Identity Politics in Pakistan An Ethnographic Study of Dalit Activism in Sindh

Abstract

This study analyses the ways Dalit activists contest and (re)construct social identities to gain self-respect and political representation in Sindh, Pakistan. The study spans over four years of episodical field work consisting of 16 months from September 2015 to August 2017, and from October 2018 to January 2019, in villages and towns in Sindh province of Pakistan, particularly Mirpurkhas and Hyderabad divisions, where Dalit activists had some public visibility. To explore contestation between the opponents and the supporters of the ‘Dalit’ and ‘Scheduled Castes’ identity markers, the researcher became one of the core members of Dalit Sujaag Tehreek (DST), a group of anti-caste activists. DST opened up outlets to interact with several Dalit and anti-caste activists that were members of different social and political groups. Most of the Dalit activists belonged to Kolhi, Bheel and Meghwar castes, which are the demographic majority in lower Sindh. The ethnographic insights are supplemented with an analysis of vernacular literature and official documents. Looking from the Ambedkarian perspective, the study revealed the arbitrariness of identity markers. The arbitrary identities were adopted by Dalit activists in the discursive spaces where Ashrafia-Savarna hegemony persists in its various forms. Instead of diluting casteism, Political Sufism glossed over caste-frictions under the performative and the rhetorical Sufi-Muslim binaries whereby Sufi was accommodative of Hindus, but a Muslim was not. Similarly, the Ashrafia denial of casteism set the epistemic barrier not to problematize caste thereby discouraging to entertain Dalit issue. The denial thrived on performative assumption that there is no concept of caste discrimination among Muslims. These normatively hegemonic assumptions choked Dalit agency to problematize caste-based discrimination and to formulate their political demands. Though Dalit activists assert to (re)construct their identities and history to achieve caste-parity and gain selfrespect, it does not wholly work as desired and often prove rather counterproductive turning Dalits into loyal subordinates of Savarna-Ashrafia political elite. Their reluctance to confront the Ashrafia elite as compared to Savarna (Hindu) elite (of the Vaniya/Lohana, Thakur and Brahmin castes) reflected the limits of their assertion in the Muslim dominated polity and the hegemonic influence of Ashrafia narrative that was constraining them to Ashrafize. Despite the appropriability of Dalit spaces, identities and issues, the possibility of counterhegemonic Dalit assertions was not completely foreclosed. There did exist a minimal epistemic and discursive space for Dalit assertions at the margins of civil society though. The impact of that discursive space became evident during the 6th population census held in 2017. The campaign launched by Dalit activists to mark the Scheduled Caste category instead of ‘Hindu’ paid dividends. The census results reflected an unprecedented demographic shift, and affirmed the viability of doing Dalit politics in Pakistan. Dalit activists could experiment with identity (re)construction in ways that could enable them to gain the desired self-respect. They could add to their subaltern consciousness of being oppressed majority (as against the Hindu minority). This assertion as the oppressed class was immanent from their attempts to invert religious binaries by asserting Scheduled Castes, Dalit and Darāwaṛ identity markers. It was also evident from their attempts to reframe their caste-based, ethnic, regional and national identity markers. The study, thus, concludes that identity assertions were infusing in Dalits a much-needed optimism and giving them the sense of direction to make social forums inclusive of all Dalit castes so that they could legitimize claims of representation in proportion to their demographic strength and subalternity.