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A British Lesson in Tolerance for ‘Hindu’ India
A British Lesson in Tolerance for ‘Hindu’ India
Rishi Sunak’s candidature for prime minister shows us how truly unenlightened the ‘world’s largest democracy’ is.
Britain’s Rishi Sunak meets Tory members at Fontwell Park Racecourse as part of his campaign to be leader of the Conservative Party and the next prime minister, in Fontwell, Britain, July 30, 2022. Photo: Joe Sene/Pool via Reuters
Rishi Sunak, a British politician of Indian origin, is in the running to be prime minister of the United Kingdom, representing the Conservative Party. After Kamala Harris’s attempt to be the Democratic Party’s candidate for American president, he is the most recent offspring of Indian-origin settlers in the West to try to reach the political pinnacle.
Britain was once the colonial master of India. From an Indian point of view, the British prime minister is the historical political head of an empire of exploitation – and also, let us remember, an empire of reform. But for British colonial rule, and the rights-oriented struggle for freedom against it, India would not have become a democratic, constitutional republic in 1947, however loudly we claim that the roots of our democracy lie in our ancient structures, whether Hindu or Buddhist.
All major aspects of our freedom struggle and colonial life were linked to the British political system. Particularly from the beginning of the 20th century, agitating Indians considered the British prime minister the symbol of colonial rule, the man to revile or to appeal to.
Given this historical context, that a man of Indian origin stands a realistic chance of becoming the British prime minister shows how the world is changing. At a time when India is experiencing a form of Hindu-nationalist apartheid, Christian Britain is engaged with a prime ministerial candidate who has stated that his religion is Hinduism. As member of parliament (and later chancellor of the exchequer) he took his oath with the Bhagavad Gita.
Now the same Hindu Sunak wants to go to 10 Downing Street. Sunak’s wife, Akshata, is the daughter of Hindu Indian billionaires. Sunak’s wealth is, quite rightly, a point of public debate, since economic and social class have long been features of British politics. But his religion is resolutely not seen as relevant. This certainly points to a notable new level of multicultural tolerance among the British electorate and the political class. In this respect, I suspect Britain is certainly more secular and multicultural than America. If Kamala Harris had presented herself publicly as a Hindu, I suspect she may not have made it to the winning Democratic ticket.
Anglican Christianity is Britain’s state religion. Queen Elizabeth is the head of the Church of England. Yet Rishi Sunak’s desire to be prime minister is not seen as anomalous on grounds of religion.
Back in India, what do the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party think about this Indian-origin Hindu being accepted as a possible prime minister of Britain? After all, they have marginalised India’s Muslims and Christians with a shameless agenda of religious majoritarianism. There isn’t a single Muslim on the treasury benches of either house of parliament, nor is there one in the Indian cabinet. (Under Boris Johnson, Britain had more Muslims in its cabinet than India!)
The RSS/BJP forces constantly boast of Hinduism being the “vishwa guru”. RSS literature is full of attacks on British and also Christian civilisational history, both as crusaders and colonial expansionists. They claim that Hinduism is the most tolerant religion in the world, notwithstanding the caste hierarchy and atrocities on Dalits. And in their historical narrative, even native Indian Muslims and Christians are treated as enemies.
In Britain today, Hindus are a small minority – around 1.6% of the population – and comprise very recent migrants and their descendants. Yet “minority-ism” does not seem to play a major role in Britain’s democratic competition. In the India of the RSS/BJP – or even of the Congress in days gone by – a Muslim or a Christian would not have been accepted as prime ministerial candidate. So much for the tolerance of Hinduism.
Britain bestrode a Christian colonial empire. Yet that Britain now allows Sunak to compete for the top job. No British opposition leader or even his party’s own competitors for prime minister have raised the question of his religion. His wealth, yes. His attitude toward the working class, yes. And his wife’s tax avoidance, yes. All very good questions in a democracy. (These questions, by the way, are rarely asked in India.)
I am agnostic on the outcome of Sunak’s bid. But I do know this: Britain, the mother of parliamentary democracy, is teaching India an important lesson in tolerance and equality. But India, alas, is no longer a country that is allowed to learn.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author. He is the author of Why I Am Not a Hindu: A Shudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture and Political Economy, and of Post-Hindu India: A Discourse in Dalit-Bahujan Socio-Spiritual and Scientific Revolution.
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From Draupadi Pandava to Droupadi Murmu | Forward Press
Without the Mandal struggle, the RSS-BJP, known as the Brahmin-Bania network, would not have chosen her as the presidential candidate. The Congress and the Left, frozen in Brahmanism as they are, have given the RSS-BJP a historical advantage, writes Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd
Droupadi Murmu, a Santali Tribal woman leader, getting elected as the 15th President of India is a milestone in the history of post-Mandal struggle, particularly for Adivasi emancipation from classical oppression. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will gain enormous mileage with her as president. Without the Mandal struggle, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the BJP, known as the Brahmin-Bania network, would not have chosen her as the presidential candidate. The Congress and the Left, frozen in Brahmanism as they are, have given the RSS-BJP a historical advantage.
By nominating a rich Kayastha leader from Bihar, from where the first president Rajendra Prasad (also a Kayastha) served two terms as the first president of independent India, the opposition parties led by the Congress committed a serious blunder. It appears that the Congress has not yet understood the changing political environment. Ever since prime-minister-to-be Narendra Modi declared that he was an Other Backward Class (OBC), caste calculations in India changed. And once he became prime minister, a Dalit, Ram Nath Kovind, was made president and a Shudra (Kamma), Venkaiah Naidu, was made vice-president. During the entire Congress-led United Progressive Alliance rule, the top ruling clique was mainly drawn from the Dwija castes (Brahmin, Bania, Kayashta, Khatri and Kshatriya) and also from Muslim feudal elite. Even the Pasmanda Muslims did not get any prominent role. Among Muslims, the BJP is luring Shias and Pasmandas. While the Left, by not studying the Indian caste system and adopting a suitable method of organizing, is disappearing from the national political scene, the Congress is getting more and more weakened.
Quite unexpectedly the RSS-BJP seems to have done a thorough study of the caste system and the Congress still seems to play the same old game. In addition, the Congress and all regional parties are under attack as dynasty parties.
Culturally, the RSS-BJP announcing as their presidential candidate a Tribal woman, with a normally unacceptable name Droupadi, which no Dwija or Shudra/OBC family was willing to give to their girl child in the known modern history, will send a strong reform signal. Draupadi Pandava was treated as an abnormal, rather immoral, woman with five husbands and given her assertive autonomous role, unlike Sita in Ramayana or other women in Mahabharata. She was not considered to be an acceptable Hindu Nari. Her life and role represented a matrilineal social condition which still has some social base among the Indian tribes. It appears that this Santhal woman was named Droupadi in defiance of the fact that independent women like the Draupadi of Mahabharata are not acceptable.
In keeping with her name, Droupadi Murmu rose with confidence and chose a political career. Now she will proudly be the first Adivasi, that too a woman, president. Having opposed the RSS-BJP’s ideology and politics all my life, I can say that this is the most progressive reformative step they have taken. The Congress left many such reform measures that have serious socio-political implications to the RSS-BJP, a right-wing network that has been even more staunchly against reform all these years. Now, they are putting down roots with such steps.
Having come to power with an anti-Muslim agenda, the RSS-BJP forces need to take some Shudra/OBC/Dalit castes and Adivasis with them to win elections and they are seriously repositioning themselves in the sociopolitical realm. This does not mean that they are opposed to the brahmanical spiritual system, which built the fourfold varna order.
