At the Jaystambh, not many slept on the night of December 31. (Express photo by Nirmal Harindran)They came from across the country, boys from a hip-hop crew wearing low-slung jeans and their hair in dramatic cuts, colours and braids; first-timer senior citizens camping around a bonfire; a barefoot Bhante, or Buddhist monk, who walked 48 days to get here; flag-waving activists.
In the minutes leading up to midnight at the Jaystambh memorialising the battle of Bhima Koregaon, it was a sombre Dalit chant, not sloganeering, that stirred the gathering. On the 201st anniversary to mark the victory of a British regiment including Mahar soldiers over a Peshwa army, the nearly 5,000 people who spent the night of December 31 around the memorial spoke of their search for solutions to caste stigma that see beyond aggression.
On January 1, 2019, a year after one person was killed and several injured in clashes and rioting, over three lakh people visited the memorial under a heavy security cover. Laxmi Wamanrao Kamble, 68, of Hingoli district was among the 300 who joined Bhante Gyan Jyoti from the Ramdegi Buddhist temple in Chandrapur on a 48-day padyatra to Bhima Koregaon. She has never been here before. “I feel pure joy to be here,” said the grandmother who is on a journey to various Ambedkarite sites. “Last year's violence was an exception — the message to us here is idealism. There's no heaven or hell, we just have to make our own heaven here,”…
