http://kafila.org/2010/09/27/the-many-lives-of-caste-in-modern-india/The Many Lives of Caste in Modern India
Posted by: Aditya Nigam | September 27, 2010
[Following my previous post, 'We are Proud Hindus', there has been an
expected barrage of comments - all along very predictable lines. Most
of them, characteristically, turn every critique of reprehensible
caste practices of Hindu society into an expression of 'casteism' and
immediately displace the criticism to their favourite enemy, Islam.
For the benefit of readers who might be interested in a more reasoned
debate, I post here an essay, which was written some years ago and a
version of which published in South Asian Journal. This is just by
way of making my own position clear. - AN ]
Politics in contemporary India is marked by the 'resurgence' of 'caste
politics'. In a sense, this is true. The past two decades have seen a
dramatic collapse of the old political formations and parties, which
had dominated the politics of the Nehruvian era.[1] Even the movements
of that period, right up to the mid-1970s, were largely movements on
economic issues and questions of corruption, black-marketing, hoarding
and food shortages. Through the decade of the 1980s, there was a
gradual erosion of the Nehruvian secular-nationalist imagination, and
one of the factors responsible for it was the 're-emergence' of caste
in public discourse.
The watershed in this respect of course, was the famous 'Mandal
Commission' agitation – which has become something of a metaphor in
contemporary Indian politics. The Commission, which was instituted in
1978, during the Janata Party government, under the stewardship of
B.P. Mandal, a socialist leader from a 'backward caste', was given the
task of looking into the question of 'backwardness' of certain castes
and suggest remedies for its redressal. For about a decade after it
submitted its recommendations in 1980, it lay in cold storage after
the Congress under the leadership of Mrs Indira Gandhi (subsequently
taken charge of by her son Rajiv) returned to power. It was
implemented under extremely contentious circumstances in 1990 under
the Prime Ministership of V.P. Singh. As is well-known, its main
recommendations included 27 percent reservations in public employment
for these castes (known in India as the 'Other Backward Classes' or
OBCs).
As soon as the government announced its decision to implement the
Commission's recommendations, all hell broke loose. There were
widespread violent agitations all over North India with sons and
daughters of 'respectable families' taking to the streets. It was an
unprecedented sight to see these young people, generally cynical about
all political activity taking to road blockades, demonstrations,
picketing and such other activities. Many of them even committed
self-immolation. Equally interesting was the sight of the usually
cynical media backing the agitators to the hilt. New terms like
'mandalisation of politics' entered public political discourse. The
tone and tenor of the public debate in the media was illuminating for
a whole generation of people who had been brought up in modern secular
values of the Nehruvian era. This was especially so because they
seemed to suggest, almost one-sidedly, that caste was something that
we had already left behind and it was the vileness of VP Singh, who
wanted to cash in on such retrograde sentiments, for purely pragmatic
electoral purposes.
It needs to be borne in mind that this large group of OBCs, who
constituted close to 60 percent of the population, had a negligible
presence of about 4 percent in government employment, when these
recommendations were implemented. Also worth bearing in mind is the
fact that even this small representation in employment was restricted
to the lower rungs of government jobs. Even today, almost two decades
after the implementation of the Mandal Commission (starting 8
September 1993), a mere 6.87 percent jobs are filled by OBCs. Take for
example, the following information received through an RTI
application:
"Nearly 17 years after the implementation of 27% reservation for OBCs
in central government jobs on the basis of the Mandal Commission
recommendations, a mere 6.87% of those employed in various union
departments in Groups A, B, C and D services belong to the group.
Thus a significant 20% posts across categories and departments
reserved for OBCs remain unfilled raising doubts on the effective
implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations. Documents
obtained under the Right To Information Act (RTI Act) by Chennai-based
biomedical engineering and activist, E Muralidharan, reveal that just
1,93,228 OBC employees including 2,430 sweepers were employed in
different central government departments as on January 1, 2008."
(Times of India, August 31, 2010)
In other words, the overwhelming majority of public services were
monopolised by the small crust of upper castes. In one estimation made
by sociologist Satish Deshpande, about 20 percent of the population
controlled about 95 percent of all jobs. Deshpande has also recently
calculated the poverty-caste relationship on the basis of the National
Sample Survey Organisation consumption data which confirm the strong
relationship between low-caste status and poverty.[2] However, what is
relevant here is not merely the incidence of poverty among different
'backward' caste groups but more importantly, the fact that even among
the relatively better-off and educated sections of Dalits and OBCs,
access to public employment, especially at the higher levels is
severely restricted. In other words, as Ram Naresh Kushwaha, an OBC
parliamentarian had put it in a parliament debate in 1978, the upper
castes have always had informal reservations operating for them in
employment; jobs were reserved for them. Manusmriti itself, he had
claimed, was nothing other than a reservation of certain jobs for only
a certain category of people.[3]
What was interesting about the agitation and the highly charged public
debate that followed, was that it was entirely conducted, from the
side of the opponents of the Mandal Commission, in the most immaculate
secular and modern language of 'merit' and 'efficiency'. The question
was posed as one of dilution, if not the elimination, of merit at the
cost of getting in 'unworthy' and 'undeserving' people simply because
they happened to belong to certain castes. "Would you like to be
operated upon by a doctor who had became one through reservations?"
