Durban Conference

Having successfully brought up the debate of dalit emancipation at the international level, it is necessary now to firstly contextualise the movement in the rising tide of Hindutva and secondly, within the logic of economic liberalisation. For, the movement for dalit emancipation has arisen as a major political discourse at the same time that Hindutva and economic liberalisation have emerged on the Indian political stage.

The Durban conference will be over before the publication of this letter. But if the NDA government fails to address the question of dalits in the conference, it will stand accused of committing a crime against humanity.

Just as the Mandal report challenged the amiable sociology of the day, and the middle class dreams of mobility, the prospect of the Durban conference on race is doing something similar to the discipline of sociology by juxtaposing and even assimilating the categories of caste and race. There is a danger that social scientists, so involved with pursuing their particular point in the debate, are in fact condemning themselves to their own ghettos of illiteracy. What is needed is a different point of entry that sees dalit sociology not through the eyes of the academe but in terms of its own emic categories.