When was the last time you were attacked because of your caste when you put up a relationship status on social media? Yes, you read that right. In yet another manifestation of the deep-set, ever-malign suspicion of and hatred towards Dalits, a woman named Renuka Jain stooped to ranting on Twitter about Tina Dabi, a Dalit woman who topped the Union Public Service Commission Exam for civil services in May this year.
https://twitter.com/RenukaJain6/status/798893295225085954
The hostility appears to be because of Dabi’s annoucement on her Facebook page that she was in a relationship with another UPSC topper, accompanied by a photo of the two of them on holiday in Amsterdam. In her tweet, Jain uses this information to jump to the absurd conclusion that this means that Dabi is affluent and therefore clearly abused her caste position to avail of the SC-ST quota, knocking other deserving candidates out of the game. (As this article suggests, it is a tiny bit rich for someone whose hobbies include sky diving in Munich to be #Shaming other people’s holidays abroad.) But clearly, as one of the apt responses to Jain’s tweet indicates, the problem here is that she just could not digest the success of a Dalit woman, and used invasive means to snoop on Dabi’s private life to make a flimsy argument against caste-based reservation. It reminds us of a pertinent point Christina Thomas Dhanaraj raises in this article, about people disguising their anti-Dalit sentiments as privilege criticism: “… doling out hateful and reckless opinions on my life and my choices, and those of my sisters, under the guise of calling out privilege”.
Dabi’s success has already caused her other problems, such as a fake Facebook account that apparently applauded Narendra Modi. So malignant trolls like Jain should really give it a rest, or better still, introspect on the casteist mentality that leads them to make baseless allegations and their noses into people’s personal lives.