Amid quota rush, an SC community that doesn't want to be a Scheduled Caste anymore

"Please do not refer to us as Dalits," Ananthan Ayyasamy, a member of the Devendrakula Vellalar community, which is listed as a Scheduled Caste (SC), told me on the phone from Tamil Nadu during one of our interactions. It was a tweet on X by Ayyasamy, an entrepreneur and politician, after a student's suicide at IIT Bombay and a professor being charged under the stringent SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, that made me reach out to him.

Ayyasamy's post pointed to something unique. His community, Devendrakula Vellalar (DKV), is categorised as an SC, but a huge section of its members want to be delisted from the list, and forsake the reservation benefits.

Ayyasamy, the BJP's district president for Tenkasi in Tamil Nadu, also highlighted the fact that the DKV community members have taken a principled stand to not file cases under the SC/ST Act.

India isn't just a land of diversity, it is also a land of dichotomy.

While India is striving to be ranked among developed countries, more and more in the country want to be counted among the backwards. The prime reason, obviously, are reservation benefits in education and jobs.

The first SC list of Independent India came in 1950 and drew from the one made in 1936. The 1950 SC list had 607 communities and the number grew to 1,258 by 2022. That means, in the last 76 years, even as India was developing, it added over 650 communities to the SC list. It also created the Other Backward Classes (OBC) category in 1993.

Coming amid the clamour and questions over quota benefits and the alleged misuse of the SC/ST Act, Ayyasamy's tweet on September 20 nudged me to find out more.

Sahil Wakode, a student of IIT Bombay, died by suicide on September 18 after he was allegedly caught cheating in his semester exams by Professor Suryanarayana Doolla, the invigilator. Doolla was charged under the provisions of the SC/ST Act after Wakode's parents alleged caste bias and abetment to suicide.

Ayyasamy said he "strongly opposed" the charges against Doolla under the SC/ST Act. More interestingly, he said that the DKV community had "taken a principled, voluntary stand not to file SC/ST cases against anyone".

"We have seen how cases under this Act are weaponised, and how that deepens enmity on the ground," he wrote on X.

Ayyasamy, belonging to an SC community, is no stranger to rural poverty and caste challenges. He is no stranger to what happens inside engineering colleges too. He is a graduate from NIT Tiruchirappalli and has an MBA from Arizona State University. He has worked in the US for 22 years, where he rose to become the Engineering Director at Intel, and holds multiple patents.

Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu backed Ayyasamy's stance and shared his post on X. Tughlaq editor S Gurumurthy too, spoke about the DKV community's decision not to use the "PCR Act as it leads to caste conflicts."

The Protection of Civil Rights (PCR) Act of 1955 bans and punishes "untouchability" in any form and compliments the SC/ST Act.

Since the UGC Equity Regulations were issued and shelved, a debate has been raging on the misuse of the SC/ST Act and the money that is disbursed as relief. The Supreme Court had diluted the provisions of the SC/ST Act fearing misuse, but the BJP-led NDA government made it stricter still with an amendment to the 1989 law in 2018.

AMIT SHAH LAUDED UNIQUE EFFORT OF DEVENDRAKULA VELLALARS

We have heard of several instances when individuals have refused to take reservation benefits, but that a community was asking to be moved out of the SC list and the associated benefits is unheard of. So, I reached out to TR Jawahar, a veteran journalist and expert on Tamil Nadu. He has written the masterly series Time, Tide and Tamil for India Today Digital.

"Leaders, including Puthiya Tamilagam founder K Krishnasamy and Tamilaga Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam's B John Pandian have, at different points, argued that the [Devendrakula Vellalar] community should move out of the SC category," said Jawahar.

I also found an article from August 2015 in The Times of India on Amit Shah, who was then the BJP President, lauding the "community's efforts to uplift itself".

But who are the Devendrakula Vellalar's, and why do they want to be delisted as SCs? Is the demand from across the community or specific to certain sections? Also, is there some politics involved in it?

A health warning before we head any further. An article on the demands of a community to delist isn't to suggest that those needing a caste-based quota shouldn't benefit from the provisions. This article looks into the aspirations and demands specific to the DKV community of Tamil Nadu.

WHO ARE DEVENDRAKULA VELLALAR OF TAMIL NADU?

