In 1921, in his Gujarati journal Navajivan, he wrote:
I believe that if Hindu Society has been able to stand, it is because it is founded on the caste system … To destroy the caste system and adopt the Western European social system means that Hindus must give up the principle of hereditary occupation which is the soul of the caste system. Hereditary principle is an eternal principle. To change it is to create disorder. I have no use for a Brahmin if I cannot call him a Brahmin for my life. It will be chaos if every day a Brahmin is changed into a Shudra and a Shudra is to be changed into a Brahmin.21
Though Gandhi was an admirer of the caste system, he believed that there should be no hierarchy between castes; that all castes should be considered equal, and that the avarna castes, the Ati-Shudras, should be brought into the varna system. Ambedkar’s response to this was that “the outcaste is a by-product of the caste system. There will be outcastes as long as there are castes. Nothing can emancipate the outcaste except the destruction of the caste system.”22
It has been almost seventy years since the August 1947 transfer of power between the imperial British government and the government of India. Is caste in the past? How does varnashrama dharma play out in our new “democracy”?
A lot has changed. India has had a Dalit president and even a Dalit chief justice. The rise of political parties dominated by Dalits and other subordinated castes is a remarkable, and in some ways a revolutionary, development. Even if the form it has taken is that a small but visible minority—the leadership—lives out the dreams of the vast majority, given our history, the aggressive assertion of Dalit pride in the political arena can only be a good thing. The complaints about corruption and callousness brought against parties like the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) apply to the older political parties on an even larger scale, but charges leveled against the BSP take on a shriller, more insulting tone because its leader is someone like Mayawati, four-term chief minister of Uttar Pradesh—a Dalit, a single woman, and unapologetic about being both. Whatever the BSP’s failings may be, its contribution toward building Dalit dignity is an immense political task that ought never to be minimized. The worry is that even as subordinated castes are becoming a force to reckon with in parliamentary democracy, democracy itself is being undermined in serious and structural ways.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, India, which was once at the forefront of the Nonaligned Movement, repositioned itself as a “natural ally” of the United States and Israel. In the 1990s, the Indian government embarked on a process of dramatic economic reforms, opening up a previously protected market to global capital, with natural resources, essential services, and national infrastructure that had been developed over fifty years with public money now turned over to private corporations. Twenty years later, despite a spectacular GDP growth rate (which has recently slowed down), the new economic policies have led to the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Today, India’s one hundred richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of its celebrated GDP.23 In a nation of 1.2 billion, more than 800 million people live on less than Rs 20 (forty cents) a day.24 Giant corporations virtually own and run the country. Politicians and political parties have begun to function as subsidiary holdings of big business.
How has this affected traditional caste networks? Some argue that caste has insulated Indian society and prevented it from fragmenting and atomizing like Western society did after the Industrial Revolution.25 Others argue the opposite; they say that the unprecedented levels of urbanization and the creation of a new work environment have shaken up the old order and rendered caste hierarchies irrelevant if not obsolete. Both claims deserve serious attention. Pardon the somewhat unliterary interlude that follows, but generalizations cannot replace facts.
A recent list of dollar billionaires published by Forbes magazine features fifty-five Indians.26 The figures, naturally, are based on revealed wealth. Even among these dollar billionaires the distribution of wealth is a steep pyramid in which the cumulative wealth of the top ten outstrips the forty-five below them. Seven out of those top ten are Vaishyas, all of them CEOs of major corporations with business interests all over the world. Between them they own and operate ports, mines, oil fields, gas fields, shipping companies, pharmaceutical companies, telephone networks, petrochemical plants, aluminum plants, cellphone networks, television channels, fresh food outlets, high schools, film production companies, stem cell storage systems, electricity supply networks, and Special Economic Zones. They are: Mukesh Ambani (Reliance Industries Ltd.), Lakshmi Mittal (Arcelor Mittal), Dilip Shanghvi (Sun Pharmaceuticals), the Ruia brothers (Ruia Group), K. M. Birla (Aditya Birla Group), Savitri Devi Jindal (O. P. Jindal Group), Gautam Adani (Adani Group), and Sunil Mittal (Bharti Airtel). Of the remaining forty-five, nineteen are Vaishyas, too. The rest are for the most part Parsis, Bohras, and Khattris (all mercantile castes) and Brahmins. There are no Dalits or Adivasis in this list.
