by Vinod Rai
The lack of momentum notwithstanding, successive Indian governments signalled their commitments to the Look East policy. Trade and investment continued to be prime movers of the relationship, but other factors soon came into play. First, Delhi had begun taking note of the potential dangers posed to regional security by the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism and extremist groups in Southeast Asia. There were concerns that a destabilized Indonesia and rampant piracy activities in the Bay of Bengal area and the Straits of Malacca might threaten India’s shipping lanes to the south and east of the subcontinent. In 2000, the Vajpayee government began articulating the importance of maritime security. Second, India has been concerned over the possibility of Pakistan spreading its influence in some ASEAN countries through likely linkages of terrorist groups (e.g. Lashkar-e-Taiba) with emerging extremist Islamist groups in the region. Third, India needed to keep up with China in its engagement with ASEAN. China was already part of the ASEAN+3 (China, Japan and Korea) cooperation framework. Economic and trade cooperation between China and ASEAN had grown rapidly. Not wishing to lag behind, the Vajpayee government began making similar offers to ASEAN countries, leading to the signing of a Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA) with Singapore in 2005. This was preceded by a bilateral Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Thailand in October 2003. Other initiatives like the Mekong–Ganga Cooperation (MGC) project launched in November 2000 to forge closer ties with India’s eastern neighbours—Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia—demonstrated India’s interests in the region.
The change of government in 2004 did not affect India’s orientation towards Southeast Asia. The Manmohan Singh-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition government continued with many of the economic reform initiatives undertaken by the Vajpayee government. For instance, the idea of an Asian economic community that was first mooted by Vajpayee in 2003 featured in the new government’s foreign policy plans. Not wishing to be outmanoeuvred by China, and seeing that trade with East Asia had risen from USD 8 billion in 1990 to USD 67.6 billion in 2005, accounting for nearly 30 per cent of India’s total external trade,19 India remained keen to participate in the East Asian economic integration process. It was thus regarded as an important step in the right direction when India was invited to the East Asia Summit (EAS) in 2005. Thereafter, several new initiatives were announced: further pursuing an open skies policy that was proposed by Singapore; early operationalization of an India–ASEAN Science & Technology Fund to enhance collaborative R & D between India and ASEAN; developing annual training courses for ASEAN diplomats; and launching of special tourism campaigns in India and ASEAN.
India and ASEAN relations, based primarily on economic ties, grew gradually to encompass military and security cooperation. Membership in the EAS has accorded India the status of a legitimate player with a major role to play in the region’s evolving security architecture. Through its membership of the ARF, India’s engagement with ASEAN also paved the way for its involvement in other important regional organizations such as the EAS and the Asia–Europe Meeting (AEM). ASEAN countries came to see India ‘as a potentially important economic partner that could provide a useful balance and a hedge [as well as a potential security provider] against . . . unilateralism by the big powers . . .’20
Regardless of the desire for closer ties, the degree of cooperation has varied widely among the grouping’s member countries with a view that the full potential of India’s partnership with ASEAN remains unrealized. Momentum had stalled and progress was lacklustre, particularly in the area of trade and India’s eastward connectivity. Figures from 2015 revealed that India’s trade with ASEAN amounted to only one-seventh of ASEAN’s trade with China, and is, therefore, proportionally low.21 This has led to the view that in the latter years of the Look East policy ‘India’s approach to ASEAN looked tired, if not stale’.22
In November 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced at the India–East Asia Summit in Myanmar that the Look East policy would henceforth become the ‘Act East’ policy. The change was meant to reinvigorate India’s stagnating relations with ASEAN and expand India’s engagement beyond the region to include the whole of East Asia to Australia and New Zealand in the south, and from neighbouring Bangladesh to Fiji and Pacific Island countries in the Far East.23 Later in 2015 in Singapore, Modi reiterated his pledge to deepen India’s focus on the countries to its east. He stressed the need to ensure freedom of navigation in Asia’s waters and the need for cooperation in areas including oceans, cyberspace and space.24
One of the motivations behind the Act East policy can be attributed to India’s concerns over China’s growing ambitions in Asia. The policy can be regarded as a ‘hedging strategy’ (the key element in this strategy being the search for strategic partners to defuse a threat) rather than an outright challenge as India lacks the wherewithal to contest an assertive and sometimes belligerent China. ASEAN remains the main pillar in India’s Act East policy. However, the efficacy of the policy remains hindered by the inability to translate ideas and policies into concrete actions and investments. Infrastructure projects in India’s northeast is one such idea. If implemented successfully, these projects (e.g. the India–Myanmar–Thailand Trilateral Highway) would significantly improve connectivity between northeast India and the ASEAN countries.25
Acting East
India’s relations with Southeast Asia have been marked by false starts and unfulfilled promises. More than half a century has passed since Nehru first attempted to build a regional identity that would galvanize the new and emerging states of India and Southeast Asia. Nehru’s vision for Asia, built on idealism, hopes and aspirations, was nearly wrecked by geopolitical conditions created by the Cold War. His non-alignment policy, which still exists as a statement of policy, was for the most part nothing more than a mirage. In the post-Cold War period, globalization and transnational challenges have made Asian regionalism possible again. In a world that is headed towards multi-polarity and global connectedness, India’s non-alignment would have to mean an openness to seek convergence and cooperation, an open and flexible approach of inclusion and engagement. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, India has taken a major step forward in the realization of its earlier vision for ‘Pan-Asianism’ through regional cooperation. India’s place in the new Asia is predicated, since the nineties, on a pragmatic approach that is grounded in common economic and security interests.26
ASEAN will remain an important region to India for several reasons. Parts of Southeast Asia are socially and ecologically linked to northeast India, and this conduit offers India immense possibilities of an east-through-northeast approach. Several ASEAN countries have become important investment and joint venture destinations for Indian businesses, while at the same time being an important source of commodities to feed India’s economic growth.
