Caste threads are spawning deadly conflicts in Tamil Nadu schools
Children are wearing the threads to school to assert their caste identity.
The result is a spiral of violence that recently led to a student's death
Johanna Deeksha
25 May 2022
https://scroll.in/article/
*O*n a windy Tuesday afternoon in May 2022, loud howls erupted from a house
in Adaichani, a village in southern Tamil Nadu’s Tirunelveli district. The
sound led villagers to the home of Sundar Rajan, a 40-something man who was
in a fit of rage: in one hand, he held his 16-year-old son’s collar, and in
another, he had a small shovel. The son cried and begged to be let go. The
women in the neighbouring houses hurriedly called the police stationed in
their village to calm the angry father down.
The neighbours explained to me that the father was furious because he had
found out that his son had gone to the village temple festival, despite
being directed to stay at home. Things were not normal outside. “Being out
during this time is not safe for us, that is why the father was angry,” a
neighbour explained. “We have to be on guard at all times.”
The villagers belong to the Scheduled Caste community of Arunthathiyars.
Eleven days earlier, a Class 11 student from the village, who belonged to
the community, had been in a fight with a Class 12 student from another
village, who was from the Thevar caste, an Other Backward Classes
community. The Class 12 student, Selva Surya, had later died, allegedly
from injuries that he suffered in the fight.
The incident had occurred at the Pallakkal Podhukodi Government Higher
Secondary school, a kilometre away from the village. The region was already
tense, and this incident had made it even more so. The police had, in fact,
been stationed at the village to prevent any clashes that could break out
between the two communities.
“Now that they have lost a son, they will be determined to take one of
ours,” said Karpagam, a resident of Adaichani, who goes by one name. “So we
are asking high school students in the village to stay home and not step
out.”
Karpagam’s son missed his Class 11 exam that morning. He had been sent away
to a relative’s house for his safety. He, too, was a student of the school
where the incident had occurred. Karpagam and her husband have decided not
to let their son return to the same school the next academic year. Instead,
they plan to send him to another school, somewhere far away, where he will
be safe.
* “It’s okay if his studies are affected, his life is more important,” she
said.*
Some other parents in the village also shared these fears and said they
were considering moving their children to different schools.
The fight between the two students had erupted over a caste thread. These
caste threads, or bands, are worn around the wrist by people in some
districts of Tamil Nadu, and are particularly common in southern districts
like Tirunelveli, Thoothukudi and Tenkasi. Some caste communities in these
districts have their own flags, and caste threads reflect the colours of
these flags.
“It was the upper castes who used to wear these bands,” said AK Manikumar,
a retired professor of history, who has studied and written on caste riots
and caste politics in the state. “It wasn’t a practice among the OBC and
Scheduled Castes. But slowly, the OBC castes also began to emulate the
upper castes by wearing these threads.” In this region, he said, it was the
Thevar community that first began to display them – over the last two
decades, other communities also began to develop their own symbols.
“It was gradual,” said Marimuthu Bharathan, a Dalit rights activist in the
region. First, caste associations designed their own flags, which would be
displayed on streets to mark the entry into areas where that caste was
predominant. “Then, young people began to wear vests in the colour of these
flags,” Bharathan said, adding that the vests sometimes had caste names
printed on them. “They would wear the vest under their uniform, so it would
be easy to identify who was who. Then they came up with *bottus*” –
decorative dots on the forehead – “and caste threads in the same colours,”
he said.
These caste markers “are a way to hold on to the identity and to the past,”
said Karthick Ram Manoharan, a scholar from the University of Wolverhampton
and author of a book on Periyar. “It isn’t even about superiority, it is
just a way to show they are ‘different’ from other castes.”
Bharathan said that he had noticed young people, especially students,
wearing these threads from the late 2000s onwards. But members of Scheduled
Castes started to sport the threads only in the last ten years, he added.
“Subaltern assertion is vital in a political democracy,” said Vignesh KR, a
doctoral scholar from King’s College London who researches Tamil Nadu
politics, caste and democracy. He observed that the success of the
Dravidian and anti-caste movement have in different ways helped ensure
access to education for Scheduled Caste students, which resulted in a
newfound confidence, and a desire to assert caste identity.
*“The fact that Scheduled Caste students are also wearing the thread is
unsettling the OBC students, who feel that the caste thread is exclusive to
them,” he said.*
Some accounts suggest this tension was the root of the Adaichani incident.
Salim Amir, the father of a student in the school who was friends with the
Scheduled Caste student, said his son had told him that Surya had been
harassing the Scheduled Caste student for some time over his caste thread.