Apart from big business, Banias (Vaishyas) continue to have a firm hold on small trade in cities and on traditional rural moneylending across the country, which has millions of impoverished peasants and Adivasis, including those who live deep in the forests of Central India, caught in a spiraling debt trap. The tribal-dominated states in India’s Northeast—Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, Meghalaya, Nagaland, and Assam—have, since “Independence,” witnessed decades of insurgency, militarization, and bloodshed. Through all this, Marwari and Bania traders have settled there, kept a low profile, and consolidated their businesses. They now control almost all the economic activity in the region.
In the 1931 census, which was the last to include caste as an aspect of the survey, Vaishyas accounted for 2.7 percent of the population (while the Untouchables accounted for 12.5 percent).27 Given their access to better health care and more secure futures for their children, the figure for Vaishyas is likely to have decreased rather than increased. Either way, their economic clout in the new economy is extraordinary. In big business and small, in agriculture as well as industry, caste and capitalism have blended into a disquieting, uniquely Indian alloy. Cronyism is built into the caste system.
Vaishyas are only doing their divinely ordained duty. The Arthashastra (circa 350 BCE) says usury is the Vaishya’s right. The Manusmriti (circa 150 CE) goes further and suggests a sliding scale of interest rates: 2 percent per month for Brahmins, 3 percent for Kshatriyas, 4 percent for Vaishyas, and 5 percent for Shudras.28 On an annual basis, the Brahmin was to pay 24 percent interest and the Shudra and Dalit, 60 percent. Even today, for moneylenders to charge a desperate farmer or landless laborer an annual interest of 60 percent (or more) for a loan is quite normal. If they cannot pay in cash, they have to pay what is known as “bodily interest,” which means they are expected to toil for the moneylender from generation to generation to repay impossible debts. It goes without saying that according to the Manusmriti no one can be forced into the service of anyone belonging to a “lower” caste.
Vaishyas control Indian business. What do the Brahmins—the bhudevas (gods on earth)—do? The 1931 census puts their population at 6.4 percent, but, like the Vaishyas and for similar reasons, that percentage too has probably declined. According to a survey by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), from having a disproportionately high number of representatives in Parliament, Brahmins have seen their numbers drop dramatically.29 Does this mean Brahmins have become less influential?
According to Ambedkar, Brahmins, who were 3 percent of the population in the Madras Presidency in 1948, held 37 percent of the gazetted posts and 43 percent of the nongazetted posts in government jobs.30 There is no longer a reliable way to keep track of these trends because after 1931 the Project of Unseeing set in. In the absence of information that ought to be available, we have to make do with what we can find. In a 1990 piece called “Brahmin Power,” the writer Khushwant Singh observed:
Brahmins form no more than 3.5 per cent of the population of our country … today they ho
ld as much as 70 per cent of government jobs. I presume the figure refers only to gazetted posts. In the senior echelons of the civil service from the rank of deputy secretaries upward, out of 500 there are 310 Brahmins, i.e. 63 per cent; of the 26 state chief secretaries, 19 are Brahmins; of the 27 Governors and Lt Governors, 13 are Brahmins; of the 16 Supreme Court Judges, 9 are Brahmins; of the 330 judges of High Courts, 166 are Brahmins; of 140 ambassadors, 58 are Brahmins; of the total 3,300 IAS officers, 2,376 are Brahmins. They do equally well in electoral posts; of the 508 Lok Sabha members, 190 were Brahmins; of 244 in the Rajya Sabha, 89 are Brahmins. These statistics clearly prove that this 3.5 per cent of Brahmin community of India holds between 36 per cent to 63 per cent of all the plum jobs available in the country. How this has come about I do not know. But I can scarcely believe that it is entirely due to the Brahmin’s higher IQ.31
The statistics Khushwant Singh cites may be flawed, but they are unlikely to be drastically flawed. They are a quarter of a century old now. Some new census-based information would help but is unlikely to be forthcoming.
