Manusmriti Prevails in Mayawati’s Sarvajan Raj
‘He is fulfilling his jatigat kartavya (caste obligation).’ – that’s what the President of the BSP Pratapgarh Unit said when asked about the local Brahmin BSP MLA who had harboured (in his own home) the killer of a Dalit college student (reported in Tehelka, 25 August 2007)
The Manusmriti decreed that if a dalit were to recite the Vedas, his tongue must be cut off, if he dared to listen to a recitation of the Vedas, molten metal be poured into his ears. Mythology tells us that Shambuk had his head cut off for daring to recite the Vedas. Ekalavya’s teacher demanded his thumb. Education, for dalits in the age of Manu, was punishable with humiliating mutilation – then death.
In the 60th year of Independent India, in the state ruled by India’s first dalit Chief Minister, the Manusmriti with its regime of ‘caste obligations’ and brutal caste punishments seems to be alive and well.
Chakrasen’s eyes held dreams of college and career. According to the feudal goons of his village, his eyes had no right to house such dreams. They didn’t just kill him. They first punished his temerity by smashing that eye that dared to dream of education.
Lucknow, the capital of UP, sports huge hoardings of a smiling Mayawati, assuring dignity, security, rights and employment for dalits, poor and women in the state. To dalits in UP, this government appeared to be an answer to the unanswered questions of centuries, as for the first time a Chief Minister of dalit origin rode to power on her own strength. Many dalit ideologues have already declared governmental power to be the key to open all locks, and in UP Mayawati’s miraculous makeover (Bahujan to Sarvajan) was even theorised as a feat of ‘social-engineering’ forging dalit-Brahmin unity to bring dalits to power.
However, the dreams of dignity fostered by the BSP victory are receiving a rude shock as the roaring success of ‘Sarvajan’ social engineering reaps a bitter harvest. Let us travel some 150 kilometres away from the state capital, in Bhadevra village of Pratapgarh district, where lie the ruins of the shattered dreams of Chakrasen’s family.
Chakrasen graduated from Allahabad University this year and also qualified for the state level Engineering Entrance Examination. He was soon to join an Engineering College in Noida. However a different destiny awaited him in his own village. On August 1, when he was out for a morning run, Santosh Mishra, Akash Dubey and their friends caught hold of him, took him some 2 kilometres away to Sudemau. There he was tied up and beaten mercilessly, and his eyes gouged out before he was killed. The brutal murder took place at six in the morning, but the police registered a report at seven in the evening, and that too under pressure from outraged protestors. The police first lodged the report under section 304 i.e. culpable homicide not amounting to murder. It was only two days later, when the incident had been reported in the media, that section 302 was added. To add insult to injury, the local BSP MLA Ram Shiromani Shukla offered Rs. 500 to Chakrasen’s widowed mother for his last rituals - which she refused.
On August 8, an investigation team of AISA and PUHR visited the spot and met the members of the bereaved family as well as other villagers. Till then none of the assailants had been arrested, and the media in UP too had barely taken notice of the gruesome crime. It was Khairlanji all over again but this time in the dalit CM’s regime. The BSP MLA in order to save his caste and kinsmen, had not only kept the murderers in his protection, he had pressurised the local administration not to arrest the accused. Family members too were being threatened to keep silence.
Why was Chakrasen eliminated? Recently, his grandfather Shiv Murat (Chakrasen lost his father in 1992) was allotted a quota for distribution of ration and kerosene in the village. Feudal goons made illegal demands for ration and kerosene from the quota shop, which Shivmurat refused to oblige. Obviously, being an educated and self-respecting young man Chakrasen was the main source of strength for the family in this battle. His success in the B. Tech examination was the last straw for the feudal forces. The thwarted feudal goons led by Santosh Mishra told his grandfather several months ago, “You’ve educated your son quite a bit, but it won’t be of any use to you” – and Shivmurat reported this death threat to the DM, the SP and the local
Agnisen, Chakrasen’s brother, told our investigation team that after the formation of Mayawati Government, his family felt reassured that with ‘Behenji’ in power, Mishra and his cohorts would not dare to implement the threats.
AISA activists encouraged the villagers to express their outrage and protest in a novel way. On August 15, Chakrasen’s family and others in the dalit basti did not hoist the tricolour. Instead, they hoisted black flags on their homes – as a mark of the darkness which continued to dog the dalits even after 60 years of freedom. This protest got a huge coverage in the media, and only then did the administration came under pressure. On the orders of the Police Superintendent, Santosh Mishra was finally arrested - from none other than the BSP MLA’s house where he had found shelter! Later the other accused were also arrested.
