‘The violence, to me, seemed scripted against Dalits,’ says Ajaz Ashraf, author of Bhima Koregaon — Challenging Caste

Different castes remember the violence at Bhima Koregaon on January 1, 2018, and the reasons for it differently

In Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste, senior journalist Ajaz Ashraf relooks the events that led to the Bhima Koregaon violence on January 1, 2018. Ashraf sees the incident as a clash between two worldviews, one striving to flatten the social hierarchy and the other perpetuating it, as he says in this interview.

The difficulty arises from different castes remembering a shared past differently. For instance, Dalits celebrate the 1818 Battle of Bhima Koregaon as they believe the British Indian Army’s victory over the Peshwa liberated them from his oppressive Brahminical rule. Mahar soldiers played a significant role in the battle. But this belief is a myth, it is argued, for the British fought the Peshwa to expand their empire, not to liberate the Dalits.

Now, consider this: in 1786, the Peshwa rejected the demand of Konkan’s Mahars that Brahmin priests should conduct their marriages. Their quest for equality was suppressed.  Wouldn’t they have been relieved, if not delighted, at the demise of the Peshwa rule 32 years later?

In Kurosawa’s Rashomon, eyewitnesses to a murder provide remarkably different accounts of it. This is as true of the accounts of four police officers and two Dalits I used to reconstruct the January 1, 2018, violence at Bhima Koregaon. The officers did not hear the insulting, provocative slogans the two Dalits did regarding their community. Whose narrative is authentic? The violence, to me, seemed scripted against Dalits. ‘Seemed’, don’t miss that.

The tradition of Dalits gathering at Bhima Koregaon is popularly ascribed to B.R. Ambedkar, who visited the village on January 1, 1927. January 1 is the day the Peshwa was defeated in 1818. But Ambedkar was taken there by Dalit leader Shivram Kamble, who had been assembling community members every New Year’s Day for some years before 1927. It was Kamble’s method of reminding the British about the contributions of Mahar soldiers in the Battle of Bhima Koregaon, and persuade the colonial power to reverse its 1892 policy of not recruiting them for the Army. However, it was from the 1980s that thousands upon thousands of Dalits began visiting Bhima Koregaon. The celebration today invokes the memory of 1818 to inspire Dalits to fight caste oppression.

On the night of December 28-29, 2017, Dalits erected a board outside the precincts of the samadhi of Chatrapati Sambhaji, located at Vadhu Budruk, a village three kms from Bhima Koregaon. The board recalled that after Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, on March 11, 1689, ordered the execution and dismemberment of Chhatrapati Sambhaji, his body pieces were scattered. The board claimed that Govind Gopal, a Mahar of Vadhu Budruk, collected the pieces of his body, stitched them together, and cremated him.

Maratha residents of Vadhu Budruk, on December 29 morning, uprooted the board, and desecrated the samadhi of Govind Gopal, also located in the same village. They said the board was propagating wrong history, claiming it was a Shivale-Patil couple, Maratha by caste, who had cremated Chhatrapati Sambhaji. This is mentioned in another board at the samadhi, but it was erected only in 2015, after an existing board was removed.