Anshul Kumar
“The Census of India has over a number of decades ceased to be an operation in demography. It has become a political affair. Every community seems to be attempting to artificially argument its numbers at the cost of some other community for the sake of capturing greater and greater degree of political power in its own hands. The Scheduled Castes seem to have been made a common victim for the satisfaction of the combined greed of the other communities who through their propagandists or enumerators are able to control the operations and the results of the Census.”
— Dr. Ambedkar (Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches Volume 1)
This is what Ambedkar had to argue at the dawn of India’s independence after a considerable amount of time had lapsed since the moral bargain had been forced on the untouchables by Gandhi in denying them separate electorates. Ambedkar was clearly not content with what he and his people had to remain content with in the form of a joint electorate, and we can feel it even today. How? Despite Gandhi’s change of heart and expectation that Hindus will have a change of heart, we see that it’s not normally seen that any Scheduled Caste candidate is given candidature to fight elections from an unreserved seat. If Hindu society is to be seen as progressing away from caste, why is it that, till this date, it is not in their imagination to see a Scheduled Caste candidate be fielded as a representative of people from an unreserved constituency?
It is the very curse of Gandhi that untouchables are still paying for, as they are victims of all discourses from left, right, and centre as puppets. Ambedkar echoed, “I am not a part of the whole; I am a part apart,” and emphasised how untouchables are a distinct element of Indian society, separate from Hindus like Muslims. Now we can see an increasing demand from the Congress-led opposition for the Caste Census in India, a demand that is backed by Left-Liberal intelligentsia too, albeit as a united opposition against the BJP.
It is increasingly demanded by almost all liberal progressive academics, journalists, and woke influencers on social media. Even among Ambedkarites, it is being demanded under the overarching identity of Bahujans, but they are mistaken that Bahujan is a political conception that has no social existence as compared to untouchables, who have existed as a social category for ages in Indian society. Ambedkar’s entire fight in British India was to get them this recognition. Even later in his life, he had this in mind and probably converted to Buddhism only to establish untouchables as a distinct element of Indian society.
Ambedkar argued in his seminal paper ‘Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development’ that it was the Brahmins who closed their door first to form themselves into a caste, and when the others found the door closed, they were bound to make their own doors, thus paving the way for casteisation of ethnic communities.
Let’s come to sociology in India. What has happened is that certain lobbies of Brahmin academics, while sitting in Brahmin quarters of the village, started closing the door of the academic scholarship to look only at those at the bottom of the hierarchy. Despite having experience of living in Brahmin households, they opined and delineated not about Brahmins but those subordinate to them and ethnically and hierarchically distant from them. This is how they closed the door of academic scholarship, which could have focused on Brahmins and other allied upper castes as a category to understand their inherent motives.
What has happened as a result is that academic scholarship produced in sociology in India is mostly about the experiences and behaviours of the people who fall at the bottom rung of the hierarchy. This is what they are still doing: navigating and leading the discourse for and about untouchables.
In the Brahmin imagination, Dalits are condemned to suffer and go through misery and exploitation. It is how Brahmins have defined us as a wretched lot. And since theirs is such an imagination, they become saviours of untouchables and preach social justice. And as Ambedkar said, “It is usual to hear all those who feel moved by the deplorable condition of the Untouchables unburden themselves by uttering the cry “We must do something for the Untouchables”. One seldom hears any of the persons interested in the problem saying “Let us do something to change the Touchable Hindu.”
Isn’t it true that even when Dalits are writing about themselves by themselves, the gaze that they are having is that of the Brahmin, where an untouchable is always suffering and beaten and timid and powerless?
“The human gaze has the power of conferring value on things; but it makes them cost more too.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
As a consequence, most of the Dalit intellectuals, as they found the door closed to look at the Brahmin, ended up looking at themselves too, just like the Brahmin. The scholarship thus produced on Caste is on and about the inferior subordinates of Brahmins. Brahmins not only gatekeep people from acquiring knowledge; they also restrict you from studying them. This is how they define themselves by defining the other as a category. And as it is said by Thomas Szasz, “In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.”
The BJP is shrewdly opposed to this demand for reasons known best to them, but it is in the imagination of the opposition that with such a demand they will be able to uproot the BJP from power. The political understanding of the Indian polity that has been produced and instilled in the minds of the Indian masses is that of a binary—the binary of Hindu vs. Muslim. The Liberal-Left intelligentsia has for long harped on to this, ignoring the question of caste. What has happened as a result is that two opposing factions have emerged in Indian politics that have shown a clear understanding of caste as it governs the political economy of the Indian nation-state. One is Bahujan politics led by Kanshiram, and the other is the BJP led by the RSS. It was the failure of the Congress and the Left’s denial of caste that paved the way for the evolution of the RSS as a strong polity. Bahujan politics emerged, reached its helm under Behenji, and has been on the decline since then. The dying remains of Bahujan politics are a scavenger meal for the RSS polity. The discourse has now shifted from the elite liberal intelligentsia of the Congress-Left bastions to the mass-oriented cadreisation of the RSS-BJP. The RSS is aware of this fact but is covertly opposed to the demand for a caste census. It is kind of a double blind, which the RSS has put Congress into. Damned you, and Damned you don’t.
I have no inclination to be an expert in political astrology, which is practised these days in India, where liberal progressives predict the poll outcome beforehand and do injustice to the process of elections in the name of election studies. But one thing I am sure of is that, as Ambedkar warned, a caste census with an unawakened Hindu majority, which will be counted as a part of the OBC, will consolidate the Hindu majority. It is for the future to see whether Congress will take advantage of it and if we see a change of regime or the BJP comes back to power, but one thing is for sure: the untouchables are to remain a perpetual kickball in the political ballgame of upper caste imagination, which is India.
But all this is not my concern; this is an interplay of Brahmins among Brahmins, with each faction trying to lure allied upper castes to form an alliance that will consolidate the Hindu majority, and it will be the untouchables who will be at stake. Much like before, untouchables are being treated as expendables in the ugly fight of dominance the Brahmin plays, hiding behind different shades of ideological orientation.
There are Brahmins in every ideological orientation trying to steer the discourse, be it the Left, the Congress, the RSS, or even the Bahujan parties. They steer the gaze at a subconscious level, if not consciously, because they know they are the ones defining what should be talked about and for whom we should talk.
The only respite now for untouchables is to realise this whole ‘game’ and institute themselves independently as staunchly as Ambedkar did. Otherwise, we are doomed, and this is how his warning that if Hindu Raj ever becomes a majority, we will be doomed will prove to be true. Till then, as Gramsci said, “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”
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Anshul Kumar is currently pursuing MA in Sociology at JNU.