He had allegedly demanded that the Scheduled Caste student remove his
thread because he belonged to a lower caste. (The names of the Class 11
student, other students accused in the incident, and their families, are
being withheld because the Juvenile Justice Act prohibits the disclosure of
any identifying information of juveniles accused in crimes.)
Francis L, the deputy superintendent of police of Tirunelveli, told
*Scroll.in *that teachers from the school had previously called Surya’s
parents, “complaining that he was causing communal issues”. But he had not
heard anything specific about Surya targeting the Scheduled Caste student.
On the day of the incident, Amir said, Surya had allegedly picked a fight
with the Scheduled Caste student during their lunch interval, and his son
and another Muslim student tried to defend him. “They were friends since
class six,” he said, of his son and the Scheduled Caste student.
According to Amir, Surya’s friends also joined in the fight. In the course
of the fight, Amir said, the Scheduled Caste student allegedly threw a
stone at Surya, which hit his head. Amir’s son returned home that evening
with a wound on his head, and told his parents that “he could not stand by
while his friend was being beaten up”.
Meanwhile, Surya was taken to a hospital, where “the doctors stitched up
the wound instead of doing a scan,” Surya’s mother said. The family found
out the next day that he had internal bleeding. Five days later, he passed
away. His family alleged that delayed medical attention and
irresponsibility on the part of the school resulted in Surya’s death.
Police arrested the Scheduled Caste student and the two Muslim students on
murder charges. School authorities declined to comment for this story.
Surya’s family has a different version of the events that preceded the
incident. They told *Scroll.in* that Surya had only asked the accused
student to remove his thread because the school had prohibited it. The
police are still investigating the incident.
Currently, the Scheduled Caste student and two Muslim students are in a
juvenile home.
*“One life has been lost and another three hang in the balance,” said
Vargis Rani, a social worker who works with the Arunthatiyar community.*
After the student’s death, police seized caste threads from shops and
warned students against wearing them. Since exams were on, they threatened
to disallow students from attending them if they arrived wearing the
threads. “They just cut it with a scissor before we enter,” a school
student said.
*N*early a century has passed since EV Ramasamy, better known as Periyar,
founded Tamil Nadu’s self-respect movement in 1925, aimed at dismantling
the caste system. At that time, Brahmins occupied most positions of power
in the state, then known as the Madras Presidency.
According to the 1916 “non-Brahmin manifesto” of the South Indian People’s
Association, in one provincial civil service exam, “15 out of the 16
successful candidates were Brahmins” although “not less than 40 out of 41
and a half million, who form the population of this presidency, are
non-Brahmins”.
In 1927, Madras Presidency became the first province in India to implement
reservations in government jobs. That legacy endures till this day: Tamil
Nadu reserves 69% of seats in government educational institutions and
government jobs for disadvantaged communities, higher than any other state.
It ranks among the top in the country in terms of development indices, for
which many credit its reservation policy.
Periyar, the philosopher and social activist, subsequently went on to lead
the Justice Party, the parent of Tamil Nadu’s two major political parties,
the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra
Kazhagam. Governance in Tamil Nadu has historically been guided by his work
and thinking, and leaders have strived to provide equitable access for
communities that were ranked among the lowest in the caste system.
But even in this relatively progressive environment, caste tensions surface
frequently. While formal political power may have moved away from Brahmins,
it has come to be concentrated in Other Backward Classes, a diverse
category marked by wide disparities. In recent years, social and economic
change has further created a churn, helping Dalit communities progress, but
making groups in the lower end of the spectrum of OBCs grow resentful.
The result is that caste tensions are now seeping into schools, with even
children developing a strong sense of caste identity. The manner in which
these tensions develop and spill over into violence is revealing of how
deep-rooted the problem of caste is in the country, and of just how
challenging it is to try and tackle it.
The prominent castes in southern Tamil Nadu are the Nadars, a Backward
Class community, and the Thevars, also a Backward Class community, which is
divided into three subcategories – Agamudaiyar, Kallars and Maravars. (Of
these three, the Kallars and Maravars are significantly disadvantaged
groups – both were previously classified as “criminal” and were
subsequently denotified.) The three main Scheduled Caste communities in
this region are Paraiyars, Arunthathiyars and Pallars.
According to responses to Right to Information Act applications filed by
Evidence, an NGO based in Madurai, 300 murders were registered in the state
between January 2016 and December 2020, under the provisions of the
Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Amendment
Act, 2015. In one particularly violent period, in September 2021, four
beheadings were reported
<https://timesofindia.
in
a span of ten days in southern Tamil Nadu – most of the incidents involved
members of the Thevar community and Scheduled Castes.
