Sakshi is Brahmin. The stiff opposition of her MLA father, who Sakshi accused of sending his henchmen to track and separate the couple, confirms why BR Ambedkar considered inter-caste marriage as the principal mode of demolishing the caste system.
In Annihilation of Caste, which is a veritable manifesto for establishing equality among Indians, Ambedkar noted: “I am convinced that the real remedy (for abolishing caste) is intermarriage. Fusion of blood can alone create the feeling of being kith and kin, and unless this feeling of kinship, of being kindred, becomes paramount, the separatist feeling — the feeling of being aliens — created by caste will not vanish.”
Ambedkar made this observation after summarily dismissing inter-dining as a remedy for tackling the caste system. His observation was akin to taking a swipe at Gandhi, who, quite radically for his time, promoted inter-dining for bridging the chasm between the untouchables and the upper castes – and widening the social base of the anti-colonial movement.
Inter-dining has proved to be a grossly ineffective measure to tackle caste. Even today, decades after Gandhi conducted his experiments to abolish untouchability, the most favoured method of political parties wishing to muster the support of Dalits is to organise inter-dining involving them. For instance, in 2018, the BJP launched the “dinner-at-Dalit house” campaign for calming the community members whose emotions were roiled because of the Supreme Court diluting the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. The campaign had BJP MLAs and ministers breaking bread with Dalits at their houses.
Yet, the limitations of inter-dining came to the fore when a BJP minister, Suresh Rana, was accused of bringing food from outside and eating at a Dalit home in Aligarh. Another BJP MLA from Uttar Pradesh, Rajendra Pratap Singh, was quoted saying that Dalits feel emancipated when BJP leaders dine with them. We do not know whether Sakshi’s father, Rajesh Mishra, was among the MLAs who dined at a Dalit house.
Inter-dining is rendered ineffectual because it is an occasional occurrence — partaking of meals is mostly a private affair; it is easy to suspend caste prejudices for an hour or so for the instrumental reason of bagging votes. The upper caste communities accept their leaders eating with Dalits as a compulsion of democratic politics, which has the idea of equality as its basis. Upper caste leaders must publicly endorse that idea.
It was perhaps why Union minister Ram Vilas Paswan had then said, “Pitying them (Dalits) is wrong, and thinking that eating with Dalits will eradicate untouchability is not right.”
By contrast, a marriage between a Dalit and a Brahmin, as between Sakshi and Ajitesh, demands that families reject the idea of purity and pollution, superiority and inferiority in perpetuity. Marriages, unlike inter-dining, isn’t a one-off thing lasting, at best, for an hour. This makes it impossible to depict a Brahmin-Dalit marriage as instrumental to the larger Brahmin community. And because the marriage is not perceived as instrumental, it acquires the radical undertone of undermining the caste system. From this perspective, the idea of equality is not only endorsed but lived as well, every hour, daily.
Sakshi and Ajitesh’s marriage rips off the mask of hypocrisy all of us wear, and demands an alignment between personal and public morality. Rajesh Mishra recently told The Indian Express, “The BJP membership drive is ongoing. We are…organising weddings of poor girls. She (Sakshi) is an adult and has the right to make her decisions.” Sakshi’s videos suggest she was apprehensive of what her father might do to her and Ajitesh. Through her defiance of her father, she has compelled him to adhere to his public avowals in the personal realm. He has had to publicly live what he espouses.
Marriages in India are mostly endogamous or confined to the same social group. These are also mostly arranged. The idea of caste equality has seeped deep enough for people issuing matrimonial advertisements to declare, “caste no bar.” Often though, the consideration of caste is swept aside only when the prospective bride or bridegroom has extremely marketable attributes — for instance, either he or she has a high-paying job in the private sector or is in an elite government service.
In 2013, the author of this article did a three-part series for The Hoot on the discrimination Dalit journalists face in newsrooms. An exception among them was a Bengali Namasudra, who said his only experience of caste discrimination was not in the newsroom, but when he responded to advertisements under “caste no bar” category on matrimonial websites. “When I tell them about my Namasudra background, communications cease at once,” he said.