Vivek Kumar
Affiliation: Centre for the Study of Social Systems, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
Email: [email protected]
Abstract: This paper attempts to analyze how the ‘BAMCEF’ (Backward and Minorities Communities Employees’ Federation) can be defined as an indigenous counterpart of the ‘Civil Sphere’ propounded by Jeffrey C. Alexander (2006) in his Civil Sphere Theory (CST). At the outset, it discusses how the Bahujans constituted this sphere and how this sphere helped ‘BAMCEF’ to create a discourse. It has identified who the actors who established this Civil Sphere were. How with the help of ‘BAMCEF,’ they established a discourse of binary between the so-called upper castes, who were termed as ‘Manuwadi’ by the BAMCEF members, and the exploited castes, who were termed as ‘Bahujans.’ This article has also probed how BAMCEF galvanized a counterpublic, which later on gave birth to the vibrant social movement ‘DS4’ (Dalit-Shoshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti- literary translated it means – Dalit-Exploited Society Struggle Association) ‘as a communicative institution to convince the public’ with the help of ‘cultural and institutional’ arrangements to raise their voices against ‘Manuvadis’ and their exploitative values. The paper has tried to find out how it deepened the divide between ‘Manuvadis’ and ‘Bahujans’ and highlighted the role of uncivil institutions of the so-called upper castes, which subjugated and excluded the ‘Bahujans.’ It has found out how the ‘Bahujan’ have polluted the so-called upper castes by publicly denouncing them through demonstrations and organizing public meetings, criticizing their exploitative institutions, through democratic means, and so on. Towards the end, this article demonstrates how ‘BAMCEF,’ through galvanizing a counterpublic, gave birth to a social movement, DS4, that later turned into a political party called ‘Bahujan Samaj Party’ (BSP), leading civil repair- Whether repair was through civilizing the so-called upper castes or whether the repair was done by giving the erstwhile excluded castes self-representation or by giving them a share in the resources.
Keywords: Indian; Civil Sphere; Castes; Hindus; Dalit; Social Movements.