National Highway

“You must append to your name all the degrees that Babasaheb has – MA, PhD, DSc, LLD and Barrister of Law,” Gopal Guru’s father, a landless agricultural labourer, once told him. Now a Professor at Jawaharlal University’s Centre for Political Sciences, and writer of widely published papers and illuminating tracts, Guru, 52, hasn’t let his father down. “He didn’t want me to become a bourgeoisie collector.”

His father could barely sign his name, but his active involvement with Ambedkar’s movement left Guru a legacy. Does that mean he belongs to Ambedkar’s caste, Mahar? “Why do you make that assumption?” he asks. Dalit he is, but he won’t tell you his caste. “I don’t have a village and I don’t have a caste. How would a declaration of my caste help Dalit consolidation?” How then does he answer the identity paradox – that on the one hand he would assert himself as a Dalit scholar and on the other not be identified with the caste that caused him to be Dalit in the first place? “There is a difference between an ascribed identity and an acquired one.”

At ease with his twin roles of being a political person and an academic commentator, he says he is nervous every time he enters a seminar room. “In the public sphere you should exude a sense of anxiety because you should have acquired a sense of anxiety along with your modernist suspicion. You should not be predictable.”

And predictable he is not. “The farmers committing suicide in Vidarbha,” which is where he hails from, “as well as the rest of India, are largely OBCs. As corporates move into agriculture it could only get worse. This could well prove to be the UPA’s undoing.” The crisis could provide lower OBCs an opportunity to break away from the Hindu sphere and join hands with the Dalit movement, he says, finally putting the longstanding project of Dalit-Bahujan unity on a high-speed track. “But any unity has to be of a substantive nature,” he cautions, “it has to fuse the aspirations of both Dalits and OBCs, based on principles. Short-term unity for electoral pragmatism won’t do it.” But such a project would require large-scale political mobilization. “Oh yes,” he says, “the sort Kanshi Ram did for Dalits in the north. He would go to villages, take out a pen and say it represented the social system. He would then show it upside down and say we could reverse the caste order. He rhetoricised Ambedkarite philosophy with symbols.”

Whereas Kanshi Ram’s eyes were fixed on both the seat at Lucknow as well as the remote village, Mayawati seems to him as looking only at the seat. “When Ambedkar said capture power he meant capture power by force of ideology, not identity.” Although critical of Mayawati’s “politics of pragmatism”, he concedes that its symbolism has its value. “Villages were always named after upper caste individuals. Naming villages after Ambedkar means a lot for the dignity of its Dalit residents. But beyond dignity and safety, what do they get? We are yet to know.” Which is why, he says, it will be interesting to watch the implications of Mayawati’s alliance with all castes including Brahmins for the forthcoming Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh in February 2007. “If she comes to power partly with votes from upper castes, would it result in changes in the access, sharing and ownership of resources at the village level?” The answer is writ large on his face, but he won’t say it.

[First published in Tehelka.]