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Modi’s ‘first OBC PM’ tag is making Rahul Gandhi aspire to be an OBC messiah now
Rahul Gandhi is Brahmin, however, he is now batting for a caste-wise census. What made the Congress go to this extreme? In my view, it is Modi who pushed it to take this stand.
11 October, 2023 12:56 pm IST
File photo of Congress party’s leader Rahul Gandhi at party’s headquarter in New Delhi, India | Reuters
In Chhattisgarh’s Bilaspur on 30 September, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asserted his caste identity and alleged that the Congress was targeting him because he belonged to an OBC community. Before that, in June, during an interactive session with BJP workers from across the country live-streamed from Bhopal, Modi had listed out several marginalised caste groups—among the backward and Scheduled Castes —across the country, and had alleged that they had lost out due to the “politics of Muslim appeasement”.
This was the essence of media reportage about PM Modi’s ownership of his OBC background and his love for marginalised communities just before 2 October. Then the Bihar Government released the findings of the state-wide caste survey. Modi immediately shifted gears and started saying that such a caste census would divide Hindu society. The question then is—without knowing the demographics of each caste, how does he remove their backwardness?
Modi’s assertion of his OBC identity, with an implication to the national polity, started in the run-up to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. His lieutenant Amit Shah was election-in-charge of Uttar Pradesh during that time. The BJP under the guidance of Modi and Amit Shah focussed on the votes of non-Yadav OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits. Samajwadi Party—known as the Yadav-Muslim party— was in power in UP at this time. And Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party, which was in power in the previous term, was known mainly as the Jatav party.
Modi repeatedly spoke about his OBC background in election rallies, well into 2019. In some meetings, he even said he belongs to the lower OBC community. This strategy worked. Most non-Yadav and non-Jatav votes shifted to BJP. Was that not the division of Hindu society in order to get votes? When Modi asserted his OBC-ness, did he do it as Hindu or anti-Hindu or Un-Hindu?
New dimension to caste
Bihar was always a caste electoral laboratory. Nitish and Tejashwi Yadav added a new dimension to it with the caste survey. The survey brings the laboratory’s experiment to a logical end. Now, the Congress Working Committee has approved a resolution to conduct a nationwide caste census and one in every Congress-ruled state if voted to power in 2024. It is a strategy to win over its OBC voter base. The Congress, no doubt, has taken a new direction by accepting the caste survey, after staying away from caste for a long time. The change came because Rahul Gandhi took a position on the caste survey. All the top ideologues of Congress, P Chidambaram, Jairam Ramesh, KC Venugopal were against such a stand on the caste census prior to this. In fact, such is the position of all educated upper caste intellectuals—whether they belong to Right-wing, Left-wing or liberals. Only OBC intellectuals and leaders were asking for a caste census in hopes that Modi as an OBC would do something about it. But he remained silent about it for the last ten years.
Rahul Gandhi is Brahmin, however, he is now batting for a caste-wise national count. What made the Congress go to this extreme caste question? In my view, it is Narendra Modi who pushed the Congress to take this stand.
Anti-OBC decisions
Once Modi announced his candidature and repeatedly spoke about him being the first OBC PM candidate in 2013, regional parties that were formed as representatives of OBCs went into a coma. The OBC masses saw Abki Bar Modi Sarkar as Abki Bar OBC Sarkar. The OBC regional parties did not know what to do. Their political existence was/is deeply related to the OBC ideology and improving their economic and social status.
Modi himself and the BJP projected Modi as a powerful decisive leader against the indecisive Manmohan Singh of the Congress. But after 10 years in power, the OBCs think that he has not done anything special for them. On the contrary, his 10 per cent EWS reservation, and 33 per cent women’s reservation, without resolving the quota within quota issue, were seen as anti-OBC. It didn’t help that the BJP projected these policy decisions as Modi’s decisions. Modi, too, gave the impression, in his speeches both inside Parliament and outside, that he was responsible for these decisions.
The OBCs of the nation expected that an OBC PM would take the lead on the issue of caste census. But now, he is speaking like an upper caste leader and an upper caste (Brahmin) Rahul Gandhi is speaking like an OBC leader. These unexpected positions are certainly worth the time of India’s psychologists.
Future messiah
Caste is an instrument of manipulation. In recent years, BJP Dalit intellectuals have argued that Valmiki, the author of Ramayana, was a Dalit, and that Vedavyasa, the author of Mahabharata, was also a Dalit. Of course, Srikrishna, the author of Bhagavad Gita was Yadav.
But none of those books assigned equal human status to Dalits or Yadavs. Why? Because claims are one thing and what one actually does for the oppressed masses is another. For votes or communitarian benefits, coopting happens on either side. But what one does for the uplift of the oppressed becomes the measuring tape.
Modi, an OBC, could be a PM face because VP Singh, a Kshatriya, took a strong stand in favour of social justice and OBC reservation. No doubt he lost support from Dwija upper castes of India for this move.
By not taking a stand in favour of caste census and OBC reservation in the legislative bodies, Modi is following the footsteps of the Nehru-Gandhi family—Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi opposed OBC reservation, right from the Kaka Kalelkar Report days to the Mandal Commission days. This historical position was the reason why the OBCs moved away from the Congress. Now they are either with regional parties or with the BJP.
Rahul has taken a difficult step to convince CWC to come around to the OBC question quite decisively. This does not mean that there will be no opponents within the party, but he has proven to the BJP and RSS leaders that he is not a Pappu. Hereafter, the OBCs, who constitute the main force of our agrarian and artisanal production and also constitute the largest chunk of the national voting population, consider Rahul Gandhi as their future messiah. This stand is not just about an election but about the socio-economic transformation of India as a nation.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist, and writer. Views are personal.
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Nitish’s caste census: Major game-changer in Indian politics
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar in a file photo: PTI While Bihar census will pressure Centre to release the caste data collected by the UPA government, it also exposes Modi’s inability to take any substantial mesures for the OBCs with whose help the BJP came to power.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd
4 Oct 2023 11:31 PM
Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and his deputy Tejashwi Yadav have hit the nail on the head by quickly conducting the caste ‘head count’ and releasing it even as the central government, in an affidavit before the Supreme Court, claimed that it alone can conduct census data mobilisation. After the Mandal reservation battle, this is the second major step that will change the democratic structure of India.
This kind of caste-based survey in our constitutional democratic set-up is going to make revolutionary changes in Ambedkar’s idea of ‘one vote one person’ irrespective of one’s caste or class. A person’s share in the national wealth and power now will be measured by the strength in terms of numbers of one’s caste and one’s ability. Whether one is created from (Hindu god) Brahma’s head or feet has no value in the future. This is a new way to annihilate caste first by equalising all human beings by reordering the status of caste-based on the principle of individual right to be equal. Caste census serves that critical historical purpose.
Implications for national polity
The Bihar Caste Census Report will have huge implications for national polity. It exposes Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s inability to take any substantial step that would do good to Other Backward Classes (OBCs). Conducting a nationwide caste census during his regime would have given him and the BJP government, as they rode to power on the back of OBC votes, an image of sticking to the promise. Nitish took away the credibility. He carried the legacy of BP Mandal from Bihar, who headed the OBC reservation commission and submitted a landmark report.