From Draupadi of Mahabharata to Droupadi Murmu of 2022 the Hindutva forces have traversed the unusual terrain of cultural gimmick and change. The Hindu Dharma, to which the RSS-BJP claim ownership, treated tribals as Vanvasis (forest dwellers) without even allowing them to have the vision of a self-respecting citizen. They were deeply suspected to be the ultimate Christian force. But they are more than seven percent of the vote base, so they need to be engaged with some share in power. Draupadi Murmu as president thus plays a long-term beneficial role.
Those who condescendingly viewed the mythological Draupadi will now have to respect Droupadi Murmu as the first citizen of the nation and commander of our armed forces. No other woman with that name in the annals of India has been known for her role in public life. We have many Sitas, many Savitris and so on but not many Draupadis.
Finishing touches being given to painting of President-elect Droupadi Murmu
Nowhere in RSS literature has Draupadi Pandava been shown as an adorable heroine. Only recently Shantishree Dhulipudi Pandit, the vice-chancellor of Jawaharalal Nehru University, projected Draupadi Pandava and Sita as first feminists. However, I do not think any woman intellectual associated with the RSS-BJP, leave alone their men, agrees with that view. When she described Pandava Draupadi as an autonomous, powerful woman – who opposed her chief husband Dharma Raja (Yudhisthira) staking her in Judam – and Sita as a first single mother, she went into a new propositional narrative. This kind of narrative was not proposed by feminist scholars either. The character of Draupadi in Mahabharat was that of a powerful independent woman who did not accept the patriarchal authority of her five husbands in particular and men in general. As patriarchy held sway in the post-epic times, Indian men promoted only those women whose life showed total obedience to men conditioned by Manu’s code. In this patriarchal cultural heritage the name Draupadi disappeared from our lives. Droupadi Murmu has brought it back, giving us a feeling of cultural regeneration.
Shantishree’s narrative gains respectability with Draupadi Murmu becoming the president of India. I am sure Draupadi Murmu will outshine Pratibha Patil, the first woman president, a Maratha who did not leave behind any significant imprint of hers in Rastrapathi Bhavan and on the nation’s psyche. She did not do anything memorable for the women’s cause. K.R. Narayanan and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, for example, left their indelible imprint in the Rashtrapati Bhavan and in the national discourse on certain issues like caste, youth education and so on. Pratibha Patil could have done so, at least around women’s issues, if only she chose to play the role of the first woman president.
Draupadi Murmu’s presence in the Rastrapathi Bhavan itself will be a morale booster to Adivasi communities of India. The RSS-BJP will try to use that as political capital and win elections in parliament as well as in the states with large Adivasi populations. But that itself will not leave a memorable history for her as a woman president. She has to show transformative vision and ideas based on her long journey from a tribal village in Odisha to the Rastrapathi Bhavan. Apart from the tribals, the women of India expect from Draupadi Murmu some initiatives that will have a positive impact in their lives.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd कांचा इलैया शेपर्ड
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, author and activist. He has been a professor of Political Science at Osmania University, Hyderabad and director of the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy at Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad. He is the author of ‘Why I Am Not a Hindu’, ‘Buffalo Nationalism’ and ‘Post-Hindu India’
https://www.forwardpress.in/2022/07/from-draupadi-pandava-to-droupadi-murmu/
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Human As Christian-2
How labour and God shaped the world
As I went late to school in life, perhaps after eight years I was born, in mid 1960 (my school record birth day is 5 October, 1952), for quite some time I was with cattle and agrarian operations in my early juvenile days even after going to school in my village. Throughout the day I used to go with my father for shepherding or go to the agrarian fields with my mother. I used to observe what people spoke about their pains and pleasures in life. When there were heavy rains threatening the life of humans and cattle or when there was drought which delayed the planting of rice or jawar that also threatened their survival, they would speak in spiritual philosophical terms.
Whether it were shepherds in the meadows or farming men and women in the fields would say ‘God decides about everything, we depend only on God now ” (In Telugu language Annitiki Devude Dikku), generally looking upwards into the sky. They would never mention any name for God. God was God for them. God and human hope were deeply entangled with philosophical speculation.
I used to look up into the sky to find out that God, and wanted to see how God looks. Though God lies up there in the skies was the message that I got from all working people no image could be seen there. Neither image nor words to listen from God would come from the sky. The only sounds that were heard from the sky were that of thunder ( Urumu) in the rainy season. And also sudden sharp thunder light (merupu) would come and disappear. Otherwise what were normally seen everyday in the sky were Sun, Moon and Stars. I used to wonder, where was God in the sky; what was God’s message? No clarity in my mind. If you ask somebody there would not come any proper reply– “God is God” they would say.
I was also surprised when people say that everything–good, bad–depends on God, why work so hard? Why not depend on God for food and water? Of course, for a long time I did not understand the role of air in human life because it is not a material like food and water. But among the grown up people, though they were not educated and read any books, there was the idea of an invisible shapeless God deep in their psyche. But at the same time they also knew that without working by deploying their own physical labour food, water and other material resources do not come. Thus God and labour are so closely intertwined that they would think that they cannot survive without either of them. That relationship was established at a deeper philosophical level.
Here I am talking about the Indian masses, who are generally believed to worship multi-idols, the world over. Actually that is not their foundational spiritual belief. Productive labour of the historical masses and divine labour of creational God have deep historical psychological relationship. Idol worship is an aberration and a negative spiritual ideology that a group of superstitious forces like Brahmins constructed as a spiritual culture now called Hindu culture. However, all forms of idol worship will disappear in an historical progressive process. Labouring masses will respect only the creational God, but not destructional idol gods anywhere in the world.
Higher level of the economy of people will sustain only when the idea of God’s creation labour and people’s productive labour synchronize. The idle, but more organized religious groups like the Brahminic priests or lazy monks and Jesuits who do not engage with the theology of labour did cause enormous economic hardships to the productive masses historically.
They forced people to build temples, Viharas, and Masjids without linking them to the education of production knowledge and expanding knowledge of linguistics and science education. They all hung around the pure idea of heaven, Moksha or so called sorrow free life (like Buddhism). Only Christian churches combined literary education with an idea of sin free life. But they too did not focus much on God’s creation labour and human production labour and their inter connectivity.
In my view no human by birth is a sinner. Even in later life the productive forces (like Dalits and Shudras of India or the working classes of other countries) are not sinners. Those who eat without producing anything are sinners. Those who treat production as pollution but eat the labour power of producers are the gravest sinners in the world. Reforming such sinners is a major task of the universal spiritual systems.
At a philosophical level the ancient food production forces appeal, if not pray in a structured manner, to the abstract God, without thinking about any image of God in routine life. Indian life is full of evidence of such non-idol God worship. There is no name to that God. At the same time they strongly believe that their labour is as important as God is. This is a classical idea that work and God make their life holistic and realistic. It is a universal philosophical notion. This combination of working on the land and praying to God is universal. The idea of worshipping shapeless and formless ‘One God’ among educated and illiterate masses got strengthened after Jesus got crucified and later resurrected, in many parts of the world. But all civilization builders much earlier than that were aware of the idea of God in the same mode that Jesus propagated in tandem with labour as life.
As I said earlier the Harappan, Jericho, Athenian civilization builders even before the Bible as a spiritual book written around the idea of creational God knew the idea of abstract One God and they seriously trusted their labour power was received from the power of creational God.
