Introduction
Forming almost a fifth of the Indian population, the Scheduled Castes
or the Dalits, a conglomeration of numerous caste groups considered as
untouchable, by caste Hindus, are victims of the most sternly
hierarchical social order that human beings have ever devised. Since
the social and economic oppression of the Dalits has been so closely
intertwined with the Hindu religion, over the centuries many Dalits
have sought to escape from the shackles of the caste system by
converting to other religions. Consequently, a considerable majority
of India's Muslims, Buddhists, Christians and Sikhs today consist of
descendants of Dalit and other 'low' caste converts.

Recent decades have witnessed a remarkable upsurge in radical Dalit
assertiveness. This resurgence of Dalit consciousness has not been
limited to those defined according to the law as Scheduled Castes,
though. Rather, the Dalit struggle for human rights has had a profound
impact on other communities as well, most particularly the large
category of castes, the Other Backward Classes (OBCs), who form over
half the Indian population, as well as the Christians and Muslims, most
of whom who share, in terms of social and economic background, much in
common with the Dalits.This article looks at the growing consciousness
and assertiveness of a large conglomerate of Muslim castes, some of
whose leaders are now seeking to advance for them a new identity as
'Dalit Muslims'. It examines the politics,
programmes and broader agendas that advocates of this new identity seek
to put forward on behalf of a large section of India's Muslim
population. We deal here with the origins and development of a
particular Muslim organisation, the 'All-India Backward Muslim Morcha'
[AIBMM] to see how this new identity seeks to position itself in the
context of debates over Muslim identity in India as well as how it
relates itself to the wider multi-religious Dalit community.

The 'Dalit Muslims': Who Are They?
Most Indian Muslims are descendants of ' untouchable and 'low' caste
converts, with only a small minority tracing their origins to Arab,
Iranian and Central Asian settlers and invaders. Although the Qur'an is
fiercely egalitarian in its social ethics, Indian Muslim society is
characterised by numerous caste-like features, consisting of several
caste-like groups (jatis). Muslims who claim foreign descent claim a
superior status for themselves as ashraf or 'noble'.
Descendants of indigenous converts are, on the other hand,
commonlyreferred to contemptuously as ajlaf or 'base' or 'lowly'. As
among the Hindus, the various jatis among the ajlaf Muslims maintain a
strong sense of jati identity. The emergence of democratic politics
is, however, bringing about a radical change in the manner in which
this sense of identity is articulated. Aware of the importance of
numbers in order to acquire political power and the economic benefits
that accrue from it, the Dalit movement has sought to establish a wider
sense of Dalit identity that transcends inter-caste and inter-religious
divisions and differences among the `lower' caste majority.
This wider Dalit identity does not seek to deny individual jati
identities. Rather, it takes them into account but seeks to subsume
them within the wider collective Dalit identity, based on a common
history of suffering as well as common racial origins as indigenous
people. This seems to have been a crucial factor in the emergence of a
specific 'Dalit Muslim' identity that the AIBMM seeks to articulate.
'Lower' caste Muslim ideologues and activists in the
AIBMM are now in the process of fashioning a new 'Dalit Muslim'
identity, seeking to bring all the 'lower' caste Muslims under one
umbrella, defined by their common identity as Muslim as well as Dalit.

The All-India Backward Muslim Morcha:
The AIBMM was set up in 1994 by Ejaz Ali, a young Muslim medical doctor
from Patna, capital of the eastern state of Bihar, belonging to the
Kunjera caste of Muslim vegetable-sellers. Bihar, India's poorest
state, is notorious for its acute caste problem and for its
>frequent anti-Dalit pogroms. Consequently, the Dalits in Bihar have
been among the first to take to militant forms of struggle. The Muslims
of Bihar, who form over fifteen per cent of the state's population, are
also characterised by sharp caste divisions. The plight of Bihar's
Dalit Muslims, whom the AIBMM estimates at forming almost ninety per
cent of the state's Muslim population and consisting of twenty-nine
different caste groups, is particularly
pathetic. Most Bihari Dalit Muslims work as daily wage labourers,
manual workers, artisans and petty peasants, barely managing to eke out
an existence.
According to Ali, the plight of the overwhelming majority of the
Muslims of Bihar, as well as an acute awareness of the limitations of
the traditional Muslim leadership, suggested to him the need for the
establishment of the AIBMM to struggle for the rights of the Dalit
Muslims. He regards the destruction of the Babri mosque at Ayodhya in
1992 as a landmark event in this regard, seeing the traditional, and
largely 'upper' caste, Muslim leadership as having only further
complicated matters by playing into the hands of Hindu militants and as
'misleading' the Muslim masses for their own petty gains.