According to The Times of India article from 2015, Amit Shah lauded the sub-divided DKV community members for their initiative to be categorised as Devendrakula Vellalar, which literally translates to the Descendants of Lord Indra.

"I have heard of caste groups that try to get categorised lower down on the social status ladder to obtain benefits, but here is one that seeks social recognition as a caste of higher status," Shah was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

It was in March 2021 that Parliament passed a Bill to merge seven sub-castes, including Pallar, and name them Devendrakula Vellalar for a unified cultural identity as was being demanded.

"The community was opposed to the term Pallar, and Devendrakula Vellalar is a Sanskritisation," said KA Manikumar, a retired professor of history at Tirunelveli's MS University.

Manikumar shared the community's legend that the sweat of Devendra (Indra), the king of Gods, is said to have fallen on a plant growing in water from which arose a child, who is said to have been the original ancestor, and hence the name, Devendrar or Devendrakula.

Devendrakula refers to the community's lineage and identity, while Vellalar reflects its association with cultivation and agriculture.

In a 2001 research paper, Manikumar wrote about how the community, once landowners were turned into agricultural serfs, "were found working in muddy paddy fields and living in segregated neighbourhoods as untouchable outcastes, when the British conducted land survey towards the close of the 18th century."

The paper also mentions how episodes of caste and class violence, including an attack on December 24, 1968, in which 44 members were charred to death, have shaped the DKV community and its responses.

Their emergence "as a militant caste group and their growing solidarity to secure a rightful place in the state polity has been phenomenal," wrote Manikumar.

Violence has also shaped the community's politics.

"The deaths during the 1957 Mudukulathur riots, the incidents of 1995 in Kodiyankulam, 1999 in Thamiraparani/Manjolai and 2011 in Paramakudi police actions convinced the community that neither the Congress nor the Dravidian parties would protect it. This led to the emergence of community-based parties," Ayyasamy said. "The community is thankful to the BJP for the 2021 DKV name change."

Isolated cases of caste conflicts are still reported, with the Devendrakula Vellalar competing with the Thevar and Nadar communities, which are both classified as the OBCs.

DEMAND TO MOVE OUT OF SC LIST DUE TO SELF-RESPECT, NOT AFFLUENCE

People from the Scheduled Castes make up about 20% of Tamil Nadu's population, and the DKV is one of the three major groups. The community forms 5-9% of Tamil Nadu's population.

"Devendrakula Vellalars are concentrated south of Madurai and in the Cauvery Delta," said Ayyasamy, adding that it is mostly an agrarian, farming community that reveres the cow.

According to the Census 2011 data, the DKV population is concentrated across southern and central Tamil Nadu, particularly Ramanathapuram, Thoothukkudi, Tirunelveli and Virudhunagar, but with sizeable populations also in Tiruchirappalli, Dindigul, Thiruvarur, Thanjavur, Theni, Madurai, Sivaganga and Karur

I asked him to give me the names of some prominent people from the community who might be known outside of Tamil Nadu, but Ayyasamy said there were none he was aware of. "There are some IAS officers and high court judges but not anyone very prominent," he said.

Ayyasamy insisted that the attempt to get the community delisted wasn't about affluence but self-respect.

"Most of the community still lives in poverty. The demand to leave the SC list is not about affluence. It is about self-respect. That is also why the community does not want to rely on the SC/ST Act," Ayyasamy told me on the phone during one of my multiple interactions with him.

"If any community has its own classical literary tradition, it is the DKV. The Pallu literature is more than 300 years old," said Ayyasamy about the community's heritage. The Devendrakula Vellalars play an important role in the festival calendar of the Meenakshi Amman Temple in Madurai and other important shrines. They also have various customary worship rights in 436 temples.

One name that cropped up during my conversations with both Ayyasamy and Jawahar was of K Krishnasamy, the founder president of the political party, the Puthiya Tamilagam.

Krishnasamy has been demanding the delisting of the DKVs from the SC list for years now.

DKVs WANT TO BE CLASSIFIED AS OBCs; ULTIMATE GOAL TO BE IN GENERAL CATEGORY

"Our leaders couldn't object to the inclusion of the community in the SC list immediately after Independence," K Krishnasamy said. "Since 1996, we have been urging state and central governments to move us from the SC to the OBC category."