The Bihar survey will force, perhaps, the central government to release the caste data that the earlier UP government collected. The Modi government is quite tactfully sitting over it. It also enacted the women’s reservation law without giving reservation to OBC women. In that context, the Congress, which opposed reservation within the reservation in the OBC Bill, took a stand in favour of OBC reservation in Parliament and state legislatures. Rahul Gandhi is repeatedly talking about caste census and the share of OBCs in power and state finances. The BJP and RSS are cornered just before the 2024 elections.
Now, the pressure will mount to push for OBC reservations in Parliament and state legislatures.
Telangana, Karnataka keep caste count under wraps
Telangana and Karnataka will be pressurised to release the caste data that they have with them. Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, in his earlier term, got a caste survey done through the state OBC commission. K Chandrashekar Rao did a household comprehensive survey in Telangana at the very beginning of his first term. He, too, did not release the data. They have provided an opportunity for Nitish to claim credit as the first chief minister ever to release caste-based numbers.
The BJP played various tricks to stop the Bihar census through legal and other means. But Nitish stood firm.
Bihar caste census
Look at caste data of Bihar. The backward (27.13 percent) and the most backward (36 percent) together constitute 63.13 percent. The general category castes that constitute Brahmins, Bhumihars, Kayasthas and Rajputs (Shatriyas) constitute just 15.52 percent of the population. Caste-wise, Yadavs, at 14.27 percent, constitute the single largest population. This one caste is as big as the general category in that state. But the general category consists of Muslim upper castes. The lower caste Muslims are part of the OBC category. The Muslim population, according to the same survey, constitutes 17. 70 per cent. What exactly is the caste break-up among Muslims is not known.
However, in all other states, Muslims do not have similar reservation facilities. In some states, converted Christians are on the OBC list.
Is 50% SC cap a legitimate benchmark?
How does this caste census play out in judicial decisions at the central level? The 50 percent cap on all reservations is imposed on moral as well as guess basis by the Supreme Court and has to go once the caste census is done at all-India level. Once data is available and the caste becomes the basis of positive discrimination, the 50 percent cap cannot stand as a sustainable benchmark.
This will be a challenge to political parties because so far, the non-reserved castes were controlling national political parties and, to a large extent, the regional parties too. In some states, though, the OBC leaders control some regional parties, which were dependent on the upper caste financial resources and could not push caste census even after 30 years of the Mandal movement.
The Modi factor
But OBC aspirations underwent a sea change with the BJP/RSS’s introduction of Narendra Modi as an OBC prime ministerial candidate in 2013 and his subsequent rise to power in 2014.
For the sake of power, the upper caste BJP leadership claimed that they, as against the dynasty rule of Congress, brought in an ordinary OBC activist to the prime minister’s office. They also projected him as a decisive leader as he faced huge criticism as Gujarat chief minister in the background of the 2002 communal riots in that state and remained unmoved.
However, Modi’s government has not changed the OBC status in the country in any sphere of life. His government mediated between the classical ideological stand of RSS and his OBC claim for power. Historically RSS was against caste discourse and political mobilisation on the basis of caste. But to defeat the Congress and UPA, it changed its position on the caste question and brought Modi with a proclamation that he was the first OBC prime ministerial candidate. This led the Dwija RSS leaders into an unresolvable contradiction. Since the BJP was winning with OBC votes, the Congress had to reposition on the issue.
To overcome its repeated defeat, the Congress had to change its anti-OBC position. It also now took a pro-OBC and pro-caste census stand.
Nitish’s caste headcount report and the numbers of OBCs in different states and the nation will lead to a new phase of Indian politics. Thus Nitish proved his political astuteness. Irrespective of the results of next elections, the Bihar caste census is the second major game changer after implementation of the Mandal Report.
The writer is former Director, Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad.)
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Prof Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd’s Talk on English Day
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Indian English and a new spring of hope
KANCHA ILAIAH SHEPHERD·OCTOBER 4, 2023
On October 5, Indian English Day, Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd gives a clarion call to make English accessible for the marginalised and the downtrodden of India.
October 5, 2023 is the 206rd Indian English Day.
English education came into our national life in 1817 and paved a new way. Two reformers of our education system, William Carey and Rammohun Roy, opened the first English-medium school on October 5, 206 years ago.
In the two hundred six years of its survival in India as an administrative language, English has remained a rich people’s property. Only the very rich or the properly employed regular salary earners manage moderate-to-high class English-medium education for their children.
All politicians of all parties educate their children in English-medium schools. National parties such as the Indian National Congress that ruled the country for the longest period from Delhi and the Bharatiya Janata Party that has ruled the nation more than 15 years, have kept the English language as a preserve of the rich. English-medium government school education is given the least priority in their model of development.
Universal English-medium education is imparted in government schools only in small states in the Northeast such as Nagaland.
Where children from the economically vulnerable sections or marginalised castes and tribes managed to get English-medium education, it was despite the system in place rather than due to it.
A new hope in Andhra Pradesh
But Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy Congress Party (YSRCP) president Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy had dented this elite English-medium education model in a short duration of four years.
Universal English-medium education is imparted in government schools only in small states in the Northeast such as Nagaland.
In my 71 years of life, I have seen several chief ministers in united Andhra Pradesh, which has now been bifurcated into Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. I have travelled in many states, and read about the administrative methods of chief ministers and prime ministers. But no chief or prime minister spent as much time on the agenda of school education as the current Andhra Pradesh chief minister is spending.
As a person who was born in a remote village in a backward Nizam State, without even a proper Telugu-medium school, and having gone through the tortuous course of learning English, I never imagined a chief minister of a state would focus so much on promoting English in government school education as Jaganmohan Reddy is doing.
Under the model he has instituted, the children of agrarian labour, Adivasis, artisans, and even those of the poorest of the poor, are getting not just English-medium education, but a model of education that is entirely different from the conventional practice.
Also read: The necessary politics over NEET
I spoke to Siddaramaiah when he was the chief minister in his earlier term in Karnataka, and Pinarayi Vijayan, the chief minister of Kerala for two terms, and requested them to introduce English-medium education in the government schools of their respective states.
Both were scared of upper caste intellectual backlash. Until today, even Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu have not gone for English-medium education for the poorest of the poor in government schools.
No chief minister spends as much money, time and energy on school education as Reddy does to keep on reviewing the working of the education system of the state.
Jaganmohan Reddy has repeatedly said, “I want to give the best education to my state’s children as that will be their future property”. School- and college-going children’s mothers get about 35 thousand rupees per year in their bank accounts. They spend that money on the educational needs of their children.
The chief minister reviews the quality of children’s shoes, bags, midday meals and toilet facilities on a regular basis. In no part of India was school infrastructure so good as Andhra Pradesh children have at present.
The construction of government school buildings was never defined as development of a state’s infrastructure. Jaganmohan Reddy has changed the idea of development from enriching big contractors to assigning work to small contractors.
