Caste Wise Census

It has become difficult to engage in an honest and objective discourse on policies overladen with the caste question if you happen to belong to the upper caste, lest you lose the trust of the OBC whose social and economic emancipation has been the passion of your life.

That is the reason why so many committed social workers of the upper caste have opted to join casteist parties; they would otherwise not have joined, because of their desire to express solidarity with their so-called lower caste brethren.

The division between upper and lower castes had, in my generation, started to disappear from the minds of the middle and upper classes as much as from the lower castes. Niether of them believed in or accepted a relationship of superiority and subordination. Hardly anybody knew the caste of his friends nor felt the need to know it unless he wore a caste surname. A tendency grew to borrow surnames from higher castes to hide your own your caste identity. A stranger would not decipher somebody’s caste from his name. Progress in banishing the caste system or making it irrelevant had started at least in urban India. In that sense the caste system has long been dead. It is only its memory and its corpse over which the caste battle has been fought in urban India. Its vestiges remained in rural India which the caste-based parties and the Left movement, social reform and Naxalites have helped to cure along with other progressive measures.

The upper castes were totally subservient to power whoever held it. I have seen no difference in the way they treated Chief Ministers Bhola Paswan Shastri, or Abdul Ghafoor or Daroga Prasad Rai from different castes or creed (SC/minority/or OBC) in Bihar except for an outstanding personal quality. On the same criterion neither Jagannath Mishra nor K.B. Sahay, both from the upper caste, were the most popular or respected.

On the contrary Karpoori Thakur rose to be one of the most respected leaders and CM in Bihar beating his contestant, Satyendra Narayan Sinha, with the help of upper-caste votes on the strength of his high integrity and his personal constituency of admirers from every caste and total identification with the poor generally from the SC or OBC, to the latter of which he belonged, He evolved a formula of reservation of government jobs which became a toast of the nation, allowing a few percentage points to women, and the poorer sections of the upper caste. It fits with the Hindu tradition of never to ask a sadhu’s or a raja’s caste nor questioning the right to rule of any caste that captured power. The Nand dynasty in Magadh was from the barber caste and the Maurayans founder had a shudra mother.

Caste bias had been a reality in medieval India and in the absence of any other means of power projection, as subjects of Muslim rulers, acquired a grotesquely rigid form of power projection in the limited rural context though the panchayat system gave the weaker sections some relief from total oppression by upholding customary laws. But with the advent of a resurgent India starting with the social reformers of the 19th and 20th centuries, which reached its highest point in Mahatma Gandhi’s continuous involvement with social reform, specially the lowest caste whom he gave the respectable name of Harijans and a new twist to the idea of caste as of equals following different but still useful occupations, none of whom could be demeaned and were equally entitled to the highest office that freedom will bring. The national psyche had already started to change towards rejecting caste inequity, the mildest being the Arya Samaj’s rejection of caste and acceptance only of the varna system, but a preponderantly progressive young opinion from the Left movement or Gandhians or others after receiving a modicum of education rejected the caste system altogether as violative of the fundamental equality and freedom of all human beings which had seized the world.

If India has evolved an ideology not only enshrined in her Constitution but put in practice over centuries, it is the idea of the unity and kinship of all human beings. It is very much there in the Vedas, again preached by Buddha and his brilliant disciple, Emperor Asoka of Magadh, through emissaries and erecting magnificent Asoka pillars all over Asia expounding the right and duty to respect all faiths, all life and non-violence.

The Hindu social structure did not always bear out these high ideals, to India’s great sorrow, and the ridicule of the colonial rulers who should have dug deeper and known better. But worst of all, it has heaped misery and humiliation on some of India’s sons and daughters for no crime of theirs. But through its long and tortuous history repeated attempts have been made to fight the grave injustice of these social evils. The most lasting was of Lord Buddha which banished caste from most of Bihar and eastern UP for nearly a thousand years before it was converted back to the Sanatan dharm by the brilliant doctrinal discourses of Adi Shankarcharya, the destruction of Buddhist monasteries by King Sasank of Bengal and the vandalisation and destruction of the great and famous centre of learning the Nalanda University, with an international caste of students and faculty, by the Afghan marauder, Bakhtiar Khilji. The makeover was helped by the growing decadence and corruption in the Buddhist monasteries.

The call for social reform was given again by the famous poet saints of the medieval period, Tulsi Das, who rewrote the Ramayan in colloquial dialect, Sur Das and Kabir with his biting sarcasm, Muslims like Rahim Khakhana and Raskhan who allegorically preached love as the highest form of life told through the love between Krishna and the gopis and gopikas and their trust in Krishna to fight evil and oppression. Krishna’s story also demolished the divide between the upper caste, in which he was born, and the OBC, which brought him up, with his equal love for both.

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THE rural reality today does not present so lurid a picture as painted by the leaders and protagonists of the casteist parties. No caste is totally one in appraising its own caste men. There is a clear gulf between the poor and the privileged in every caste. In my village near Chapra, a Yadav and a Muslim teamed together to appeal to me to haul up and restrain a whimsical Yadav teacher who oppressed the Brahmin mahant of the local temple. It was just an instance of the rural community standing together to uphold and be counted in a support to a good cause as they did during the freedom struggle, in the 1857 Indian mutiny against the British or in their reponse to very tall leaders like Abul Kalam Azad or Rajendra Prasad or Subhash Bose or Lohia or Jaya Prakash Narayan or Raja-ji or Kamaraj or Lal Bahadur Shastri.

It is not so much the casteist slogans which has brought castes together as the new awareness of their political power, land reforms like the abolition of zamindari and the new farm technology which has raised farm productivity and their incomes. Of course caste frenzy has side by side also been whipped up by calculating seekers of political power. But the frenzy has also started to vanish in favour of supporting agendas—not for selective but all-round development. This is how the majority has crossed over from one OBC-led party to another in Bihar. Drawing a lesson from a non performing party only with a social agenda, the new leader has worked hard both to promote development and devolve greater decision making power on women and the extremely backward by wise reservations.

The point I am trying to make is that what shape the Indian and rural political and social landscape will take is a matter that we should coolly and dispassionately ponder over. The longer term forces of social and economic justice are bound to beat the more parochial thinking of people still obsessed with memories of past inequities over time. But the process can be delayed and the wind of change muddied by encouraging and following divisive policies. What good they could do to promote the dignity of the weaker castes has been done and there is little left to do on that score.

It is in this context that the question whether we should have a caste-based census or not should be decided. The issue with a lot of explosive and emotive content should be handled very carefully. It should be decided with a vision of a caste-free India. What would seem politically expedient in the short run must yield to the long term impact of branding people with their caste—not letting them forget their caste impairment or privilege, keeping them immersed in historical memories and denying them the feel of a free and equal people in the present and rapidly changing India. There is far greater merit from the point of view of our weaker brothers in treading the visionary course rather than the more politically expedient.

This is not to deny the importance of affirmative action to speed up social justice, but merely to suggest that we should now take the next step to deny their caste existence as a means of erasing the caste system from the popular mind. What information would be needed to protect affirmative action can be obtained by other means like the NSS or information updated by repective commissions charged with the reponsibility of their welfare as advocated by Justice Sachar.

The author is the Convenor of Lok Paksh, Patna/Delhi.