Buying a motorcycle can spark a riot in tamilnadu

[AGHORI]

Refusal by Dalits to work as agricultural labour and to perform menial duties plus their relative economic improvement have made them the targets of caste violence

In the recent violence against the Dalits in Dharmapuri district in Tamil Nadu, about 300 of their houses were burnt down and other properties destroyed by the Vanniars, a numerically strong intermediate caste, sections of whom have been economically stagnant. The immediate cause for the rampage was a Vanniar woman's marriage to a Dalit youth and the consequent suicide of the woman's father. However, the large-scale and systematic destruction of Dalit properties was a result of the simmering discontent against the upward mobility of the Dalits. The growing intolerance of the intermediate castes towards this economic mobility of the Dalits is not confined to Dharmapuri district alone. In the last two decades, 11 districts in the State have witnessed similar destruction of Dalit property as part of caste violence. There are two aspects to this Dalit mobility andthe resultant violence against them. One is the declining of role of agriculture in rural Tamil Nadu and its impact on the social and economic relations within villages. The second is the specific ways in which the changing economic relations have been negotiated through altered caste and gender relations posing challenges to the intermediate caste's pre-existing power.

Further, caste dominance is contingent upon the masculine power of men, their ability to control women in private and public spheres and also their ability to control the subordinate men of oppressed castes. With the challenge posed to their caste dominance, the intermediate castes find their masculinity in crisis since they are unable to exert power over the subaltern Dalit men and women. They also imagine an erosion of their masculine power in the private sphere with their claim that Dalit men lure away their women.The crisis of intermediate caste masculinity, which is the result of theeconomic mobility of the Dalits, is certainly at the core of these conflicts and the caste violence which targets Dalit properties. Otherwise, how can one explain the fact that invariably during the caste violence in recent times, motorbikes owned by the Dalits, a symbol of masculine mobility, have been targeted by the intermediate castes who desire to imitate the erstwhile dominant castes in their starched white dhotis moving on Enfield motorbikes!

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/where-buying-a-motorcycle-can-spark-a-riot/article4280216.ece