Such small contractors spend money in the village and town markets. Labourers who used to receive wages in construction work only in big cities and towns have been able to spread out to villages and smaller towns. This model does not concentrate development to big cities. Village markets are booming with this model of development.
The chief minister reviews the quality of children’s shoes, bags, midday meals and toilet facilities on a regular basis. In no part of India was school infrastructure so good as Andhra Pradesh children have at present.
I have seen the first five years of N. Chandrababu Naidu’s rule in the same state of Andhra Pradesh and ten years of rule of K. Chandrashekar Rao in Telangana. They never reviewed the school education structures in their respective states. The chief minister’s office was never a place of discussions on the lives and development of children of poorer sections of their society. Their governments are known for handing over school and college education to corporate business houses.
Jaganmohan Reddy, on the other hand, not only keeps on reviewing school education but also keeps on adding national and international innovative educational techniques to village schools, apart from providing Wi-Fi internet and smart televisions to village schools.
This is the background of the country and states run by national and regional parties in which we need to celebrate Indian English Day this year. All regional languages get celebrated by those who send their children to rich private English-medium schools.
I saw Chandrababu’s son Lokesh and his daughter-in-law Brahmani speak on TV channels after he was arrested. Their English is much better than their Telugu. Why? They were educated in top English-medium schools and also in the US.
That family and his party opposed introducing English-medium in government schools in 2019. Jagan had to fight court battles and media battles to introduce English-medium in government schools.
Also read: Fraudulent promise of education: The case of Patna
Former vice President of India M. Venkaiah Naidu and former Chief Justice of India M.V. Ramana, both of whom hail from Andhra Pradesh, opposed the policy of English-medium government school education. Yet Jaganmohan Reddy stood firm.
What has been the result of the policy?
Children of labourers have spoken in United Nations education conferences and also in the US White House with courage and confidence. They got applause from the audience wherever they went. This is certainly a motivational example for the future school education system of India.
Conclusion
This year, on Indian English Day, we must reiterate the need for children from poorer backgrounds and from rural areas to learn English.
The fruits of that language have not yet reached the children of agrarian masses and urban poor. No educationalist coming from the high-end English-medium school education fights for the right of an equal medium of education.
This year, on English Day, we must reiterate the need for children from poorer backgrounds and from rural areas to learn English.
Nobody is opposed to celebrating the regional languages of our country. But at the same time, celebrating Indian English and expansion of the global language into our villages shapes our own variants of English.
For 206 years, English has remained a preserve of the upper-caste rich people. It is a crime to confine the language to rich houses, high-end offices, malls and airports. It should reach out village markets, village bus stops and agrarian fields. That is where it will acquire Indianness more and more. No language should be treated as the property of one class alone.
Jaganmohan Reddy’s government has taken that first step. Let us celebrate Indian English Day from now every year and make our children and youth read a book on that day.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author. He wrote a book in Telugu with an English title Birth Without Birth Day as his parents, like many Indian villagers, were kept illiterate as they were Shudra-Shepherds. However, his school teacher created a birthday for him and that is October 5, 1952.
https://theleaflet.in/indian-english-and-a-new-spring-of-hope/
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Why we should Celebrate October 5 as the ‘Indian English Day
by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd
All lovers of equality should celebrate October 5 as the Indian English Day. We declare that ‘English is Indian’. We study in English and preserve our buffalo cultural nationalism as against the unproductive forces of cow nationalism.
English teaching started in Calcutta sometime in October 1817 by gathering a few Brahmin male children both by British educationalists and Indians. In 2017 we need to celebrate the 200th year of English education in India. In the last few years we, the Osmanians at the Osmania University’s Monumental Arts College, built by the famous Osman Ali Khan, the last Nizam, celebrate October 5 as the ‘Indian English Day’. Everyone knows that October 5 is the ‘Inter-national Teachers Day’. Some of us thought that it should also be celebrated as the ‘Indian English Day’.
In 1817 English teaching started by imparting English alphabets to some Brahmin children because in those days there was no scope for the Dalit bahujan or even the upper Shudras to study in any school. Even persons like Raja Rammohan Roy, who were associated with these initiatives, were casteists. Roy thought of reforming the Brahmin women’s life but never took any initiative for educating the lower castes.
The first educated modern Shudra in India was Mahatma Jotirao Phule, in a Scottish English medium school in Bombay province. That was much later in the 1840s as Phule was born in 1827. The Calcutta province was in the grip of the Britishers and Brahmins. No caste reform movement was initiated by the Bengali Brahmins. A shudra ruler like Shivaji resisted Brahmin hegemony in the Bombay region and initiated some changes there.
Subsequently, his grandson, Sahumaharaj, took a serious step of anti-Brahmin mobilisation of Shudras and Dalits. Thus, English education began in the land of the Dalit bahujan. If Calcutta province represented the Brahmin English, the Bombay province represented the Dalit bahujan English.
Dr B.R. Ambedkar was the first Dalit to get the English medium education and later on a world-class higher education. Even the Muslims of India were pushed back in English education because they were for Persian and Urdu education. Sir Sayyad Ahmmad Khan pushed the ideology of English education into the Muslim community. Now there are several English-educated Muslims in India due to Universities like Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia.
Today the Dalit bahujans and Muslims and other minorities are in the present position because of English education, though they are the least educated. If a person like me, having come from a totally illiterate shepherd family, could challenge the mighty Brahminism that controls the state power, temple power, even the educational power structure, it is because of English (earlier Sanskrit), though learnt under a tree, at a very later age in my village.
The celebration of the Indian English Day is to checkmate the Hindutva forces from confining the SC/ST/OBCs to regional languages and to educate the rich and upper castes in private English medium schools with their money power. Our struggle is to establish common medium and syllabus-based schools for all children—the rich, poor of any caste.
I appeal to all those lovers of equality to cele-brate October 5 as the Indian English Day and tell the diabolical convent and foreign English educated people—you cannot stop us from learning good English education in our village schools with the bogus theory that English is not an Indian language. We declare that ‘English is Indian’. We study in English and preserve our buffalo cultural nationalism as against the unproductive forces of cow nationalism.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is the Director, Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, at Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad. The views expressed here are his own.
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BJP Must Choose: Either Sanatan Dharma or Constitution
The Constitution of India symbolises anti-sanatan rebellions over the ages.
The Dwija leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, speaking from their ruling position in Delhi, are trying to mislead the nation about sanatan dharma and its “inclusiveness”. Moving away from their usual Hindutva or Hindu religious rhetoric, they have put forward the notion of sanatan dharma. Though they started this by opposing DMK minister Udayanidhi Stalin’s statement about “eradicating sanatan dharma”, it is the primary internal ideological agenda of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the progenitor of the BJP, to push the Shudra-backward castes and Dalit-Adivasi forces to their pre-constitutional status.
