Social | The dark underbelly of Kerala’s social progress

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Affirmative State action has ensured that Kerala’s Dalits and backward classes are much better off compared to their counterparts in other parts of India. A certain degree of mobility in their political and economic situation has helped them improve their living conditions vastly. Also, they have not been subjected the indignities of untouchability, as is the case with most states, including the neighbouring Tamil Nadu. Yet, this rosy picture conceals much more than it reveals.

The bias against Kerala’s Dalits and backward classes in the subterranean levels of social structure has continued without any weakening; it has rather gained strength in recent times.

There is an increasing frequency in the occurrence of incidents involving atrocities and humiliation of Dalits and adivasis at the workplace, education institutions, cultural spheres and social hierarchies. There have been a number of cases where the victims were forced to take their lives as the treatment meted out to them was beyond all degrees of tolerance. The victims include students, government servants, cops and even unemployed youth. In fact, according to the National Crimes Records Bureau, Kerala accounts for one of the highest rates of increase in the crimes against Dalits. In many cases, these crimes are committed with the acquiescence of the authorities.

The disappearance of traditional caste practices, such as segregation and untouchability in the public place, has not meant the extinction of the casteist culture. It is very much there in the approach of the upper castes and their mental make-up when dealing with Dalits and adivasis. Even graded inequality has been secularised to justify such behaviour.

Essentially, a part of the Hindu scriptural concept, the idea of caste has, however, permeated other religions, such as Islam and Christianity. When people from the lower rung of the Hindu society converted to Christianity and Islam, they carried the stigma along and have been treated as such in their new religion. Those who got converted in the early days were gradually assimilated into the mainstream, but this is not applicable to the later converts, who continue to be discriminated against due to their former status, despite the fact that their new religion does not offer any doctrinal support to the practice.

A most glaring case of such bias recently shocked public conscience when caste prejudice led to the murder of Kevin Joseph, a Dalit Christian, who dared to marry a girl belonging to a traditional Central Travancore Christian family. Members of the girl’s family, including her brother, hatched a conspiracy to get rid of Joseph by kidnapping and murdering him. The principal session court, Kottayam, which heard the case, pronounced it as a case of ‘honour killing’ and found 10 persons, including the brother, guilty. The father, a co-accused, was let off for want of evidence about his involvement in the murder.

In fact, Dalit Christians and Muslims are in a way worse than the Hindu Dalits. They continue to suffer exclusion and social disabilities based on their erstwhile religions both at the hands of the upper caste Hindus as well as the traditional/older believers in their new religion. In addition to this social discriminations, their new religion has robbed them of the special concessions that they would have been entitled as their former selves. This has come as a double whammy for the Dalit converts. There have been demands for extending the benefit of reservations to them, but quotas being such a sensitive issue and non-elastic, there has been little progress.

The early growth of communism played a key role in minimising economic inequalities in society in Kerala. The successful struggle for land reforms led by the communist parties in the early 1970s brought gains in productive land to the tenants, but not to the Dalit agricultural workers, who had provided the ‘man’ power for these agitations. The beneficiaries of those campaigns were mostly peasants and agricultural tenants and excluded the Dalits as they were mainly hired hands or only landless labourers.

The assertion of Dalit identity in recent years has put these people in conflict with the elite class, the authorities and even political parties. The communist parties themselves turned against them when the Dalit agitations challenged the interests of the leftists, ensconced in their newly-acquired power and comforts. The manner in which the State and the political parties fought the assertive land agitations launched by Dalits and adivasis as part of their Chengara and Muthanga campaigns are still fresh in the memory of the depressed class, who continue to face discriminations of all kinds irrespective of their religious denomination.

K Raveendran is a senior journalist. Views are personal.