november 5, 2011

Marginalisation, Memory and Monuments

Mayawatis grand edifice to dalit icons is diminished by her personality cult.

t is indisputable that there is something skewed about our national memory and the heroes who populate it. The nationalist pantheon, whether of the Left or the Right, is largely dominated by a small demographic of upper caste men. There are a few token women and fewer from the less exalted castes. This is not necessarily a critique of the ideas and activism of these men but rather a fact of reality that needs to be acknowledged. Many of these upper caste, upper class men worked hard not only to overcome the privilege and power they were born into but also to destroy the institutions and structures which perpetuated caste, class, gender and other discriminations in our society. Their contributions to the anti-colonial struggle and to building India as a modern nation cannot be denied, but it cannot also be denied that despite all these efforts discrimination and prejudice remained high in Indian society. Caste, gender and class hierarchies could be reformed and ameliorated, but rarely was there space for an outright challenge to them. Not only has this dominance of upper caste, upper class men excluded reformers from castes, classes, regions, religions and a gender different from theirs from the national pantheon of heroes, it has also dyed the national imagination in colours which reflect the world view from the top of the social pyramid. The vast majority of Indias citizens have been, in a sense, marginalised from the national imagination and also from the construction of national memories and myths. How do those thus excluded enter the hallowed portals? How does a different memory, which places the leaders and representatives of the marginalised in this exalted firmament, become national? In the past few decades a mass politics of the oppressed and marginalised has emerged. This politics is not willing to accept paternalistic benevolence and social reform, but wants to dismantle the structures of power within society; at the least it wants a share of power, it wants to exercise power. The upsurge of the dalits, the various communities forming the Other Backward Classes, the minorities and adivasis has altered Indias political landscape beyond recognition and is a welcome step forward towards achieving the goals of equality and justice. Much of the recent effort in the social sciences has been to address these and similar concerns. Parallel to this has been the churn in the social sciences and humanities which have endeavoured to break free from the hegemony of elite ideologies and bring to the fore the ideas and perspectives of those who have entered academia from the marginalised and oppressed communities.
Economic & Political Weekly EPW

It is in this context that the Rashtriya Dalit Prerna Sthal (National Dalit Inspiration Place), inaugurated by Uttar Pradesh (UP) Chief Minister and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) leader, Mayawati, needs to be understood. The point is not how much money it has cost, rather the fact, which has been underscored by almost all dalit activists and intellectuals, that it memorialises an alternate pantheon of intellectual and political leaders. Further, as a commentator has noted, most dalit icons will not get archives and museums and libraries that celebrate their life and work. This Dalit Prerna Sthal, like the numerous other statues and memorials built by Mayawati, is thus both a site for archiving dalit memory and history as well as establishing, in cold physical form, the actuality of dalit presence in the national imagination. The towering statues are meant to be weapons of shock and awe in the dalit armoury. The media and public reaction from non-dalit sections appears to underline their polemical effectiveness. The statues of 15 dalit icons installed at the Dalit Prerna Sthal in the Delhi suburb of Noida metaphorically face the Delhi of Gandhi and Nehru on the other bank of the Yamuna. This symbolism was reiterated by Mayawati at the inaugural of the Sthal to underline the eagerness of dalits to capture power in Delhi. Mayawati has built on the political groundwork of Kanshi Ram and earlier generations of dalit politicians to weld a political coalition in UP which has ensured her a full term in office. However, her attempts to move beyond UP have been largely unsuccessful and given her lacklustre performance in Lucknow it is not sure whether she will be able to even retain her hold on power. Political commentators and Mayawatis supporters view the Dalit Prerna Sthal almost entirely through the prism of her attempt to retain chief ministership and as a measure to shore up dalit support and position herself as the pole star of dalit politics. That the larger political and ideological concerns of challenging the entrenched national imagination remain marginal, not just for Mayawatis opponents but for her as well is evident from the manner in which her persona is magnified and projected. Mayawati has put up a massive statue of her own in the Sthal along with Kanshi Rams and B R Ambedkars, and these are the only ones which have been publicised. Despite contacting various officials of the UP government, EPW could not get a definitive list of people whose statues have been put up. Other than these three, none have been mentioned and there was none who could say for sure who among the

November 5, 2011

vol xlvi nos 44 & 45

EDITORIALS

dalit icons had been included and who had not been. In fact, they appear irrelevant to Mayawatis efforts to regain Lucknow and thus emerge already neglected at the moment of their inauguration. The personification of the entire dalit politics in Mayawati is at

once a symptom of the rising aspirations among the dalits she is giving leadership to as well as the difficulty of aligning such bourgeois aspirations with emancipatory politics. Will Mayawati be able to overcome this contradiction?

