Gopal Guru, Mahatma Gandhi Professor, University of Pune

One of the leading tribal intellectual activists, Wahuru Sonwane, has been questioning representation of tribals by urban-based upper caste leaders. This resentment is articulated in his celebrated poem, "Stage", which says: "We have never reached the stage, neither were we invited to occupy the stage; but our stage was occupied by those who kept telling us our own miseries and pains. Our miseries remained ours; they never became theirs."

Even in the realm of electoral politics, the Dalits argue that they just make a rhetorical appearance in the election manifestoes of political parties but never get real representation in terms of access to material, social and cultural resources. This issue has now acquired dangerous proportions with Dalits protesting violently against those who claim to speak for them ...

This raises two fundamental questions. First, are the objections of the Dalits, tribals and women justifiable? Whose claims of representation are authentic and valid? Do they become automatically valid because someone is born in a particular social situation or do the claims become valid just because someone has more academic degrees or belongs to a "great" family? And finally, does the common Dalit and tribal really require any kind of representation?

Let us understand these questions. One, such particular claims can be justified on the ground that they enable historical recovery of authentic voices of Dalits, tribals and women. Two, representation of Dalits by non-Dalits may accord to the claimant a kind of morally, often egoistically, superior position, which then demands all the time a kind of hierarchical relationship involving Dalit humiliation on which this ego is based. Third, the assumption in such claims is that Dalits, tribals and women are incapable of developing a democratically-informed internal reasoning and hence need to be given such democratic reasoning from outside. Such an assumption expects the Dalits to undergo a kind of agnipariksha conducted by the non-Dalits ... On these above grounds one might justify Dalits objecting to the initiative taken by non-Dalits on their behalf.

However, such culturally-specific perspectives towards representation, though initially desirable, are essentially problematic for two reasons. First, they do not provide sufficient conditions for the transformative politics of Dalits, as they tend to foreclose the possibility of Dalits acquiring a morally umversal leadership to speak in a universal language of emancipation. Second, these culturally-specific claims of representation assume that the Dalit claims for tepresentation are automatically valid and authentic. is it the case? The Indian experience of claims of Dalit representation goes against all such arguments. In other words, it cannot be argued that someone's being born in a particular caste or sex or region or religion makes her or his claim automatically valid and authentic. If that were the case, the common Dalits would not have rejected their own leadership in the post-Ambedkar period. In such a situation, it is important to understand the validity question in terms of the ability and commitment of claimants to get to the truth, piercing through different and often intersecting layers of social reality that surrounds the common Dalits. The leadership claims must also be aimed at deriving a meaning. from this truth. Second, the representational claims should have certain moral stamnina and stature that require a claimant to uphold the dignity of those who are being led. For example, the representational claim should not involve patronising or condescending tendencies which seek to humiliate the led. Such claims, loaded with the language of patronage, tend to deny the led the capacity to think and act with authenticity in universal terms.

... Hence, Dalits will refuse to be led by those, both Dalits and non-Dalits, who refuse to see the complete truth. (Source: The Hindu, 25 February, 2000)