NEWS

“Our government is your government,” said Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, addressing a conference of Dalit entrepreneurs in December 2015. “We are working for your empowerment.” At a perfunctory glance, such a statement would appear inconsistent with the Modi regime’s divisive politics directed at caste minorities in India. Ever since Modi’s right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party rose to power in 2014, caste-based violence has skyrocketed nationally. Sexual violence against Dalit women and Dalit people with disabilities headlines human rights reports on India annually. Human rights watchdogs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch rebuke the Indian criminal justice system’s failure to intervene and prosecute those who perpetrate anti-Dalit hate crimes, pointing out that the Indian police are often behind the very violence inflicted on Dalits. In lieu of the dreary conditions of state violence in which Dalits find themselves trapped, Modi’s 2015 message recognizing and promoting Dalit entrepreneurialism would appear confounding, but when the element of ownership of wealth is injected into this simple equation about caste, the tone of Modi’s message is easier explained.

Modi’s empathy toward the Dalit community came with a caveat. “We want to create job-creators, not job seekers,” he told the entrepreneurs. The persistent and systemic disenfranchisement of caste minorities from the economic system that had denied Dalits jobs—especially in the wake of liberalization, privatization, and globalization that swept Indian markets post the Cold War in 1991—went unacknowledged. Instead, capitalism as an emancipatory arena where the oppressed caste could create its own jobs was extolled.

Modi’s ‘wooing’ of Dalit entrepreneurs, not to be mistaken as support for Dalit liberation, is in line with the neo-liberal economics of privatization and liberalization propounded and embedded by his conservative government. Since the onslaught of globalization in 1991, Dalit intellectuals and activists, finding their community unprotected within the private sector, jumped on the leftist bandwagon of a complete repudiation of neo-liberal capitalism. In the early 2000s, exhausted by their continued marginalization within the private sector as globalization permeated every aspect of Indian society, a new strand of political thought emerged within the Dalit liberation movement. Led by Chandra Bhan Prasad—the young Dalit journalist, intellectual, and cult figure of sorts—this stream of revisionism in the Dalit movement relinquished its prior uncritical alliance with the left, calling for the emancipatory employment of capitalism by Dalits to liberate themselves. Prasad wanted greater ownership of capital by Dalits, as he believed the path to liberation stemmed from equal participation of the oppressor and the oppressed in the economy. Consequently relieved to have been offered an alternative path to Dalit liberation divorced from radical leftism, neoliberal right-wingers like Modi are keen to jump into bed with the revisionist Dalit theorists—those who call for liberation through capitalism rather than liberation from it.

In December 2005, Prasad organized a party in a modest New Delhi apartment to celebrate ‘Dalit capitalism.’ The invitation letter for this party was a two-paged treatise explaining this newly coined phrase. Described in this letter and later expanded upon in the book Defying the Odds, written by Prasad, Devesh Kapur, and D. Shyam Babu, was the core tenet of Dalit capitalism: the “democratization of capital.” Prasad, Kapur, and Babu, the torchbearers of Dalit capitalism, also founded the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DICCI) that aims to fight caste with capital. To members of DICCI, capitalism is an egalitarian ideology. They idealize a moment of Dalit capital forces sitting together on an equal plane to negotiate with their dominant-caste oppressors. They believe that because Dalits have been historically disenfranchised from owning capital, they deserve equal participation in the ownership of public resources. They seek to decrease impediments to Dalit capital accumulation, which will override the economic inequalities that induce caste-based marginalization of Dalits. In sum, this can empower Dalits to assert agency within a system that has shackled them for centuries.