In less than a decade of its founding, by early 2001 the AIBMM had
emerged as an umbrella group of over forty organisations claiming to
represent various different Dalit Muslim castes. It now has branches in
the states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Delhi,
Rajasthan and Maharashtra, in addition to Bihar, where it has its
headquarters.

Aims and Objectives of the AIBMM:
The foremost priority for the AIBMM is to get recognition from the
Indian state for the over 100 million 'Dalit Muslims' as Scheduled
Castes so that they can avail of the same benefits that the Hindu, Sikh
and Buddhist Scheduled castes enjoy, including reserved government
jobs, reserved seats in state legislatures and in the Indian
Parliament, special courts to try cases of atrocities against them as
well as social and economic development programmes meant specially for
them. According to Indian law as it stands at present, only those
Dalits who claim to be Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists can be considered to
be members of the Scheduled Castes and thereby eligible for the special
benefits that the state has made available to these castes. The AIBMM
sees this as violating the basic secular character of the Indian
Constitution. It insists that its demand for Scheduled Caste status for
'Dalit Muslims' is fully in consonance with the spirit of the Indian
Constitution. Recognising the fact that demands
>for special legal status for Muslims have been viewed in the past
as 'separatist' and 'anti-national' and even `pro-Pakistan', the AIBMM
is careful to project its demands as aimed at integrating the 'Dalit
Muslim' into the 'national mainstream' by enabling them to progress
economically and socially, along with other deprived sections of the
Indian population. Besides being considered 'anti-secular', the law as
it stands today is also condemned by the AIBMM as a gross violation of
human rights. Furthermore,it is seen as a ploy to keep the more than
one hundred million Dalit Muslims in perpetual thraldom, a conspiracy
in which both the Hindu as well as Muslim 'upper' caste elite are seen
as being involved. Because they
have been denied Scheduled Caste status and the benefits that accrue
from such status, the Dalit Muslims are said to lag far behind the
Hindu Dalits, who have been able to make considerable progress in all
fields because of the special facilities that the state has provided
for them.

A New Indian Muslim Leadership and Changing Discourse of Community Identity:
The AIBMM prides itself in having coined the term 'Dalit Muslims', and
in this it seeks to radically refashion notions of Muslim community
identity. Deconstructing the notion of Muslims as a homogenous bloc, it
brings to the fore the existence of caste distinctions among the Indian
Muslims, which it sees as one of the primary and defining features of
Indian Muslim society.

In articulating a separate Dalit Muslim identity it finds itself at
odds with the traditional, largely 'high' caste Muslim leadership,
which, in seeking to speak for all Muslims, sees the question of caste
that the AIBMM so stridently stresses as divisive. Leading Muslim
spokesmen have, not surprisingly, accused the AIBMM of seeking to
create divisions within the Muslim community and of spreading
'casteism', and thus playing into the hands of militant
Hindus.Ali sees as Islam as having historically played a key role in
the emancipation of the Dalits, a role which, he says, was gradually
watered down over time. Islam spread in India principally through the
agency of the Sufis, he says, whose teachings of love and social
equality attracted many Dalits to the new faith, shackled as they were
by the chains of the caste system and the Brahminical religion.
It was not by the sword but through the love and compassion that the
Sufis exhibited in their behaviour towards the poor, principally the
Dalits, that large numbers of Hindus converted to Islam. With the
establishment of Muslim political power in various parts of India,
however, he says, this radical egalitarianism of the early Sufis gave
way to more institutionalised forms of religious expression. 'High'
caste Hindus, in order to save their properties or to secure high
positions in Muslim-ruled territories, converted to Islam, bringing
with them notions of caste superiority that are foreign to pristine
Islam. Doctrines were developed that sought to legitimise caste
inequalities by suitably misinterpreting the Qur'an. Gradually, he
says, the 'spirit of Islam' was replaced by the 'rituals of Islam'.

