MUMBAI, January 18: Experts called for an end to old prejudices against Dalits and Muslims and more participatory role for the exploited class at a seminar held today.``An exploited class is just that : be it Dalit, Muslim or woman. And they are all suffering under the tyranny of the Brahministic class which can now be equated with Hinduism,'' they observed.
The day long meet on `Mahatma Phule and Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar and their relevance to Indian Muslims' was organised by the Muslim Intellectual Forum.Subjects like the common future of Dalits and Muslims (Dr Suresh Mane), contributions of Muslims to the Dalit-Bahujan movement, the stratification of Indian Muslims (Hasan Kamaal), castes and Indian society (Vilas Sonawane), impact of Islam on Phule (Sarfaraz Arzoo) and conversion as central to the strategy of liberation from the Dalit-Bahujan perspective (Feroze Mithiborwala) were hotly debated.
Speaking on Dr Ambedkar and Muslims, Dr Bhalchandra Mungekar had a definition for communalism that Hindu
nationalists are unlikely to endorse: using religion blatantly to secure your political ends. ``Of course, I distinguish between Hindus and Hindu communalists,'' he said. ``There is a difference. Not all Hindus are communal. So I shall speak of Hindus and Hindu communalists.''
He said Hindu communalism in the current day and age fed Muslim communalism and the two are growing immensely fat on each other. However, Hindu communalists failed to distinguish the minority complex : a Keralite in Mumbai immediately went hunting for fellow Keralites, be they Hindu, Muslim or Christian. ``I went to Ahmedabad for a specialised course in economics, along with my friend Bhattacharya who, of course, hailed from Bengal.
In every bus on every occasion, he would ask people if they were Bengali. I asked him how he hoped to find a busfull of Bengalis in Gujarat. This is the minority complex and this is totally unspecific to any religion, caste or community,'' Dr Mungekar, a noted Dalit activist and professor or economics atthe University of Mumbai said.
Lata Pratibha Madhukar, noted green activist and women's rights advocate, however, got the maximum nod for her observations on caste, religion and gender politics. She stated, `Hindu men are basically cheesed off with the right to marry more than once accorded constitutionally to Muslim men. It is from here that all political demands for the uniform civil code arise,'' she said. ``If the Hindu woman has any rights today, it is entirely due to the codification of the Hindu laws by Ambedkar and not that granted by the Hindu scriptures,'' she added.
Narrating her experience while working for the Nari Kendra she revealed that statistics proved that 58 per cent of the men in India who are bigamous are Hindu. The remaining are from all other religions, including Jews, Muslims and Christians, she said. ``Brahmins were the ones who opposed Mahatma Phule's attempts to accord education to women. Why? Because they reckoned if these women were given an education, they would protest
against Sati, they would demand their rights and they would ask for an equal share in property. Yet women outside the Brahminical mould have had far more freedoms, including the right to widow remarriage,'' she added.
The seminar came to some bold and politically incorrect conclusions. For instance, conversions to religions, like Islam, which are non-discriminatory, were for many in the Dalit-Bahujan communities actually a liberating factor from the hardcore casteism within the Hindu practice; that Phule and more particularly Ambedkar considered Hinduism as nothing but Brahminism.
Moreover, the general feeling prevailed that Hinduism might collapse if Brahminical practices were taken away from it and that Hindu festivals like Holi and Diwali were the celebration of the destruction of those belonging to the Dalit Bahujan class, like Ravana and Holika.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