This notion strongly exists even among the tribal masses the world over. The tribal idea of worshipping nature is not akin to idol worshipping. It is a continuation of the Harappan or pre-Harappan Indians, Mesepotomian and pre-Mesopotonian Middle Eastern people and Athenian and pre-Athenian Europeans. From tribalism to the post capitalist development of the world the human consciousness is shaped by God who is a crationist and human who is a by product of that creational process, has no shape and other name, but just God, as the illiterate working masses in the productive agrarian fields or the shepherds who were developing the animal economy believed.
In a textual mode only in the Bible Cain and Abel the first children of Adam and Eve, perhaps as twins (though Cain was said to to be the first born), started both agriculture and animal aconommy simultaneously. However, the history of evolutionary economics shows that domestication of animals was done much earlier than domestication of grain and fruit plants. That could be the reason, perhaps, for God preferring animal food to grain food (what is now known as pure vegetarianism) when offered by Cain and Abel. However, it is not very certain which started first and which later because Adam and Eve the first humans were known as only fruit eaters.
The present world is shaped with a philosophical inbuilt structural human consciousness that creational God and productive human labour need to be engaged with. The role of idol gods, worshiped by some humans for a long time has not given any constructive ideas to humanity for survival and well being, except fear and superstition. However, the world is likely to overcome idol worship sooner or later as it has no spiritual philosophical basis.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a socio-spiritual reformer and author in a caste ridden India. His books Why I am Not a Hindu, Post-Hindu India, Buffalo Nationalism, The Shudras–Vision For a New Path, Untouchable God, God As Political Philosopher–Buddha’s Challenge to Brahminism are meant to carry on the reform
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Is The Congress On Suicide Course?
The Congress Party’s ideological steps remind us of a famous saying of Lenin “ One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward’ not in a tactical sense of retreating and advancing with a progressive strategy in a given unfavourable political environment, but retreating in a more consistent manner with blindfolded vision. The present crisis is much bigger for the party than that it faced in the 1970s, with the JP movement, emergency and formation of the Janata Party that overthrew the party.
The rise of the Bharatiya Janatha Party under the leadership of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah in 2014 created a most difficult and unfavourable political environment that the grand old party with a huge history of experience of conducting movements and running administration for decades.
It appears that the top leadership does not have the political stamina and capabilities to face the unexpected turn of events one after the other. Most of its old top leaders, Sonia Gandhi, Man Mohan Singh and P.Chidambaram and so on have no experience of mass mobilization in their life time or conducting any agitations. But they controlled power for ten years during the UPA period. Man Mohan Singh and Chidambaram were in power during P.V.Narsimha Rao period also. But they had no grass root experience and never involved in the mass mobilization. The present BJP, on the other hand, have many who worked at the ground level, of course, with negative ideology of the Sangh system.
The Congress got largest number of seats, though less than 50 per cent. in 2004 and 2009 because of weak BJP under Vajpayee and L.K Advani because they also did not think of addressing the caste question. Under their control over the BJP structures, the opinion was that discussion on caste was negative and harmful. Now that understanding changed in the BJP structures, to a large extent.
The BJP used the caste card more skillfully than the Congress in 2014 elections and continues to do so. It won two elections with full majority very easily. The Other Backward Classes (OBCs) are roped in as the backbone of the BJP vote power. But their communal agenda, that constantly puts the Muslims and Christians in spot, is creating negative environment, which is likely to create major crisis in the deeply globalized economy. The response of the Muslim and Christian world to the recent Masjid-Mandir issues has a potential to disrupt the economy and the society. But the Congress is still in its blindfolded anti-OBC agenda. Hence it is likely to lose 2024 election as well.
The anxiety of the nation as to what will happen in 2024 could be seen everywhere. But that anxiety does not seem to bother the Congress intellectual leaders who ruled India through Rajya Sabha for several decades.
In this background the Congress held a Chintan Shibir at Udaipur. It created some hope with some new declarations. Of which the social justice, one family one post and two term limit to Rajya Sabha nomination were very significant.
But within few days the ten nominations for the Rajya Sabha have shown that all the three declarations were violated. Of the ten seats seven were given to Dwija (top upper ) castes. The list is here under:
1. P Chidambaram – Shettiar, Dwija
2. Jairam Ramesh – Brahmin, Dwija
3. Rajeev Shukla – Brahmin, Dwija
4. Pramod Tiwari – Brahmin, Dwija
5. Ajay Maken – Khatri, Dwija
6. Vivek Tankha – Kayastha, Dwija
7. Ranjeet Ranjan – Khatri, Dwija
8. Imran Pratapgarhi – Muslim
9. Randeep Surjewala – Jat, upper Shudra
10. Mukul Wasnik – Dalit
Even if we consider Ranjeet Ranjan as an OBC as she is Pappu Yadav’s wife, six are given to the Dwijas. However, no OBC in the country considers her to be their representative.
Look at the way two of its intellectual senior most leaders, P.Chidambaram and Jayaram Ramesh, violated two declarations of Udaipur–one family one post and two term- Rajya Sabha nomination. Jayaram Ramesh is an all time Rajya Sabha ruler and the party’s known intellectual face, without showing any understanding of the history of caste system. He also does not seems to be interested in checkmating the BJP. He againt became a Rajya Sabha law maker.
Chidambaram is a leader who seems to think that without he being in the house the Indian parliament would not be able make laws, deliberate ideas on economy. But Modi said in many election campaigns that ‘hard work not Harvard’ should rule India. The Shudra/OBCs who represent the agrarian hard work seem to believe Modi and do not read the unending columns of Chidambram in English media. The direction is clear. Many OBC youth understand the meaning of hard work vs Harvard now. Chidambaram’s son is already an MP and has not shown any new wisdom in the parliament, worse facing money laundering cases time and again.
Why did they accept this renomination if they are really serious about the party’s future? These two leaders have the ability to get anything in such a weakened party structure. Could not they have promoted two young leaders from grass roots by sidestepping? They do not recognize caste as a institutional reality. But the BJP recognizes and the people are responding. Greater education seems to make leaders more blind to social reality. Their writings are a living testimony for their caste blind intellectualism, which will never help to revive the party.
Chidambaram has taken many decisions when he was Home and Fiance Minister that the BJP uses to their advantage today. Chidambaram declared that the Telangana state will be granted when K.Chandrasekhar Rao was in hunger strike, which has gone in his favour. The Congress lost power once for all in Telangana, it appears. He changed the FCRA ( 2010) policy. Now the BJP is using it for its advantage by destroying many small employed livelihoods.
After Modi claimed that he was an OBC chaiwala and mobilized OBCs and also labour, those who were not habitual voters of the Bharatiya Janata Party voted for the party both in 2014 and also 2019. In 2024 that looks to be the future.
Even this has not woken up the Congress intellectual Rajya Sabha rulers and law makers. They do not even seem to understand that the BJP, which was known as Brahmin-Bania party, is now turned into multi-caste party by promoting more and more Shudra/ OBCs/Dalits into the power positions. The Congress never made an OBC as the Vice-Chancellor of JNU. Now the BJP made a first woman-OBC vice-chancellor of JNU. Does not that work in their favour by influencing young Shudra/OBC stsudents? The BJP’s present cabinet and Rajya Sabha list also shows the new caste composition.
The two national parties must compete for promoting new social forces into the process of system running. But the Congress is refusing to compete. What diversity does this Rajya Sabha list present? What secularism the Congress leaders preach when they do not understand the productive castes that constitute 52 per cent get just one seat out of 10 (Surjewala, a Jat) even after 75 years of Independence?
