The communal preparations for the so-called ‘Vishnu Mahayagya’ hit the family of Deepak Malik Dom of Aurahi Rural Municipality in Siraha District like a tonne of bricks. His house was demolished, and Dom’s family home was uprooted because Bajrangi Baba—the organiser of the ritual—reportedly declared that the presence and movement of Dalits near the proposed venue of the performance would defile the ritual.

In line with the Sanatan tradition, the rural municipality chairman Shivaji Yadav—the temporal agent of the event—was duty-bound to implement the instructions of the religious authority. Even the very layer of earth where Dom’s house once stood was declared polluted and a bulldozer was employed to remove the ‘impure soil’ from the site. The media coverage of the odious practice created a public outcry, and the provincial authorities quickly apprehended the alleged perpetrators.

It’s not that Siraha is located somewhere in the back of beyond. It was from this district that Krishna Prasad Koirala, whose three sons would later become prime ministers of Nepal, secured a place in legends when he mailed a package containing tattered clothes of impoverished people from the hills that had come down to relatively prosperous plains. Established in 1914, the Chandra Secondary School of Siraha is perhaps the first modern school to come up outside of Kathmandu Valley.

The district has produced the ‘mother of Panchayat system’, and lifelong monarchist Tulsi Giri elected the instigator of Maoist insurgency Puhspa Kamal Dahal and has been home to iconoclastic politician Pradip Giri. The founder of the NRN movement Upendra Mahato, celebrity chef Santosh Shah and power couple of Maithili media Dhirendra Premarshi and Rupa Jha among others call Siraha their home. It has also been the favourite playfield of social entrepreneurs and an attractive market for the donor-driven NGO industry. Apparently, all that has done little to raise public awareness about various sociocultural ills bedevilling the Brahminical society.

Cases of discrimination aren’t unique to Madhesh. A house owner declined to rent a flat to journalist Rupa Sunar, purportedly on the grounds of her outcaste status, in the heart of Kathmandu. Breaking the norms of Brahminism and falling in love with a girl from the upper caste turned out to be fatal for Nabaraj BK of Jajarkot District: He along with five of his friends, were mercilessly murdered. The West Rukum District Court later convicted 26 culprits involved in the heinous crime. Instances of verbal and physical micro-assaults upon the dignity of Dalits by upper caste individuals—passing snide remarks, refusal to shake hands, asked to sit separately and even served tea in cups different from others—are still everyday affairs in various parts of the country.

Dalit emancipation

Dominated by monarchist, socialist and Marxist thinkers, the political discourse of Nepal has always downplayed the Dalit question. Monarchists consider it to be a settled question because the revised Muluki Ain of 1963 has already outlawed the despicable Hindu tradition of untouchability. The Nepali Congress thought that its motto of “nationality, democracy and socialism” would take care of all sociopolitical ills. In the Marxist formulation, sociocultural aberrations are components of superstructure standing upon the base of economic conditions; hence class conflict is the only way of settling all bedevilling issues of society, culture and polity. With a longer history of Dalit struggle, the trajectory of Ambedkarism perhaps holds important lessons for Nepal.

Even though widely respected as a constitutionalist because he chaired the constitution drafting committee of independent India, BR Ambedkar was essentially a social reformer who became a philosopher in his later life as the progenitor of the Navayana path of Buddhism. Having experienced the indignities heaped upon what the twice-born Hindus termed ‘untouchables’, the British colonialists categorised as Depressed Class and Gandhi called Harijan (Children of God), Ambedkar listed the group in the Indian constitution, and it came to be called Scheduled Castes. Due to the negative connotation of brokenness, he wasn’t very enthusiastic about the term Dalit, but that name has emerged as an assertion of the once ‘outcasted’ identity.

In an obvious attempt to unite Hindus and polarise them against Islam, Christianity and communists, the Sangh Parivar has begun to safrronise Ambedkar. Every political party in India wants to appropriate his legacy for electoral benefits. However, very few outside the small community of conscientious thinkers have paid attention to his primary assertion that Dalit emancipation was impossible without dismantling the Hindu hierarchy of castes.

In 1936, Ambedkar wrote the “Annihilation of Caste” as a speech to be delivered at the annual conference of the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal (Caste Destruction Society) in Lahore. The organisers found its content so explosive that they cancelled the programme. The speech was later published as a monograph and continues to remain a seminal work upon abominable but inalienable component of Hindu religion: Take out the Brahmanistic caste system and what remains of the Sanatan Dharma is a hollow shell of meaningless rituals and animistic mumbo jumbo.

Somewhat in bewilderment, Ambedkar notes: “Hindu Society as such does not exist. It is only a collection of castes. Each caste is conscious of its existence. Its survival is the be-all and end-all of its existence.” It was the inseparability of caste from Hinduism that impelled Ambedkar to declare in 1935 that even though he was born in a Hindu family, he wouldn’t die “… as a person who calls himself a Hindu!”. Reluctant to declare himself an atheist, embrace Islam or convert to Christianity for political reasons—he was a reformer and not a revolutionary and wanted to work with the dominant majority—he propounded the Navayana stream of Buddhism that emphasises ethical living and self-discipline rather than the inescapability of suffering.

Social justice

In his address to the Fourth Conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists in Kathmandu in 1956, Ambedkar unambiguously pronounced a preference for Buddha’s peaceful path over the inevitability of violence in the prescriptions of Marx. He rejects anachronistic feudalism and derides Gram Swaraj of Gandhi in stinging words: “What is a village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness, caste and communalism?” He tries to engage with capitalism but knows its limitations too well to recommend. He abhors the violence inherent in the Marxist doctrine.

Ambedkar settles for the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity with an emphasis on the last term which comes close to the Maitri or Metta in the practice of Buddhism to ensure human dignity for all. Even though pessimistic about the project of building a “palace on a dung heap”, he maintained the optimism of securing social justice for the downtrodden through constitutionalism. But when majoritarian assertiveness tortures the principles of constitutionalism to serve its interests, there is little that the marginalised and the externalised sections of society can do to have their grievances addressed in a peaceful way.

Those hankering for the declaration of Hindu Rashtra and the restoration of monarchy just want to ensure that the spirit of Article 4 of the Constitution of Nepal— “protection of religion, culture handed down from time immemorial”—be ensured! Just as Sanatan secularism is a contradiction in terms, a Hindu republic is culturally an oxymoron. Progressive voices need to explain republican secularism not just as a constitutional provision but also as an uncompromising ideological position.