What better solution than to aim a kick at that tried and trusted old political football—Kashmir? The hanging of Afzal Guru, its brazenness and timing, is deliberate.8 It has brought politics and anger back onto Kashmir’s streets.
India hopes to manage it with the usual combination of brute force and poisonous Machiavellian manipulation designed to pit people against one another. The war in Kashmir is presented to the world as a battle between an inclusive secular democracy and radical Islamists. What then should we make of the fact that Mufti Bashiruddin, the so-called Grand Mufti of Kashmir (which, by the way, is a completely phantom post)—who has made the most abominable hate speeches and has issued fatwa after fatwa, intended to present Kashmir as a demonic, monolithic Wahabi society—is actually a government-anointed cleric? Kids on Facebook will be arrested, but never he.9 What should we make of the fact that the Indian government looks away while money from Saudi Arabia (that most steadfast partner of the United States) is pouring into Kashmir’s madrassas? How different is this from what the CIA did in Afghanistan all those years ago? That whole sorry business created Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, and the Taliban. It has decimated Afghanistan and Pakistan. What sort of incubus will this unleash?
The old political football is not going to be all that easy to control. And it’s radioactive. A few days ago Pakistan tested a short-range battlefield nuclear missile to protect itself against threats from “evolving scenarios.” Two weeks ago the Kashmir police published “survival tips” for nuclear war. Apart from advising people to build toilet-equipped bombproof basements large enough to house their entire families for two weeks, it said: “During a nuclear attack, motorists should dive out of their cars toward the blast to save themselves from being crushed by their soon-to-be tumbling vehicles.” And it warned everyone to “expect some initial disorientation as the blast wave may blow down and carry away many prominent and familiar features.”10
Prominent and familiar features may have already blown down.
Perhaps we should all jump out of our soon-to-be-tumbling vehicles.
First published as “Does Your Bomb-Proof Basement Have an Attached Toilet?” in Outlook, February 25, 2013.
THE DOCTOR AND THE SAINT: THE AMBEDKAR-GANDHI DEBATE
“Annihilation of caste” is the nearly eighty-year-old text of a speech that was never delivered. When I first read it I felt as though somebody had walked into a dim room and opened the windows. Reading Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar bridges the gap between what most Indians are schooled to believe in and the reality we experience every day of our lives.
My father was a Hindu, a Brahmo. I never met him until I was an adult. I grew up with my mother in a Syrian Christian family in Ayemenem, a small village in communist-ruled Kerala. And yet all around me were the fissures and cracks of caste. Ayemenem had its own separate “Paraiyar” church where “Paraiyar” priests preached to an “untouchable” congregation. Caste was implied in people’s names, in the way people referred to each other, in the work they did, in the clothes they wore, in the marriages that were arranged, in the language they spoke. Even so, I never encountered the notion of caste in a single school textbook. Reading Ambedkar alerted me to a gaping hole in our pedagogical universe. Reading him also made it clear why that hole exists and why it will continue to exist until Indian society undergoes radical, revolutionary change.
Revolutions can begin, and often have begun, with reading.
If you have heard of Malala Yousafzai but not of Surekha Bhotmange, then do read Ambedkar.
Malala was only fifteen but had already committed several crimes. She was a girl, she lived in the Swat Valley in Pakistan, she was a BBC blogger, she was in a New York Times video, and she went to school. Malala wanted to be a doctor; her father wanted her to be a politician. She was a brave child. She (and her father) didn’t take heed when the Taliban declared that schools were not meant for girls and threatened to kill her if she did not stop speaking out against them. On October 9, 2012, a gunman took her off her school bus and put a bullet through her head. Malala was flown to England, where, after receiving the best possible medical care, she survived. It was a miracle.
