Author – Kalyani

The encounter of gangster Vikas Dubey has thrown open many questions and debates. The mainstream media has discussed the many facets of the encounter including the authenticity of encounter, the sequence of events, and the ‘tragic’ life-history of Vikash Dubey. Many others have discussed even gone onto to re-creating crime scene to add an extra tinge to the news events. Among many cacophonies, there have been some relevant debates that too have emerged including issues of police reforms, criminalization of politics, and politicization of crime.

However, the many discussions that have happened on the Vikas Dubey episode, the caste question behind the dark world of gangster, remains silently hushed-up. As an upper-caste hoodlum in the world of crime, privileges become handy. It allows the upper-caste to have better bargaining power in political as well as in the social sphere.

This is evident from the criminal history of the gangster’s life that has seen them not only influencing the electoral process but also contesting elections. Surely, the episode of crime and gangster does not end with Vikas Dubey. A re-look of top criminals and their political influence has shown the well-enmeshed structure of crime along with caste identities. Some of the top criminals like Brijesh Singh, Anand Mohan Singh, Munna Shukla have got easy political bargaining rather than police hardship.

The sequence of events of Vikas Dubey’s encounter shows how well Brahmin privilege functions. The killing of the gangster was followed by #VikasDubeyDiary that had discussions like ‘Brahma-Hatya’ (killing of Brahmin), Brahman-Shiromani etc. Somewhere these over-flooded discussions on twitter had overshadowed the criminal with more than sixty cases, to an upper-caste Brahmin who is too naïve to be accounted for from crime. This benign attitude to upper-caste crime has a scriptural sanction of Manusmriti that says that killing a Brahmin is most heinous of all crimes.

Source: https://theprint.in/opinion/pov/brahmin-pride-pain-flood-facebook-vikas-dubey-encounter-killing/458417/ access date 12th July 2020.

Source – Twitter

In many of the biopic of Vikas Dubey that was shown or discussed in national media, he was discussed more as a culprit of the state’s systemic failure. In one of the editorials, he was even discussed as the Frankenstein, which somewhere allows him to share the burden of his crime with institutional failure of State. This is very unlikely to happen if the criminal is a Dalit-Bahujan. The ‘privilege’ that shrouds an upper-caste is not just in tangible terms of political perks, but it also works subtly were his crimes get absolved merely by becoming a Brahmin. No caste can justify the crime.

The problem with Vikas Dubey’s encounter should be more than just investigative journalism of whether the encounter was fake or not. The ways in which the entire sequence of events had unfolded, it reflected upon how society treats the gangster with the caste privilege. Despite his heinous crimes nowhere he gets tagged as a terrorist or anti-national. The branding of identity is much more than mere acts of crime, it is about how the identity fits within the imagination of the nation. Unfortunately, these over-discussed tags are directed towards Dalit-Bahujan much more conveniently than any other. This approach of upper-caste mainstream media reflects how Dalit-Bahujan is imagined within a nation.

It is important to understand that crime is a sociological fact and hence social facts become important in understanding crime per se. David Matza (1969) in his discussion of delinquency had talked about the process of empathizing with deviant and appreciating the deviant often dilutes the crime per se. The source of empathy for upper-caste criminals like Vikas Dubey comes from his caste location. The solidarity for his death emanates from the fact that since Brahmins are born from God’s head, the crime committed by them is only be a fatal accident. The Brahmin ‘privilege’ has all the potential to conveniently shift the blame to state and its institutions without becoming ‘terrorist’ or ‘anti-national’.

Even within popular culture, the web series like Rangbaaz has the shown life of a Brahmin gangster Shiv Prakash Shukla as a victim of a broken society. The second season of Rangbaaz Phirse comes up with a hashtag #NotBornACriminal. The popular imagination crime fails to see a criminal as a criminal until he is shrouded in the Brahmin ‘privilege’. It is an irony that the same popular imagination doesn’t hesitate in openly showing rape scenes of Dalit victim Phoolan Devi, in her biopic Bandit Queen. The screening of Dalit-Bahujan identity lacks this sense of ‘privilege’ and hence the very possibility of empathizing with them gets completely lost.

The dark world of gangsters and their crime is heinous, irrespective of what their identity is. However, unfortunately, the vendetta for crime is stratified across caste lines. There is a need to discuss what makes a crime empathetic while the other crime as not even worth getting discussed. Surely, caste ‘privileges’ have segregated crimes differently and the empathy in popular-culture or in mainstream media fails to recognize it.

Kalyani is a Ph.D. scholar at Center for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi India. She tweets at @FiercelyBahujan.