Bhadevra has split wide open the reassuring myth of dignity and security for dalits in Mayawati’s rule. It’s time for dalits to demand a reply – and to make Behenji and her BSP pay dearly for their betrayal.
- Ramayan Ram (AISA State Secretary, UP)
6 comments:
I am not a student of JNU and bear no particular political affiliation.
I am in favour of reservations, workers’ rights, peasants’ rights (I am in total opposition to the illegal grabbing of land from peasants to build factories) and women’s rights. I happen to be seriously against bourgeoisie and multinational culture too. However I have a question for you.
AISA is anti-revisionist and I believe you follow the same line of thought as that of Ludo Martens, Prachanda, William Hinton (“The Great Reversal: The Privatisation of China”), Enver Hoxha and Jose Maria Sisson. Anti-revisionists practice the theories associated with Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao.
I would like to know your opinion on the following;
In the former U.S.S.R.;
1) KATYN FOREST MASSACRE: The mass execution of Polish officers in 1940, inside Katyn forest, carried out on the orders of Stalin and with the approval of Lavrentiy Beria. The total number of victims were 21,768.
2) HOLODOMOR: The national catastrophe of the Ukrainian people as a result of forced collectivization of farms, ordered by Stalin, which left 3.5 million Ukrainians dead from starvation, malnutrition and disease. This was an instance of a man-made famine and not a natural one.
3) THE GREAT PURGE or BOLSHAYA CHITSKA: Orchestrated by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as well as it’s Armed Forces, were purged, with imprisonment, torture and killing of Communist personnel, which has been estimated to be at 400,000.
4) THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO: An epic novel by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn detailing the environment of the Soviet forced labour concentration camp system, it is an eyewitness account as Solzhenitsyn had at one time been a prisoner himself. The deaths resulting from the torture of the inmates has been put at 30 million by reliable sources who compiled data from KGB archives after they were opened in the early 1990s. It covers the entire period of Marxist rule in the Soviet Union
5) SUPRESSION OF ETHNIC NATIONALISM IN THE BALTIC STATES OF THE FORMER U.S.S.R.: Stalin was extremely suspicious about ethnic minorities rising up to defend their nationalistic aspirations and asserting their liberation from the U.S.S.R., so he created complex surveillance systems to track, arrest and deport leaders from ethnic movements in the Baltics, resulting in these leaders and their organizations going underground to form “samizdat” circles, where officially banned literature was printed and circulated.
In Communist China;
1) THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD: A major economic disaster, Mao Tse Tung’s reforms proved to be so unpopular with Chinese peasants that the movement was dubbed “The Little Leap Forward” and “The Great Leap Backward”. Another example of forced collectivization and unrestricted industrialization for which the Chinese peasantry was not prepared, TGLF saw pogroms initiated against peasants who refused to comply with Mao’s orders, which anyhow, drew on the Internationally discredited genetic crop production theories of Soviet biologist, Trofim Lysenko. Famine followed, which has been described as “30% fault of nature and 70% human error”. The official toll of deaths was put at 14 million by Communist authorities, however, scholars estimate it to be between 20 and 43 million.
2) THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION: Why did the Red Guards destroy thousands of years of China’s rich cultural heritage which scholars on Sino-Studies have said was a kind of destruction unmatched at any time or place in human history? Why in defending Marxism, did Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing order University professors and other intellectuals to parade themselves in disgrace, with placards hung round their necks which read “I am a Traitor”? Widespread suppression of religious freedom taken to ridiculous heights by denying Chinese citizens the right to even practice feng-shui or hang a Chinese traditional calendar in their homes was a common everyday occurrence. Such was the ferocity of Mao’s abuse, that during the Cultural Revolution, as eminent historians have put it – “China ceased to be Chinese”. Is it any surprise that the Cultural Revolution is viewed by objective scholars today, both within and outside of China, as well as by Human Rights activists and Civil Libertarians, as an unmitigated disaster? The suffering and stifling of traditional life of the ordinary Chinese was ofcourse of little concern to Mao and his “Gang of Four”, Mao being focused on developing a personality cult of his own, a phenomenon referred to as “Statism”. What is it an example of, if not the low moral character of your beloved anti-revisionist hero, Mao?
Can you provide me with your opinion on the abovementioned events? I am curious.