According to the CSDS study, 47 percent of all Supreme Court chief justices between 1950 and 2000 were Brahmins. During the same period, 40 percent of the associate justices in the high courts and lower courts were Brahmin. The Backward Classes Commission, in a 2007 report, said that 37.17 percent of the Indian bureaucracy was made up of Brahmins. Most of them occupied the top posts.
Brahmins have also traditionally dominated the media. Here too, what Ambedkar said in 1945 still has resonance:
The Untouchables have no Press. The Congress Press is closed to them and is determined not to give them the slightest publicity. They cannot have their own Press and for obvious reasons. No paper can survive without advertisement revenue. Advertisement revenue can come only from business and in India all business, both high and small, is attached to the Congress and will not favour any Non-Congress organisation. The staff of the Associated Press in India, which is the main news distributing agency in India, is entirely drawn from the Madras Brahmins—indeed the whole of the Press in India is in their hands—and they, for well-known reasons, are entirely pro-Congress and will not allow any news hostile to the Congress to get publicity. These are reasons beyond the control of the Untouchables.32
In 2006, the CSDS did a survey on the social profile of New Delhi’s media elite. Of the 315 key decision makers surveyed from thirty-seven Delhi-based Hindi and English publications and television channels, almost 90 percent of the decision makers in the English language print media and 79 percent in television were found to be “upper caste.” Of them, 49 percent were Brahmins. Not one of the 315 was a Dalit or an Adivasi; only 4 percent belonged to castes designated as Shudra, and 3 percent were Muslim (who make up 13.4 percent of the population).
That’s the journalists and the “media personalities.” Who owns the big media houses that they work for? Of the four most important English national dailies, three are owned by Vaishyas and one by a Brahmin family concern. The Times Group (Bennett, Coleman Company, Ltd.), the largest mass media company in India, whose holdings include the Times of India and the twenty-four-hour news channel Times Now, is owned by the Jain family (Banias). The Hindustan Times is owned by the Bhartiyas, who are Marwari Banias; the Indian Express by the Goenkas, also Marwari Banias; the Hindu is owned by a Brahmin family concern; the Dainik Jagran Hindi daily, which is the largest-selling newspaper in India with a circulation of fifty-five million, is owned by the Gupta family, Banias from Kanpur. Dainik Bhaskar, among the most influential Hindi dailies with a circulation of 17.5 million, is owned by Agarwals, Banias again. Reliance Industries, Ltd. (owned by Mukesh Ambani, a Gujarati Bania) has controlling shares in twenty-seven major national and regional TV channels. The Zee TV network, one of the largest national TV news and entertainment networks, is owned by Subhash Chandra, also a Bania. (In southern India, caste manifests itself somewhat differently. For example, the Eenadu Group—which owns newspapers, the largest film city in the world, and a dozen TV channels, among other things—is headed by Ramoji Rao of the Kamma peasant caste of Andhra Pradesh, which bucks the trend of Brahmin–Bania ownership of Big Media. Another major media house, the Sun TV group, is owned by the Marans, who are designated as a “backward” caste but are politically powerful today.)
After Independence, in an effort to right a historic wrong, the Indian government implemented a policy of reservation (positive discrimination) in universities and for jobs in state-run bodies for those who belong to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.33 Reservation is the only opportunity the Scheduled Castes have to break into the mainstream. (Of course, the policy does not apply to Dalits who have converted to other religions but continue to face discrimination.) To be eligible for the reservation policy, a Dalit needs to have completed high school. According to government data, 71.3 percent of Scheduled Caste students drop out before they matriculate, which means that even for low-end government jobs, the reservation policy only applies to one in every four Dalits.34 The minimum qualification for a white-collar job is a graduate degree. According to the 2001 Census, only 2.24 percent of the Dalit population are graduates.35 The policy of reservation, however minuscule the percentage of the Dalit population it applies to, has nevertheless given Dalits an opportunity to find their way into public services, to become doctors, scholars, writers, judges, policemen, and officers of the civil services. Their numbers are small, but the fact that there is some Dalit representation in the echelons of power alters old social equations. It creates situations that were unimaginable even a few decades ago in which, say, a Brahmin clerk may have to serve under a Dalit civil servant.36 Even this tiny opportunity that Dalits have won for themselves washes up against a wall of privileged-caste hostility.