The US president and the secretary of state sent messages of support and solidarity. Madonna dedicated a song to her. Angelina Jolie wrote an article about her. Malala was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize; she was on the cover of Time. Within days of the attempted assassination, Gordon Brown, former British prime minister and the UN special envoy for Global Education, launched an “I am Malala” petition that called on the government of Pakistan to deliver education to every girl child. The US drone strikes in Pakistan continue with their feminist mission to “take out” misogynist, Islamist terrorists.
Surekha Bhotmange was forty years old and had committed several crimes, too. She was a woman—an “Untouchable,” Dalit woman—who lived in India, and she wasn’t dirt poor. She was more educated than her husband, so she functioned as the head of her family. Dr. Ambedkar was her hero. Like him, her family had renounced Hinduism and converted to Buddhism. Surekha’s children were educated. Her two sons Sudhir and Roshan had been to college. Her daughter Priyanka was seventeen and finishing high school. Surekha and her husband had bought a little plot of land in the village of Khairlanji in the state of Maharashtra. It was surrounded by farms belonging to castes that considered themselves superior to the Mahar caste that Surekha belonged to. Because she was Dalit and had no right to aspire to a good life, the village panchayat did not permit her to get an electricity connection or turn her thatched mud hut into a brick house. The villagers would not allow her family to irrigate their fields with water from the canal or draw water from the public well. They tried to build a public road through her land, and when she protested, they drove their bullock carts through her fields. They let their cattle loose to feed on her standing crop.
Still Surekha did not back down. She complained to the police, who paid no attention to her. Over the months, the tension in the village built to fever pitch. As a warning to her, the villagers attacked a relative of hers and left him for dead. She filed another police complaint. This time, the police made some arrests, but the accused were released on bail almost immediately. At about six in the evening of the day they were released (September 29, 2006), about seventy incensed villagers, men and women, arrived in tractors and surrounded the Bhotmanges’ house. Her husband Bhaiyalal, who was out in the fields, heard the noise and ran home. He hid behind a bush and watched the mob attack his family. He ran to Dusala, the nearest town, and through a relative managed to call the police. (You need contacts to get the police to even pick up the phone.) They never came. The mob dragged Surekha, Priyanka, and the two boys, one of them partially blind, out of the house. The boys were ordered to rape their mother and sister; when they refused, their genitals were mutilated, and eventually they were lynched. Surekha and Priyanka were gang-raped and beaten to death. The four bodies were dumped in a nearby canal, where they were found the next day.1
At first, the press reported it as a “morality” murder, suggesting that the villagers were upset because Surekha was having an affair with a relative (the man who had previously been assaulted). Mass protests by Dalit organizations eventually prodded the legal system into taking cognizance of the crime. Citizens’ fact-finding committees reported how evidence had been tampered with and fudged. When the lower court finally pronounced a judgment, it sentenced the main perpetrators to death but refused to invoke the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act—the judge held that the Khairlanji massacre was a crime spurred by a desire for “revenge.” He said there was no evidence of rape and no caste angle to the killing.2 For a judgment to weaken the legal framework in which it presents a crime, for which it then awards the death sentence, makes it easy for a higher court to eventually reduce, or even commute, the sentence. This is not uncommon practice in India.3 For a court to sentence people to death, however heinous their crime, can hardly be called just. F
or a court to acknowledge that caste prejudice continues to be a horrific reality in India would have counted as a gesture toward justice. Instead, the judge simply airbrushed caste out of the picture.