The RSS and BJP seem to have concluded that the Muslims and Christians have already been pushed into a shell during their ten years in power at the Centre and in several states. Their ultimate agenda, especially of the classical Dwijas who operate through the RSS, seems to be that the backward castes and Adivasis must now be pushed back to their classical enslaved and semi-enslaved status.
Whether it is possible or not is a different issue—their drive is crystal clear.
How BJP Defines sanatan dharma
While attacking Udayanidhi in a press conference, Ravi Shankar Prasad, a senior BJP spokesperson, defined sanatan dharma as “eternal law”. But what is this eternal law? Prasad did not elaborate. Is it an eternal natural law or an eternal spiritual law? This, too, nobody knows. Per the Vedic rules, Sanatan only means traditional or old religious practice.
As we know the RSS-BJP understanding of it, sanatan dharma has three characteristics:
1) Maintaining the caste order without allowing the Shudras, Dalits or Adivasis liberation from bondage;
2) Performing yagnas and consuming ritual food after animal sacrifice;
3) The top two Dwija castes—Brahmins and Kshatriyas—are never supposed to work in the productive fields and should make the Shudras do those jobs in perpetuity.
Therefore, sanatan dharma defines the eternal duties of the Sanatans, Shudras, Dalits and Adivasis.
Revolts Against Sanatan Dharma
The first revolt against such an order came from Vardhamana Mahavira, the last of the 24 Tirthankars and founder of Jainism. Jainism turned to complete vegetarianism around the 7th century BCE as a response to the large-scale Vedic sacrifices (yajna) in which animals were killed. It allowed members of any caste to join the Jain sect as equals, and opposed the killing of any life form as violence.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah, a Jain, now supports sanatan dharma—which Jainism has opposed since the ancient period.
The second revolt came from Gautama Buddha. This was well-formulated with many of the earliest humanitarian principles. Buddhism opposed the caste system and supported the sramana philosophy as natural to all human beings. For them, working on farms or grazing animals was as dignified as preaching the Vedas.
Buddhism opposed animal sacrifices and proposed a balanced food culture of meat and non-meat (or vegetarian, as it is now known) as the everyday foods for humans. It saved animal life and allowed animal use for agricultural tasks, like the bull used to plough. Sanatan dharma opposed all these Buddhist ideas as anti-Vedic.
The Buddha described sanatan dharma or Vedism as unnatural and inhuman. According to him, human equality was part of the law of nature, while sanatan dharma believed in the opposite—permanent human inequality. The conflict between Buddhism, Jainism and the Sanatana school continued until the Muslims captured India from the North West.
History is mostly silent for quite some time after that.
Medieval Revolts
The subsequent major revolt against sanatan dharma and Indian Islamic spirituality came in the medieval era from Sikhism. The Guru Granth Sahib laid down several principles that respected the dignity of labour. No Sikh guru accepted the caste system, particularly Brahmanism, as a humane or respectable practice. That was why, right since inception, Sikhism stressed that all its adherents must participate in agricultural work.
The strong rural production ethic of the Sikhs of Punjab came from the indignity of labour in sanatan practices. It never asked the followers to go into seclusion or isolation—the tapasyapractice by an individual—to realise divinity or perfect one’s soul. Sikhism rejected the idea of Brahman as divine.
It asked its followers to work and worship in communes. Though in actual practice, it has some elements of caste, there is no permission or religious sanction in the Guru Granth Sahib for caste and untouchability. Any Sikh child can go for training in the priesthood. This created a crisis in the Brahmanism of Western India.
If the RSS-BJP rulers make sanatan dharma the ruling ideology of India, it will spark a Sikh revolt. That is one reason why Dr BR Ambedkar wanted to embrace Sikhism as an alternative to Sanatanism.
Revolt of Arya Samajists
In the 19th century, Swami Dayanand Saraswati, from the Punjab region and the Brahmin community, emerged with a new interpretation of Vedic spirituality. He believed Varna dharma and yagyas were introduced by unethical Sanatanists. He started recruiting people from all castes into the Arya Samaj. Consuming food together—vegetarian, of course, but ignoring the traditional caste hierarchy—was made normal in the Arya Samaj. Women were recruited to study the Vedas and preach them.
Therefore, his contemporary Sanatanists opposed the Arya Samaj, its admitting people from any caste and women into the study of Sanskrit and mantra patana. This enraged the Brahmins and Kshatriyas and massive clashes erupted in North India between the Sanatanists and the Arya Samajists. Finally, his believers say, the believers in sanatan dharma killed him by poisoning his food. Though Arya Samaj was anti-santana, it was not as well-organised as Buddhism and Sikhism. Hence, it remained a weak movement.
Phule-Ambedkar Anti-Sanatan Movements
Mahatma Jyotirao Phule’s Satyashodhak Samaj(truth-seeking society) and BR Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste awakened the Shudras and the Dalits in a new, modern, universalist and democratic way. They critiqued the entire history of sanatan dharma and assessed the role of anti-sanatan schools. Phule proposed an entirely new religion, while Ambedkar embraced Buddhism and gave it a new modern direction called Navayana Buddhism.
The BJP-led central government has entered into a profound contradiction by supporting sanatan dharma and Ambedkar’s Constitution simultaneously. The Constitution of India embodies all anti-Sanatan struggles.
Anti-Sanatan Movements in South India
In the southern states, the Basava movement of Veerashaiva was a powerful anti-santan revolt in the 12th century. Basava, though born in a Brahmin family, revolted against the sacred thread or janeu, fought the caste order, and promoted numerous women and men from the so-called lower castes. The Shudra Lingayat and Vokkaliga communities became followers of Basava, rejecting Brahmin and Kshatriya authority.
As happened during the Sikh rebellion, mostly the Shudra agrarian castes in Karnataka became the followers of the Lingayat spiritual movement. They established their mutts, which operate with Shudra mattadhipatis or chiefs.
In Karnataka, the Adishankara peethas established by Brahmins with the new philosophy of Advaita parallel the Lingayat peethas.
The Anubhava Mantapas of Basava were casteless spiritual congregational centres. The Lingayat religion gives women a major place. Akka Mahadevi, a Kuruba (from the shepherd community) in medieval times and Gauri Lankesh, a Lingayat in our time, became strong followers of Basava. Remember that Lankesh was killed by the believers in sanatan dharma.
From the same tradition emerged Sree Narayana Guru, who opposed sanatan dharma and mobilised the Ezhava community, which, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was treated as an untouchable and un-seeable community by the Brahmins in Kerala. Narayana Guru has become a counterbalance to Adi Shankara in the same state.
Periyar’s Dravida Movement
The final blow to sanatan dharma in the South came from Periyar Ramasami’s Dravida Khazgam movement. It defined sanatan dharma as an “Aryan racist” and “Brahmin casteist” religion. They drew a subtle difference between sanatan dharma and Hinduism. This was the most intensive and tension-ridden movement against the Sanatan Brahmanism of the Dravida Shudra-Dalit social forces in South India.
It became a prominent political and electoral issue for the first time. Though Periyar began the movement as an atheist thinker, he drew a line between the agrarian Shudra-Dalit spiritual and Brahmin spiritual culture.
