. In 2009, the Jatavs followed them into the burgeoning Mahadalit ranks, leaving out only the Paswans.

In Gaunpura, I am shocked that the Mahadalits live separately than people of other castes, even other Dalits. Hadn’t Bihar changed? TV programmes have been telling us so. So my cameraman and I get off the highway into ‘kuchcha’ roads, drive over a snake, and ask “Bhaiyya, yahan Dalit basti kahan hai?”(Where is the Dalit village)? Blank. I repeat, “Dalit basti”. No response. Then my cameraman whispers, “Harijan basti”. We get the directions. Gaunpura is a little hamlet where about 30 families live in abject poverty.

They are well aware of their rights, that they are entitled to housing under the Indira Awas Yojna programme, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) should grant them minimum days of work. Some of them who worked under this scheme like Ramdev were not paid for 11 days of labour that he did, out of the 60 days he was employed under the MGNREGA. He has been fighting with the authorities to get that money. Another says he was thrown in jail when he asked for his complete wages. Bijay Pawan says fake MGNREGA booklets are handed to the villagers to sign in their attendance and then they were cheated off their wages. Uma Devi is completely illiterate, but has cast her vote a few days back. She says that it is to teach a lesson to those who should have built a house for her under a central government scheme, but didn’t do it.