Surekha Bhotmange and her children lived in a market-friendly democracy. So there were no “I am Surekha” petitions from the United Nations to the Indian government, nor any fiats or messages of outrage from heads of state. Which was just as well, because we don’t want daisy-cutters dropped on us just because we practice caste.4
“To the Untouchables,” Ambedkar said, with the sort of nerve that present-day intellectuals in India find hard to summon, “Hinduism is a veritable chamber of horrors.”5
For a writer to have to use terms like “Untouchable,” “Scheduled Caste,” “Backward Class” and “Other Backward Classes” to describe fellow human beings is like living in a chamber of horrors. Since Ambedkar used the word “Untouchable” with a cold rage, and without flinching, so must I. Today “Untouchable” has been substituted with the Marathi word “Dalit” (Broken People), which is, in turn, used interchangeably with “Scheduled Caste.” This, as the scholar Rupa Viswanath points out, is incorrect practice, because the term “Dalit” includes Untouchables who have converted to other religions to escape the stigma of caste (like the Paraiyars in my village who had converted to Christianity), whereas “Scheduled Caste” does not.6 The official nomenclature of prejudice is a maze that can make everything read like a bigoted bureaucrat’s file notings. To try and avoid this, I have mostly (though not always) used the word “Untouchable” when I write about the past, and “Dalit” when I write about the present. When I write about Dalits who have converted to other religions, I specifically say Dalit Sikhs, Dalit Muslims, or Dalit Christians.
Let me now return to Ambedkar’s point about the chamber of horrors.
According to the National Crime Records Bureau, a crime is committed against a Dalit by a non-Dalit every sixteen minutes; every day, more than four Untouchable women are raped by Touchables; every week, thirteen Dalits are murdered and six Dalits are kidnapped. In 2012 alone, the year of the Delhi gang-rape and murder,7 1,574 Dalit women were raped (the rule of thumb is that only 10 percent of rapes or other crimes against Dalits are ever reported), and 651 Dalits were murdered.8 That’s just the rape and butchery. Not the stripping and parading naked, the forced shit-eating (literally),9 the seizing of land, the social boycotts, the restriction of access to drinking water. These statistics wouldn’t include, say, Bant Singh of Punjab, a Mazhabi Dalit Sikh,10 who in 2005 had both his arms and a leg cleaved off for daring to file a case against the men who gang-raped his daughter. There are no separate statistics for triple amputees.
“If the fundamental rights are opposed by the community, no Law, no Parliament, no Judiciary can guarantee them in the real sense of the word,” said Ambedkar. “What is the use of fundamental rights to the Negro in America, to the Jews in Germany and to the Untouchables in India? As Burke said, there is no method found for punishing the multitude.”11
Ask any village policeman in India what his job is and he’ll probably tell you it is to “keep the peace.” That is done, most of the time, by upholding the caste system. Dalit aspirations are a breach of peace.
Annihilation of Caste is a breach of peace.
Other contemporary abominations like apartheid, racism, sexism, economic imperialism, and religious fundamentalism have been politically and intellectually challenged at international forums. How is it that the practice of caste in India—one of the most brutal modes of hierarchical social organization that human society has known—has managed to escape similar scrutiny and censure? Perhaps because it has come to be so fused with Hinduism, and by extension with so much that is seen to be kind and good—mysticism, spiritualism, nonviolence, tolerance, vegetarianism, Gandhi, yoga, backpackers, the Beatles—that, at least to outsiders, it seems impossible to pry it loose and try to understand it.
To compound the problem, caste, unlike say apartheid, is not color-coded, and therefore not easy to see. Also unlike apartheid, the caste system has buoyant admirers in high places. They argue, quite openly, that caste is a social glue that binds as well as separates people and communities in interesting and, on the whole, positive ways. That it has given Indian society the strength and the flexibility to withstand the many challenges it has had to face.12 The Indian establishment blanches at the idea that discrimination and violence on the basis of caste can be compared to racism or to apartheid. It came down heavily on Dalits who tried to raise caste as an issue at the 2001 World Conference against Racism in Durban, insisting that caste was an “internal matter.” It showcased theses by well-known sociologists who argued at length that the practice of caste was not the same as racial discrimination and that caste was not the same as race.13 Ambedkar would have agreed with them. However, in the context of the Durban conference, the point Dalit activists were making was that though caste is not the same as race, casteism and racism are indeed comparable. Both are forms of discrimination that target people because of their descent.14 In solidarity with that sentiment, on January 15, 2014, at a public meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, commemorating Martin Luther King Jr.’s eighty-fifth birth anniversary, African Americans signed “The Declaration of Empathy,” which called for “an end to the oppression of Dalits in India.”15
In the current debates about identity and justice, growth and development, for many of the best-known Indian scholars, caste is at best a topic, a subheading, and, quite often, just a footnote. By force-fitting caste into reductive Marxist class analysis, the progressive and left-leaning Indian intelligentsia has made seeing caste even harder. This erasure, this Project of Unseeing, is sometimes a conscious political act, and sometimes comes from a place of such rarefied privilege that caste has not been stumbled upon, not even in the dark, and therefore it is presumed to have been eradicated, like smallpox.
