The Rediff Special/N Sathiya Moorthy

Arson and killing don't make news anymore in southern Tamil Nadu

Peace has -- mostly -- returned to southern Tamil Nadu.

At least, so one hopes. And the essential tragedy of this entire thing is that one is reduced to hoping.

Minor incidents remain the order of the day but so intense has been the conflagration of before, that an arson here or a killing there does not make news anymore. Because even a death or three is 'acceptable', or so the feeling goes, when set against the situation of April through June this year, when entire families were decimated, and entire villages evacuated to prevent wholesale slaughter.

There is in the observer a sense of deja vu, to this sequence of disorder and order. The 'Kodiyankulam incidents' of 1994, when scheduled caste villagers were beaten up and their community wells poisoned allegedly by the backward class thevars in collusion with the local police, witnessed a similar escalation of violence, followed by an eerie calm.

At the centre of these controversies, invariably, has been the desecration of a statue -- either of the late Forward Bloc leader Mutthuramalinga Thevar, or of B R Ambedkar. This year, as a minor departure from the norm, the clashes were sparked by an ill-advised state government move to name a public transport corporation after Sundaralingam, a patriotic local military commander of a bygone era.

Such caste violence is not confined to the southern parts of the state -- the northern districts have seen violence of equal virulence, between the local scheduled caste communities and the backward class vanniars, through the seventies. The 'Meenakshipuram conversions' of local harijans to Islam in the early eighties -- a surefire spark for violence, one would have thought -- had the ironic effect of actually checking the violence. Because for the first time, the various subsects of Hindus suddenly woke to the realisation that continued violence could actually end up driving Hindus of whatever persuasion into Islam's fold.

The current caste clashes in Tamil Nadu are a contemporary fallout of historic developments. The intermittent caste clashes, spread out over three or four decades, are also an expression of an evolving socio-economic cause getting lost in its political attainments.

It's not without reason that the 'self-respect movement' of the Dravidian parties succeeded in Tamil Nadu, and the Justice Party and its various manifestations ruled the roost at the height of the socio-political churning of the society. The nawab of Arcot giving away revenue collection rights to the British East India Company in the mid-eighteenth century meant that a region with no great kings or kingdoms came under the British rule. And along the way, jobs-on-merit at the hands of the alien ruler meant equal opportunity for equal talents in a race for the survival of the fittest.

If the brahmin community, because of its better learning, benefited initially, others did not lag behind. When education brought them social enlightenment, the otherwise well-off upper caste non-brahmin communities saw through the social imbalances that had no political or economic justification. It needs pointing out that the Justice Party and its predecessors were organisations of non-brahmin upper castes, mostly educated landed gentry, equal to the brahmins in education and more than equal to them in economic status, but always one rung below the brahmins in social hierarchy and acceptability.

If the need for societal spread made the non-brahmin movement adopt education and employment as its ‘equaliser-slogans’, the attainment of this goal, first with the formation of the Justice Party and more so with that party's coming to power in the 1919 elections, made the movement itself near-redundant. The Communal G O of 1921 and its later-day modifications, all formalising and legitimising the non-brahmin movement’s demands for reservations in education and employment, benefited only the non-brahmin upper castes initially. The intermediary castes and the harijans, the later-day backwards and the scheduled castes respectively -- to whom education and hence, non-farming, formal employment -- were alien, were left mostly untouched.

It was thus left to ‘Periyar’ E V Ramaswami Naicker to take the non-brahmin movement to the masses, a decade and a half after Gandhi had succeeded in doing so with the Congress movement. If the Justice Party could fill the political vacuum and use its own presence to ensure equality in education and employment for the non-brahmin upper castes, ‘Periyar’ necessarily had to demythify the social status of the brahmins drawn mainly from religious edicts.

In the absence of any political power that was available to his later day DMK followers for enforcing their ‘social will’, Periyar’s movement did lead to stray violence against the brahmins. If it did not gain greater proportions, it could be because at the time there was no political protection.