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a Political Theorist, Social Activist and Author. His books God As Political Philosopher, The Shudras–Vision For a New Path are well known.
https://countercurrents.org/2022/06/is-the-congress-on-suicide-course/
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Human As Christian
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St. Devasahayam’s Caste, Crucifixion And His Resurrection As A Global Shudra Saint
The canonization of the first ever layman of India, Devasahayam, or Lazarus (1712–1752) as saint, on the lines of Mother Theresa or on the lines of St.Peter, by the Vatican on 15 May, 2022 is historic in many strange ways. The human history of religions does not find a man of his kind of torturous life from birth, growth and death to become a saint in the Christian world. While he is being prayed for his sacrifice for the sake of other Indians by Christians, he is also being worshipped in Hindu mode with multi-flower garlands around the neck of his statue. Women and men beg for gifts (miracles in Chritian heritage) as they do in Hindu temples. One of the testimonies for granting his sainthood was of a woman who said “ he turned a dead foetus in her womb into a living baby after she worshipped him”.
Why his birth itself began with a unusual torture? He was not born to a man and woman in proper marriage, nor was he born to a virgin like Mary with her consent to God’s gift in the form of Jesus, before she was married to Joseph. Jesus lived with his mother and father, who adopted him knowing pretty well that that baby boy was not the son of any man on the earth. He was the son of Mary and Mary alone. But Joseph protected him from getting killed by Herod, the king and nurtured him in a family. He trained him to be a carpenter and educated him in Jewish history and scriptures till his 30th year.
Jesus’ birth in that form only tells that the future world may witness a woman who could procreate children without having an intercourse with man and that religions have to adjust to such a scientific birth of humans as well.
BORN IN SAMBANDAM
Devashayam was born in a system of wretched caste spiritual, cultural and Brahmanic superstitious hegemony over Shudra women. His mother was Devaki Amma, who belonged to the Shudra agrarian productive caste called Nair. He was an illegitimate child of a Brahmin priest working in a Hindu temple called Vasudevan Namboodiri. He was working in Adikesava Perumal temple at Thiruvattar. The relationship between Devaki Amma and Vasudevan Nambboodiri was not because of a love affair between them nor because they were married. She was not a prostitute earning money out of sex trade. Her sexual submission to Namboodiri was because a casteist coersion by Brahmins of that region to have sexual relations with Nair woman at will and leave the children to be nurtured by mother, without any responsibility. Such a relationship was called Sambandam (relationship between a Brahmin man and a Shudra woman) in that area.
The caste ritual system and the state power allowed such sambandam only by a Brahmin man and Shudra woman not a Shudra man with a Brahmin woman. If such reverse Sambandam was found, very harsh punishment was given to the Shudra man and Brahmin woman, including killing them. When Devasahayam as a Shudra was undergoing this human torture as child and as adult the Manu Dharma Shastra legal codes were being implemented by states under supervision of the Brahmin priestly forces in the Indian subcontinent.
WHY NEELAKANTAN PILLAI REBELLED?
The torture part of the Brahmin led sambandam was that the children would know who their biological father was, while living with mother at her parental home or outside alone doing agrarian works. Though many Nair families accepted such illegitimate children of their daughters and gave them some property rights, but for children born in sambandam, who live in families where there were other children with father and mother ( of his/her maternal uncle’s and so on) living together, it was a life of worst toruture. The worst part of it was that life was forced on the children like Devasahayam (before conversion Neelakantan Pillai) as god given. If he were to get the patrilineal heritage his last name should have been Nambbodiri. But he had to live with his mother’s caste name Pillai even in the eighteenth century. Some writers justified this kind of Brahmin coerced illegal fathering as matrilineality, but it is a total misnomer. In this system not that the woman does not know who impregnated her, irrespective of her Will. She and her children knew the whereabouts of the man who was responsible for their fate. The the families of that region did not treat that kind of child as a product of a rape by an unknown man. The man is known and he lives in the same village or town with greater respect than of the woman’s family. In the case of Devasahayam’s father he was a priest of a Hindu temple and Hinduism treated him with more dignity and respect than an ordinary Brahmin. But his son did not inherit that dignity. He and his mother remained undignified Shudra.
They had to suffer that life of so called god given wretchedness without revolting against it. Devashayam rebelled against that wretched inhuman life in Hinduism and embraced Christianity. This was seen as the greatest crime both by the priestly class and the state that was under the control of a Ksatriya ruler who gave him the maximum punishment that Manu Dharma prescribed. The Manu Dharma Brahminic laws were more cruel and brutish than Roman laws that punished the slaves and those who embraced Christianity in the first two centuries before Constatine himself became Christian and his mother, Helena, became a devoted follower of Jesus and visited Israel and built many churches, including the tomb of Jesus at Golgotha. Devashayam was killed by applying more cruel methods than the Romans had applied.
WHAT DID HE DO AFTER HE BECAME A CHRISTIAN?
As a Christian he seems to have realized that it was the caste system that led to a cursed life of millions of people around him. He started interacting with lower castes than that of Nair caste and untouchables. The Nair caste was/is a top layer of the Shudra agrarian caste in Kerala even now. There were landlords, small farmers and agrarian labour also in that caste. But in caste location the Nair caste was/is higher than all other Shudra artisan and agrarian castes. At the same time the Nairs had no right to wear sacred thread. They had no right to read the Sanskrit books and become priests in Hindu temples. It was the 8th century Adi Shankara who handed out this life to the Shudras and Dalits.
Devasahayan started breaking that caste system. He was said to have mingled with all castes and ate food with all caste people (2). It was like Jesus mixing with Samaritans, Gentiles and prostitutes and so on in Israel.
According to his Wikipedia bio ‘ that the Brahmin chief priest of the kingdom, the feudal lords, members of the royal household and the Nair community brought false charges on Devasahayam to the Dewan, Ramayyan Dalawa”. (3)
Why should Nair community which was suffering both Shudra historical slavery, and in addition the most humiliating sambandam man-woman relationship, joined the priests and the king in torturing and killing a liberator? This consciousness of the Shudras in India made this land a perpetual slave land. Devashayam had shown the way with his death as Jesus has shown the way for the entire human slavery in the world about 2000 years ago. Till today the Shudra spiritual slavery continues. The Nairs of Kerala, who are perhaps most educated Shudra community in India, still accepts the spiritual slavery as given and divinely ordained.
THE PUNISHMENT
What was the treatment that he got after he became Christian both from the priestly Brahmins and the king of the Travankore state? He was living in Maharaja Marthanda Varma’s kingdom and was also serving the state in some significant position when he embraced Christianity and got crucified in his 40th year, in 1752. Varmas were Ksatriyas who ruled the Tamil-Malayali region for a long time. Ksatriyas ruled India as part of their caste divine right granted by Brahminism in their books. They were no less cruel and inhuman toward Shudras and Dalits (the food producers of India) than the Roman rulers in Israel of Jesus’s times towards the masses. The Brahmins made the laws for the Ksatriya ruled states, in the whole of Indian subcontinent, as the Pharisee council at Jerusalem did for the Roman rulers at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion. Though the Roman ruler, Pontius Pilate, did not want to be very harsh towards Jesus while giving him the capital punishment, the the priestly council was merciless and brutish in awarding crucifixion punishment with all the cruelties that were available in their armours–beating, kicking, putting thorny crown on his head, making him carry the cross all along the road up to the crucuixion point–Golgotha.