Annadurai and Udayanidhi’s grandfather Karunanidhi emerged as powerful mobilisers of the movement, giving the Tamil masses an unparalleled opportunity and ability to fight the vegetarian Tamil Santana Brahmanism. They used political, cultural (including cinema) and literary forms in their struggle. Karunanidhi used his ability to write film scripts to mesmerise the Tamil cultural and spiritual social base.
Udayanidhi is also a popular film actor; and is part of a tradition that uses cinema to take on the RSS and BJP’s Sanatan revivalist efforts. The BJP’s External Affairs Minister at the Centre, S Jaishankar, and Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman represent the Tamil Sanatan Brahmin saga. Periyar fought the Sanatan Brahmin representative C Rajagopalachari. Karunanidhi and Annadurai contested Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi’s Brahmanical mediation-ism and stood by the Shudra, OBC, Dalit masses and defended their right to representation.
Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin and his son Udayanidhi realise that the BJP is pursuing Sanatanism with a new diabolism that includes spewing vitriol against Muslims and Christians. They know its ultimate goal is to subdue the Shudras, Dalits, Adivasis and women with a slow but systematic revivalism of sanatan dharma. However, this agenda of the BJP is likely to prove self-destructive.
The author is a political theorist, social activist and author of ‘The Shudras: Vision For New Path’ with Karthik Raja Kuruppusamy. His next book will be The Shudras: History From Field Memories. The views are personal.
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The Clash of Cultures review: A primer on ground reality of Dalits, OBCs in Modi’s India
The controversy over caste census and the demand by the OBCs for reservations in iobs and education lend Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd’s The Clash of Cultures the immediacy it needs
John Dayal
21 Sept 2023
The Hindu right wing, which has been ruling India for the last ten years, considers Professor Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd one of its most stinging gadflies outside of the parliamentary Opposition in the country. For over thirty of his 70 years of life, he has punched holes in the policies of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, calling his doles and statements on Dalits as not only mere lip service, but a sinister act to deny agency to the former untouchable castes, while further strengthening the upper castes and crony capitalists who uphold his parent political group, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
In doing so, Modi, his Bharatiya Janata Party and the RSS provide sinews to an Islamophobic and anti-Christiaan rhetoric that poses a constant threat to the unity of India, its constitutional secularism, and its otherwise pacific culture.
I have known Kancha Ilaiah (Ilaiah ought to be pronounced like you would the name of the Prophet Isaiah, he told me once so very long ago) for about thirty years, call him a friend, and follow his writings as indicative of a bridge between the early intellectuals and leaders from mahatma Jyotirao Govindrao Phule (1827-1890) and DD Kosambi (1907-1966) to Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891-1956), and the modern writers from the Dalit and backward communities who too are treading a brave and often lonely path in the national discourse heavily invested with violent religious and nationalist rhetoric.
The genie of hate and a deaf state
Despite strong criticism from fellow academics and abuse from Modi’s surfeit of friends in the media, Professor llaiah has been unsparing and unafraid in his criticism of the varna system, the caste stratification which provides the steel frame of the Hindu, or Santana faith which is the religion of 80 per cent of India’s more than 1.30 billion population (estimated, as the 2011 decadal census has not yet been carried out).
He has taught political science at Osmania University in Hyderabad, north capital of Telangana. He was one of the early ones to testify internationally on the continuance and possible strengthening of the caste stranglehold despite decades of Independence. He spoke at the US Congressional hearing on ‘The Abolition of Untouchability: the Key to Stability in India’, describing the roots and the ongoing reality of violence and discrimination against Dalits.
For those who may not have seen his many books, the collection of his many essays published in newspapers, magazines, academic journals, and pamphlets, The Clash of Cultures: Productive Masses Vs Hindutva-Mullah Conflicting Ethics is an important primer on the ground reality of the Dalits and the Other Backward Classes (OBCs. The current controversy on whether India should have a caste census and the demand by the OBCs for reservations in jobs, education, and political presence, provide the volume the immediacy it needs in this age of Google and 30-word news capsules.
Ilaiah sets the tone, and brings us up-to-date, in his 10-page introduction which by itself deserves place in any contemporary anthology someone may want to edit on the million mutinies – that hackneyed phrase which still serves a purpose – in contemporary India where an impending general election in 2024 has released the genie of communal and targeted hate that often leads to violence, and a state which, by turns, is deaf to the developments, or causes its agencies to add fuel to the fire. The police, as always, look on, or turn away their gaze.
Brahminism and Islamism
He writes “Brahminism and Islamism have become bitter enemies after demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992. Brahminism took revenge against the Indian Islamic culture by deploying the Shudra and Dalit muscle power and now it is in control of political power at Delhi with a total grip on the productive masses of India.”
“Brahminism yielded to Islamism for centuries. It lost power to the British. But it has been in control of the Shudra/Dalit/Adivasi masses for millennia. Brahminism was in control of them during the Muslim rule and the British rule. But so far the Shudra/Dalit/Adivasi forces never established their control over Brahminism. If there is a cultural war between Brahmanism and Islamism, who wins? We do not know. Globally speaking, Islamism is bigger and stronger. But Brahminism is more cunning. It can make the Shudra/Dalit/Adivasi masses cannon fodder in the name of ‘We Are All Hindus’.”
He wrote these weeks before Modi declared India would henceforth be known as Bharat. The Constitution had called it “India that is Bharat”. A subtle but well-marked difference.
Ilaiah picks on the PM almost instantly. “Modi declared himself as an Other Backward Class (OBC) person, without telling the nation whether his family/caste has roots in the Shudra or Bania (as many Banias also acquired OBC certificates) heritage. The Shudra/OBC masses have a culture of production of a whole range of food and civilizational commodities, technologies and instruments which is different from what the RSS/BJP top leaders believe and practise. That will lead to cultural clashes as the RSS/BJP top leaders keep hegemonising their own culture over the other cultures.
A democratic state, slowly subverted
The book explores this in well-chosen articles bunched in three sections dealing with each of the groups he discusses. In some ways, he is at his best while analysing the standoff between the Dalit-OBC and the BJP, while his brief discussions on Islam touch upon the critical support needed for the religious minority’s existential struggle. However, there are also areas of criticism, particularly with regard to the role of the Mullahs and the political elite that have held control, but failed to shepherd the community in the years since Independence.
llaiah is right in saying that sections of Catholics – wrongly singled out Jesuits who have often challenged the regime – have been roped into the RSS/BJP networks and they are willing to serve them. Similarly, a section of Shia Muslims (the majority of Indian Muslims, over 85%, belong to the Sunni branch of Islam) has been roped into the RSS/BJP ranks and they played a critical role in stabilising the RSS/BJP. During the BJP/RSS rule, India is likely to become an unstable and conflicting civil society, and even the democratic state may be slowly subverted.
Islam, which occupied vast regions of the Islam, which occupied vast regions of the Indian sub-continent, built a strong counterculture to the age-old Aryan Brahminic culture. In a way, Islam weakened Aryan Brahmanism more than Indian Christianity because Islam took away Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh historically from the fold of Aryan Brahmanism and established a big Islamic cultural Asia.