This violence is also mirrored in a rise in tensions between schoolchildren.
* “What students see in their homes and neighbourhoods, they replicate in
their school as well,” said Rani, the social worker. “Where else will
children learn these things?”*
Bharathan, who noticed that many school children had begun wearing caste
threads, petitioned the National Human Rights Commission in 2015, seeking
its intervention in the matter. That same year, the Commission issued a
notice to the Tamil Nadu government, directing it to look into the issue of
caste threads and other caste markers among school students in Tirunelveli.
Four years later, a 2018 trainee batch of IAS officers appealed to the
Tamil Nadu government, seeking its intervention in the matter of caste
threads. The subject had come up for discussion during a training session,
following which the batch decided to make the representation. In 2019, the
Tamil Nadu government issued a circular banning the wearing of the threads,
and directing authorities to identify and crack down on schools where they
were being worn.
The BJP leader H Raja called the move “anti-Hindu” and condemned the
circular. The next day, the then education minister K Sengottaiyan, of the
AIADMK government, which was an ally of the Bharatiya Janata Party at the
Centre, did a U-turn and claimed that it had been issued without his
permission. A day later, he backtracked. *The Hindu* reported him as
saying: “Necessary action will be taken if complaints are received in this
regard.”
Bharathan explained that the interventions have had little impact.
“Students continued to wear the caste thread,” he said. “In some instances,
teachers who are casteist allowed it to continue, in others, the
administration simply failed to implement the rule.”
Those teachers who are trying to enforce the rule struggle to discipline
students who are determined to display caste markers.
At around 1.30 pm on a Thursday, high school students of a government
school in the village of Nadakallur in Tirunelveli strolled out of their
classrooms after an exam. Outside at the gates, on the busy highway on
which the school was located, middle school students waited to be let in
for their exam. As I stood at the gate, speaking to a physical education
teacher, he pointed out a student who had one palm wrapped around the wrist
of his other hand. “See, he knows we’re watching so he’s trying to hide the
caste thread,” the teacher said. That student slipped away but the teacher
managed to stop another student and make him wipe out the *bottu* on his
head.
“It’s not easy,” the teacher confessed. “When I ask them to remove it,
they do it immediately but the minute I turn away, they put it back on.”
Many teachers said that social media had had a role to play in reigniting
children’s feelings of caste pride, often referred to as “*jaati veri*”, in
Tamil, which literally translates to “caste mania”. Caste pages and
caste-related videos on YouTube were contributing to this mania, teachers
told me.
The problem can be dealt with if school administrations take effective
steps, noted R Shankar, the principal of the Nettoor Government School in
Tenkasi. “But the teachers and principals are scared,” he said. “They are
scared of the students and their parents, so they do not take strict steps.
That is why these practices continue to take place.”
Shankar said that he himself took about six months to ensure students were
not wearing caste threads to class. If students threatened to call their
parents, he asked them to go ahead. “I would ask the parents, do you want
your ward to sit on a chair like me?” he said. “If they said yes, then I
would tell them to let me do my job and not interfere.” Currently, he said,
no students wore these threads to his school – but he added that sometimes,
he observed some wearing them outside the school.
More than 80 km away from Nadakallur, in the village of Palavoor
Beneath the surface of these law-and-order problems a darker agenda of resurgent Tamil chauvinism also appears to be rearing its ugly head. Not only is the anti-Delhi mood of the mobs becoming more strident by the day, but posters of Velupillai Prabhakaran, late leader of the extremist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka, are popping up, as are “secessionist slogans” reported in several protest sites.
These signs are indicative of a deeper play, and it cannot be a coincidence that the spiralling mass demonstrations come at this particular juncture in Tamil politics, when a feverish search is on for political legitimacy, and both major Dravidian parties are facing their toughest test of leadership in recent history.
Beyond jallikattu
While jallikattu indeed enjoys a temporal provenance that dates back to the hoary history of Tamil civilisation, as far back as 400-100 BC according to some accounts, the latest legal saga of the “sport” relates directly to the May 7, 2014 decision of the Supreme Court to ban the sport by upholding a notification issued by the Ministry of Environment in 2011 to add bulls to the list of animals whose training and exhibition is prohibited.Perhaps fearing the loss of political currency associated with the ban in the aftermath of the death of Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa on December 5, 2016, the State government acted quickly, promulgating an ordinance to amend the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960 (POCA), thus making jallikattu legal again. Legislation was subsequently passed in a special session of the State Assembly on Monday.
