14) DOCUMENTARY REVEALS CASTE OPPRESSION IN INDIA

By Gurpreet Singh 

     A powerful new documentary by a prominent leftist filmmaker, Anand Patwardhan, reveals the ugly reality of ongoing caste oppression in Indian society.

     Jai Bhim Comrade, screened at the recent Vancouver International Film Festival, is based on events after the killing of ten unarmed Dalits or so-called untouchables by police in India's financial capital of Mumbai in 1997.

     The police fired without any serious provocation after Dalits gathered to protest the desecration of the statue of Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian constitution and a Dalit thinker himself. "Jai Bhim" or "long live Bhim" is the most popular slogan of Dalit activists.

     At the time, Maharashtra state was ruled by the Hindu nationalist BJP and its Hindu right-wing partner, Shiv Sena. It is no coincidence that ultra-nationalist Hindus support the status quo of the ancient caste structure of orthodox Hindu society.

     Unable to bear the sufferings of the families of the deceased, a Dalit activist and poet, Vilas Ghogre, committed suicide. Ghogre, was previously a Marxist activist who gradually became an Ambedkarite. These incidents happened when India was preparing to celebrate its 50th anniversary of independence from British occupation.

     Dalits continue to suffer at the hands of "upper caste" groups, vigilantes and the state machinery. Even though their leadership has also deceived them by forging opportunistic alliances with parties like BJP and Shiv Sena, Dalit activists carry on their struggle through street shows, music and art in the face of both the state and upper casteist goons. A case in point is the artists associated with Kabir Kala Manch, a Dalit activist network who are hounded by the police and branded as Maoist extremists. Some of them have gone underground.

     The most striking question the film tries to raise is the role of the left parties. In the director's view, the communists could not recognize the caste reality within society, seeing only class divisions. As a result, poor Dalit workers who could have been ready recruits for the communist parties embraced other forces or were eventually co‑opted by the bourgeois parties.

     The brutality of caste discrimination is so powerful that it cannot go away even after the class shift of the Dalit population.  Overall, the film has a potential to prompt the left parties to indulge in self criticism.