The clash of civilisations
The Sangh Parivar is using the international and national tension between Muslims and Christians to their advantage, he writes. The anti-Muslim feelings that grew after 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks in several parts of the world fixated the Muslim position. The Hindutva forces used the occasion to establish more controls on not only Muslims but others as well. The disunity and unfriendly atmosphere between Muslims and Christians helped the Sangh Parivar to win the 2014 elections. Subsequent to that^ election, they have mounted a series of cultural attacks on Muslims and Christians through their campaigns of Ghar Wapsi, Love Jihad, Cow protection, beef ban, Triple Talaq, Uniform Civil Code, FCRA issues and so on.”
llaiah says the Sangh Parivar intellectuals celebrate Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilization’ thesis, which predicted a major clash between the Christian and Islamic civilisations. What Huntington talked about was that those two biggest religious cultures of the world – Christian and the Muslim – would create conditions of World War Ill. The Sangh thinks that such a clash between the Christian culture and Islamic culture would give scope to the Brahminic culture to gain global acceptability. If World War Ill is fought on cultural issues, India will become the epicentre of that war.” Islamic Pakistan, and India, brandish nuclear weapons.
The Cold War protagonists, with their nuclear arsenals, were 5,000 kilometers apart. India and Pakistan share a border. Ilaiah is no military strategist, but he may not be far from what many others in civil society fear.
About the Author
John Dayal is a human rights activist and author
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Bharat, a Casteist and Patriarchal Name
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd | 20 Sep 2023
The RSS-BJP’s idea to reframe Hinduism as Sanatana Dharma and India as Bharat are interlinked and damaging to India.
Image Courtesy: PTI
Under the leadership of a Prime Minister who claims a backward class identity, the central government is trying to unsettle the idea of calling this nation “India”. At the G20 Summit, his government showcased the name Bharat instead of India, the name most commonly used by ordinary people, governments, civil society, and writers and thinkers globally. It is by the name “India” that this modern democratic nation is known to the world.
In India, too, when universities build universally understandable knowledge, research centres work, or in the English media, whether print or visual, the name India has featured right from the days of the freedom struggle.
Bharat and Hindustan are used within India in language discourses and writings. Most Muslim leaders and scholars, and even Hindutva leaders and scholars, use the name Hindustan in their speeches and writings. But in every state, writers and speakers, especially in the South Indian languages, use Bharat or Bharata Desham.
Simultaneous to the Bharat idea, the BJP power structure has thrown up another discourse—obviously with the OBC Prime Minister’s approval—to use “Sanatana Dharma”, not “Hinduism” as much, to describe the religion.
Both ideas—Sanatana Dharma and Bharat—are interlinked. They originated in ancient Sanskrit literature—the Vedas, Upanishads, Ramayana, and Mahabharata, up to Kautilya’s Arthasahstra and Manu’s Dharma Shastra. They reflect the cultural heritage of the ancient Brahmin, Kshatriya and Vaishya communities. The ancient Shudras (today’s backward classes or OBCs), the Mlecchas (Dalits) and the Vanavasis or Adivasis were oppressed and exploited in that cultural domain. The Kshatriya kings, Brahmin saints, and priests treated the productive masses worse than animals.
Even when the name Bharat was adopted for India, a modern free country, it came from two sources—the Ramayana’s dynastic male king, Bharata, who was said to have ruled for the fourteen years when Rama was in vanavasa (dwelling in the forest). The second source is Dushyanta’s son Bharata in the Mahabharata. Does not an OBC Prime Minister know that during the Vedic era, the OBCs, then known as Shudras, had no rights? They could not read and write or even perform tapasya (religious penance).
Does the Prime Minister not know that women in those times had no rights in any sphere of human life? Leave alone the Shudra or Chandala women—even Brahmin, Kshatriya and Vaishya women had no spiritual, social or economic rights.
After considerable debate in the Constituent Assembly, it was decided Article 1 would use the name “India, that is Bharat”, but the fundamental philosophical direction of the Constitution of India is in the Preamble. And the term used there is “We, the People of India”. The word Bharat does not feature in the Preamble. It does not say, We, the People of India, that is Bharat”.
Why did Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Kayastha and Khatri (Dwija) members of the Constituent Assembly accept “India” in the Preamble without Bharat? After all, Dr Rajendra Prasad, who belonged to the Kayastha community, was the chairman of the Constituent Assembly.
It is because the name India has its roots in the Indus civilisation—it did not emerge from a particular caste ruler’s name, male or female. Nor did it arise from any dynastic source. By contrast, the name Bharat is not only the name of a male ruler but a Kshatriya dynastic one.
The OBCs, Dalits and Adivasis must oppose the Prime Minister, his party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)—their mother organisation—if they try taking India back to a classical Varna-dharmic and dynastic name. Those who follow Buddhism, Sikhism and all Dravidian sects must fight against it, too.
On the one hand, the BJP says it is against dynastic rule—how can it then promote the dynastic and patriarchal name of an ancient monarch for a modern nation?
The followers of Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, the Lingayats, and Dravidians of all sects and faiths cannot accept the mono-name Bharat. Indian civilisation was shaped through achievements far advanced for its times. The ancient Harappan towns and cities throughout the Indus region are a testament to its achievements.
That civilisation was created with the collective efforts of our ancestors long before the institutions of caste, patriarchy, monarchies and dynasties evolved. It was built before religious books were written, and today’s religions arrived on the scene. That civilisation was not based on what was written in some books but on the agrarian, artisanal, animal and fish economythat people of those times built. If even Mesopotamia and Jericho could not match that civilisation, why don’t the RSS and BJP want us to own that civilisation? It is because India of the Indus civilisation had nothing to do with race or caste, as the name India makes clear. Those are the value-neutral roots of all Indians living here today and who will live here in the future—which the casteist, patriarchal and anti-production culture cannot accept or tolerate.
But that civilisation, the roots of the human tree on which the Shudras, Dalits, Adivasis Buddhists, Sikhs, and Dravidians have advanced, cannot allow the recapture of this nation by bulldozing the foundational name, India.
India stands for a plural, secular, productive and scientific origin. Why does the BJP want to erase a pre-Vedic civilisation—in which Shudras, Dalits, Adivasis, Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Kayasthas, Khatris Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, and Sikhs all belong—and impose a name on the nation that mirrors the Brahmanical history of post-Vedic times?
How does an OBC Prime Minister, who is said to command all central structures, allow such an anti-OBC, anti-Dalit and anti-Adivasi agenda to take precedence over a civilisational identity that represents all Indians?
When the Prime Minister promised in 2013 that he would pursue Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas, Sabka Vishwas (run a government for all Indians), did he tell all Indians that the casteist, dynastic patriarchal name Bharat would come to represent all Indians?
This is not Sabka Saath. It is misleading the OBC, Dalit, and Adiavsi working masses—including those in his government and party.
