Anshul Kumar
“A deputation of Harijans waited on Gandhiji at Sevagram with the request that members of the castes grouped under the head of ‘Scheduled Castes’ should be allowed representation on the governing body of the Harijan Sevak Sangh. Gandhiji is reported to have replied that the Sangh is meant to help Harijans and was not a Harijan organization and, therefore, their request was inadmissible. “ ~ K. Natarajan in Indian Social Reformer of 14th October 1944.
As quoted in What Congress and Gandhi have done for the Untouchables by Dr BR Ambedkar.
Recently, Rahul Gandhi’s evolving persona came to a very interesting turn in the parliament when he reiterated his demand for a caste census, on which he was taunted by Anurag Thakur, that those who don’t know the caste to which they themselves belong are asking to have a count of castes of people in India.
The above mentioned quote sourced from Ambedkar’s ‘What Congress and Gandhi have done to the untouchables makes us inquire deep into the demands of a caste census. Why not have a Caste Census in the Indian National Congress first?
What is the percentage of Untouchables in the Working Committee of the Indian National Congress?
How many Untouchables have been able to secure victory on a Congress ticket from a seat which is not reserved for the untouchables?
“A candidate whose majority is due to votes of persons other than Untouchables has no right to say that he is a representative of the Untouchables and the Congress cannot claim to represent the Untouchables through him merely because he belongs to the Untouchables and stood on a Congress ticket. ~ Dr BR. Ambedkar
Indian National Congress should first clear it stand that where do the untouchables stand in their imagination? As a separate element of Indian Society or a mere appendage to the Hindu Social Order. In an another article which I have written I have clearly warned on the perils of tyranny of a caste Hindu majority, if the consolidation of backward castes Hindus takes place under the demand of a nation-wide caste census.
The debates in Indian socio political arena are still manufactured by the liberal and the orthodox factions with the untouchable opinions relegated to the margins. They are manufactured to cater to the binary of a moderate version of Hinduism, the Congress and an extremist version, the BJP-Sangh.
What is overlooked in these manufactured debates is the already established idea that Untouchables form a distinct element of the Indian Society and they have every right to govern themselves and act sovereign in the strict political sense of democratic contract between the Indian State and the Untouchables, which is being followed in the aftermath of Poona Pact.
“There is certainly no ground for thinking that the Congress is planning to establish democracy in India. The mere fact that the Congress is engaged in a ‘Fight for Freedom’ does not warrant such a conclusion. Before any such conclusion is drawn it is the duty of the foreigner to pursue the matter further and ask another question, namely, ‘For whose freedom is the Congress fighting ?’ The question whether the Congress is fighting for freedom has very little importance as compared to the question, ‘for whose freedom is the Congress fighting ?’ This is a pertinent and necessary inquiry and it would be wrong for any lover of freedom to support the Congress without further pursuing the matter and finding out what the truth is.” ~ Dr BR Ambedkar in What Congress and Gandhi have done for untouchables
“It is of course impossible for the Brahmins to maintain their supremacy as a governing class without an ally to help them on account of their being numerically very small. Consequently, as history shows, the Brahmins have always had other classes as their allies to whom they were ready to accord the status of a governing class provided they were prepared to work with them in subordinate co-operation. “ ~ Dr BR Ambedkar in What Congress and Gandhi have done for the Untouchables
It is this very danger of numerically stronger backward castes co-operating in subordination with governing class for which the Congress is fighting which makes us question the demand for a caste census as nothing short of a populist measure. Untouchables should keep away from being swayed by this newfound politics of social justice being played in the name of Bahujan Politics.
Bahujan as a term has no social significance and is sociologically not just poor but a gross misrepresentation of the various classes that form part of the Indian Society.
As already mentioned, the manufactured debates rarely take into account the opinion of the untouchables and not only that, each side of the Brahmin Spectrum tries to Meta narrrativise the Separate existence of untouchables from a separate existence into a larger construction of Hindu Identity. What is important in this debate on Caste Census in the parliament is the invocation by Rahul Gandhi, that how many SC ST OBC are there in the Halwa Ceremony of Ministry of Finance?
