Setting right the caste vacuum

To put the Left on the defensive in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), its presumed bastion, is no easy task. To its credit, the barely two-year-old Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students’ Association (BAPSA) has done this convincingly in the recently held university polls. It registered an impressive performance, thanks mainly to the uncomfortable questions it raised relating to caste — an albatross around the Left’s neck for long. While BAPSA did not win any posts — president, vice-president, general secretary and joint secretary — in the student union’s central panel, Rahul Sonpimple, its charismatic presidential candidate, finished a close second, giving the United Left’s Mohit Pandeya tough fight.

Sonpimple, a wiry, bearded MPhil student in Sociology, is the son of a rickshaw puller from a Nagpur slum. He lost by around 400 votes to Pandey, the candidate put up jointly by the Students Federation of India and the All India Students’ Association. The two other Left bodies — the Democratic Students’ Federation and former president Kanhaiya Kumar’s All India Students’ Federation — put up no presidential candidates. Other BAPSA candidates also fared well and won a substantial number of votes.

Chinmaya Mahanand, a founding member of BAPSA, says caste used to be a ‘rumour’ in JNU. “Before 2014, in JNU there was hardly any discussion on, or discourse around Bahujan icons and intellectuals like Jyotiba Phule, Periyar Ramaswamy and BR Ambedkar. The talk centred around foreign revolutionaries. The anti-Brahminical discourse was absent. We started working aggressively to set this right. Caste exists in JNU and there are several wrongs related to it that have not been addressed. Students from marginalised communities receive very few marks in the viva-voce examination (mandatory for MPhil and Phd admissions as well as other study programmes). The dropout rate for students from marginalised communities remains high. Quota for students and faculty members from Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe/ Other Backward Communities remains unfulfilled. We raised issues that affect students from these communities. It attracted the oppressed sections to us,” Mahanand says, seated outside the School of International Studies (SIS), where he is a research scholar.

Mahanand was BAPSA’s presidential candidate last year. The son of agricultural labourers in the impoverished Kalahandi district in Odisha, Mahanand has been a member of the United Dalit Students’ Forum (UDSF) in JNU. The UDSF, though active in the socio-cultural arena for a long time, never contested elections, and BAPSA was created by its activists to fill this gap.

Commentators have noted the rise in the percentage of non-upper caste students — almost 50 per cent in JNU — following the decision in 2006 to implement OBC reservations in institutions of higher learning. “If one includes other deprived social groups — minorities and women — the upper castes and classes are a minuscule minority,” an essay in Forward Press , a publication focusing on Dalit-Bahujan discourse, pointed out last year. This changing profile has reflected in the social background of the candidates winning elections.

The same essay noted that in the three years before Kanhaiya Kumar, who belonged to an upper caste, the elected presidents came from marginalised communities.

However, all three belonged to Leftist parties and BAPSA challenged this alignment. “The mai-baap (patron-client) relationship has to end. The pain is ours, the struggle is ours. So we will lead ourselves,” asserts Sonpimple, puffing on a Wills Navy Cut cigarette outside the Brahmaputra hostel, which is usually allotted to senior students and is far from the bustle of the rest of the campus. He has just met his research guide — a professor he describes as a kindred spirit — and has had a frugal lunch of the usual mess fare: watery lentils, parboiled rice and seasonal vegetables. His research focuses on Dalit politics, particularly contrasting against the ‘moral lens’ through which politics has been viewed conventionally in India. “When Gandhi went around without clothes, it attracted even Dalits who felt a human connection. On the contrary, Ambedkar favoured a suited-booted attire, for which he was ridiculed,” he says.

At lunch, Sonpimple, like a seasoned politician, tried to engage with the other diners in the mess hall. He delivered a bitter critique of the campus’s Marxists — “They don’t even bother to read Marx” — his voice well-audible to those around. It was an impromptu speech, and included subjects close to his heart, the most well-articulated of which is his beef with the Marxists. “The Left is unwilling to drop its Brahminical tendencies,” he declaimed, scouring the reaction of fellow diners. None contradicted him; some smiled. Sonpimple’s oratorical skills are appreciated on the campus; his presidential debate speech received a thunderous applause from the thousand-strong crowd.

Like Mahanand, Sonpimple hails from an impoverished background. “My mother worked to support us, as my father stayed at home, especially during the latter part of his life,” he says.

It was not easy to run the household on his mother’s income as a construction worker. “I often had one meal a day, a reason why I do not believe in hunger strikes,” he scoffs.

BAPSA had refused to support the hunger-strike called by the Leftist organisations earlier this year to protest against the high- level enquiry committee’s report on the events leading to, and following the incident of February 9. (An event organised to protest the capital punishment to Afzal Guru, convicted in the Parliament attack, had led to the arrest of three students, including the then president Kanhaiya Kumar). When the Left insisted on making the report the main item on the agenda at the Academic Council meeting, BAPSA resisted. It was not against discussing the report, but favoured discussing the relaxation of cut-off marks for OBC students first.

Worried about Sonpimple getting into scraps in the slum, his elder brother took him to social-political events where issues were discussed from an Ambedkarite perspective. “He was puzzled that although I liked reading books, I still got into fights,” Sonpimple says, amused at the ‘contradiction’. He says he is mellow now, and thanks his partner for it; she is from a higher caste. “Her mother has accepted the relationship, but her father is yet to do so,” he says with a tinge of disappointment.

His partner, says Sonpimple, once forbade him from intervening in her fight with a man in a Mumbai local train. “She said it was patriarchal of me to want to protect her when she was capable of handling the situation on her own,” he says.

Quite fittingly, he thanked her during his presidential debate speech. The thoughtful gesture was appreciated on social media.

BAPSA president Bhupali Magare agrees that the presidential speech played an important role in boosting Sonpimple’s electoral performance. However, Magare, also an alumnus of Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Social Sciences like Sonpimple, points out that BAPSA’s organisational work was critical to its strong showing in the polls. “We were engaging closely with students, many of whom were critical of the Left, and it includes some of its sympathisers too,” says Magare, currently an MPhil student at SIS.

Magare claims that BAPSA was instrumental in ensuring that women students from backward areas were awarded two extra deprivation points during admission. JNU awards deprivation points to students from backward areas. “The Left parties wanted all women to be awarded five points. We said that women and transgender candidates from backward areas should get two extra points, as ‘women’ is not a homogeneous category. This was finally accepted. We had also fought to make sure OBC candidates were given relaxation in cut-off marks at both the entrance exam and viva-voce. This too was accepted,” Magare says.

The organisation, he says, has an advisory council and a dedicated group of about 35 activists. The council also has a few senior students and alumni members. There will soon be an effort to enrol more members, Magare says. BAPSA is largely funded by scholarship stipends and activists who have jobs.

Jitendra Kumar, an AISA activist and BAPSA sympathiser, says the latter’s emergence is the culmination of a long-standing struggle. “Dalit students have become vocal now,” says Kumar, who was among the first in JNU to organise a protest against Rohith Vemula’s suicide. The Left, he says, has come late to the issue of caste. “Till a decade ago, it did not believe in the existence of caste,” he says. However, he favours a conciliatory approach. “The Left should not be discarded as a whole. There is a need for healthy critique but not enmity. The Left has fought communalism but it needs to learn about caste from the Ambedkarites,” says Kumar, seated on the bed in his hostel room, which has a cupboard with a poster of Ambedkar on it.

BAPSA is working with other organisations, including those from the Left, to fight for better hostel facilities in the campus. It remains to be seen whether the unity will last and how that will affect the future of JNU politics.

Abhimanyu Kumar is a Delhi-based journalist

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