The National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, for example, reports that in Central Public Sector Enterprises, only 8.4 percent of the A-Grade officers (pardon the horrible term) belong to the Scheduled Castes, when the figure should be 15 percent.
The same report has some disturbing statistics about the representation of Dalits and Adivasis in India’s judicial services: among Delhi’s twenty high court judges, not one belonged to the Scheduled Castes, and in all other judicial posts, the figure was 1.2 percent; similar figures were reported from Rajasthan; Gujarat had no Dalit or Adivasi judges; in Tamil Nadu, with its legacy of social justice movements, only four out of thirty-eight high court judges were Dalit; Kerala, with its Marxist legacy, had one Dalit high court judge among twenty-five.37 A study of the prison population would probably reveal an inverse ratio.
Former President K. R. Narayanan, a Dalit himself, was mocked by the judicial fraternity when he suggested that Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, who according to the 2011 Census make up 25 percent of India’s 1.2 billion population, should find proportionate representation as judges in the Supreme Court. “Eligible persons from these categories are available and their under-representation or non-representation would not be justifiable,” he said in 1999. “Any reservation in judiciary is a threat to its independence and the rule of law,” was the response of a senior Supreme Court advocate. Another high-profile legal luminary said: “Job quotas are a vexed subject now. I believe the primacy of merit must be maintained.”38
“Merit” is the weapon of choice for an Indian elite that has dominated a system by allegedly divine authorization and denied knowledge—of certain kinds—to the subordinated castes for thousands of years. Now that it is being challenged, there have been passionate privileged-caste protests against the policy of reservation in government jobs and student quotas in universities. The presumption is that “merit” exists in an ahistorical social vacuum and that the advantages that come from privileged-caste social networking and the establishment’s entrenched hostility toward the subordinated castes are not factors that deserve consideration. In truth, “merit” has become a euphemism for nepotism.
In Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)—which i
s regarded as a bastion of progressive social scientists and historians—only 3.29 percent of the faculty is Dalit and 1.44 percent Adivasi,39 while the quotas are meant to be 15 percent and 7.5 percent, respectively. This, despite having supposedly implemented reservation for twenty-seven years. In 2010, when the subject was raised, some of its professors emeritus said that implementing the constitutionally mandated reservation policy would “prevent JNU from remaining one of the premier centres of excellence.”40 They argued that if reservation was implemented in faculty positions at JNU, “the well-to-do will move to foreign and private universities, and the disadvantaged will no longer be able to get world class education which JNU has been so proud to offer them so far.”41 B. N. Mallick, a professor of life sciences, was less shy: “Some castes are genetically malnourished and so very little can be achieved in raising them up; and if they are, it would be undoing excellence and merit.”42 Year after year, privileged-caste students have staged mass protests against reservation across India.
That’s the news from the top. At the other end of New India, the Sachar Committee Report tells us that Dalits and Adivasis still remain at the bottom of the economic pyramid where they always were, below the Muslim community.43 We know that Dalits and Adivasis make up the majority of the millions of people displaced by mines, dams, and other major infrastructure projects. They are the pitifully low-paid farm workers and the contract laborers who work in the urban construction industry. Seventy percent of Dalits are by and large landless. In states like Punjab, Bihar, Haryana, and Kerala, the figure is as high as 90 percent.44
There is one government department in which Dalits are over-represented by a factor of six. Almost 90 percent of those designated as sweepers—who clean streets, who go down manholes and service the sewage system, who clean toilets and do menial jobs—and employed by the government of India are Dalits.45 (Even this sector is up for privatization now, which means private companies will be able to subcontract jobs on a temporary basis to Dalits for less pay and with no guarantee of job security.)
My Seditious Heart Page 71