One of the crucial tasks before the Dalit Muslims, as Ali sees it, is
to rescue Islam from the clutches of those who claim to speak in its
name, the 'high' caste Muslim leadership. Thus, he calls for a revival
of 'the true spirit of Islam', which fiercely condemns all caste and
racial divisions. The practice of untouchability, which Islam roundly
condemns, is still observed, Ali notes, to varying degrees, by 'upper'
caste Muslims, who look down upon 'lower' caste
Muslims as inherently inferior. While Islam calls for Muslims to share
in the plight of their fellow believers and to work for their social
emancipation, the Muslim 'upper caste feudal lords' are said to be
'deaf, dumb and blind to the suffering of backward Muslims'.
Ali is bitterly critical of the traditional, largely 'high' caste,
Muslim leadership, both `ulama as well as 'lay'. Over the centuries of
Muslim rule, he says, the ruling class among the Muslims displayed
little concern for the plight of the Dalit Muslims, who remained tied
down to their traditional occupations, mired in poverty and ignorance.
The only concern of the ruling class Muslims, he writes, was to
perpetuate their own rule, and for this they entered into alliances
with 'upper' caste Hindus, keeping the Dalits, both Hindus as well as
Muslims, cruelly suppressed under their firm control. This disdain for
the Dalits, he writes, carried down right through the period of Muslim
rule, and continues till this very day. He accuses the present-day
Muslim 'high' caste leadership of playing the 'minority card' and
practising the politics of 'minorityism' to garner power for themselves
while claiming to speak on behalf of all
Muslims, the vast majority of whom are Dalits. They, he says, refuse to
recognise the acute problem of caste within the community because 'they
do not want to lose their jagirdari (power and privileges)'. Yet, the
cling to their exalted caste titles simply to 'produce an impression of
supremacy and to demoralise the backward caste Muslims'. In their
attitudes towards the latter they are said to be hardly different from
the way Hindu 'upper' castes treat their own Dalits. He sees the Indian
Muslim community as a whole as having 'all the ingredients of the
Brahminical order'. The 'upper caste' Muslim leadership, he argues,
thrives on championing such 'communal' 'non-issues' as the protection
of the Muslim Personal
Law or the Babri mosque, which have only helped militant Hindu 'upper'
caste forces, resulting in terrible violence unleashed against Muslims
and communal riots in which the major victims are the Dalits, both
Hindu as well as Muslim. 'The time has now come', he
declares, for the 'upper' caste Muslims to 'stop thinking of the entire
Muslim community as they have been clearly reduced to their [own] caste
leadership, which they were doing from the very beginning (sic.) under
the pseudo-umbrella of Muslim unity'.

