What is the issue?

• The recent advice by the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting to the media to refrain from using the word “Dalit” by implication introduces a moral hierarchy in the use of words.

What are the happenings?

• Following the petition submitted by some Buddhists from Nagpur, the government argued that the word Dalit has to be avoided because it is morally offensive & the term “Scheduled Caste” is preferable as it has been given constitutionally.
• However, the Constitution has no control on the use of this term on account of it being misused by those belonging to the upper castes and who feel that they face competition from the SCs
• This misuse of the term was evident in caste slurs that were levelled at some SC students in a medical college in Delhi

Why ‘Dalit’ is irreducible to ‘SC?

• The Dalit Panthers in the early 1970s sprang from the inactivism of many SC politicians who did not take a public stand on the growing atrocities against Dalits. It is in this strong political sense that Dalit is irreducible to SC.
• Since the word Dalit expresses the totality of exploitation, discrimination, & patriarchal domination, it cannot be accused of posing any danger to the solidarity of the oppressed.
• Dalit is also irreducible to SC in another and perhaps more fundamental moral sense  Unlike SC, it does not carry the burden of having to prove its authenticity.
• However, the word Dalit in its long career has faced many contestations, coming mainly from Buddhists for whom, the word Dalit is a morally offensive reminder of a humiliating past.
• The state?s attempt to impose one single term on the symbolic and cultural universe of Dalits is both unfair and unwarranted.
• In fact, such legal moves as the present petition against the word ultimately empower the state to establish its monopoly over the symbolic order of the Dalits.
• This symbolic order of the Dalits includes their ideological and cultural interaction with each other as also their wider mobilisation around transformative symbols.
• This was evident in 1978 when several lakhs of Dalit Panthers had gathered for renaming Marathwada University after B R Ambedkar & the recent social mobilisation of protestors against the systemic humiliation that led to the tragic death of the scholar Rohith Vemula.
• It is in this expansive sense, therefore, that the word Dalit is irreducible to the term Scheduled Caste.