"Would you like to fly by an aircraft that was piloted by a
reservation pilot?" Such were the kinds of questions that were asked
by the anti-Mandalites in these discussions. Not once was the question
of upper-caste and brahminical privilege ever articulated as a
question of caste-privilege. Even more interesting was the fact that
the more sophisticated among the anti-Mandalites were prepared to
accept that there was a question of privilege involved here but that
should be addressed in terms of 'class': that 'economic' rather than
caste criteria should be made the basis of reservations. The question
was really one of poverty, they argued, rather than that of caste.
Now, this is an argument that actually erupted in public discourse in
the 1990s but has a fairly long and hallowed history. As evidence
shows, it was an argument that had been rehearsed over the decades by
the modernist upper caste leadership. Right from the days of the Kaka
Kalelkar Commission, set up in the mid-1950s for the purpose of
addressing the same questions that were later taken up by the Mandal
Commission, to parliamentary debates and more localised public
discussions, this was invariably the argument deployed by the
opponents of positive discrimination. As Christohpe Jaffrelot shows,
many members of the Kaka Kalelkar commission dissented from the
commission's recommendations and what is more, the Gandhian Kaka
Kalelkar himself started developing serious doubts even as he
submitted his report. Nehru, the immaculate modernist was the one who
finally gave the stamp of legitimacy to this position thus: "If we go
in for reservations on communal and caste basis, we swamp the bright
and able people and remain second-rate or third-rate".[4] On this one
question, then the Nehruvian elite and the Hindu Right were always in
complete agreement.
Was Nehru a casteist then? Were all those who opposed the Mandal
commission in the 1990s, who included respected scholars of the
country, also casteist? This is a question that is being asked today
by the Dalitbahujans.[5] My answer to this question would be that they
were not casteists – at least a large section of them were not. They
were opposing the 'bringing in' of caste into public discourse on very
modernist and secular grounds. They sincerely believed that talking in
terms of caste would be a regression into the past that they were so
desperately seeking to annihilate. The point that needs to be stressed
here is that this time round, caste was the banner of those who had
been oppressed by it. The recalcitrance of caste is not a mere
repetition of the older story. For in that story, it was the upper
castes that aloft held the banner of caste in order to put people 'in
their place'. Now things had decisively changed; the upper castes were
in constant and vehement denial. Somewhere here, in this denial lies
hidden the story of Indian modernity. In what follows, I will sketch
what I believe are the broad outlines of that story and underline some
of the complexities of present-day caste politics.
Let me go back to where I began this essay. Is there really a
'resurgence' of caste? Is it the case that the question of caste has
'suddenly' become important, implying thereby that till now such was
not the case? Is the general perception that was aired in the media
during the Mandal Commission controversy, that caste was simply
resurrected by VP Singh, a correct perception? The answer is both
'yes' and 'no'. Yes, because there was a sense in which caste had been
banished from public discourse and to that extent, its reappearance is
a new phenomenon. No, because this unpseakability of caste in public
discourse was limited to civil society, that is to the domain of the
secular modern institutions of society. And it was precisely this
unspeakability that made it impossible to challenge the continuing
domination of upper castes over all institutions and resources – for
it could not have been challenged in any other language.
Secular-modern language provided no way of posing this challenge –
just as it provided no vocabulary for challenging race-based
discrimination in the West.
Equally importantly, it had not disappeared from society at large. In
another realm, away from the watchful gaze of the modern elite, in the
domain of what Partha Chatterjee calls political society, caste was a
central category that framed the common ways of seeing and being in
the world. The secret story of our modernity is of course, lodged in
the first realm, that of civil society, for it is here that we see the
mutated upper caste modern Indian Self, in perpetual denial of caste
(and to some extent, religion) in all his/her splendour. There is no
denying that this modern Self is really and genuinely modern; it wants
to excise that shameful thing called caste from its memory. The
upper-caste-turned-modern Self does not ever want to be reminded of
this one aspect of his/her inheritance. It can deal with religion, for
that is something that 'we all have' – whether we are from the West or
from the East. But caste is a blot that has affected the psyche of the
mutated modern in ways that can be best expressed in Freudian terms:
Caste is the suppressed/ repressed, the 'unconscious' as it were, of
the modern moral Self (the Superego?). Yet, caste is the hidden
principle that gives it the access to all kinds of modern privileges
precisely because it functions, as Deshpande suggests, as
cultural/symbolic capital.