The push for Dalit capitalism arose from a disillusionment with other forms of economic systems. Bhan argued that because feudalism was defeated, and socialism was “self-defeated,” capitalism remained the only hope for liberation. In 1991, India entered a period of neo-liberal reforms subdued by the wake of American unilateralism, following the collapse of the erstwhile Soviet Union. Prior to 1991, the Indian welfare state, patronized by the Soviet Union, was characterized by state ownership of capital, particularly nationalization of heavy industries, which boosted the public sector as a protector of the economically marginalized, despite stagnating national growth. Under this system, Dalits, like other caste, class, and religious minorities, benefited greatly from a system of reservation that held a select few seats for the upliftment of the disenfranchised in the public sector. This was a “safeguard” designed into the Indian constitution by its writer and iconic leader of the Dalit liberation movement, Bhim Rao Ambedkar. Therefore, in the period immediately after 1991, Dalit activists and intellectuals mobilized around a defense of the public sector and opposed globalization.

However, Prasad began to articulate an alternative position realizing that globalization and neoliberalism would stay in perpetuity. He argued that rather than wasting time by opposing the private sector, Dalits needed to stake a claim within it. Because the Indian capitalist system was itself casteist and sought to exclude Dalits who wanted to own capital, Prasad lobbied for the ownership of more capital by Dalits. For instance, there was a near complete exclusion of Dalits from the media and the academy. The solution to this, according to Prasad, was for Dalits to own their own newspapers. This was impossible given the scale of investments necessary if the community did not have its own entrepreneurs. Thus the push for Dalit capitalism.

Toward the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the rift between leftist Dalit activism and Dalit capitalism in modern-day India was mirrored within the movement for Black liberation in the United States. Spearheaded by Booker T. Washington, a form of Black capitalism emerged predicated around the notion that formerly enslaved African-Americans deserved equal participation in private ownership of public resources. This movement, built around the controversial premise of ‘racial uplift,’ laid the foundations of a capitalist enterprise for the marginalized in America, creating a model for ‘emancipatory capitalism’ in different political and social contexts across the world.

Booker T. Washington’s approach was vehemently opposed by W.E.B. Du Bois in multiple works throughout his lifetime. In The Souls of the Black Folk, Du Bois critiques Booker’s Atlanta Compromise, a statement on race relations welcomed by white leaders in the American south, that argued economic security of Black Americans superseded the need for political and intellectual liberation. DuBois critiqued the statement for its narrow interpretation of emancipation as the attainment of self-sufficiency. Washington sought not to transcend the idea of race and the inequities that follow in its wake. Instead, he wanted to enable formerly enslaved Black Americans, who had been historically denied access to the closed quarters of white capital, to participate in the structure itself. Here, Dalit capitalism’s desire to carve out space for the minority caste into the system resonated with Booker’s Black capitalism. On the other hand, for DuBois, much like Dalit activists who resist capitalism, materialistic gain had no meaning if dignity and freedom had to be compromised to attain economic power.

Washington and DuBois’ differences diverged further on the education of formerly enslaved African-Americans. Washington set up the Tuskegee Institute for vocational training that would promote education among African Americans and in turn convert masses of underpaid Black artisanal labourers into a bourgeois class of business people. Washington explicitly sought to elevate Black labor into “honorable labor”. He believed that accumulation of wealth by the first and second generations of formerly enslaved people was the path to emancipation. He believed in the importance of honing productive skills that Black people had been stripped of many decades ago, questioning why modern education for Black people focused on subjects like mathematics, English, and sciences when Black people, according to him, were 250 years behind in economic skill development. In 1900, he established the National Negro Business league with the intent to “promote the commercial and financial development of the Negro.” In many ways, what Washington hoped Tuskegee would be to the aspiring Black capitalists in the early 20th century, DICCI is to Dalit entrpeneurs in India today—a network of marginalized capitalists attempting to appropriate space within

The debate between Washington and Du Bois finds renewed historical significance in charting out the trajectory of Dalit capitalism and the discourse centering it. In fact, DICCI, the organization empowering Dalit capitalists, have invoked the work of Booker T. Washington as its inspiration. Prasad has argued that as DICCI is an entity catering to marginalized business persons, 19th century African-American capitalism is central to the understanding of the historiography of Dalit capitalism. Prasad also compared the founder of DICCI, Milind Kamble, to Washington.

However, much like the DuBois-Washington rift, there exists another stream within Dalit scholarship and activism that challenges the ethics of Dalit capitalism. Of these, one of the most prominent is Suraj Yengde, a leading public intellectual and young Dalit scholar. Yengde wrote a chapter titled “Dalit Capitalism” in his book Caste Matters, where he draws from the Washington versus Du Bois debate to establish the paradox within this movement’s ideological premise. According to Yengde, castebased capitalism reiterates the divisions and marginalizations that abound within the capitalist set-up, rather than challenge them. This further accentuates caste-based divisions in the country instead of diminishing them, an argument voiced by DuBois about Washington’s attempt at Black emancipatory capitalism. For instance, Dalit capitalists do not own profitable businesses in the heavy metal industry. Rather, upper caste capitalists monopolize ownership of such industries.

Yengde and Prasad agree that the Indian capitalist system is innately casteist, but they disagree on the tools of its dismantlement. Prasad argues that to percolate such a system, a few Dalits must be billionaires, a few hundred multi-millionaires, and a few thousand millionaires. “A few dozen Dalits as market speculators, a few Dalit-owned corporations traded on stock-exchanges, a few Dalits with private Jets, and a few of them with Golf caps, would make democratic Capitalism loveable.” This in turn will democratize capitalism in India.

Yengde rejects this claim, arguing that this prioritizes private gain and success rather than communal liberation. The projection of some successful Dalit capitalists on mass media creates the “myth” that particpating in similar trajectories of capital accumulation, as the few successful will, fetch emancipation for the community. In reality, there is no on-theground assistance for credit or support to establish a start-up for budding Dalit entrepreneurs. He argues, “By brandishing the image of Dalit success stories, the capitalist framework paints an ideal picture: one day you will also win the lottery and ascend to the top; that is, win the 21 inch colour TV you had dreamt of. Such lies are constantly penetrated into poor neighbourhoods and working-class Dalit shanties.” In turn, Dalits—who were formerly desirous of political and economic emancipation—now seek validation of their identity, meaning, and self-worth. This is a layer of marginalization inflicted upon the low-income, subaltern Dalit by the Dalit capitalist. By succeeding and peddling success within a structure that is biased against the Dalit, the Dalit capitalist injects self-doubt into the “working-class Dalit” who questions why they are unable to acquire the success that they witness in the Dalit icons portrayed on media.

At the same time, to dismiss the emancipatory utopia of capitalism invoked by Dalit capitalists without criticality would be wrong. Take, for instance, the dimension of cultural emancipation that capitalism has fetched the community, that offers Dalits a flamboyant and “carnivalesque” escape from their plight. In 2003, when the first Dalit woman chief minister of a central Indian state, Mayawati, threw a dazzling birthday party that recreated the set of a Bollywood blockbuster, Dalits, including low income communities, reveled in the shadow of her glory. This pride in representation undercut the legitimate New York Times critique that juxtaposed her failure as a Dalit leader with her garish opulence. As Nivedita Menon, a postcolonial scholar of caste in India, has noted, Mayawati’s birthday offered to the historically oppressed Dalit an opportunity to occupy space. To Dalits, the ostentatious experience of capitalism, even second-hand, felt justified and long overdue. In lieu of this, Yengde’s academic dismissal of caste capitalism—set in terms of a historical academic debate between DuBois and Washington—appears out of touch.

The unfortunate truth is there is little to Dalit capitalism beyond its imaginative utopia. For, as Yengde shows, albeit in often inaccessible terms, Dalit capitalism is a paradox, designed to elevate some among the marginalized, create hierarchies of class within caste, and recast structural power hierarchies along new lines instead of dismantling them. The marginalization of the subaltern Dalit through all of this remains persistent, even as who constitutes this category shifts. To remedy this, radical theories of liberation embodied by DuBois and now Yengde must be recast in a manner that empowers the Dalit subaltern both materially and spiritually. Leftist theory for Dalit emancipation must therefore make room for a working class Dalit’s desire to own a 21 inch color teleivision while repudiating the system that deems this necessary. Only then can resistance to caste capitalism be truly emancipatory.

ANCHITA DASGUPTA B’21 asks that you replace all institutions with communities.