Post-Doc Cleaning Septic Tank: Struggles Of A Man Suffering Caste Discrimination (Photo @mnsyadav)
The Supreme Court on August 1 made a landmark judgment on the sub-categorization of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. A seven-judge bench headed by Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud, after years of legal fights, allowed states to form sub-classifications within the SC and ST categories recognising the most backward communities within these categories.
The decision overturned the top court’s 2004 verdict which held that SC and ST are homogenous groups” that cannot be further divided. One of the verdict’s footnotes of the apex court’s verdict on sub-categorisation of SC and ST, the name of Ravichandran Bathran, who converted to Islam in 2022 and became Raees Muhammed, worked for years, trying to educate on the discrimination amongst the SC and ST.
Bathran’s literature, including his noted publications, emanates from his own struggle to break the shackles of the caste system. Through his writing, he has elaborated on why it is important to create sub-categories of Dalits for the purpose of reservation. According to him, the nomenclature “Dalit” and the homogenizing claims of the category have failed to address the concerns of discrimination within Dalits. A major omission, as per his opinion, is connected to the scavenging work.
In an article written for The Hindu, Raees Muhammed claims that despite the iconic Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA), which highlighted images of celebrities voluntarily sweeping the streets, it was the scavengers forced into the profession by their caste to remove waste who did the work later, when municipalities began to employ more contractual laborers. Surprisingly, as a post-doctoral fellow, he has spent years cleaning septic tanks working for a cleaning service company.
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After converting to Islam and accepting a new name, Muhammed argues that the real problem they face is when Hindu society attaches that name to a caste and instills a stereotype of the hereditary occupation of scavenging. “My father was treated badly because the Hindu society said he did a job that was considered filthy,” writes the activist in an article published in The Print, adding that it was hypocrisy to first enforce a traditional occupation on some groups, treat their members badly, and then blame the people rather than the caste system.
Muhammed laments that despite acquiring education and fair earnings, his identity has never changed. Talking about the discrimination he faced by his fellow untouchables, Muhammed says he was called an outsider and a migrant. The fight for equality eventually led him to Islam, as he points out that the only religion in India that has the strength to annihilate the caste system is Islam, opines Bathran, now Raees Muhammed.