The violence did not stop, it merely changed shape and contour. Once the ‘brahmin question’ was settled, then naturally came the divisions within the non-brahmin segments. The ‘Periyar factor’ and the post-Independence socio-economic reforms, particularly during the chief ministership of the late K Kamaraj. has since ensured the spread of education, economic well-being and consequent social awareness among the lower strata of the non-brahmin segments.

If the stresses and strains in the northern districts involved the upper caste mudaliars and the backward vanniars, the upper caste saiva vellalars were mostly short-circuited in the south, largely thanks to their numerical minority. With Kamaraj, as chief minister, over-throwing a brahminical Rajaji, his native nadar community usurped the role, and was ranged against the thevars, the other numerically strong, emotionally backward community in the region.

Though that question by itself has not been ‘satisfactorily settled’, the perceived political patronage that the thevar community got under the Jayalalitha chief ministership between 1991 and 1996 meant that the target of the scheduled castes in the region also remained as focused as that of the thevars themselves. And the scheduled castes, emancipated by education, and empowered by economic prosperity compared to their own past, is out to ensure that it be heard.

For all this, however, untouchability as a social curse still exists in many parts of Tamil Nadu. The victims are always the scheduled castes, but the perpetrators are not the upper caste brahmins, but the intermediate castes, like the thevars, nadars and vanniars. The latter class sees the educated and emancipated scheduled caste communities vying with them for a share in the socio-economic cake by way of employment opportunities and the like.

This, and the rampant urbanisation of the state at the cost of prosperous agrarian economy, and the self-assertion -- at times bordering on self-righteousnes -- by indignant sections of the scheduled caste, have all made matters worse. The thevars of southern Tamil Nadu, for instance, have not been able to accept the social assertiveness of the scheduled caste youth, caused by education and enlightenment, and the latter’s economic prosperity, again caused by education and employment, many of them in urban centres and as far away as the Gulf.

It’s also true that proximity to the political power-centre, namely the state capital of Madras, made empowerment that much easier for the backwards first, and the scheduled castes later, in northern Tamil Nadu. Even the non-brahmin movement of Justice Party vintage had its base among the traditionally power-conscious mudaliars of the north rather than the saiva vellalars, addressed as Pillais, of the south.

Though they haven’t won political power through elections as yet -- the chances of them doing it on their own is next to impossible in a caste-conscious state -- the vanniars of the north have made a political success of their Pattali Makkal Katchi, taking the socio-political baton from the mudaliars. As it is, it is, only in the western districts that the dominance of the non-brahmin upper castes in the socio-political milieu is perceptible.

Nearly a century after the birth of the non-brahmin movement, Tamil Nadu is still a society in transition. Surviving political identities notwithstanding, the movement by itself has outlived its utility, what with the attainment of political power by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, and the achievements on the socio-economic front by Kamaraj, Karunanidhi and MGR in the last 40-plus years. The Dravidian parties have lost their social moorings and purpose, as the brahmin Jayalalitha’s ready acceptance as leader of the AIADMK would show. Only, all that has happened before the social agenda of the scheduled castes could be fulfilled.

Gandhi united the various untouchable communities in the country by addressing them as ‘harijans’. It is yet surprising that the recent events in southern Tamil Nadu have made a ready acceptance of the Hindi term ‘dalit’ possible among the scheduled castes of the state, despite its traditional anti-Hindi sentiments. The parayars of the northern districts and the pallars of the southern districts, who have been mutually distancing each other, have now come back under a common tag.

The absence of a credible dalit political leadership -- the northern districts gave up the search long back, and the southern districts are alternating between the politically ambitious Dr S Krishnaswamy, heading the Devendra Kula Vellalar Sangam, and the venom-spitting militant leader John Pandian -- is at the heart of peripheral interest groups taking a pot-shot at the dalit communities in the state. And of their frustrated youth, in turn, showing a preference for the law of the jungle rather than the rule of law.

EARLIER REPORTS:
Clashes rocked TN as backward caste elite couldn't digest the poor's victory: Survey
Fear, hatred haunt violence-hit southern Tamil Nadu
TN drops leaders's names to end caste clashes

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