The main Brahmin ancient law book Manu Dharma shsastra says a Shudra slave has no scope for liberation from the control of Brahmin authority. One of its codes said “Even if a Brahmin frees a Shudra from slavery the Shudra continues to be a slave as he is created for slavery. Nobody has the right to free him”. (Manu VIII-50,56 and 59) 1. Because of such a law the Shudras were afraid of leaving Hindu fold. Even after leaving the Brahminical Hinduism they decided to kill him in the most cruel form of toture. The small film made after he was canonized ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdnUo9eqbS8) shows how brutal it was. India did not have the method of nailing persons alive to the cross like the Romans and Israelites had. But the Indian rulers and the priests evolved their cruel methods of execution. One could see how such barbaric methods in killing Devasahayam were used.
NO RIGHT TO LIVE AFTER LEAVING HINDUISM
Devasahayam had no right to freedom even after becoming a Christian. In fact such an escape was seen as a bigger crime. The mental freedom of thinking was destroyed among the Shudra and Dalit population for millennia. But Devasahayam decided to break that historical shackles even though he knew that he would get the cruellest punishment for that.
He was accused of working to destroy the caste system and untouchability by sharing food with Dalits and other lower castes like fishermen/women, carpenters, shepherds, potters, iron and gold smiths and so on. The caste and untouchability were treated as sacred and god given by the Brahmin priests and the state mandated to protect that system. Devasahayam was seen as the most dangerous breaker of the caste system. He was also accused of indulging in conversions, and treason for giving information to foreigners. He was first arrested and put in a torturous solitory cell, as Jesus was put. After three years torturous imprisonment, because of the pressures from the Europeans, he was exiled with a systematic process of torture and humiliation.
Devasahayam was beaten up mercilessly and was made to sit on buffalo, as the buffalo was described as an animal of death and hell (Yama) in their books, facing backwards. He was whipped all along the ways in the villages in which he was made to pass through.
It is this buffalo that produces the largest amount of milk in the Indian subcontinent. Since it is a black animal it was treated by the Brahmin priests and the Ksatriya rulers as a devilish animal. But for Devasahayam it became a God given vehicle as the donkey was the vehicle of Jesus.
While the buffalo was moving on, he was beaten to bleed. For several days he was made to undergo the torture sitting on the bufalo without giving water and food. His wife was forced to watch how he was being tortured and suffered. Finally they shot him dead in a forest amidst rocks and bushes. But it is said that as he was being taken on buffalo from village to village to the productive masses, particularly the fishing community became his followers, as the fishing community on the banks of Sea of Galilee became the followers of Jesus.
RESURRECTION IN 2022
The idea of resurrection worked in the Devasahayam’s case differently. After five days of his death his body was found by his followers, may be because his caravan of torture was not to be seen and heard by villagers. They finally located his dead body. They took it to the church of Kottar Nagercoil. They entombed him, perhaps amidst crying and veiling. He inspired millions from that tomb. The Christians prayed at his enchained statue and the non-Christians worshipped by garlanding his statue. But ultimately he resurrected to become a St like Peter and Paul in 2022.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a socio-spiritual reformer and author in a caste ridden India. His books Why I am Not a Hindu, Post-Hindu India, Buffalo Nationalism, The Shudras–Vision For a New Path, Untouchable God, God As Political Philosopher–Buddha’s Challenge to Brahminism are meant to carry on the reform
References
1) https://velivada.com/2017/05/31/casteist-quotes-verses-manusmriti-law-book-hindus/.
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JNU’s VC is Celebrating ‘Herstory’ With Men, a ‘Civilisation State’ With No Rights
If the OBCs, Dalits and Adivasis were to follow Santishree Dhuilipudi Pandit, they would have to give up the agenda of social justice and forget about the rights recognised in the constitution.
Shantishree Dhulipudi Pandit. Photo: Facebook
The vice chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University has attempted to construct a strange theory of the Indian state. In an article in the Indian Express, which was part of a talk she gave to a Delhi University conference, Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit held forth on India as a constitutional state and ‘civilisation state’, Indian feminism and methods of writing ‘her’ story (herstory) and ‘his’ story (history). However, her creative social science theorising raises more questions than it answers.
The moment she became JNU’s VC, Pandit declared that she had broken two glass ceilings: she was the first woman and the first Other Backward Class (OBC) person to hold the job. This I thought was good news. But when I read her article, I realised her thinking runs against the interest of both OBCs and women. Let me explain why.
Pandit writes, “Reducing India to a civic nation bound by a constitution disregards its history, ancient heritage, culture and civilisation. I would place India as a civilisation state.” In other words, as a female intellectual coming from an OBC background, she is telling us that there is no place for constitutionally-mandated civic rights for either women or the Shudras (OBCs) as there were none in the ancient ‘civilisation state’ of India that she celebrates.
Pandit also said that history was ‘his’ story and that there has been no ‘her’ story written so far. One would have expected her to elaborate on the women who made herstory, which would have helped us understand her own new mode of writing about Indian civilisation by foregrounding women’s creativity, knowledge, bravery and so on. But all she did was to mention the two very conventional mythological names of Sita and Draupadi: one whom she lauded as a ‘single mother’ and the other as wife of five husbands with her own autonomy. The popular writer Chitra Banerjee Devakaruni made these points a few years ago. Why does the scholar Santishree’s herstory end there?
In her article, Pandit mentions only male thinkers of modern India – Subramanya Bharati of Tamil Nadu, Balagangadhara Tilak, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Eswar Chandra Vidyasagar, Mahatma Gandhi, Kandukuri Veeresha Lingam Pantulu and so on. There is not a single modern woman in her herstory. Strangely, all the men she names are Brahmin-Bania. Neither Savitribai Phule, not Pandita Ramabai, Jilukaribai or even Sarojini Naidu – who worked with Gandhi – exist in the JNU VC’s herstory. Pandit’s herstory does not talk about Periyar Ramaswamy Naikar of Tamil Nadu, Narayanaguru of Kerala or Mahatma Phule and Ambedkar of Maharashtra, the state from which Tilak and Gokhale came and who – according to the JNU VC – made bigger history, if not herstory, than them. Human equality was Phule and Ambedkar’s focus, a subject which was totally negated in Pandit’s ‘civilisation state’.
If the OBCs, Dalits and Adivasis were to follow Santishree Dhuilipudi Pandit – the new organic intellectual from an OBC background who came into the limelight thanks to the current power dispensation in Delhi rather than by her writing of herstory – they would have to give up the agenda of social justice. They would have to disregard the constitution that gave them rights to education, employment and equality, rights that the Vedas and Dharmashastras denied. They would henceforth seek to recreate ‘civilisation states’ like the classical janapadas and mahajanapas or monarchies, which constructed caste and untouchability and executed them through the punitive apparatus of the ‘civilisation state’ with the guidance of the Vedas, Puranas, Kautilya’s Arthashastra, Manu’s Dharmashastra and so on.
Does Pandit, as vice chancellor of India’s leader university in the social sciences, seriously want students to debate the merits of the present constitution vis-a-vis the classical ‘civilization states’ of ancient India? Is she aware of the fact that Bahujans were never allowed to take part in such debates in the ancient ‘civilisation state’ she valorises?
Her proposal that henceforth we should write herstory and not history is a positive, feminist one but why should herstorians only draw, as she did in her article, on the knowledge reserves of men, and that too of only Brahmin men? As an OBC intellectual heading such a great university, does she not want her students to critique the caste system? I ask this question because history and herstory both tell us that no civilisation state in ancient India tolerated such a critique or allowed it to take permanent root. Is there any place in her world for the thinkers who worked to build an egalitarian India by abolishing all inequalities, including caste and gender based inequalities? Is there a place in her regime to think afresh that civilisation in fact starts with hands and implements producing food from the earth and not with the Vedas? We will know the answers to these questions only when Pandit elaborates on her new theory of herstory.
