Caste your vote

The Left alone proceeds without abject dependence on either casteism or communalism in the conduct of its politics. Why? The simple answer is that the Left did not give much credence to Ram Manohar Lohia’s thesis that classstruggle by itself was not enough because in India class and caste were coterminus. The Left maintained that sharpening of caste differences would play into the hands of “vested interests”. Class struggle would blur these differences.

The momentum of the national movement for freedom had placed power securely in the hands of the Congress party. Representing all shades of political opinions united behind as programme for freedom, the Congress felt no urgent need to work out any long-term strategy towards the backward castes or the minorities. They were the party’s assured vote banks. There was, in other words, no Congress strategy to tackle the issue of caste except to maintain the status quo.

This approach is manifest even in the writings of Jawaharlal Nehru. The Dalit writer A.K. Biswas has in a recent article quoted a passage from Discovery of India in which Nehru writes the following about the caste system:

“The breaking up of a huge and long-standing social organisation may well lead to acomplete disruption of social life, resulting in absence of cohesion, mass suffering and the development of a vast scale of abnormalities in individual behaviour, unless some other social structure more suited to the times and to the genius of the people, takes its place …. We cannot just create a vacuum or else the vacuum may fill itself up in a way that we may deplore. In the constructive schemes that we may make, we have to pay attention to the human material we have to deal with, to the background of its thought and urges and to the environment in which we have to function. To ignore all this and to fashion some idealistic scheme in the air, or merely to think in terms of imitating what others have done elsewhere, would be folly.”

Biswas quotes Nehru with the singular purpose of discrediting him as a casteist. The fact of the matter is that there is a considerable amount of truth in what Nehru says. Nowhere has he said that the caste system was perfect. It is not. But, alas, it is the only way wehave organised society for thousands of years. The structural violence inherent in the system is its bane. What is the way out? The politics of reservations has the potential of transferring power from the top of the caste pyramid to the intermediate and lower rungs. This poses some questions. Will those who acquire power through the system of reservations have the skills to run the modern state? And, will this redistribution of power within the caste framework eventually result in the system fading out? Should that happen as M.N. Srinivas asks, what will be the future of Hinduism without caste?

These are questions of fundamental importance to each one of us, irrespective of religion. What we are talking about is the central column of the structure in which all of us reside.

It would be extremely short-sighted for Muslims to develop a vested interest in casteism. If communalism is an evil, so is casteism. The one feeds on the other. The communal formation seeks Hindu consolidation by openly (or byinnuendo) projecting the minorities as the “others”. Casteist formations seek to enlist the minorities electorally in order to alter the power equations in their favour within the caste framework. The minorities are being used either way. They will navigate intelligently only if they grasp this essential truth.

The dilemma for a Muslim is a real one. People I have grown up with through school, college and my working life have, at least in their minds, defected in large numbers to the BJP, not because they have become “communalised” but because the party offers them a sense of belonging at a time when backward caste politics threatens to topple them from their positions. People with whom I have had no social experience are suddenly projecting themselves as my political protectors.

The very fact that I am making this observation opens me to the charge of being “elitist” and “upper caste”. The caste system, let it not be forgotten, affects the Hindus as well as the Muslims. But all discussionseventually lead us to a dead end as happened in the Lok Sabha when the Women’s Bill was sought to be introduced. The only reassuring element in the whole picture, let me repeat, was the behaviour of the Left parties.

Is open and frank discussion on caste, its origins and its future, possible? Would it help? Or, am I overstepping?