Opinion Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: Caste questions for Rahul Gandhi

It is also natural, therefore, that caste will be an axis of political mobilisation. In part, it has to be, because its reality has to be recognised and taken into account, if it is to be overcome. There is also no doubt that Indian society needs extensive affirmative action to make our economy and society more inclusive, though how these should be designed can be debated. It is also natural that politicians ought to try and find ways of drawing attention to caste injustice, or shake us out of a syndrome that makes caste invisible. Sometimes contradictions have to be sharpened before progress can be made. It is an open question what rhetorical strategies and occasions work best to draw attention to this reality.

Even if one acknowledges the force of this context, there was something disconcerting about the way in which caste was invoked in Parliament by Rahul Gandhi in his speech on the budget, waving a photograph of the ministers and officers, who had prepared the budget, ritually cooking the halwa, and asking how many Dalits and OBCs were in the picture, as if suggesting it is the caste identity of those who made the budget that determines its validity. In the larger context of caste oppression, this might seem like a minor transgression. But it’s the kind of rhetorical performance that has itself become a diversion: Invoking caste in a way that is at best a cheap rhetorical trick. The way in which it is named represents as much a diversion from social justice under the guise of drawing attention to it.

It is true that as a matter of sociological fact in contemporary India, no one can claim to be “above caste” as it were — that claim can also disguise a privilege. The general argument that professions need to be more inclusive goes without saying. But what does it mean to create a public culture where every individual civil servant, every individual judge, every individual teacher, every individual journalist’s caste is called out no matter what the occasion, as Rahul Gandhi is almost on the verge of doing? One of the greatest corrosions of intellectual life we have seen in this country is an increasing culture in Indian universities where the prefix “savarna” before a professor or a book is meant to somehow exhaust a full consideration of what is being said. The collapse of reason and identity that is authorised in the name of social justice does far more damage to the cause of social justice than its proponents realise. In the name of social justice, this calling out of identity each time enacts, be it for different purposes, the same insidious logic of caste it is trying to displace. People can only be their caste, nothing else; the most salient feature about them is their caste, and their standing on any subject will be a function of their caste. I get the argument that we might want to signal that the budget serves the cause of the privileged. But that argument would be true irrespective of who made it, as if a bad budget might be legitimised if backward castes made it (as it often was, in many states).

But this is a diversionary tactic for other reasons. It cannot be sincerely meant. If the caste of sincere civil servants is suggestively used to impugn the budget, then what of the leader of the Opposition himself? If one wants to play the caste game this way, it will have to be said that there is something deeply insincere about a savarna calling out the caste of individual civil servants or ministers to signal his own virtue on this score. This kind of calling out of individuals’ caste uses a ploy that logically ought to undermine the standing of those who use it. That suspicion is reinforced by the rhetorical conflations in the invocations of caste. Again, there was the breezy conflation of Dalit and OBC histories, making the complexity of caste invisible even in the guise of naming it.

Yes, the project of building an inclusive society has to take caste into account, and sometimes it might be prudent politics. But it is also equally true that caste has become an overdetermined, lazy catch-all explanation for everything, and frankly, increasingly a cover for a range of bad decisions. If it is true that many privileged avoid confronting the realities of caste. It is equally true that many of those who invoke caste seek cures for the ill of social justice in a set of policies that do little to address the underlying causes of deprivation. Caste politics has become social justice on the cheap, and a diversion from the complex task we face.

Rahul Gandhi’s transformation as a leader has been quite remarkable. The confidence, empathy, dedication, ease with people, and the stand against hate that he exudes is a breath of fresh air with enormous transformative potential. But it would be a pity if this politics of hope once again lands up in the suffocating cul-de-sac of caste. A debilitating competition between smaller and smaller identities, a public culture where invocation of caste becomes a substitute for serious thinking, a constant impugning of the standing of individuals on account of their identity, will not serve the cause of social justice or healthy institutions. It may be safer than Hindutva. But in its own way, this politics also peddles a suffocating political future. The dismantling of caste will not take place by its cynical uses, the cheap use of identity is often a symptom of intellectual bankruptcy and perhaps even lack of honesty.