One good thing is that she is a believer in E.H Carr’s facts as ‘sacred theory’, as against the existing trend of interpretations are ‘sacred theory’. By citing Carr, a foreign scholar to boot, she is in a way disagreeing with the present ruler’s worldview – which functions not on facts but faith. The movements the BJP deployed in the post-Mandal phase of Indian politics are based on the idea that faith is more sacred than anything else.
One gets the feeling that the JNU VC wants to write herstory based on Sita’s single mother battle. Once the Rama temple in Ayodhya is complete, the present regime will start implementing its version of Ram Rajya with a new name called Hindu Rashtra. What will be the fate of Sita and Draupadi in that state? Does she expect many newborn girls to be called Draupadi, a name we rarely encounter today? The JNU VC surely knows Sita did not become a single mother because Ram ceased to exist as her husband. Rather, the caste law of Rama Rajya forced him to abandon his pregnant wife.
I hope the students and social scientists at JNU engage themselves with some of the questions their VC’s article raises. In particular, one hopes the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad takes a cue from her and enters into scholarly discourse through reading and writing rather than keeping a watch on who eats beef or meat.
Whether one agrees with her or not, Pandit has done well as a university vice chancellor to speak and write about social science issues. Since the present regime came to power in 2014, those in positions of authority have rarely given the rest of us the chance of engaging with ideas and theories. In my view, this is one of the primary tasks of a vice chancellor. In the recent past, sadly, VCs have engaged mostly in non-academic work to please their masters above.
I seriously hope Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit continues with her academic discourse in the future too.
Author’s biographical note: I am a Shudra OBC retired professor from Osmania University Hyderabad, who failed to get a seat in M.Phil course in JNU in 1976
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For long, Congress wavered on social justice. Now it’s waking up to BJP’s OBC politics
Many wanted Congress to focus on secularism, diversity and pluralism. But party has realised that the Shudra/OBC/Dalit/Adivasi aren’t interested in these abstract ideas.
Congress leaders including Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi at the Nav Sankalp Chintan Shivir at Udaipur, Rajasthan. (Photo Credit: Twitter/Salman Khurshid)
The Congress’ revival strategy has gained a potent factor. At the recently held three-day Nav Sankalp Chintan Shivir, or New Resolution Brainstorming Conclave, in Rajasthan’s Udaipur, the Congress constituted a social justice committee headed by senior leaders Salman Khurshid and K. Raju. The committee has recommended several social justice measures to restructure the party.
The panel, according to media reports, has recommended “50 per cent representation to Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, OBCs and minorities at all levels in the party organisation”. It has also recommended fighting for OBC reservation in Parliament and state assemblies, and “quota within quota in the women’s reservation bill” with “proportionate reservation for SC, ST and OBC women”.
More crucially, the social justice panel has recommended caste-based reservation in the private sector. This is a difficult area for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Although the BJP twice came to power in large part because of the OBC vote, it has not taken any step to improve the presence of OBC/SC/STs in the private sector. In fact, the Narendra Modi government’s massive privatisation drive severely undercuts their presence in the employment sector.
While the Congress’ top decision making body, the Congress Working Committee (CWC), didn’t ultimately approve the panel’s recommendations, the fact that such a reformative social justice programme has found a footing in the party’s thinking could well decide its future politics.
As Hindustan Times reported, Congress leader K. Raju said the quota policy has “not been rejected”. “Not everything can be decided in one meeting. The quota for SC, ST, OBCs and minorities will be taken up in the next phase of internal reforms,” he said, as per the newspaper.
A major shift
A social justice package like this is the maximum that a national party like the Congress could come up with. Significantly, the Khurshid-led panel also recommended that the Congress should fight for enumeration of caste census, which the BJP has been ignoring. It now openly, and categorically, challenges the BJP, which is in power largely because of the OBC vote.
If the Congress does make a resolution on these recommendations, its composition and ideological position will undergo a metamorphosis unlike anything we have seen since Independence.
Unsurprisingly, the social justice agenda of the Congress has shocked not only the BJP but also those who don’t want social justice issues — particularly the reservation question — to take centre stage in the national polity. The Congress’ brainstorming teams were sympathetic to the view that the party should seek power by focussing on issues like secularism, diversity, pluralism, and anti-communalism. But the Shudra/OBC/Dalit/Adivasi masses are not interested in these abstract ideas anymore. Clearly, the Congress has realised this.
And the credit for this goes to Rahul Gandhi, who is the Congress’ only mass leader.
Ignoring social justice
The Congress has long wavered on taking a strong position on the social justice agenda because of its internal structural dilemma. Though the Congress ruled India for 15 years after the Mandal Commission’s report was implemented by the V.P Singh Government — five years of P.V. Narasimha Rao rule and 10 years of Dr Manmohan Singh’s tenure — the party was mainly under the hegemonic grip of anti-social justice elite.
Most of its elite leaders were boardroom managers but not vote mobilisers. Manmohan Singh, P. Chidambaram, Jairam Ramesh, Mani Shankar Aiyar, and the late Ahmed Patel were managing the government and the party, with a negative view about the Mandal forces at the ground level. Rajya Sabha route became the power politics of the elite. Now that route has been cut short for two years.
After Rajiv Gandhi’s victory in the 1984 Lok Sabha election, when the party won 414 seats in the backdrop of the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the Congress effectively became a Doon School team. The victory made the Doon School team overconfident, causing internal crisis and the rise of V.P. Singh as a new national leader. Though the Congress was able to form a minority government under the leadership of P.V. Narasimha Rao in 1991, Rao was no mass leader to take the Congress forward.
The Mandal movement was opposed by the anti-reservationists, who raked up a merit theory. And Rajiv Gandhi’s arch enemy V.P. Singh implemented the Mandal Commission Report, much to the annoyance of Rajiv and his elite team. They opposed the OBC reservation with all their strength. Not a single person in the Congress’ elite team was from the Shudra/OBC/Dalit/Adiavsi background. Both the Congress and the BJP misjudged the aspirations and strength of the Shudra/OBC youth and the masses.
During the ten years of UPA rule — 2004 to 2014 — some positive steps were taken to satisfy the Mandal forces that were getting more and more organised. But the Congress did not give any visible position to any Mandalite either in the government or in the party. It mainly depended on the Dwija, minority (Muslim and Christian), Dalit and Adivasi electoral base and Dwija leaders to run the government.
By 2014, there was no leader in the Congress who could effectively communicate to the masses in rural India as to what they did in their ten-year rule. It solely depended on young Rahul Gandhi to fight the well-organised RSS/BJP across India. Manmohan Singh did not address any major public rally as he was never a mass leader. Such a Rajya Sabha PM was no match to the BJP, which had positioned its understanding of Mandal forces and brought Narendra Modi with an OBC card.
A late realisation
The rise of Narendra Modi and consecutive electoral losses has perhaps made the Congress realise that the OBC won’t align with the party unless it restructures itself.
Given the numbers of the Shudra/OBC — 52 per cent as per the Mandal estimation — winning a general election without addressing their concerns is unthinkable in today’s politics. The Congress seems to have realised that the old ideological agenda of secularism, pluralism and minoritism is not going to bring OBC votes.
