Amrit Dhillon is a New Delhi-based journalist.
Rarely have Indian politicians been as patronizing as in the current grotesquerie being enacted all over India: members of Parliament dining in the homes of dalits. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, keen to get the votes of the country’s 200 million dalits (or untouchables, as they were formerly called) has instructed his MPs to go and eat in the homes of poor dalit families to, presumably, make them feel good.
The order is an insult. By graciously condescending to eat the food cooked by a dalit in a dalit home, politicians are reinforcing the sense of “inferiority” that has been foisted on them for centuries by the Hindu caste system. It is an affront to their dignity. It is an insult to their self-respect.
If Indian politicians were able to treat dalits as normal human beings, why would they need to make a special gesture of going to eat in their homes? As though they are so dirty that eating with them is not something they would otherwise do?
Of course, it is obvious where Mr. Modi is coming from. The majority of upper-caste Hindus abhor the idea of eating with dalits or using their utensils. They believe it pollutes their caste purity. Many still refuse to allow dalits into their kitchen. Roadside eateries in rural areas keep separate plates and cups for dalit customers. Upper-caste children have been known to refuse to eat their school meal if they discover it has been prepared by a dalit cook.
By selecting the powerful taboo of food and inter-caste dining, Mr. Modi wanted to send out a strong signal to dalits that they are important to his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is predominantly upper-caste.
But what a way to do it. This kind of meaningless exercise is much-loved by nearly all Indian politicians as a substitute for effective policies. Visiting a dalit home – where the poor family has to scramble to clean it, buy food and prepare it for the dignitary, as though they don’t already have enough on their plates – is easier than giving them jobs, education and protection against murderous attacks by upper-caste men.
Form is always preferred over substance. Some 40,000 crimes against dalits and other low castes were reported in 2016 but no BJP MP is worked up about that.
When it matters, MPs never turn up. A young dalit bridegroom, Sanjay Kumar Jatav, has been fighting for the right to take his wedding procession through the upper-caste area of his fiancée’s village in Uttar Pradesh. In villages, segregation reigns. The upper castes and dalits live in different areas, the latter usually on the outskirts of the village.
The upper castes told Mr. Jatav that such an “outrageous” thing as a dalit daring to head a procession through their area has never happened. Not in centuries. And it will not happen now, either. Mr. Jatav has been fighting in the courts for this right.
“I contacted the legislators of all the parties and asked them to stand up for the basic principle that I, as a citizen, have the right to walk down a public road, a road that’s public property, with the law on my side,” Mr. Jatav told me on a visit to the Indian capital. “But not one offered me any support.”
The progenitor of the dining-in-dalit-homes fad is Congress Party Leader Rahul Gandhi, who started it some years ago to prove his credentials that he stood with the poor. It was an equally patronizing gesture by him, too, but at least he ate the food prepared by the dalit family he visited.
BJP MP Suresh Rana was caught ordering a takeaway and mineral water from a local restaurant and eating that instead of the dalit family’s meal. Anupama Jaiswal, another BJP MP, was called out for being condescending. She whined that MPs were good enough to eat in dalit homes despite being troubled by mosquitoes. Someone give her a prize.
These visits are mere photo opportunities that, in their superficiality, mock the cruelty that dalits face almost every day. The BJP seems unaware that, by making a big deal of something so simple as sharing a meal in the home of a fellow Indian, it is, de facto, betraying ingrained caste attitudes. Presumably, dalits are meant to be grateful for being treated as human. If they had any sense they would tell these intruders to buzz off and leave them alone, but they are far too well-mannered to do that. Alas.
Indian public life is full of phony gestures. The problem with being inauthentic is that one is easily caught out, such as the two MPs mentioned above. True feelings have a nasty habit of bursting out spontaneously, through all the contrived artifice.
With this drive, the BJP’s attempt to reach out to dalits has backfired and come across as a piece of cheap tourism.