The rise of an economically powerful and stable India, with close ties to the US, and confident in its dealings with China, adds immeasurably to the stability of the region. Southeast Asia stands to be transformed by the rise of China and India, and this strategic relationship, if managed properly, is set to determine the future of the Asia-Pacific region.
VI
Normalizing the Unique: Explaining the Persistence of Caste
Dipankar Gupta
Why does caste lead to so much excitement? What is so unique about it?
Apparently, it is the only form of social hierarchy where those at the bottom agree to be there; or, at worst, are humbly reconciled to their lot. In fact, if one were to go by traditional interpretation, there is no contestation at any point over social placement anywhere in the caste system. That is because caste is premised on the presumption of different physicality, which ranges from the most pure to the most impure.
Accordingly, Brahmins and Untouchables are at either ends of this continuum, while other castes find their place somewhere in between. Through all this, let us not forget that the special fact about caste is the supposed acce
ptance of the hierarchy by everybody, including the most oppressed.1 The view that poorer ‘subaltern’ castes participated in their own subjugation is what makes the caste system unique.
Even though the presentation of caste is fetching and attractive, contemporary India puts it under considerable pressure. If castes ordain ranking and if this is accepted by all, then how can caste competition be explained? This is particularly relevant when observing the passion with which politics is conducted in India. This is a major contradiction, which a traditional understanding of caste just cannot reconcile.
Caste competition, regardless of how it is seen, cannot allow for acceptance without protest of how bodily substances2 are placed hierarchically. Therefore, in a nutshell, caste politics, including caste alliances, violate the essence of the pure hierarchy, as it is known. When castes compete against one another, how can there be a single hierarchy?
Yet, it is not as if, for all these reasons, castes have disappeared. What has changed is that castes no longer form a ‘system’, but are active as ‘identities’. The phenomenon has morphed quite significantly, and has become one that we need to be sensitive to in order to understand how different castes manifest themselves today. When castes interacted as a ‘system’, people behaved in accordance with an ascribed rank, or what was ordained by birth. This hierarchy was manned and patrolled by the ruling caste of the region and even defined by them. This is why caste rankings differed from region to region; but, more importantly, the ‘system’ held.
This worked well for centuries with different Kshatriya castes heading the system, but came unstuck once the closed village economy collapsed. Almost all powerful castes, such as the Jats, Rajputs, Bhumihars, Thevars, Okkaligas, do not want to be Brahmins but covet the Kshatriya status. In India, there has been a gradual undermining of the rural way of life from the late nineteenth century onwards. What had remained unchanged in essence for centuries began shaking in the latter decades of colonial rule.
By the time Independence came and zamindari was abolished, the system began to wobble seriously. The rural economy was no longer closed, and as time went by, it was not overwhelmingly agrarian either. Today, over 60 per cent of India’s Rural Net Domestic Product is non-farm in character, and only 13 per cent of its GDP is agricultural. There are very few big landowners, and the old landlords have all but disappeared. This has wrecked caste as a ‘system’ for there is no oligarch, or ruling patron, who could keep the various castes in place.
In time, the systemic aspect collapsed, but caste as an identity remained, and it is this that fuels competition and politics in India today. In fact, the collapse of caste as a system encouraged the emergence of caste as an identity. Now that caste functions as identities, there are open declarations of contesting origin myths that are as fantastical as the Rig Vedic Purusha Shukta.3 The only difference is that many of these are borne by oral traditions and are not part of the great Hindu textual heritage. Here too, changes are occurring for many of these alternate origin myths are being written up at the pace with which its subscribers are getting literate.
The question then is whether the caste identities that are now sprouting up everywhere —were they brand new, or were they there earlier, but suppressed?
The more credible argument, which would fall in line with what has been said so far, is that the fear of punishment kept subaltern castes from asserting themselves. Now that times have changed and the old oligarch is no longer the source of power and patronage, it is much easier to come out in the open and shut the closet door behind.