It remains to be seen if Rahul Gandhi’s image among the social justice forces will change. He will have a tough time bringing on board the group opposed to his and the Khurshid-led panel’s social justice measures. Though for the sake of Indian institutions, which are under threat from communal forces bent on eroding them, the Congress will have to mount a struggle for social justice and re-democratisation of the country’s constitutional polity. Not only will it pull the country back from the dark path it is on, but it will also put the Congress back on the national stage. For what it’s worth, the party’s Udaipur Conclave has made a start.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author. His most known books are Why I Am Not a Hindu: A Shudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture and Political Economy, and Post-Hindu India: A Discourse in Dalit-Bahujan Socio-Spiritual and Scientific Revolution. Views are personal.
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Public intellectuals must end their hypocrisy on English education for the masses
In a closed-door meeting with public intellectuals, Rahul Gandhi told me he’s not opposed to English medium education in government schools. But surprisingly, a Left intellectual disagreed.
COURTESY: PTI. IMAGE FOR REPRESENTATION.
Public intellectuals play a very important role in a democratic system. A public intellectual challenges the policies they think will go against the people’s interests, and keeps on proposing pro-people policies and theoretical propositions. India needs more honest public intellectuals becasue of the historical, spiritual, social, and political discrimination of the SC/ST/Shudra communities, and women. Specifically, when it comes to education, many public intellectuals take a hypocritic stand, where what’s good enough for their own children is not what they propose for the children from historically marginalised communities.
The education sector has played a most powerful discriminatory role in Indian history, keeping out marginalised people from getting an education that can lead to material improvements in their lives. To correct this, the constitutional democracy is opening up many channels of anti-discriminatory policies, and the school and university education system is constantly undegoing shifts and changes in this process. Currently, one of the important issues across states is whether governments should promote English medium education in schools.
On May 7, 2022 Rahul Gandhi, the former Congress president, wanted to meet some public intellectuals and activists in Hyderabad. I was also invited to meet with him, of course, without any specified agenda. I went to the meeting with a view to ascertain his opinion mainly on two issues. Firstly, his view on English medium education in government schools, along with the question of development of government school infrastructure to match private schools. Second, to know what his Other Backward Class policy is. Both these issues have immediate relevance to Telangana, where he addressed a big public meeting on May 6 at Warangal. In that meeting, the Telangana Congress made a declaration for farmers, but on other issues, they were silent.Featured Videos from TNM
At the meeting, I asked Rahul Gandhi what his stand on English as a medium of education in government schools was. He said, “I am not opposed to the English medium in government schools.” He then asked Revanth Reddy, the Telangana Congress president who was also present in the meeting, as to what the party’s state unit’s stand was. The KCR government has already announced English medium education in all government schools from the 2022-23 academic year for classes 1 to 8. Revanth Reddy also said that the Telangana Congress is for English medium in government schools.
That Rahul Gandhi, at least in private, agreed that he is not opposed to the English medium in state government schools is important. In 2015 when I met Siddaramaiah, the then Chief Minister of Karnataka, in his official residence for a one-on-one meeting and told him that he should think of introducing English medium in Karnataka government schools, his response was two fold. One, his high command would not accept such an educational policy, he said. And secondly, Kannada intellectuals including UR Ananthamurthy and Girish Karnard had been opposing any such move in the state for a long time. Hence, he said, high profile intellectuals and the media will create a problem for his government. Instead of introducing English medium in school education, which would have brought more votes, he chose to rake up the Tipu Sultan issue. That ended up strengthening the BJP.
Rahul Gandhi is a driving force of the Congress party’s high command and to know his stand is important in the context of the BJP’s anti-English posture.
However, in that closed-door meeting last week, one public intellectual who was also an invitee intervened and said, “I am opposed to introducing English medium in government schools.” Rahul Gandhi asked him why, and he replied, “Since I studied in the Telugu medium, I think studying in the Telugu medium will be better than studying in the English medium.”
I was surprised at this position of someone who is known as a Left intellectual. The problem with those who take this position on the question of English medium in state government schools is that they educate their own children in the best private English medium schools that they can afford. I knew that the man who opposed English medium education in government schools educated his own sons in one of the best English medium schools in Hyderabad.
It’s not just one public intellectual who opposed English for rural children in one meeting — this is a hypocritical stand taken by several public intellectuals without concern for how it practically affects the futures of SC/ST/Shudra children.
Public intellectualism in Euro-American countries emerged as a Left-Liberal profession to spread the ‘Idea of Honesty’ and fight for human equality in every sphere. A public intellectual is neither a politician nor an institutionally trained bureaucrat to say one thing in office and do something else in personal life. Particularly on issues of public concern, they have to have an honest, committed stand, which should not drive the society and the state in opposite directions. For a public intellectual, what is good for them should be seen as good for others, and they must fight for others’ benefit. Such a consistent stand of public intellectuals pushes politicians to a new position in the interest of the larger masses.
Intellectual dishonesty is a historical legacy of Brahmanism. The productive masses suffered historical loss and backwardness during the period of Sanskrit hegemony, which was controlled by the Dwijas, mainly Brahmins. Now, this kind of intellectual dishonesty about English language education for the poor keeps the rural and urban working classes away from English education, which will confine them to the margins of the system.
The Vice President of India and a popular right-wing leader, Venkaiah Naidu, and the Chief Justice of India NV Ramana, have expressed similar opinions. They have repeatedly said in public that introducing English medium education in government schools is a wrong decision. Naturally the reference is to the decision of Jaganmohan Reddy government in Andhra Pradesh and the KCR government in Telangana. The AP government pushed the policy by overcoming the political and judicial hurdles. The Home Minister of India, Amit Shah, went one step further and said that people of all states must communicate with each other in Hindi and not in English.
But to my surprise Rahul Gandhi without hesitation said he was not against states deciding about the medium of instruction issue in government schools. And I hope that his party at the national level will formulate a language policy that gives freedom to the states as he believes that India is a ‘Union of States’ not a unitary state.
If the Congress comes to power in Telangana and a grand old national party like the Congress goes along with the view that Rahul Gandhi expressed in that closed-door meeting, the nation will enter a new phase of education policy. Naturally, the BJP also will have to come around.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author. He has been campaigning for English-medium education in government schools across the country for the last 30 years. Views expressed are the author’s own.
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An Open Letter To Muslims And Christians Of India
As some of you are aware, I am a Shudra intellectual and activist, working and writing to change the unequal conditions of the Dalits, Adivasis and Shudras (including the Other Backward Classes) in the Indian Brahminic Hindutva rule. My books Why I am Not a Hindu, Post-Hindu India and Buffalo Nationalism have been attacked by the Brahminic Hindutva forces and also dragged to courts, up to the Supreme Court of India. Time and again I was called an agent of Muslims and Christians. Since I worked as a professor at Maulana Azad National Urdu University from 2011 to 2017, I am accused of being a pro-Muslim and anti-national person. However, I have been doing my job without caring for the consequences.
I am writing this open letter to the Muslims and Christians of India in the context of the Hijab controversy and fundamentalist stand that Brahminic Hindutva forces and Muslims of India have taken. The Hijab issue is a part of the dress code of human beings. We, the Shudra/Dalit/Adivasis of India, have suffered in the hands of historical Brahminism on the dress code issues for a very long period. The Shudra/Dalit/Adiavsi women were not supposed to wear the upper garments– a blouse or jacket — for a long time. For instance, such oppressive practices were in vogue in Kerala till Ayyankali, a Dalit leader and Sri Narayana Guru, an OBC leader, fought against it. Women and men from oppressed castes were also not allowed to wear footwear even while toiling under the hot sun all day. Even the widowed Dwija women (belonging to the five castes –Brahmin, Bania, Kayastha, Khatri and Ksatriya), were forced by the Brahmin priestly men and also other educated pundits, to not wear blouse or jacket and their head was tonsured. Also the married Dwija women, especially from Brahmin families were subjected to perverse customs such as madi (women cooking in wet clothes as long as they were in the kitchen). The Shudra/Dalits/Adiavsis, women from all castes and some reformers from the Dwija communities as well, fought against these practices and religious sanctions. Many of such Casteist and Sexist dress code norms were obsolete now.