Your ideology has wrongfully held for a very long time, that ordinary Indians are probably ignorant of Marxist-Leninist history and thus being in the dark, have no complains against it. In that, you are definitely wrong.
Thank you.
Yours sincerely,
Indrani Bhattacharya.
Is it very useful to set up a straw man and then shoot it down?
Firstly, difference between theory and praxis are important- I am not defending theory here though.
For example, the "democratic" Indian state has massacred thousands - does it mean, we are to roll back our democratic institutions?
I was expecting a reply of this sort. Because Marxist-Leninists have been living in denial of the crimes their mentors committed.
You mentioned democracy. If there was democracy in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China, please let me in on it. As far as I know, a one-party rule over decades, classifies as ‘dictatorship’ and ‘totalitarianism’, not democracy.
I am yet to come across a single Radical Leftist, who modestly admits to the crimes of the mentioned Marxist leaders. Even though, their own partymen have publicly denounced the misdeeds, Radical-Leftist ‘apologists’ would have us believe, that the KATYNs and HOLODOMORs were, well, that hackneyed line: western propaganda.
Worse and what else could I call it, but a total absence of conscience, anti-revisionists decry their own ‘fellow travellers’ who have found the courage to denounce the criminals who rose within their ranks.
Sad.
Being neither a Leftist, nor from the Right or the Centre (which is anyway, a political vacuum), in my opinion the victims of Marxist-Leninist violence, Capitalist Imperialism: specially the holocausts of the Native Americans, Maoris and the Aboriginals of Australia, the Jewish ghettos under Nazi rule, are all crimes against humanity.
Hannah Arendt in “Eichmann in Jerusalem”, contended that the Nazi and Soviet holocausts were essentially the same. And Arendt’s observation is worth noting, because not only was she a Jewish scribe fleeing Nazi Germany, she had Left leanings, having been tutored by Martin Heidegger himself.
The victims of Communism donot need any justification in flowery English, Sir. All that they ask of you is – we have seen our own people die. Yes or No?
Genocide was a reality. True or False?
I am glad I am not bound by ideology and therefore, see no need to answer in the negative.
Also, you mentioned violence within India which is perpetrated by her Law Enforcement Agencies. Yes, such incidents happen by the score.
May I ask: How does the brutality of the Indian police, rectify the mistakes of Marxists?
Additionally, the AISA posts stress that in order to be an ‘activist’, students must join it’s ranks. Excuse me, but I can compile a list of Non-governmental organizations who through their activities and awareness missions, have greatly improved the quality of life in city slums and rural areas. Does AISA imply that without attaching themselves to politics, ordinary Indians can make no contribution to their environment?
If you ask me, without the baggage of politics, individuals are better equipped to understand problems and more importantly; to see the good that lies on the other side.
I was actually expecting much worse than those couple of lines in your post, given my prior experience of being in a Yahoo club, dominated by western Marxists. They would use vile language to silence anyone who merely mentioned KATYN VICTIMS’ MEMORIAL DAY.
It’s revealing, you know. At that club, when I listed the crimes of Imperialism, I was feted online by the Marxists, who pushed me into creating more of those articles, yet a few posts later when I wished to draw attention to Communism’s victims, I was told to shut up and get lost for good.
So much for democracy.
One other thing. It has been held by some Leftists that Marx, Engels and Lenin, were the ‘good czars’, whereas Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the repressive regime of East Germany which employed terror tactics through STASI - the East German secret police system, perhaps one of the most notorious surveillance systems after the NKVD and KGB – were the ‘erring’ dilettantes. This theory has been put to rest. A study of the socio-psychological background of the development of Marxist principles has established, that there is a lot that is intrinsically wrong with this ideology.
And the study was not carried out by the usual suspects: the Revisionists. It has been conducted by academics who are neutral.
Arnold Toynbee was one of the intellectuals who studied the socio-psychology of Marxism and came up with some stunning facts.
I have been going through the other posts of AISA as well. And I can see some glaring discrepancies. But gauging the reactions I am likely to receive, meaning the defensive retorts, like your reply, discussion won’t lead to anything, I rest my case.
Thank you.
Yours sincerely,
Indrani Bhattacharya.
I read the article and wanted to find whether the said person got killed because he has dalit or because he and his family did not bent in front of the local goons...
If latter is the case then the author like many other is serving their own vested interest by dividing the society and spreading hatered by asking people to hoist black flag and all...
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