Articles by Badri Narayan

After the 1990s, communal incidents in India have spread to rural areas, and they occur on a smaller scale, but with much larger frequency. In this strategy, the making of a communal consciousness requires a string of communal moments that produce and reproduce communal polarisation directly and indirectly. The Bharatiya Janata Party, backed by the cadres of the Sangh Parivar, holds an advantage in this communal game in Uttar Pradesh, while the other parties are forced to play it for fear of further losing their voter base. Post-election communal clashes in UP have occurred around constituencies going for assembly by-polls soon. This trend is only going to harden by the time the assembly elections take place in 2017.

At the grass-roots level of democracy, many gram pradhans are becoming powerful by grabbing land and resources meant for the welfare of the people they represent. Fear of these musclemen has led to the shrinking of the space for dissent and discourse in democracy. The murders of Superintendent of Police Narendra Kumar in Morena, Madhya Pradesh and more recently, Deputy Superintendent of Police Zia-ul-Haq in Kunda in Uttar Pradesh by the mafi a are indicative of how far these goons, many of them patronised by political parties, are able to go.

The Nara-Maveshi Movement was one of the precipitating factors of the new dalit politics that emerged in Uttar Pradesh. Carried out by the Chamars (shoemaker caste) in Uttar Pradesh and adjoining regions to end their caste-based work and the indignities involved with it, the NMM started in the 1950s and continued till the 1980s. But it has hardly been noticed, whether in academic works, literature or even in the media. This article uses methods of oral history, along with police and court documents at village and district levels, to unearth this history. It tries to bring out the multiple layers of discriminations, exclusions and violence in hierarchically caste-divided Indian society, even within dalit castes.