Women’s dress codes are generally dictated by men in all organized religions in the name of God. Whether Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Brahminism (I am deliberately not using Hinduism), Judaism, Sikhism and so on, the men who lead communities or religions dictate women what to wear and what not to; or to wear more than what is required or wear less than what they needed in seasons and times; or forced them not to wear what they want or not to wear enough even to protect themselves from sun, rain and cold. All these are done by invocation of God (those who believe in one God) or Gods (those who believe in many Gods) and spiritual books. The most sufferers in this world because of such men dictated methods of life for women and men are the Dalit/Shudra/Adiavsis. The RSS/BJP combine, which is ruling India, stands for all the historical Brahminism that we suffered. The latest barbaric spiritual interpretation of Ayyappa temple entry issue for our women between age 10 and 50, with a spiritual theory of women’s menstrual blood impurity, is also constructed by men pundits of Brahmanism.
When we are fighting against these forces for their anti-women and anti-Dalit/Adivasi/Shudra spiritual systems and practices the Muslims and Christians should not give them a scope to claim that they could liberate Muslim and Christian women from their men’s oppression. After the Triple Talaq judgement of the Supreme Court and the law passed by the BJP/RSS Government, they started claiming that Muslim women are liberated from the unjust divorce system and abandonment of the helpless children.
Now, the Hijab issue is raised in relationship to school, college education for Muslim girls. It has become another issue around which they will claim that they are liberating Muslim women from an oppressive dress code.
The Hijab, pardhah or burkha system is a form of over-dressing by completely covering a woman’s body from toe to head to guard women’s visibility in public places. This is said to guard women’s bodies from the evil eyes of men. To me, this is a very oppressive dress code. It also projects all men as possible rapists. If our women suffered from the brahminic under-dress oppression, the Muslim women are being forced to suffer from over-dress oppression, in all kinds of weather, including tormenting them in summer heat. If I go by what I see amongst Muslim women and men in India, I find that the Muslim men do not have the problem of Hijab, pardhah or burkha. Why should it be there for women alone? If one goes into Quran or courts this problem cannot be resolved. Because this issue is fundamentally related to the question of spiritual equality: whether God created man and woman equal or not! What is contemporary spiritual rationalist understanding of scholars about this question?
A recent collective team study of the Genesis of the Bible, which both Christians, Muslims and Jews accept as a common spiritual guide, referring to the status of Adam and Eve, the first man and woman that God created said: “Notably God’s image is expressed as male and female together. There is no room for male’s superiority or domination. Most human societies have featured both ( superiority and domination of men–emphasis mine), but it was not God’s intention, and it does not reflect the most basic truth about our (human) nature”. (God’s Justice, The Holy Bible)
This understanding of God’s creation of men and women as equals was never there among the brahminic forces of India and hence they forced dress codes or even prescribed death for the wife along with the husband if he dies. Because of a lack of understanding of history, the Christians (the Catholics, Orthodox of Russia and the Protestants), the Judaists, Sikhs and Muslims forced their women to over-dress. In the case of women’s under-dress or overdress it was not of their choice. It is forced training from childhood onwards. The practice of covering face with an extra cloth also came into many non-agrarian castes, which is known as the purdah system.
Let us not go by the face value of the public declaration of women sufferers saying ‘we want to under dress or over dress’. Women publicly said in the brahminic spiritual system “we want to burn ourselves on the funeral pyre of husband and die”. When you force-feed an idea as religious and God-given from childhood onwards, self-suffering becomes a ‘hobby through lobby’.
There are Christians who say women should cover their heads with Hijab in the church or at prayer times. But that is not the rule for Christian men. Christian churches practice human untouchability within the church. Such practices would only strengthen Hindutva brahminism.
Muslim women in India are not allowed into the Masjid and pray standing side by side with men of their own family or other men. This itself gave a handle to the right-wing Hindutva forces to claim “look at us, our women; they go to temples freely either alone or with their men’. But what they try desperately to hide is the fact that the Shudra/Dalit/Adivasis are not allowed to become priests in the so-called Hindu temples (read Brahmin-controlled). Such practice is not there around the temples managed by the Shudra/Dalit/Adivasis themselves The RSS/BJP forces never open their mouths for that spiritual right of Shudra/Dalit/Adivasis who they paint as ‘Hindus’.
The RSS/BJP forces are known as conservative and fundamentalist across the world. But the Muslim women’s question of conservatism and fundamentalism is giving them a progressive posture, making our struggle for equality difficult. The Indian Muslims and Christians should understand that there is a massive struggle for reform in India now. It is not by the RSS/BJP combine, but against it. In this situation with the Muslim conservatism and fundamentalism–particularly about women’s question — all of us suffer and the national reform becomes impossible.
If the Muslims keep on insisting that their women students or employees must go in Hijab or otherwise they will not study or work as it is their essential practice of religion, the brahmanic forces can say that caste and untouchability are an essential practice of Hinduism and all caste students cannot sit together should be accepted by us, the sufferers. This is where Mahatma Phule and Ambedkar rebelled against such practices. The Shudra/Dalit/Adivasishave been fighting that. The Hindutva forces can say that caste and untouchability are essential practices of Hinduism. The Brahmin priests and pundita told to the Muslim rulers that caste and untoucability were part of their religion. Hence the Muslim rulers did not abolish caste and untouchability. But the caste system was/is against human equality and God’s idea of creation of human beings. If the Hindutva forces say that caste segregation and untouchability have to be practiced in the schools how do the courtshandle the issue? The Brahmin priests and pundits told the Muslim kings that caste and untouchability practices were essential practices of Hindu religion and they had shown Rigveda and Manu’ dharma shastra evidence. The Muslim kings obviously accepted such arguments and allowed such barbaric practice to continue, even though Islam does not have such a practice. Should we the Shudra/Dalit/Adivasis accept and sit in segregated class rooms today? Such arguments about caste and any other practice of discrimination should not be projected as essential practice of religion, if the religion needs to survive in changing times. These things cannot be settled in courts or with quotations from religious books. They are old practices, characterized by men or or by community control and oppression over women and Dalits and so on. They must be changed through laborious reforms from within. Muslims and Christians have to be part of this reform agenda in India. Otherwise all of us will suffer.
Religion and God are universal phenomena. Man-woman equality in all spheres is a God-given gift. What is not required for men is also not required for women. We, Indians, with our roots in Harappan civilization with equality of man and woman and hard physical labour and equality, while working with nature, can teach the world that we shall overcome every inequality, whatever religion or caste we belong to. Let all our women study on par with men as equals in every respect. Under the force of training if the elderly Muslim women, who are used to such over-dress, may be allowed but young ones who are going to live a long life should be allowed to overcome it. To me all religious systemic practices should be subject to the very idea that ‘God created all men and women equal’.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a Political Theorist, Social Activist and Author. Many of his books, Why I am Not a Hindu, Post-Hindu India, Buffalo Nationalism, From a Shepherd Boy to An Intellectual– My Memoirs, The Weapon of The Other, God As a Political Philosopher, Untouchable God, The Shudras–Vision For a New Path and so on are meant to reform the socio-spiritual system in India
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Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd 