DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR

from Manifesto for the Just City, Vol.1 (TU Delft)

ELINOR OSTROM

Cities [in India] are kept clean by this [marginalised] population. Ninety-seven percent of city cleaners are people who belong to the Dalit community. If [one day] they decided not to work, cities [in India] would have more [serious] problems than the ones we have with COVID-19 right now.

So, you are relying on [Dalit] labour, which is again banished to peripheral locations, yet we need their labour to maintain our purity. The same purity that banishes these untouchables. Dalits are not wanted in urban localities so as to keep [so-called] purity. If you want to remain clean and if shit needs to be taken out of your sight, you need a Dalit labourer’s body to do that. And in this job one Dalit enters the manhole and doesn’t come out as an alive person. The deaths of manual scavengers is 1 every 3 days.

This hygiene does not correspond to the new liberal promises of an egalitarian economy that advances the individual labour through contractual arrangements.

If Dalits chose to have their own country, they would be the sixth largest nation in the world. That is a huge mass [of people] we are talking about. What we need to understand is how the Dalit rebellion becomes a state problem. Today, these people are seen as almost urban terrorists. And so, if Dalits were to remain in their rural world, they would be terrorised by the feudal caste. If they come to urban centres, they get terrorised by the state. The people who continue to occupy [more and more] urban land and who displace Dalits [from their houses] belong to a specific caste of people in Bombay.

These are the immigrants, Sindhi community from Punjab who came to occupy the land and are now building and creating new [high-rise] properties on our promises of this developing economy. Therefore, I think that when we talk about [urban] space [in India], we need to understand that Dalits remain the most oppressed people in the world, and more particularly the Dalit women. Dalit women are not just oppressed because they are women, they are oppressed because they are poor. They are oppressed because they [occupy] the most marginalised sections [of society] where their articulation cannot foment new revolutionary dynamics.

People ask me, can there be a revolution? I have a pessimistic response, because unlike the French Revolution, when they blasted the Bastille, the people who will rebel [in India] will have to take three modes of transportation to get to the site [of the revolution]. The state again controls [urban space] and urban infrastructure. Would the revolution then take place in rural parts, as it did in Mao’s China? The answer is not encouraging because here too Dalits are put in a situation of being a minority and forced outside the village.