Since November 2012, in northern Tamil Nadu, the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) has led a campaign with far worse consequences. S. Ramadoss, founder-leader of the PMK, and leaders of the Vanniyar Sangham — the caste outfit that is to the PMK what the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — have been making statements no less outrageous than Muthalik’s. Ramadoss believes that young Dalit men wearing jeans, T-shirts and sunglasses, riding motorcycles and wielding mobile phones are luring girls of Vanniyar and other “intermediary” castes. Last November, the actions of the cadres of the PMK and Vanniyar Sangham, and the hate speeches of Ramadoss, his son Anbumani Ramadoss, and other Vanniyar leaders such as ‘Kaduvetti’ Guru, resulted in a Salwa Judum-style torching of over 250 Dalit homes in three Dalit colonies of Dharmapuri district. In April 2013, there was another round of violence unleashed by the PMK cadre protesting intercaste affairs. According to a report in Frontline (May 31, 2013), they damaged about 500 public and private buses, setting fire to 13 of them, and also cut down over 160 trees. Everyday life was affected in 10 districts with a sizeable Vanniyar population.
This cycle of violence culminated in the July 4 death of E. Ilavarasan, a 23-year-old Dalit who married Divya, a Vanniyar girl. When found dead along a railway track, Ilavarasan was wearing sky-blue jeans, the attire Ramadoss loathed. In fact, it was their elopement and marriage last October that first instigated Ramadoss’s tirades against “love dramas” in which Dalit men were posing a threat to the “honour” of Vanniyar women. In sheer scale — both of moral policing and damage to lives and property — Ramadoss and the PMK have far exceeded Muthalik and Rama Sene. And yet no one feels the need to send pink chaddis to these caste fanatics. Where Muthalik & Co. erred was in attacking the consumerist logic of both Valentine’s Day and the culture of pubs, antagonising a powerful class constituency. Had Muthalik opposed Vokkaliga-Dalit marriages, he would not have been bestowed pink chaddis. Muthalik courted controversy when he declared: “If we come across couples being together in public and expressing their love, we will take them to the nearest temple and conduct their marriage.” Surely, this is ridiculous, but compared to Ramadoss’s war against intercaste marriages, Muthalik sounds like a misinformed reformer. While the former speaks the language of Hindu supremacy, the latter embodies the logic of caste supremacy. Caste or rather jati dharma predates, and is a far more gruesome and pervasive reality than, Hindu dharma.
Caste and Hindutva
What we are witnessing is merely a restatement of the battle at the heart of India’s flawed democracy in the post-Mandal, post-Babri phase: the divisive discourse of jati assertion, where each jati demands its share in power structures in proportion to its share in the population, competing with the discourse of Hindutva that seeks to project a united force of all Hindus. At first, like many social scientists and commentators, I too believed that post-Mandal jati assertion had derailed and subverted the Hindutva agenda, but it is time we realise that caste majoritarianism is by no means in contradiction with communal majoritarianism (a Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam or PMK would happily align with either the BJP or the Congress, depending on what could be gained). The forces of destruction wielded by Mandalite politicos are just as bad as those unleashed in the name of Mandir...
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