"This will be an upward mobilisation, and a new category could be created between SC and OBC to accommodate the Devendrakula Vellalars," said Krishnasamy, adding that the "ultimate goal is to move to the general category."

"The aspiration is to ultimately move to the general category," he said.

It is pragmatic. A community being moved up the ladder from SC to OBC to the non-reserved category.

"We cannot take the entire community from being marginalised to an open category. After being in the OBC category for 10 to 15 years, the community will be better placed to move to the general category," Krishnasamy explained to me.

SC STIGMA PREVENTING OVERALL GROWTH OF COMMUNITY: DKV LEADERS

K Krishnasamy said the overall situation of the community hadn't improved despite the SC reservation for decades as the stigma attached has held them back. The SC tag, he said, has done more harm than good.

"Our people want to shed the Scheduled-Caste stigma. They might get some government jobs because of the reservation, but the SC stigma is a hindrance to our overall development. People can't do business because of that," he said.

According to the BJP's Ayyasamy, the DKV community is agrarian but remains at the bottom of the food value chain, with merchants and traders making the most profits. Education has been on its way up, but caste follows it into business, even in cities of Tamil Nadu.

"Even in Madurai, restaurants carrying other caste names do well, while people avoid a DKV-run eatery once they identify the owner's caste. Government contracting is dominated by communities from the OBCs, with hardly any licenced SC contractors, and the community's professionals mostly remain salaried rather than becoming employers," explained Ayyasamy.

He reasoned that while reservation is usually associated with the SCs, Tamil Nadu reserves 69% of seats in education and government jobs. "Nearly every community in the state falls under some reserved category, so reservation is no longer a benefit that sets SCs apart," said Ayyasamy.

Krishnasamy said DKV leaders made a formal representation in 2017 to the Prime Minister and the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister that the community be moved out of the SC category, and a committee was formed to look into that demand.

IS DEMAND TO DELIST DEVENDRAKULA VELLALAR FROM SC LIST FROM ENTIRE COMMUNITY?

Puthiya Tamilagam founder Krishnasamy said the demand that the DKV be moved out of the SC category is an overwhelming demand of the entire community, cutting across political affiliations of its members.

The BJP's Ayyasamy said the demand was from the grassroots and that is why the politicians were forced to endorse the demand.

In India, like in most of the world, socio is usually hyphenated with political. So, is there a political side-story to the demand of the DKVs? To find that out, I spoke to Ravindran Duraisamy, a Chennai-based social and political expert.

"A large section of the DKV community believe delisting will lead to their social elevation, and are in favour of that," Duraisamy confirmed.

However, he said, a small section of the DKV community were opposing the delisting demand. The split is along communal lines.

"Those opposing the delisting are mostly Christians and availing of reservation benefits. They believe that they are getting jobs because of [BR] Ambedkar," said Duraisamy.

The Christians among the DKVs have traditionally voted for the DMK, but are now switching their loyalty to C Joseph Vijay's TVK, he said.

In 2023, when DMK supremo MK Stalin was the chief minister, the Tamil Nadu Assembly passed a resolution, urging the Centre to extend the benefits accorded to Scheduled Castes also to those among the SCs who had embraced Christianity.

"They will be socially uplifted if reservation benefits are extended to them in education and employment. Denying them all the benefits merely because they have converted to another religion is not fair. This is our stand," Stalin said, according to a PTI report from 2023.

I asked Duraisamy if he had heard of any case similar to the delisting demand of the DKV's. He told me about Tamil Nadu's Nadar community, which had approached the Britishers in 1920 against the reservation. The Nadars were in the unreserved category till 1963, and since then are part of the OBC list.

The Chennai-based expert said the attempt by the Devendrakula Vellalars is unique in independent India, and no other community has voiced such a delisting demand.

"The DKVs might aspire to move to the general category, but it will take time. For now, they believe the community is capable of being delisted as SCs," said Duraisamy.

While the Scheduled Caste list has seen several additions, any removal from it on the demand of a community because of self-respect and for social elevation would be a first in India. The country has seen people trying to be tagged as backwards, for reservation benefits, but here is a community, the Devendrakula Vellalars, who are demanding to be delisted from the SC list and who do not resort to the stringent SC/ST Act. And now we know why.