The Narendra Modi government projected India as a vegetarian nation at the G-20 Summit. The RSS and BJP have every right to promote vegetarianism, but its bounds are within these organisations. The Prime Minister might be a vegetarian by training or choice, but India as a nation is not vegetarian. Lust for power has them draining this historical civilisation of its lifeblood in the guise of pursuing the non-violence of vegetarianism. Globally, no sensible human being accepts such partisan bulldozing of this nation’s civilisation and culture with one-sided projections.
The BJP rulers are not greater nationalists than those who fought the British and institutionalised democracy and constitutionalism in this country. They are slowly moving in the opposite direction than the vision unfolded before the nation during the campaign before the 2014 Lok Sabha election. The trajectory the RSS and BJP have put India on will cost the nation much more than can be visualised now.
The author is a political theorist, social activist and author of ‘The Shudras: Vision For New Path’ with Karthik Raja Kuruppusamy. His next book will be The Shudras: History From Field Memories. The views are personal.
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Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd | Bharat, symbol of brute power
‘India’, an inclusive term, embodies our social, spiritual and civilisational roots. ‘Bharat’ has drunk deeply of Sanatan Dharma’S brutal brew of caste, race and masculinity. Dalits/adivasis must oppose its adoption
(Illustration by Tanmoy Chakraborty)
ISSUE DATE: Sep 15, 2023
After opposition parties adopted the acronym INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance), Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other BJP leaders attacked it as an indication of the Opposition’s colonial mindset. Followed by RSS sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat, they asked people to use “Bharat instead of India” to instil a sense of “national pride”. Thus started the name-change game plan of the RSS/ BJP. They are now trying to project it as part of their decolonisation agenda. Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s final adoption of the name ‘India’ in the Preamble of the Constitution—“We the people of India”—has priority over the way it was used in Article 1: “India, that is Bharat”. Why did he prioritise India over Bharat as the name of the country, though both were used in the Constitution?
The oppressed castes of India were starting to be conscious of their rights by the time the Constitution was adopted in 1950. The name Bharat stemmed from the Sanatan heritage in post-Vedic times and has caste/ racial connotations. The name of the subcontinent, India, is more acceptable as it mirrors our most ancient advancement. It unites all under a common identity—Dravidian, Aryan and Mongoloid races and the teeming agrarian productive masses. Most such productive masses exist now in social categories like Shudra (OBC), Dalit and Adivasis. The name of this country must reflect their contribution too. ‘Bharat’ has no such civilisational significance; it does not encompass the long-existing productive civilisation of this subcontinent.
The name India indicates the subcontinent’s social, spiritual, cultural and civilisational roots, not just of the present land mass of the nation-state. It encompasses the Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Muslim, Christian and Vedic religions.
‘Bharat’, whether it originated from Dasaratha’s Kshatriya dynasty in the Ramayana or Dushyanta’s Kshatriya dynasty of the Mahabahrata, has its roots in male dynastic upper-caste rulers. Why should it be acceptable to women, apart from Shudras/ Dalits/ Adivasis, who all have problems with the Kshatriyaness of the name? It symbolises monarchical brute power, not our ancient republican heritage.
The Indus civilisation, from which the name India emerged through several—Greek, Latin, Persian etc.—twists and turns, reflects collective labour power, as well as the science and technology devised by our ancestors from pre-patriarchal Vedic times. The Indus source is a secular one; it does not hark back to our religious/ caste roots.
If colonial use of ‘India’ is the main cause for changing it, the term ‘Hinduism’, which was popularised and used widely in colonial times, also needs to be dropped. Before colonialism, all extant records have ‘Hindoo’ or ‘Hindu’, while the Brahmanical religion was referred to as ‘Sanatan Dharma’. Muslim rulers and the East India Company coined ‘Hinduism’ to mean the Sanatan Dharma. The name Hinduism for that religion did not exist in any written text—either in Sanskrit or regional languages—before Muslim and British rulers used it. Muslim rulers did not use ‘India’, but the name Hindustan. That name incorporates both religion (‘Hindu’) and land (‘sthaan’).
The use of ‘Hinduism’ should thus be relinquished by the RSS/ BJP forces to oppose both Muslim and British rule. An ideal nationalist name for their religion could be ‘Sanatan’. Then the Shudras/ Dalits/ Adivasis can draw a clear line between them and Sanatans. The concept of Sanatan stands for varna dharma. Dr Ambedkar and E.V. Ramasamy ‘Periyar’ have written about the close ties between caste and Sanatan Dharma.
The BJP in general and Narendra Modi in particular keep on attacking the dynastic rule of the Nehru family. How come the same BJP/ RSS forces now prefer a Kshatriya dynastic name for the country itself? The PM’s aircraft already has ‘Bharat’ written in Hindi. The government used ‘Bharat’ at the G-20 summit. If the country’s name is changed to Bharat during the Modi regime, all the PM’s speeches against dynastic rule boil down to hypocrisy.
Ambedkar had an idea that a name like India shall reflect his vision where there should not be oppression of caste, religion, class or gender. He rejected many Sanatanists’ demands in the Constituent Assembly that India should be named Bharat, not India. If ‘India’ is dropped by this government, Shudras/ Dalits/ Adivasis of India must oppose the move with all the might at their command. n
—Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, activist and author
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If only the Indian communists emulate the path of ‘Gaddar’!
KANCHA ILAIAH SHEPHERD· SEPTEMBER 16, 2023
Gummadi Vittal Rao—Gaddar— lived a life of song, dance and revolution. The State put six bullets in his body. Not only did he survive, he nursed one of them for 25 years. That bullet is now buried with him as a testimony of his life and times.
GADDAR’S unexpected death on August 6, 2023 and his Buddhist burial as thousands thronged to catch a last glimpse of the dearly departed shall pave a new way for Indian communists.
Gummadi Vittal Rao, also known as Gaddar, was active in the Naxalite–Maoist insurgency, as well as the movement for Telangana’s statehood.
Prior to his death, he was known as a communist revolutionary singer, lyricist and stage performer.
A life of public performance as a revolutionary singer in villages and cities, facing state repression for decades, took his songs to almost every house.
Even the few years he spent underground did not douse his popularity. In fact quite the contrary.
He faced bullets fired by State agencies in 1997. He nursed a bullet in his body for the rest of his life and it has now been buried along with him. It stands witness to the trials and tribulations of this balladeer for centuries.
Communists, socialists, ex-communists and atheists must realise that Gaddar turning to Navayāna Buddhism in his death was a revolutionary counterpoint to the Hindutva forces in the present atmosphere.
If only his body was burnt to ashes, the ash from his burnt flesh and bones would have suffused the bullet with an unintelligible memory. In that case, no one would be able to decode the amalgamation as historical testimony, though!
A Maoist, Buddhist and Ambedkarite; and an eternal revolutionary
Gaddar lived the life of a Maoist and, later, as a Buddhist Ambedkarite, but his death with a Buddhist ritualistic burial made him a representative of peace after having been a sufferer for 25 years of painful days and wounded nights.
Despite his struggles, he never stopped writing, singing and dancing till his death.
