Caste in stone

It is said that a society is democratic when it matters more where people are going than where they are coming from. It is a society which c...

It is said that a society is democratic when it matters more where people are going than where they are coming from. It is a society which celebrates freedom, not inherited identity; ability, not family privilege; future possibility, not dead ancestry. But, most importantly, it is a society where we relate to each other through shared citizenship not blood kinship. In practice, of course, a society like India’s is still structured by past privilege and oppression. Caste is one marker of this oppression, and we sometimes need to recognise it in order to overcome it. But democracy aspires to ensure that identities inherited from the past no longer remain the axis by which society is divided, and some groups remain subordinate to others. But the proper way to ensure this is not to render politics a power struggle between castes, but to render caste irrelevant to the struggles of politics.

Given this broad ideal, the Congress has exposed its own retrograde thinking about politics by making caste an important attribute in the criteria of selection. It could be argued that caste is the de facto reality of Indian politics; that merely by mentioning the castes of candidates in its list, the Congress has not done anything extraordinary. But this response would miss the egregiousness of what the party has done. In any democracy there is a gap between rhetoric and reality. But the response to this should be to craft alternative strategies. Congress has simply capitulated to the most unthinking form of identity politics.

The fact that the caste of the candidate was the only attribute to be formally listed is also a potent expression of all that is wrong with Bihar’s politics. It suggests that Congress’s political imagination is still tied to inherited bloodlines. It has no clues about how to craft a different and alternative future. No wonder, then, it carries little appeal and opts for caste as a default option. It is about time that political parties stopped underestimating the intelligence of their voters and begin to speak the language of citizenship — not caste.