Looking for the Poor

The media noise shed little light on the important issues involved in deciding the coverage of welfare programmes.

he context for the Planning Commissions (PC) affidavit on the official poverty line was the deliberation in the Supreme Court on how many people could be covered by the public distribution system (PDS). But while the sound and fury over the poverty line Rs 32 per capita per day in the urban areas and Rs 26 in rural India has subsided, it is not clear if we are any closer to taking a correct decision on who will be covered by welfare programmes. All that we know from the joint statement issued by the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and the union minister for rural development is that the state-wise poverty numbers based on the PCs methodology will not be used to set ceilings (caps) on the number of households to be covered in each state by specific programmes. What the statement was silent about was if a different set of caps will henceforth be applied and if these caps will operate within the ceiling of the national poverty ratio. In other words, first, capping is still on the table. Second, the union cabinet, when earlier clearing the Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC), had taken a decision on which kind of household would be automatically excluded, which one included and how to score deprivation indices of others, and had linked the size of the beneficiary population to the PCs poverty ratios. It has now been decided that yet another committee of experts will make recommendations on how to use the information of the SECC. Fiscal considerations drove the introduction of the targeted public distribution system (TPDS), which in turn called for the design of the Below the Poverty Line (BPL) Census. It is now almost universally accepted that targeting whichever the programme and whatever the criterion used has led to errors in exclusion (i e, those who should be covered are not) that are substantially larger than the errors in inclusion (i e, those who should not be covered are). Yet the government and those who would like to shut down all anti-poverty programmes prefer to focus on the errors of inclusion, which is not surprising given their concern with containing the fiscal deficit. It is unfortunate that the debate begins with the premise that some caps (poverty line based or any other) are necessary. It is sometimes argued that it may be better to have universal coverage with an appropriate design of self-selection. This would prevent any errors in exclusion and inclusion and simultaneously contain the costs of administration. This is how the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) programme which is not restricted to BPL families has been designed. Some programmes like the Indira Awaas Yojana may yet call for identification since unlike the gains from labouring on an MGNREGA project those to be had from grabbing a house site would be

tempting to even the well-off. As far as total costs are concerned, a universal PDS may be more expensive than even a poorly designed TPDS, but in other programmes universalisation with self-targeting should not lead to higher outlays. Therefore, some programmes may lend themselves to universalisation and others may require the use of identification criteria. There is admittedly no simple solution and there are numerous programmes other than the PDS such as the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana, the Indira Awaas Yojana and the new National Rural Livelihoods Mission which currently use BPL criteria to identify beneficiaries. The design of the SECC that is now being conducted with how much preparation and how much rigour in comparison to the population census we do not know is an improvement over the earlier BPL Censuses. But, as commentators have pointed out, the SECC too is not free from possible problems and pilot surveys have reportedly shown up complications. Instead of looking for a single measure of identification based either on consumption expenditure norms or on a deprivation index as likely from the SECC it may be better to rank households on different criteria (see The BPL Census and a Possible Alternative, EPW, 27 February 2010, for a proposal on identifying a Social Assistance Base). Then, depending on the programme that is being administered, households could be chosen on where they rank on appropriate criteria (for example, possession of a pukka house for a housing programme, age of the head of the household for a pension scheme, etc). Sadly, these difficult but very important issues were ignored in the frenzy about the poverty line and poverty numbers that swept the newspapers and the airwaves. The poverty line is not a new concept; it has been around in official India for almost half a century. Academics have wrestled with its meaning and measurement for even longer. There is an unresolved and heated dispute about the correct measure and how the incidence of poverty in India has moved over the years. Yet, this has never been of concern to the media. The recent avalanche of comment and abuse was a comment on how fashions can grip a media, which after refusing for years to acknowledge the pittance of an income that many million Indians live on every month, suddenly but only fleetingly seized upon the absurdity of the current official poverty line. The PC certainly needed to be placed in the dock for claiming before the Supreme Court, The recommended poverty lines ensure the adequacy of actual private expenditure per capita near the poverty lines on food, education and health... But the disclosure of the PCs affidavit was an occasion to address the more important issue of access to the governments anti-poverty/ welfare programmes. There, once again, we failed.
November 5, 2011 vol xlvi nos 44 & 45
EPW Economic & Political Weekly