“To the backward classes, I am a Devi.”
BSP supremo Mayawati in 2016.
Goddess. A divine aura is often conferred on the Indian woman in common speech. The reality that fills daily lives, though, is the spectre of a broken body. Not broken by its fragility, but by deliberate violence. Mayawati has faced this violence—a political opponent’s sexually-loaded barb in 2016, a physical assault by armed goons of another rival in 1995. She came out strongly on both occasions, calling herself a Devi of the Dalits as a riposte. She would often refer to those abuses as a Dalit, as a woman. These are wounds women face, subjects of debates on women, for women and by women, from which, many rhetorical questions arise, activists say. Women, especially Dalits, ask—is it patriarchy, or is there a double violence, that of caste? And as Uttar Pradesh gets ready for assembly polls, similar questions crop up. Are women a caste or a constituency? There has already been social engineering of caste. Now, there is talk of reorganising caste. Where does gender stand in all this? How do ordinary women, caught between caste and gender, or outside of it, express their political aspirations at the ballot box?
The questions come on the back of assembly elections in Bihar, West Bengal and Assam that threw up “women as vote banks” recently. With north India’s caste parties swatted aside in poll after poll since 2014, the air is rife with speculation about the possible emergence of newer political equations and questions. Will women decide who rules Uttar Pradesh? What role will caste play in the equation?
UP is no stranger to strong women in politics, from India’s first woman chief minister Sucheta Kripalani, to Indira Gandhi and now Mayawati. Over the past year, Nitish Kumar and Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal have retained power on the back of women’s votes. But in UP, where caste is deeply entrenched in the socio-political fabric and dominates electoral politics, can women as a homogenous voting group work?
Gender as a Political Category: Women as an exclusive political group is not a novel idea. In the West, recognition of women as a separate category goes back to “first wave” feminism, which focused on universal suffrage. In colonial India, similar demands led to reservation for women in politics, education and jobs. But since the turn of the new century, a demand to recognise intersectionalities within feminists has grown stronger, helped in no small measure by the empowerment and emergence of Dalit-Bahujan women as a political force.
Sociologist Vivek Kumar of JNU feels that despite political leaders and their parties foregrounding women’s issues from time to time, intersectional issues of women across social and economic stratifications like caste and class have remained untouched. He stressed the need for parties, governments and feminist groups to look beyond gender. “If society is so infected with caste, how can women remain untouched by it? How then can women organise independently with gender as their primordial identity?” Kumar asks.
According to Bahujan scholar Kalyani K., policy instruments and outreaches for women still fail to reflect their intersectional needs because of the lack of recognition of “Dalit-Bahujan woman” as a separate category. “Caste identity has doubly marginalised Dalit-Bahujan women, by excluding them across social, cultural and political realms,” she points out, adding, “Even if their presence has made a dent in political dynamics, their contribution is limited as something in passing, or as a matter of vote banks and alignments.”
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This, according to activist Shobhna Smriti, is the main reason for the “invisiblisation” of Bahujan and minority women as voters. “We get nothing. The centre and states have schemes like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, Ujjwala, etc. But most of it is eyewash.”
Smriti feels Bahujan women in UP have almost no representation, despite forming a chunk of the women voters. “There are caste vote banks, there are women vote banks. But what about lower-caste women?” she asks.
No party understands the importance of caste equations and of perceptions better than BJP. PM Narendra Modi recently launched Ujjwala 2.0, yet another scheme to woo women voters ahead of UP’s assembly polls. Meanwhile, the Yogi Adityanath government launched the third phase of Mission Shakti, which makes women’s safety and dignity the cornerstone of development in the state.
All these programmes, Smriti says, treat women as a homogenous group, while ignoring ground realities. As per NCRB data from 2019, ten Dalit women and girls are raped every day across India, but only 29 per cent of the accused are convicted. “Successive governments have made provisions for women as a homogenous category. As a result, caste-based crimes get presented as crime against a woman, not as one against a Bahujan woman,” Smriti says. She adds, “This is intrinsically wrong, as it tries to depict women as an identity that is caste-less, or a caste in itself.”
Gender as Caste?: The argument of looking at gender as a homogenous ‘backward’ category akin to caste has been repeated several times, especially in the context of women’s reservation. In her book Gendering Caste, historian Uma Chakravarti looks at how the caste system controlled upper caste women through their sexuality, and lower caste women by appropriating their labour. She highlighted an incident when upper-caste women protested against reservations during the Mandal Commission upheaval. One of their placards read: “We don’t want unemployed husbands”.
In his first paper, “Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development” in 1916, B.R. Ambedkar argued that the caste system survived upon oppressing women by controlling their sexuality through endogamy, that is the custom of marying within a local comunity. Thus, both caste and gender oppression are rooted and codified in Indian scriptures and texts like Manusmriti.
With the weakening of BSP in UP, the political participation of Dalit-Bahujan women has taken a back seat, feels Kalyani K., whose research focuses on Dalit-Bahujan politics in the state. “However, Dalit-Bahujan women are now exploring newer Ambedkarite alternatives through Chandrashekhar Azad’s Azad Samaj Party and other political coalitions,” she adds.
As the state readies for a long-drawn election season, one thing is clear—by labeling women as a homogenous vote bank, especially in a state as stratified as UP, issues important to women may once again get swept under the carpet.
(This appeared in the print edition as "Casteing Gender At The Ballot Box")
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