Given the stress that Islam places on radical social equality, on the
one hand, and what he sees as the failure of the traditional Muslim
leadership in championing the rights and interests of the backward
caste Muslims, on the other, Ali calls for a 'power shift' from the
'Arab-origin ashraf' to the 'oppressed Muslims'. Denying that his
struggle is aimed against the `upper' caste Muslims, he says that it is
directed principally at the government, to force it to grant
Scheduled Caste status to the Dalit Muslims. A new, Dalit Muslim
leadership is called for, for it alone is seen as able to champion the
rights of the oppressed among the Muslims. By taking up the interests
of the Dalit Muslims, he argues, the AIBMM is not seeking to divide the
Muslim community on caste lines, as some have accused him of doing.
Rather, he says, championing the cause of the oppressed is what Islam
itself calls for, a radical concern for the poor and the weak, which
'is repeatedly stressed in the Holy Qur'an and in the Hadith'. The
Prophet Muhammad's early followers, he notes, were largely poor and
dispossessed people, and because he spoke out on their behalf, he was
fiercely opposed by the rich Quraish of Mecca.
Islam, he says, insists on a passionate commitment to the poor. Hence
the accusations against the AIBMM of allegedly dividing the Muslims by
taking up the cause of the poor Muslims alone are dismissed as
baseless. If special facilities were to be provided by the state to the
Dalit Muslims, they would, he argues, be able to advance economically
and socially. As a result, inter-marriages between them and the 'upper'
caste Muslims would increase, and gradually the caste system within the
Muslim community would begin to disintegrate, this
being seen as working towards the fulfilment of Islam's vision of a
casteless society. By denying the existence of caste within the Muslim
community, he says, the traditional Muslim leadership is only helping
to perpetuate it.
Ali calls for a struggle to be waged to fight for extending Scheduled
Caste status to Dalit Muslims, and in this the Dalit Muslims would join
hands with non-Muslim secular and progressive forces, in the face of
the stiff opposition that is expected from many 'upper' caste
Muslims as well as 'upper' caste Hindus. The struggle would need the
help of non-Muslim Dalits as well, for if the Dalit Muslims gain
Scheduled Caste status, they could join hands with Dalits from other
religions and become one strong force, almost half the Indian
population. They could, together, even capture political power, bring
their interests and demands to the centre of the Indian political
agenda and put an end to atrocities against them. Ali sees the new
Muslim leadership that he envisages as being drawn primarily from
among the 'backward' Muslims, who form the vast majority of the Muslim
population in India, for they alone can truly speak for their people.
Since the primary concerns of the backward caste Muslims are sheer
physical survival, jobs, wages and the like, this new
leadership would seek to bring about a 'revolution of priorities'.
Instead of taking up 'communal' issues that would further exacerbate
Hindu-Muslim differences by playing into the hands of fiercely
anti-Muslim Hindu zealots, which only works to further their interests
of
the Hindu and Muslim elites, this new leadership would focus onissues
such as 'employment, food, housing and elementary education', issues
which affect the daily lives of all poor people irrespective of
religion. In this way, Hindu-Muslim antagonisms would fade away, the
Dalits of all religions, the primary victims of the politics of
communal hatred, would unite, and the conditions of the poor would
improve.

Since the Dalit Muslims share similar concerns of sheer survival with
Dalits of other religions, this new Muslim leadership would seek to
build bridges between the Muslim Dalits and those of other faiths. All
Dalits, irrespective of religion, belong to the same 'nation' (qaum),
Ali says. Mere change of religion cannot wipe away the common blood
that runs in their veins. The Dalit 'nation', representing the
indigenous inhabitants of India who today follow various different
religions, has been fractured into various antagonistic groups, but
they must be united. The 'divided Dalit nation', he writes, will be
united once again when all Dalits, irrespective of religion, are
granted the same status as Scheduled Castes.

Hence, in order to re-unify the Dalit 'nation' so that the Dalits
emerge as a powerful collective force, all Dalits must unite to support
the AIBMM's demand for Scheduled Caste status to the Dalit Muslims (as
well, interestingly, to the Dalit Christians, who, too, are denied such
status). By joining hands with Dalits of other faiths and jointly
struggling to improve their living conditions, Ali writes, the Dalit
Muslims would be able to join the `national mainstream' of Indian
society. With a new Muslim leadership coming to the fore drawn from the
Dalit Muslims, the community would turn its back to the communal
antagonisms of the past rooted in a long tradition of exclusivism and
separatism. The Dalit Muslims would begin to collaborate with other
Dalits, with whom they have 'a great commonality of interests',
pursuing the same occupations and facing the same economic and social
problems. In this way, a joint struggle for social justice and
inter-communal harmony can be launched for all Dalits, irrespective of
religion.

Demanding Scheduled Caste status for the Dalit Muslims may, in itself,
not be a very radical step, given the present climate of privitisation
in the country, where government jobs are being sharply curtailed and
public expenditure and subsidies drastically reduced. However, its
wider implications are certainly more momentous in their probable
consequences. The demands of the AIBMM, limited as they may well be,
might actually help facilitate a radical shift in the very terms of
Muslim political discourse. Its stress on secularism and human rights,
which it sees as being grossly violated by the present law related to
Scheduled Caste status, its call for 'integration' of the Muslims into
the 'national mainstream', its radical disavowal of communal politics,
and its appeal for building bridges and working in
collaboration with other Dalits in order to reunify the 'Dalit nation'
and working for inter-communal harmony, might well provide a key to
what has so far seemed the intractable communal problem in India.

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