The origins of caste will continue to be debated by anthropologists for years to come, but its organizing principles, based on a hierarchical, sliding scale of entitlements and duties, of purity and pollution, and the ways in which they were, and still are, policed and enforced, are not all that hard to understand. The top of the caste pyramid is considered pure and has plenty of entitlements. The bottom is considered polluted and has no entitlements but plenty of duties. The pollution–purity matrix is correlated to an elaborate system of caste-based, ancestral occupation. In “Castes in India,” a paper he wrote for a Columbia University seminar in 1916, Ambedkar defined a caste as an endogamous unit, an “enclosed class.” On another occasion, he described the system as an “ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt.”16
What we call the caste system today is known in Hinduism’s founding texts as “varnashrama dharma” or “chaturvarna,” the system of four varnas. The approximately four thousand endogamous castes and subcastes (jatis) in Hindu society, each with its own specified hereditary occupation, are divided into four varnas—Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (soldiers), Vaishyas (traders), and Shudras (servants). Outside of these varnas are the avarna castes, the Ati-Shudras, subhumans, arranged in hierarchies of their own—the Untouchables, the Unseeables, the Unapproachables—whose presence, whose touch, whose very shadow is considered to be polluting by privileged-caste Hindus. In some communities, to prevent inbreeding, each endogamous caste is divided into exogamous gotras. Exogamy is then policed with as much ferocity as endogamy—with beheadings and lynchings that have the approval of the community elders.17 Each region of India has lovingly perfected its own unique version of caste-based cruelty, based on an unwritten code that is much worse than the Jim Crow laws. In addition to being forced to live in segregated settlements, Untouchables were not allowed to use the public roads that privileged castes used, they were not allowed to drink from common wells, they were not allowed into Hindu temples, they were not allowed into privileged-caste schools, they were not permitted to cover their upper bodies, they were only al
lowed to wear certain kinds of clothes and certain kinds of jewelry. Some castes, like the Mahars, the caste to which Ambedkar belonged, had to tie brooms to their waists to sweep away their polluted footprints, others had to hang spittoons around their necks to collect their polluted saliva. Men of the privileged castes had undisputed rights over the bodies of Untouchable women. Love is polluting. Rape is pure. In many parts of India, much of this continues to this day.18
What remains to be said about an imagination, human or divine, that has thought up a social arrangement such as this?
As if the dharma of varnashrama were not enough, there is also the burden of karma. Those born into the subordinated castes are supposedly being punished for the bad deeds they have done in their past lives. In effect, they are living out a prison sentence. Acts of insubordination could lead to an enhanced sentence, which would mean another cycle of rebirth as an Untouchable or as a Shudra. So it’s best to behave.
“There cannot be a more degrading system of social organization than the caste system,” said Ambedkar. “It is the system that deadens, paralyzes and cripples the people from helpful activity.”19
The most famous Indian in the world, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, disagreed. He believed that caste represented the genius of Indian society. At a speech at a missionary conference in Madras in 1916, he said:
The vast organisation of caste answered not only the religious wants of the community, but it answered too its political needs. The villagers managed their internal affairs through the caste system, and through it they dealt with any oppression from the ruling power or powers. It is not possible to deny the organising capability of a nation that was capable of producing the caste system its wonderful power of organisation.20
My Seditious Heart Page 70