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Dalit is a Dalit even in a 'free' market by Radhika Ramaseshan

Caste is feudal, the market free and equal. Correct? Ask Ratan Lal Sirswal or Deepak Jatav.

Sirswal, 75, had started off as a sweeper but is now one of the oldest businessmen in Panipat, Haryana. He quit his sweeper’s job once his handloom unit was on its feet. His success, he says, came largely because he hid the fact that he was born a Valmiki Dalit.

Customers who discovered his caste origins shunned him. Banks would not give loans because caste matters to them too, and Dalit entrepreneurs are too few and far between to work the system as a group like the upper castes do.

Jatav, 51, is an established footwear manufacturer in Saharanpur, western Uttar Pradesh. Even today, he says, people refer to him by a caste label whose use is a non-bailable offence under the SC/ST Act.

His non-Dalit peers, however, are respectfully called “businessmen”. Upper-caste traders deal with Dalits only if they have to, he says.

Theirs are some of the testimonies included in a pioneering study on first-generation Dalit entrepreneurs by Surinder S. Jodhka for the Institute of Dalit Studies in New Delhi.

Jodhka, a sociology professor with JNU, contests the tendency of academic writings to look at caste as a “traditional system of social hierarchy and culture” that is expected to weaken and eventually get subsumed by the whirligig of development and modernisation.

“In the mainstream understanding of textbook economics, development or the market were essentially secular or socially neutral and anonymous processes. Similarly, the social science understanding of entrepreneurship has typically revolved around the notion of a rational individual operating in a supposedly free-market economy,” he has written in a paper titled “Dalits in business: Self-employed Scheduled Castes in northwest India”.

Jodhka’s study aims to show just how “free” the market economy is for Dalits, two-thirds of whom are land-less or marginal farmers with virtually no employment or wealth-generating assets.

The sociologist, who drew his samples from industrially prosperous Panipat and Saharanpur, found that most of the Dalit entrepreneurs ventured into basic businesses such as small shop-keeping, contracts and dealerships (like gas agencies), and skilled service (like plumbing or electrician’s businesses). Hardly one or two per cent were into more capital-intensive enterprises such as hotels, factories and educational institutions.

When the Dalit entrepreneurs were asked if caste mattered in the “secular” business space, a typical answer was: “They hate us; non-Dalits do not like us being in business.”

A doctor in Saharanpur said upper-caste patients came to him only as a last resort.

Ram Kumar, 35, who set up a school against strong opposition in Saharanpur had to struggle to get it recognised by the education authorities. His students are drawn from among the Dalits, the most backward classes and low-caste Muslims. No landowner, Hindu or Muslim, would think of enrolling his child in Kumar’s school.

Even locating the entrepreneurs was a problem for the researchers: they had to rely on local activists.

Barring one, the rest were first-generation entrepreneurs whose fathers were either unlettered or barely literate.

All of them had a problem finding space to rent.

Despite the hiccups, the study found that the Dalits’ enterprises, however small, had grown — though they were reluctant to fill in the details because most of them kept no books nor filed tax returns.

Most of them also felt that economic success had helped them enter the mainstream political space.

They looked on themselves as “role models” for the community. But every one of them said that if they could, they would send their children abroad where caste did not exist.