Ghatkopar's Ramabai Nagar: Where the Republic still lives

Early on the morning of July 11, 1997, at Ramabai Nagar in Ghatkopar, a woman claimed to see the statue of iconic leader BR Ambedkar desecrated. Within a few hours, angry Dalits had gathered on the highway in protest.

By 7.30am, a police van would stop 450mt away from the protesters, disembark and immediately start firing. They would fire over 50 rounds within 20 minutes into small lanes and by-ways and into people’s homes and into the homes of people who were not even protesting.

They killed 10 people.

Young Mangesh Shivsharan was shot in his head, right in front of Namdeo Surwade who was shot on his shoulder.

“The boy’s brains were all over my father,” said Manoj about his father Namdeo Surwade, a handcart puller who could never work a day after the injury and died a few years later, becoming the eleventh victim.

But there was another casualty of the killings at Ramabai Nagar.
Vilas Ghogre, Dalit poet and singer, committed suicide horrified by what he saw at Ramabai and the realisation that “this country is not worth fighting for anymore” as witnessed by his friend, singer Sambhaji Bhagat in Anand Patwardhan’s new film Jai Bhim Comrade, screened at Ramabai Nagar on the eve of the nation’s 63rd year as a Republic.

For three-and-a-half hours, over 1,500 people saw the film on a makeshift screen, many standing through its entire duration. The film details not just the life of Vilas Ghogre and the police firing but its aftermath — the movement for justice that led to the police officer who ordered the firing to spend less than a week in hospital (not jail), before being let off on bail by the High Court.
It tells other stories — the martyrdom of a young Dalit Panther Bhagwat Jadhav, killed by the Shiv Sena at a protest rally in 1974; the incisive and fiery oratory of Panther leader Bhai Sangare that possibly led to his martyrdom in 1999; the Khairlanji massacre and continuing atrocities in the countryside. It examines the assault on the Constitution and the slow appropriation of radical Dalit leaders into mainstream Congress or hardcore right-wing politics while also critically examining the role of the left in dealing with caste.

Highlighting precarious livelihoods, it paints intimate family portraits of ordinary Dalits across Mumbai and Maharashtra and all this intersects seamlessly with the central role of music in not just the film but in the Dalit politics of resistance. Protest songs sung in every chawl, basti and galli lead us to the newest generation of cultural activists musicians such as the Kabir Kala Manch, whose songs are viewed as a threat by the state, that they’re branded as Naxalites and forced to go underground.

The religious mother of the enigmatic singer Sheetal Sathe of the Kabir Kala Manch, would say, “At every performance, my children always assured me that they’d never take up arms and they’d change the world only through song and drum.”

At Ramabai, young teenagers with moist eyes watched the screen quietly, listening to a spirited widow describe how her husband’s hands were slashed by upper caste men, and how he bled to death while the police refused to take their statement. The proud woman had saved Rs5 and Rs10 a day over the years to buy herself land and educate her children. When the filmmaker asks her how she kept up her spirit, she replies, “I can’t afford to lose. What’ll happen to my children if I lose?”

When a group of boys were asked what was their favourite part of the film, they replied, in unison, “The songs of the Kabir Kala Manch.”

No wonder the state views them as a threat.  Resistance and symbols of resistance need to be wiped out like Pochiram Kamble who was killed for uttering the words “Jai Bhim”. Yet the film that documents the recent decades of caste oppression, has found that symbols of joy, hope, perseverance and resistance, always survive, irrespective of thousands of years of oppression.

Another Dalit leader Ashok Saraswat’s speech in the film drew laughter from the crowd at Ramabai: “Unfortunately, we gave up 330 million gods but made Ambedkar into a god. We wear Babasaheb Ambedkar’s photo around our neck. On waking up, we say ‘Jai Bhim’. Before sleeping, it’s ‘Jai Bhim’ and when having a little drink, it’s ‘Jai Bhim’!”

The filmmaker interviews a young student from Jai Hind college who says, “Dalit issue frankly is definitely ameliorated over the past half a decade or so.” A sentiment that is not only echoed in the mainstream media that is beginning to cite Dalit neo-liberalism as a way forward, yet those comments are put in sharp contrast to the National Crime Records Bureau that mentions every day three Dalits are raped and two killed and the conviction rate under the Prevention of Atrocity Act is a mere 1%. 
In Beed district of Maharashtra, a young woman was raped by upper caste men, and her entire family was beaten for confronting the attackers. An old man from the same family begins to speak, “We are responsible for this.  We never got organised or converted to another religion. Had we done it we could have mentally discarded caste and made others understand we are humans. We, Mangs, bear the brunt of injustice.”

“But those who converted to Buddhism also face atrocities,” says the filmmaker.

“Yes in some places it happens even to Buddhists. But they have the strength to retaliate.  We lack that strength.”

At that point, the crowd at Ramabai Nagar, was moved to cheers and applause.