It is hard to make the claim that in the past most people adhered to the ruling castes’ versions of hierarchy and, therefore, remained obedient and servile. The present has taught us to suspect the traditional treatises on caste. Pressured by contemporary circumstances, we begin to appreciate caste as ‘identity’ and once we do that its uniqueness disappears. This is because people across the world fashion origin tales for themselves and are often willing to die for them. It has often been observed that members of a particular caste attach a great deal of ‘patriotism’ to belonging to it. Indeed, Brahmins may consider certain castes to be ‘low’, but that is not how these castes view themselves. In fact, there are several occasions when a Brahmin is seen as inauspicious and borderline ‘impure’. This phenomenon was adequately captured by Celestin Bougle when he said that the principle of ‘mutual repulsion’ is active between castes.4
Having said all that, it can also be admitted that India is not the only country where birth defines a cultural identity. This is a human failing everywhere, an anthropological truth, as it were. The world is separated on the basis of language, religion and colour, and none of these markers are achievement-based, but determined by birth. Likewise, one is born into a caste and dies in it.5
People are not just divided into ‘us’ versus ‘them’. Each identity has a certain pride of belonging. No matter which category people fall into, everybody believes that their character and heritage are the best of all. This is true for everyone, from our ancestors in the Stone Age to Hindus and Europeans alike.
Therefore, castes share many of these characteristics that are present in other forms of social stratification elsewhere in the world. In addition, contrary to the traditional view, generated by Purusha Shukta partisans, the castes that were taken to be low, actually never believed in their positioning. This completely robs castes of their unique attribute. Like people everywhere in the world, those who are considered to be low or impure by some standards have a different opinion about themselves. There is no caste that does not see itself as superior to all others. How ordinary and commonplace is this?
There are hierarchies everywhere—in Britain, France, the US and in African nations as well. Yet, nowhere can it be said that those who are politically and economically dominated actually acquiesce in their humiliation. Racism, in whatever form, whether in Europe, America or South Africa, did not result in Blacks saying that they deserve to be punished by Whites.
The colonized also always found reasons to explain away their defeats at the hands of outsiders to factors that did not question their heritage. The French, true to form, believed that the Prussians gave them a sound hiding in the late nineteenth century simply because their children went to better schools. Nationalism, in many cases, arose out of defeats in the battle field. The vanquished often attribute their defeats, not to their physical or intellectual shortcomings, but to traitors, named and unnamed.
Once again, all these features come alive in the making of caste identities as well. So what is so unusual about them? For instance, even those who were once called Untouchables, refuse to bow down to orthodox pressures. They too have their own origin stories to relate, and they are all grand. These castes, like Blacks in apartheid-driven South Africa, may concede that others are richer, more educated, and so on. But when it comes to the crunch, they will never accept the fact that their lower social status is on account of the inherent substances that make them. If ‘Black is beautiful’ gave voice to this view in America, the ‘Dalit’ heritage has done it for those who were once considered impure in Hindu India. If Black counterculture, from the margins of New Orleans, Harlem and Chicago, can be the carrier of pride, so can Dalit poetry and worship be for the once considered Untouchables. In which case, the established view that is put forward in sociological texts of lower castes participating in their own subjugation is false and untenable.
Interestingly, in none of the studies that assert that lower castes participate in their own subjugation, are the views of the subordinated people taken into account. What is overlooked is that India too has its own version of the ‘Harlem culture’ and this is best expressed in the way those who were once deemed as low castes have carved proud niches for themselves.
For example, one of the legends of leather workers relates an episode that purportedly happened long ago when three Brahmin brothers went out to bathe in the Ganges. On the way to the river they saw a cow trapped in qu
icksand and struggling for life. As the other two were weak and scared, it was the youngest brother who went out to rescue the cow but failed to pull it out alive. When he returned his older brothers turned on him and claimed that because he had touched a carcass, he would henceforth be called a ‘leather worker’.6
Then there are ex-Untouchable legends that claim that they were once rulers and much loved by their subjects. In this happy world descended some evil forces, often with divine help, and cheated them of their land and power. Jyotiba Phule propounded a similar view, but went on to add that it is the culture of this community that is actually the origin, the adi, of Hindu civilization. In other words, true Hinduism rests with the culture of the adis, who were tricked by usurpers to the horror and anguish of their erstwhile subjects. Communities like the Meradh, Kammara and Jajjagara, who are blacksmiths by occupation, also believe they were among the adis.
Other lower-caste-origin myths need not even be about Brahmins, rulers or kings; they deal directly with gods. The washer-men of Bengal believe that they were born of Shiva’s divine intervention. Many, many years ago a washer-woman sent her son to collect Shiva’s soiled clothes. The boy waited patiently, but as Shiva was so completely immersed in meditation, Parvati asked him to play around and then go back. After his meditation, when Shiva came to Parvati, she scolded him and said that a little boy was waiting outside to take his garments for a wash. When Shiva stepped out, there was no boy in sight. This horrified him for he feared that some devil or ogre had gobbled the boy up. How would he face the little one’s mother now? So Shiva, by pure meditative skills, that only he was capable of, created another boy, a doppelganger of the one he thought had been picked up. However, he later came to know that the first boy got tired of waiting and went home. Now there was one boy too many and out of this creation of Shiva’s, arose the caste of Chasadhoba of Bengal.