Anand Teltumbde says dalit business chambers will fail just as black trade bodies have
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THE SIMPLEST way to assess any development from the standpoint of the oppressed people is to observe the reaction of the adversary camp. On the eve of opening of the Mumbai chapter of the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Dicci) on May 28, there was excitement in the business world that almost every business paper covered the news prominently. The big corporate houses, like Tatas and Finolex, had already sponsored a Dicci show, DEEP Expo, in Pune last year, that supposedly showcased 200-odd Dalits, where mainstream business chambers had participated.
In contrast, Dalits who generally celebrate the slightest identitarian accomplishment have been surprisingly nonchalant. They have totally ignored Dicci, which has been around for the past five years. Going by the thumb-rule assessment with the above criteria, one may not be wrong in suspecting if Dicci may have anything to do with anyone but Dalits. In fact, it appears to be of particular interest to the capitalist camp and the neo-liberal state.
The basic point Dicci makes is that Dalits have arrived, which, although grossly wrong, is of profound political importance. The Dalit entrepreneur is not a recent breed. They have been part of the Dalit struggle, which flowered in the liberal spaces created during colonial times. Likewise, there have been rich individuals too among Dalits. But they have been insignificant to Dalit community.
If one takes into account the profile of a majority of Dalits, one is immediately struck with the incongruity of the concept. Dalits are predominantly rural people, almost 81 per cent of them live in rural areas; approximately 50 per cent of them being landless labourers, 24 per cent as marginal and small farmers and the remaining 26 per cent engaged with non-farm vocations. Of the 19 per cent who live in urban areas, more than 85 per cent live in slums. Thanks to the policy of reservation, a political system that ensures flow of tribute to the political class and the entrepreneurial drive of a few, over the past 60 years not more than 10 per cent of Dalits may be taken as having “arrived”.
The pro-elite, neo-liberal policy paradigm over the past two decades has reversed the wheel of progress for 90 per cent of Dalits, who have been facing multidimensional crises. The health statistics place them as the near-famished community; with rampant commercialisation of education, they have been cut off from the quality education; what little land they had is being taken away. With growing power asymmetry in villages between them and non-Dalits, the number of atrocities on them are galloping. To such people, the propaganda about Dicci by a handful of individuals should surely cause annoyance. Unfortunately, thanks to their pseudo-representatives, they no more have an organised expression. But, even their silence speaks.
The proponents of Dicci state that the US has hundreds of African-American chambers of commerce to help the African-American people do business. Notwithstanding the differences in these two societies and two communities, no one will deny that there is much that can be mutually emulated. Although, the civil rights struggle of Dalits precedes the civil rights movement in the US by a full quarter of a century, Dalits have keenly noted the progress the Blacks made and tried to emulate them. In the 1960s, it was the Black literature movement that was emulated to create Dalit literature. A while later, the Black Panthers were emulated to form the Dalit Panthers in India. Like Dalits, the larger Black community has been uninterested in it, leaving it to be the game of their handful elites. But, unlike Dalits, there have been concurrent assessment of this phenomenon of individual success by the Black scholars, which cohere to the point that the wealth of few African- Americans has made very little contribution to the plight of African-Americans in general.
Black capitalism has a chequered history, starting from pre-Civil War period; many prominent Blacks like Booker T Washington upholding it with active support from the big bourgeoisie like Andrew Carnegie and at the same time many Black leaders opposing it. The masses, however, were consistently kept away from these games of their rich. In the recent times, Black capitalism is associated with presidency of Richard Nixon (1968-1974), who viewed an uncontrolled Black Power movement of the 1960s as a major threat to the internal security of the United States and also found it fitting in his “Machiavellian” political scheme to incorporate Blacks into the “anti-Communist” system as part of his Cold War strategy.
Despite this active support from the US establishment that Nixon galvanised, the state of Black capitalism in the 1980s was far from encouraging, as noted by writer Manning Marable. He saw Black capitalism as three distinct constituencies: the proletarian periphery; the intermediate Black petty entrepreneurs; and the Black corporate core. The first one comprised over four-fifths of all Black-owned US firms, 82.7 per cent of the total number. He noted several common characteristics among these 1,91,235 enterprises: almost all were sole proprietorships, unincorporated firms owned by a single Black individual; most were started by Black blue-collar or marginally white-collar employees; the firms were under-capitalised from the outset and at least 75 per cent of them become bankrupt within three years. The corporate core of Black capitalism comprised just 1,060 Black businesses, led by Black Enterprise magazine’s top 100 firms. Even this constituted a drop in the corporate ocean. As Manning observed, white corporations allow Black companies to exist for symbolic value.
As in the case of Black capitalism, Dalit capitalism should not be seen as the development promoting Dalit entrepreneurship or wealth generation among them; rather, they should be seen as subverting the logic of contemporary political economy. It firstly serves the purpose of both, the Indian state and the big bourgeoisie, insofar as the mass of potentially threatening community of Dalits is incorporated into their creed. One does not have to go back to ideological making of Dalit, for instance by BR Ambedkar, who termed capitalism to be one of their enemy duo, the other being Brahminism. The state, which systematically ignores the demands of the crisis-ridden Dalit masses, had put up a red carpet to the upstart Dalit bourgeoisie and proactively wanted to know what it could do for them. The corporate interests are varied, ranging from the emergence of the sizable Dalit middle-class market to making the Dalit enterprises subservient to their supply chains and control Dalit proletariat. Politically, the move will have huge diversionary potential, further marginalising the agenda of the Dalits. No one grudges wealth generation among Dalits, but let no one associate it with the economic progress of Dalits.
Anand Teltumbde is a writer and civil rights activist.tanandraj@gmail.com
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