Although the social justice ideologues of all hues try to portray this as a legitimate question by Rahul Gandhi but we should not forget that it’s merely an act of rhetoric because we all know even Congress have never given India a Finance Minister who was a Dalit or Have they?
In fact it Was Rahul Gandhi’s great grandfather Nehru who disrespected Ambedkar by not appointing him to the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs.
“I was not even appointed to be a member of main Committees of the Cabinet such as Foreign Affairs Committee, or the Defence Committee. When the Economics Affairs Committee was formed, I expected, in view of the fact that I was primarily a student of Economics and Finance, to be appointed to this Committee. But I was left out. I was appointed to it by the Cabinet, when the Prime Minister had gone to England. But when he returned, in one of his many essays in the reconstruction of the cabinet, he left me out. In a subsequent reconstruction my name was added to the Committee, but that was as a result of my protest.” -resignation letter of Dr BR Ambedkar, when he resigned from the post of Law Minister
We are always bombarded with the binary of the Congress Vs the BJP in the Indian Political Arena and this became a major issue of public debate when BJP was limited to few seats short of clear majority and the entire Intellegentsia made Congress the Bandwagon of Hope from a BJP free India.
Largely the Liberal Intellegentsia has been quite supportive of the newly evolved role of Rahul Gandhi in revamping Indian National Congress but this time Pratap Bhanu Mehta has somehow hit some discordant notes with Gandhi’s imagery of a caste rhetoric.
It is quite an established fact that the the discourse on which Congress is battling to come back to power has never been a central reckoning of the Congress Party . It is largely borrowed from the politics of Bahujan Samaj Party which was championed by Kanshiram and Mayawati in their heydays. The loosening grip of Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh has given Congress an option to co-opt that discourse and at the behest of Dalit votes, bounce back into power.
Mehta has been deeply irked by the remarks of Rahul Gandhi and resorts to question the entire discourse on caste as a reductionist form of cheap identity politics.
At a surface level, it seems to be a critique of Rahul Gandhi, but Rahul Gandhi is merely an eyewash, Mehta this time is irked by the albeit fractured but rising consciousness of caste politics among the scheduled castes.
The Untouchable Populace at this point of time lacks a luminary leadership but the ideals which were set in place by Ambedkar still stand tall. It is the under utilised potential of these ideals which makes people Like Mehta up in arms against the discourse on Caste.
Little did Mehta care to understand that what Rahul Gandhi asked was mere rhetoric and a Rhetoric that he knows serves him and his party very well but why is it that a Rhetoric hurts Mehta so badly that he goes on to say that
“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.”
According to Mehta, the adding of Prefix Savarna to judge the Scholarship of an Upper Caste intellectual is “intellectual corrosion”.
It should be noted here that Mehta here is trivialising an important aspect of the anti-caste politics which tries to dismantle the upper caste intellectuals who tend to define and delineate the problems and lives of almost every other marginalised community in India.
This adding of Prefix is not merely rhetoric but an important step in the direction of pointing out that gaze of the upper caste intellectuals is always downwards, that is towards those who are inferior to them in hierarchy and hence easy subjects of study.
The politics of adding a prefix which indicates the caste location of an intellectual is something that intellectuals like Mehta might take generations to acknowledge that it’s not cheap identity politics but redefining the academic gaze.
It is not to discredit the intellectual works of Upper Caste intellectuals which the limited cognitive capacities of Mehta understand as, but it is in a Bourdieuan sense an act of self-reflexivity which upper caste intellectuals should themselves indulge in, in order to practise a sociology in search of the truth.
But it’s not strange that Mehta is behaving like a snob, when the leading giant of Indian Sociology, MN Srinivas himself never cared to look at himself reflexively as a Brahmin sociologist, up and untill he was questioned by a British Anthropologist named Edmund Leach.
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Anshul Kumar is currently pursuing MA in Sociology at JNU.