To the oppressed castes, especially the lowest among them, that is the
Dalits, this repression of caste appears as a conspiracy of the
brahminical castes to deprive them of their voice. It appears to them
to displace what is their bitter lived experience to another domain –
that of class, for instance. The story that the Dalit wants to narrate
can only be told with reference to the history of caste oppression. It
is there that the secret of their exclusion and cultural mutilation
lies. One of the critical elements of the recalcitrance of caste in
contemporary Indian politics is therefore, the search for a past, a
cultural legacy, a history and a sense of Self. The oppressive
structure of caste functioned, in relation to the Dalits in
particular, through their almost complete exclusion from 'society'
such as it was. Here I will not go into stories of daily humiliation
and degradation that was and has been part of Dalit life, as these are
by now fairly well articulated, documented and discussed. I will
merely briefly refer to one aspect of their exclusion: their exclusion
from any kind of access to learning – of whatever kind, including
elementary skills of reading and writing. The implications of this
forced exclusion are far greater than might appear at first glance.
For these took away from them any possibility of registering their own
history, creating their myths and literature – in other words,
deprived them of any sense of their own past. It was therefore, only
with the arrival of colonialism and the opening up of public spaces
and institutions to the Dalits, if in a limited fashion (because of
upper caste opposition) that these became accessible to them. It is
therefore, only in the early twentieth century, strictly speaking,
that the Dalits really found their voice – in the sense of being able
to record their experience of oppression and talk about it publicly.
And it was at this precise moment that the mutated upper caste modern
began to legislate a certain modern universalist language, decrying
all attempts to talk of caste oppression as 'casteism', a sign of
'backward consciousness'.
There is therefore a peculiar ambivalence that marks Dalit politics
and discourse today. On the one hand, it invests tremendous faith in
modernity because it is really with its onset that possibilities of
Dalit emancipation opened up in significant ways; on the other, it
exhibits a strong aversion to the dominant, secular-nationalist
discourse of modernity in India that it sees as irrevocably 'upper
caste' and the root of the re-institution of upper caste power over
modern institutions.
This ambivalence is visible not only in the field of cultural
politics, as it were, but equally in the field of politics as such. In
this field, the dynamic is somewhat different but what makes it
possible for the Dalit political formations like the BSP, to chart out
a course that radically questions the common sense of the secular
modern, is its deep distrust of the old nationalist and secular elite.
A case in point is the relationship of BSP and much of the Dalit
intelligentsia, with the emerging secular political formations,
especially in North India. It is well-known that here, in the state of
Uttar Pradesh, the Bahujan Samaj Party, has repeatedly gone into an
alliance with the main party of the Hindu Right, the Bharatiya Janata
Party. It has formed governments along with the BJP, not only in 1993
and 1997 but also in 2002, in the year of the Gujarat massacres of the
Muslims. In this period, when the BJP and its partner organisations of
the Sangh family have bared their fascist fangs, leaving nobody in any
doubt about their intentions, the BSP entered into an alliance and
formed a government with the BJP in UP, and its top leaders even
campaigned for it in Gujarat during the subsequent elections.
There are two levels of problems involved here. First, the actual
relations between different caste groups and second, the logic of
electoral politics. On the face of it, it only seems logical that in
order to break upper caste hegemony there should be a larger alliance
of the OBCs and Dalits. This had seemed to be a promising line of
action to many leaders of the late nineteenth early twentieth century
like Jyotiba Phule of Maharashtra and Periyar EVR Ramasamy Naicker of
what is today Tamil Nadu. Hence they had advocated the idea of a
'Nonbrahmin' unity (Periyar) or a unity of the Shudraatishudras
(Phule) in order to challenge the hegemony of the brahminical elite.
And up to a point this did have an impact in the first half of the
twentieth century, insofar as brahminical stranglehold over society in
these two regions was seriously challenged. Even Kanshi Ram, the chief
architect of the present Dalit upsurge in North India, believed that
his party should not simply be a Dalit party but a party of 'bahujans'
(literally, majority). Hence the name, Bahujan Samaj Party. The
bahujan samaj, in Kanshi Ram's rendering was to be forged through a
broad alliance of the Dalits, the backwards and the minorities –
particularly the Muslims. Kanshi Ram also saw clearly that the Dalits
alone, comprising no more than about 20 percent of the electorate in
any constituency, could not possibly challenge upper caste dominance.
Hence the aggressive slogan of the period of the rise of the BSP:
Tilak, tarazu aur talwar/ inko maro joote chaar (thrash the Brahmin,
the Bania and the Rajput with shoes).
