Opinion: Is caste dead? No

Caste today fights for its ‘rights’ like a trade union. The lifeline of the Ambedkarite and Mandal parties is caste support

By Arun Sinha

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat told Indians recently, “Let’s bury caste.” Do we not need to ask him, “Is caste dead? When did it happen?”

Because caste was expected to die with Shankaracharya proclaiming in the eighth century that in everyone the same divinity exists and it is the ignorance of this reality that is the cause of all evils perpetrated by one being against another. It survived. It was expected to wither away with the Bhakti saints singing songs of oneness of human beings with God between the 13th and 16th centuries. It thrived.

It was expected to pass with the heroic line of social reformers from Rammohan Roy to Bhimrao Ambedkar combating it with zeal and courage between the 19th and 20th centuries. It got away with very minor bruises. It was expected to perish with the Constitution declaring equality as a cardinal principle and any discrimination on the basis of caste illegal. It escaped.

Guffawing Monster

How can we bury caste when it stands before us like a towering, guffawing monster? We have to kill it first before we can carry it to the grave. And we have to say it with regret that no leader or organisation of our times, including Bhagwat and his RSS, has honestly tried to pierce caste right into its chest. On the contrary, they have all poured more nectar into its cup.

Let us begin with Gandhi. He was revolutionary on several political and social fronts but ultra-orthodox on Varnashrama. He believed that the fourfold division of Hindu society (Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishya and Shudra) was an ideal social order. Men who followed their fathers’ professions were content with what they had. There was no room for greed, competition and jealousy in this order. Varnashrama was a model, he said, which other nations of the world could follow to their benefit!

Of course, Gandhi wanted all castes to be treated as equal and with respect. While he justified the heredity of occupations, he rejected any hierarchy of them. Caste inequalities and untouchability in his view were ‘perversions’ of Varnashrama and needed to be eliminated to re-establish the ideal order. In short, Gandhi did not want the abolition but the reform of the caste system.

Nehru ideologically wanted caste to go but as prime minister made compromises to allow reservation on a caste basis. The liberal intelligentsia wanted him to give reservation based on economic criteria but he remained ambivalent. Lohia made it worse for him with his ‘Sainkre Saath’ campaign – “Give sixty per cent share to the backward classes in all sectors” – a campaign which was to culminate in Mandal politics and proliferation of what sociologist GS Ghurye labelled as ‘caste patriotism’.

Like Trade Union

Caste today fights for its ‘rights’ like a trade union. It seems well-nigh impossible now to eradicate caste. The lifeline of the Ambedkarite and Mandal parties is caste support. They are dead against any idea of discontinuation of reservation on a caste basis. Mohan Bhagwat had had an awful experience in this regard. A few weeks before the elections to the Bihar Assembly in 2015, he said it was time for reservation to go. That caused a phenomenal surge in the anti-BJP vote.

The trouble with Bhagwat and the RSS is that when they call for the end of casteism they essentially address it to the lower castes. They do not address it to the upper castes. That is because they see the lower castes setting up antagonistic fronts against the upper castes. They see it as the Hindu family breaking up. They want the Hindu family to reunite.

When Bhagwat talks of burying caste what he means is that the Dalits and backward classes should ‘return’ to the Hindu family. The aim of the RSS is not to destroy the inegalitarian Hindu social order and reconstruct it as an egalitarian order but to reform the Hindu society. Like Gandhi, it views social segregation and untouchability as ‘perversions’. Much like Gandhi, it aims to eliminate those perversions. But unlike Gandhi who wanted to do it to establish human equality, the RSS wants to do it to establish Hindu brotherhood to fortify against religious conversions by Islamic and Christian missionaries.

Away from media attention, the RSS has been conducting a programme for decades to ‘assimilate’ Dalits into ‘Hindu family’. Its programme started before Independence as a reaction to radical mobilisation of Dalits by Ambedkar. Its local units worked in several places to facilitate Dalits’ entry into Hindu temples. Savarkar made a temple (Patit Pavan Mandir) in Ratnagiri in 1931 where Dalits could worship along with others. The RSS has also been promoting interdining with Dalits.

Bhagwat needs to ask himself: have these RSS programmes going on for a hundred years weakened caste in any way, leave aside killing it? And if they have not, why?

Four Reasons

We can try and help Bhagwat with our assessment. They have not for four reasons. One, the RSS never attacked the root of the caste system. Its root lies in the divine sanction given to it in certain Hindu texts considered sacred. The RSS never rejected it.

Two, for reasons of divine sanction, only Brahmans can be priests. Ambedkar wanted priesthood to be a service, like the civil service, to join which people from all castes could compete. Brahman priesthood was at the core of the caste system, Ambedkar said: if you democratised priesthood, the core will melt and the caste system would collapse. The RSS has never supported the idea.

Three, the RSS has never taken off its coloured religious glasses to look at why the lower castes have been moving away from the ‘Hindu family’. The reason is the oppression, cruelties, discrimination, violence and rape they are routinely subjected to by the upper castes. The upper castes have lorded over the lives of the Dalits and backward classes for ages. Had they treated them like brothers, there would never have been any casteism in the first place.

Four, the ‘casteism’ of the Ambedkarite and Mandal parties is a reaction to the casteism of the upper castes. Unless the RSS fights the upper castes with all its organisational might to end their oppression and violence against the lower castes, its call for the end of caste will be seen as hypocritical, as a camouflaged attempt on behalf of the upper castes to bamboozle the rebellious lower castes and blunt their political sword.