That, despite this, swelling crowds have continued to bring life to a standstill, that riot-like conditions have gripped other parts of the State such as Alanganallur in Madurai district, and that the anti-New Delhi sentiment continues to stalk the land speak to factors underpinning the civic disturbance that go beyond sentimentalism for jallikattu.
Taking a macro view, at the heart of the debate is the allegation by animal rights organisations such as the Animal Welfare Board of India and the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) that the Bos indicus bulls used in jallikatu are subject to cruelty, are physically and mentally tortured for human pleasure, and the sport is thus directly in contravention of the POCA. This appears to be borne out by a plethora of photographic and video evidence, some of it available on the YouTube channels of the aforementioned animal rights groups.
The countervailing arguments by spokespersons of the jallikattu “movement” include the claim that as a key event of Mattu Pongal, jallikattu is essential to preserving the indigenous bull species, a way of life in rural, pastoral Tamil Nadu, and is indeed a celebrated feature of Tamil identity itself, described as it is at several points in the cherished Sangam literary tradition.
On the face of it, the argument about preserving biodiversity cannot constitute a full and consistent defence of jallikattu, for that reasoning does not address the charge of animal cruelty, the burden of disproving which belongs to the proponents of the event — especially given the startling clarity of the animal abuse evident in video evidence.
The proposed middle path of permitting jallikattu but tightly regulating it is potentially feasible; yet, as in the case of any policy in India, and specifically policies that clash with weighty historical-cultural practices, the efficacy of regulation will boil down to sheer political will. This applies to every level of government, from the very apex of the State administration down to officers charged with monitoring the event at the village level.
This brings us to the nub of the issue: the role of politics in fomenting or controlling what is being naively dubbed as the ‘Tamil Spring’ by some overzealous pundits.
Behind the protests
The remarkable energy that has infused this apparently leaderless ‘movement’, as well as its uniformly peaceful nature, were seen as praiseworthy attributes during the first few days of the protest marches in the State.Yet as the protest slogans have become more shrill, and festive gatherings on the Marina beach have given way to more unruly agitations across the State, it has become evident that invisible forces have been backing the protesters.
Otherwise, who could have funded the distribution of food and water to the many thousands gathered with their families on the beach last week? Was it out of a sheer sense of duty that the entire police machinery quickly snapped to attention to marshal the crowds on Marina beach, to manage with a firm but gentle hand all the traffic snarls and bandh-associated disruptions across Chennai and similar issues elsewhere in the State?
While it will probably be an ongoing endeavour of investigative journalists and political analysts to unpack the forces of collusion behind the uprising built on the sentiments of Tamil cultural identity, the political ramifications may take much less time to bubble to the surface.
Yes, it is true that the top brass of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam have been unable to assume the mantle of leadership of this protest so far. However, given that the former is witnessing a behind-the-scenes power tussle between the Sasikala clan and the disgruntled non-Thevar party bosses, and the latter may be awaiting an opportune moment for recently anointed Working President M.K. Stalin to prove his mettle once again, it would not be surprising if one or both of these parties soon seek to step into the fray.
No matter who wins this battle, either of the major parties, or even popular leaders from within the protester cohort, what is evident is that the jallikattu protests reflect a flirtation with the forces of Tamil ethnic politics that can demonstrably spin out of control of any institutional mechanism and become increasingly chauvinist.
The long history of the Dravidian movement shows that the Tamils have a remarkable capacity for articulating valued cultural attributes, whether the Tamil language, Tamil cinema, or their love for their god-like political heroes. It only takes an emotive trigger such as jallikattu to bring the masses to their feet, as we have seen over the past week.
The changing nature of the State
Historically the ebb and flow of this movement has come up against the broader rubric of the Indian state, for example during the anti-Hindi agitation, and on such occasions a compromise solution has usually emerged, striking a balance between radical ethnic-based demands and forced uniformity imposed by a distant capital.Similarly the changing nature of Tamil society, which has been impacted by recent trends in economic mobility and the influx of people from other States, has profoundly transformed the more radical-assertive anti-Brahminism of the early years of the Dravidian movement into a more inclusive, paternal-populist welfarism of the late 1990s and beyond.
The danger at the present juncture lies in possibility that the political elites within the fold of the Dravidian parties may, in their bid to capture the momentum of the jallikattu movement, empower the more intolerant, unstable and violence-prone strand of Tamil identity politics.
If that unfortunate outcome should
materialise, it would be a series backslide for the State in terms of
the commendable progress made under the old guard.