Communists, socialists, ex-communists and atheists must realise that Gaddar turning to Navayāna Buddhism in his death was a revolutionary counterpoint to the Hindutva forces in the present atmosphere.
His path has become that of a communist-Buddhist nationalist alternative to Hindutva nationalism.
There is a major solution here.
Atheism does not perturb Hindutva forces as they have created an atmosphere of ‘religion as superstition’ with a grip of mantric mysticism over the masses.
If all communists, socialists and atheists follow the path of Gaddar, who lived as an unparalleled revolutionary all his life with a most creative message through song, dance and speech that no contemporary communist could do, India will surely find a new path.
He was a philosopher effectively communicating his philosophy through lyrics and music.
He was a master singer with a melodious tone and the best of performers, whose handsome face and robust body worked like a rubber robot on the dias in public.
Normal cultural heroes do become social-spiritual reformers. But Gaddar blended many anti-Hindutva essences into one inside himself.
After Dr B.R. Ambedkar, it is Gaddar who has shown a new path for the Dalit family, communist culture and Telugu land, which was the place of the first major anti-feudal armed struggle of Telangana.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh can claim Jyothi Basu, Charu Majumdar, Puchalapalli Sundarayya, Kondapalli Seetharamaiah, Tariela Nagi Reddy, Devulapalli Venkateswara Rao and Chadra Pulla Reddy as Hindus.
Normal cultural heroes do become social-spiritual reformers. But Gaddar blended many anti-Hindutva essences into one inside himself.
But these people never understood the alternative spiritual and caste-centred Hinduism, which is now being equated with Sanatana Dharma.
In India, given the history of Brahmanism that takes the shape of every snake, it can incorporate anybody but certainly not Buddha, Ayothidasar, Ambedkar and Gaddar, because they left evidence in every step of their life alternatives to Brahmanism, Sanatanism and Hinduism.
Sitaram Yechury, Prakash Karat and D. Raja also cannot escape their enlistment in Hinduism, if they do not swiftly declare their spiritual alternative.
Gaddar’s Navayāna Buddhism can counter the false Hindutva nationalism with a blend of communism, socialism and nationalism.
He lived with a bullet sitting in his spine for more than 25 years. That life is unparalleled in human history. He survived six bullets that pierced different parts of his body.
We do not know any soldier who fought any war, including World War I and II, who survived six bullets in the body and lived with a bullet in the body for such a long time. Gaddar’s life is unique in human history.
Such a life made him a man of massive popularity and loving respect.
In the united Andhra Pradesh before bifurcation of the state in 2014 into two states, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Gaddar had a huge fan following for his songs and dance.
His commitment to the cause of human liberation from hunger and exploitation made him live a life of suffering, while singing and dancing.
Though later some Andhra people might have disliked his role in the Telangana movement that fought for separation of the state from 1996 till 2014, he remained very popular in Andhra Pradesh after the division too.
As a writer and artist he was a unique political, literary and cultural icon known all over India.
The manifest symptoms of a malady
His divorce from the Maoist party in 2012 was about serious ideological issues that he put before his underground party.
He proposed that the party should fight against caste and class, by recognising Jyotirao Govindrao Phule, also known as Mahatma Phule and Ambedkar, along with Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong, to suit the Indian conditions.
He also started writing songs and started performing about caste’s negative role in India.
The Maoist party rejected his proposal and issued a show cause notice against him in 2010. His work was considered anti-party and his understanding was dubbed anti-Marxist.
As he had anticipated his expulsion, Gaddar resigned from the party in 2012.
His efforts to change the line of his party to suit Indian caste–class exploitation should not go unrecognised.
He openly declared his spiritual and social allegiance to Ambedkarite Navayāna Buddhism and wrote several songs on Dalit and women’s oppression.
His song on women’s wage-free work at home “O my husband, what is the wage for my washing clothes and dishes; what is the wage for my sweeping the house and giving birth to a baby and feeding the baby to become a future human being” tells about the deepest human essence in him.
He was not a mechanical Marxist, Buddhist or Ambedkarite, but a human being of the highest sensitivity. He continued to be a thinker, writer, singer and dancer till his last days.
Just before his death he wrote an elegy in a song about his own death. In that he mourned, “Who will preserve the bullet sitting in his body?”
Of course, it is now preserved in his grave as fossil evidence of the rulers’ brutality on humanity.
It is a known fact that communist leaders in India never accepted social reform as a necessary issue along with class struggle.
Indian social reform encompasses spiritual reform along with dignity of labour and women’s equality with men.
He was not a mechanical Marxist, Buddhist or Ambedkarite, but a human being of the highest sensitivity. He continued to be a thinker, writer, singer and dancer till his last days.
The final form of that would be annihilation of caste, abolition of poverty, hunger and women’s inequality.
However, in spiritual terms, the Indian communists declared themselves as atheists and basically focused on class questions as economic determinists.
But in reality most of them die as Hindus. Their atheism in day-to-day life does not relate itself to any form of social reform.
Gaddar gave them a major social and spiritual reform programme in his death.
Caste-blighted birth redeemed by a death seeking freedom
Ambedkar said: “I had the misfortune of being born with the stigma of Untouchability. However, it is not my fault. But I will not die a Hindu, for this is in my power.” He became a Buddhist and died.
Gaddar was born as an Untouchable, as it was not in his power.
He worked in the communist revolutionary party which had many armed squads. He was their Parja Youdda Nauka (the ship of a people’s war).
After decades as a mover of that warship he realised that without Ambedkar, who used the power in his hands at the time of his death to die as a Buddhist with a message of peace, change would be possible.
The guns he supported all his life cannot liberate from Untouchability. He, therefore, became a Buddhist and got liberated from Untouchability.
More importantly, as a person who fought against that a State system that burnt hundreds of dead bodies, killing people in fake encounters after torturing them so that no evidence of torture could be left behind, Gaddar wanted his body and the bullet to be buried at a marked place in the premises of the English school that he built for the children of his basti.
If those so-called encounter bodies were buried even after decades they could have been exhumed and re-examined. Gaddar, therefore, preferred to be buried along with the bullet in his body.
It was Chandrababu Naidu who had blood on his hands as he was the ruler of the undivided Andhra Pradesh at the time.
The guns he supported all his life cannot liberate from Untouchability. He, therefore, became a Buddhist and got liberated from Untouchability.
Interestingly, the party was named by Naidu’s father-in-law as Telugu Desam Party and Gaddar is the most powerful Telugu writer, singer and communicator that the Telugu land has ever produced.
The nation will excuse if Chandrababu, at least now, goes to his body and the bullet in the grave in the school, Mahabodhi Vidyalaya, prostrates, and tells the truth about what happened on April 6, 1997 when he was the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh.
He can certainly live as a human being after that confession for the rest of his life.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author. His latest book, The Shudras: Vision for a New Path co-edited with Karthik Raja Karuppusamy, examined many issues of Shudras. Currently, he is also working on a book titled, The Shudra Rebellion: History from the Field Memories.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd 