Attack on Dalits celebrating the 200th anniversary of Battle of Koregaon is a forewarning on what's to come
The manufactured outrage over the annual Dalit-led celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Koregaon, unless seen through the pseudo-nationalist lenses, is yet another aggressive Hindutva attempt to muzzle the new Dalit voices that are becoming louder after the marginalisation of the likes of Mayawati and Ramdas Athawale.
It is an expression of the venomous bigotry that drives the ill-informed Hindutva narrative - the very same bigotry that sparked off the Karni Sena anger against Padmavati, a film purportedly (I use the word deliberately because no one has seen it, apart from Arnab Goswami and Rajat Sharma, outside the CBFC) based on an allegorical Sufi poem written in 1540 CE by a Muslim, Malik Muhammad Jayasi, about a fictional princess from Sinhala (modern-day Sri Lanka; note, she wasn't a Rajput), who becomes the queen of Chittor, and Allauddin Khilji falls in love with her.
Understandably, the country has gone into election mode, and Hindutva loyalists have little to brag about after three and half years in power, except an economy where the fiscal deficit has spiralled out of control, jobs are hard to find, the farming sector is wracked by crises and prices of essential commodities showing no signs of abatement, even as Pakistan continues to kill and maim our braveheart soldiers in cold blood. There's only one way to deflect national attention away from the paralysis of equitable development that has set in. And the cynical strategy is to manufacture controversies to polarise voters - Hindus against Muslims and Christians, and the upper castes against Dalits.
It started with the so-called "love jihad" and the alleged cow smugglers, but the virus, post-Gujarat Assembly elections, has infected the national discourse. Branding Rahul Gandhi as being anti-triple talaq bill when all his party, along with 17 others, has asked for is a parliamentary select committee review of one provision of the bill, is the latest expression of this nation-corroding argument.
Questioning the legitimacy of Jignesh Mevani joining the annual celebrations of the Battle of Koregaon - the victory of a unit of the East India Company (comprising 900 Mahar soldiers) over the Peshwa Bajirao II's army in the Second Anglo-Maratha War, a commemoration whose history goes back to January 1, 1927, when BR Ambedkar started the tradition as an assertion of Dalit opposition to upper caste oppression, which had been institutionalised by the Brahminical Peshwas - is a strand of the same divisive narrative.
Any Indian citizen can legitimately join a celebration, even it has political overtones, in any part of the country. If a Bhojpuri film star can represent North East Delhi and become the president of the BJP's Delhi unit, how can Jigesh Mevani be questioned for emerging as yet another national voice of the Dalits? Only those with a Peshwa mindset will parrot (reminds me of Padmavati's parrot in Jayasi's poem) such arguments, including the one linking Mevani with Umar Khalid, who, like any other Indian citizen, has the right to engage in a political or any other activity in any part of the country. This argument is as destructive as the mischievous misrepresentation of the acronym HAJ (Hardik, Alpesh and Jignesh) formed with the first letters of the names of the three youth leaders who turned the political tide in Gujarat during the recent elections.
Politics aside, let's turn to facts to make sense of the mayhem that just shook Maharashtra:
1) It was Chhatrapati Shivaji, who's much loved by the Hindutva army, who inducted Mahars into his army as scouts and guards of forts.
2) The tradition was discontinued by the Peshwas, who heaped inhuman insults upon the Mahars, like insisting that they have a broom tied to their back (to clear their footprints) and hang an earthen pitcher from their necks to prevent their shadow from "polluting" the streets. The celebration of the East India Company's victory in the Battle of Koregaon is not a homage paid to a colonial army, but an assertion of Dalit power against Brahminical oppression.
3) If the celebration of the Battle of Koregaon tantamounts to paying homage to colonialism, then the BJP, too, stands guilty of the same charge because of its opposition in Karnataka to Tipu Sultan, who fought the East India Company till his last dying moment.
4) After the Second Anglo-Afghan War, when British colonial generals, led by Field Marshal Frederick Sleigh Roberts, floated the myth of the martial races, the Mahars were edged out of the British Indian Army and eventually the regiment bearing the name of the caste was disbanded in 1895.
For the Mahars, the army provided an escape from their dehumanised life in a caste-oppressed society, which was why they kept demanding that their regiment be reinstated - a demand that was supported by Mahatma Gandhi's political guru, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and later, the Indian National Congress even though it was opposed to the army recruitment policies of the British Raj.
5) It was the British Indian Army that provided a caste-free upbringing to BR Ambedkar, whose father, Subedar Ramji Sakpal, was a teacher in the Mahar Regiment school at Mhow, Madhya Pradesh. That may have been the reason why Ambedkar, as member of the viceroy's Defence Advisory Committee in 1941, made a strong pitch for the revival of the Mahar Regiment.
6) The viceroy accepted Ambedkar's plea and the first battalion of the Mahar Regiment was raised in Belgaum in October 1941. In the years that followed until Independence, the regiment expanded steadily, saw action in Burma and Iraq, was among the first to become a machine gun regiment in 1946 (it was then that the Koregaon Victory Pillar, the scene of the January 1 celebrations, was replaced by two crossed Vickers machine guns on the regimental crest), and provided security to refugees during the Partition bloodbath. Post-Independence, it became a more integrative unit with the induction of Bengalis, Oriyas and Gujaratis who were rejected as non-martial by the British. The Mahars today are 21 battalions strong and have produced two distinguished Army chiefs, General KV Krishna Rao and General K Sundarji.
Most importantly, the regiment has given the community back the self-pride that the Peshwas had snuffed out.
Hindutva bullies who don't want the Dalits to celebrate their moment of freedom are pursuing cynical electoral manoeuvres that can only lead to one loss - the inclusive idea of India that had been so caringly seeded by Jawaharlal Nehru and nurtured by all those who practise the politics of inclusion.