The problem however, began after the first alliance of the BSP and the
Samajwadi Party led by Mulayam Singh Yadav, representing the backward
castes formed its government in UP in 1993. Within a short time it
became apparent that as soon as the political pact that was forged
between the parties moved toward the countryside, sharp conflicts
between the two groups began playing themselves out. It was during the
panchayat elections that the conflicts became really serious and many
Dalit leaders and intellectuals realised that much of their present
conflict in the villages was with the dominant backward castes who had
consolidated their hold following the post-independence land reforms.
In many states, it was these castes, comprising the erstwhile tenants,
now become landowners, who were their main oppressors. And they were
not willing to change their attitude towards Dalits in everyday
matters, even in the face of the political alliance at the state
level. In many areas it was they who had been preventing the Dalits
even from casting their votes.
More importantly, this was the period of the sharp rise of the Hindu
Right. Very soon, this threat of the Sangh combine was to become the
most important reference point for all future electoral-political
alliances. The parties of the OBCs, represented by Mulayam Singh and
Laloo Yadav in the two most important northern states of UP and Bihar,
positioned themselves firmly against the BJP and the Sangh combine. It
is worth remembering that in the period of the build-up to the
demolition of the Babri Masjid, it was these two leaders who had
displayed the most determined opposition to the BJP. Mulayam Singh in
fact used the entire force of the state machinery, during his chief
ministerhsip, to prevent the kar sevaks from demolishing the structure
of the masjid in November 1990. It was during this same period when LK
Advani's notorious Rath Yatra entered Bihar, en route to Ayodhya, that
Laloo Yadav displayed exemplary courage in arresting Advani, leading
to the eventual downfall of the VP Singh government of which Laloo was
a part. It was in this context, that the anti-communal, secular front
came into existence, and the OBC parties naturally acquired a crucial
position within it, given their stance. This is where the problems
began, as far as the BSP and the newly assertive Dalits were
concerned. To throw their lot with the secular front unconditionally
was to tie their own hands and throw themselves to the wolves. For the
conflict with the OBCs in the countryside was now playing itself out
in its most aggressive form.
This is where the deep distrust of the common sense of the
secular-nationalist, so ingrained in Dalit politics comes into play.
For, it did not really have a moment's hesitation in joining forces
with the BJP in forming a government and in a sense, it was to open
the floodgates for later realignments where parties like the Telegu
Desam Party and the AIADMK and DMK were to enter into alliances with
the BJP, in order to form the government at the Centre. Not only did
it form governments with the BJP, the BSP in its last round of
power-sharing even bent over backwards to help the BJP leaders in the
Babri Masjid demolition case. The point here is not simply that the
BSP went into a power-sharing alliance with the BJP, for there are
enough precedents of many other parties and groups doing the same in
different ways, in different times. Even the Left is not entirely free
of that taint. The point here is that it entered into this alliance
with a clear argument against the dichotomised mode of politics where
the 'communalism versus secularism' conflict was presented by the
secular front as simple common sense, as if it subsumed all other
conflicts and exhausted all other problems. This manner of privileging
the 'secular versus communal' conflict in a manner of speaking,
presented the secular front as a non-negotiable: you had to enter the
front only on the terms already set by it. There was no possibility of
any negotiation here, especially with regard to the backward caste
parties. It is here that despite its history of attempting to build an
anti-upper-caste-Hindu alliance, and despite the fact that it sees its
project as irreconcilable with the Hindutva project, the BSP displayed
its refusal to take any proposition as given and non-negotiable. The
sole concern that guided it was whether its move would help its own
project of Dalit liberation.
In this story of the recalcitrance of caste in contemporary India, one
thing is clear: The script of modernity in India has to be and is
being rapidly re-written. The upper caste secular claim to the modern
is being revealed, every day, every hour, as a mode of preserving
secular privileges and power that are inherited from an already
existing non-secular power.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] The term 'Nehruvian era' is being used here to refer to an era
that actually extends far beyond the person of Jawaharlal Nehru
himself – almost upto the beginning of the 1980s, when the terms of
political discourse and practice were still articulated within a
secular-nationalist framework that was put in place by the Nehruvian
leadership.
[2] For further details, see Satish Deshpande (2002), Contemporary
India: A Sociological View, Penguin India.
[3] See Lok Sabha Debates, Sixth Series, Vol. XXII, No. I, Lok Sabha
Secretariat, Feb. 23, 1978, Pp. 340-3
[4] Christophe Jaffrelot (2003) India's Silent Revolution: The Rise of
the low Castes in North Indian Politics, Permanent Black, Delhi. See
especially the discussion on pages 222-228.
[5] The term 'Dalitbahujan' is a recent coinage that refers to the
broad spectrum of lower caste groups ranging from the untouchable
castes, that is Dalits, to the other lower castes generally referred
to as Shudras in the language of the chaturvarna system.
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