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Taking a Page out of India’s Medical History of Courage, Sacrifice and Suffering
Taking a Page out of India’s Medical History of Courage, Sacrifice and Suffering
Well-equipped hospitals and well-trained doctors and nurses with the courage to make sacrifices like Dr. Yashwantrao and Savitribai Phule alone can save the world and India.
COVID-19 has created a global crisis. We are not sure how the world and India will come out of it. The modern world faced a similar pandemic in late nineteenth century called the bubonic plague, which killed millions in the eastern part of the world – mainly in India and China.
That pandemic also originated in China, in Yunnan province, and spread to many countries through the sea route. Medical facilities at the time were almost all but absent. Particularly in India, there were hardly any trained doctors in modern medicine.
That pandemic spread to all inhabited continents and reached India through the ports at Calcutta and Bombay. Later on, it spread to Pune and other towns and villages. One guess is that more deaths occurred in towns than in spread-out villages, where natural social isolation is already a factor. Several herding communities left urban and populated towns and established settlements in the forest and plain lands.
Though several medical practitioners must have played a role during the time – one young doctor died while treating patients in the Poona region: Mahatma Jyotirao Phule and Savitribai Phule’s adopted son Dr. Yashwantrao.
The doctor died alongside his adopted mother Savitribai while serving plague patients in a special clinic that they opened in 1896-97. According to historical texts, Dr. Yashwant Rao served patients of all castes and communities as a part of his father and mother’s social reform movement. In those days, Brahmins were avoiding becoming doctors as the British had made it mandatory that medical partitioners treat patients of all castes, and many Brahmins were unwilling to touch Dalits and Shudras.
The Satyashodak movement launched by the Phules took up a massive campaign against human untouchability and superstitions. Since the couple had no children of their own, they adopted a boy – the son of a brahmin widow, Kashibai. The name of Yashwantrao’s birth father is unknown.
It is said that having while after her husband’s death, conservative Brahmins in the Poona area had wanted to kill his pregnant wife. It was the Satyashodak movement headed by Phule that saved her and took care of the mother and child at their ashram. The son was eventually adopted by the Phules in 1874.
Yashwantrao eventually became a doctor and was married to Radha in 1889, whose father was part of the social reform movement. An inter-caste marriage, it was performed with a simple garland exchange in defiance of being married traditionally by a Brahmin pandit. The priestly class took this marriage to a court also.
Jyotirao Phule died in 1890. After his death, Savitribai and her son continued to undertake social and medical services. One biographer of Savitribai writes:
More in Home “Her (Savitribai) adopted son Yashwantrao served the people of his area as a doctor. When the worldwide Third Pandemic of the bubonic plague badly affected the area around Nallaspora, Maharastra in 1897, the courageous Savitribai and Yashwantrao opened a clinic at outskirts of Pune to treat the patients infected by the disease. She brought the patients to the clinic where her son treated them while she took care of them. In course of time, she contracted the disease while serving the patients and succumbed to it on March 10, 1897.”
The tragedy did not end there. Dr. Yashwantrao died as well after contracting the disease. This episode of the bubonic plague ultimately led to more than 12 million deaths in India and China, with about 10 million killed in India alone.
India has evolved a lot since the days of Dr. Yashwantrao and Savitribai Phule’s sacrifice. We now have doctors of all castes and communities. Apart from Dr. Yashwantrao, another doctor to die in the line of duty was Dwarkanath Kotnis during China’s hour of need in the late 1930s. Kotnis was one of the five Indian physicians dispatched to China to provide medical assistance during the second Sino-Japanese war in 1938.
It was on January 10, 1897, that Aldemar Haffkine, a bacteriologist who trained with Louis Pasteur at his institute in Paris, and who was based in Bombay, tested the vaccine on himself and created a vaccine in record time to combat the bubonic plague epidemic in Bombay and Poona regions. That vaccine saved millions in over subsequent years – even though at that time, India superstition and illiteracy coupled with ignorance resulted in restricted use.
The Haffkine Institute is now a premier research and vaccine producing organisation in Bombay.
Today, coronavirus seems to pose a much bigger threat in a globalised world of air travel in closed air-conditioned aircrafts. Well-equipped hospitals and well-trained doctors and nurses with the courage to make sacrifices like Dr. Yashwantrao and Savitribai Phule alone can save the world and India. And while there is still no vaccine for this novel virus, there will hopefully be one soon.
With some among the ruling party spreading superstitions, we must take a page out of our own medical history of courage, sacrifice and suffering. India still has a long road ahead when it comes to social reform and this crisis is suited to push such reform.
So while there is misinformation about how cow urine and dung work work like a vaccination for coronavirus, people must depend only on tested science, medicines, laboratories, doctors and nurses.
India is a country of 1.3 billion people, among them many who believe in superstitions as part of a long heritage of illiteracy and ignorance. We now have the media, and even mobile networks, informing people about how to look after oneself – from washing hands to not touching faces.
However, casteism and baba-ism will only contribute to loss of more life. As Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself accepted, the Kerala government has been handling the COVID-19 better with a belief in science and medicine. Other state governments must also make adequate preparations.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author.
https://thewire.in/history/doctors-yashwantrao-savitribai-phule
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The Dilemma Of RSS/BJP In Higher Education
The State run universities in India have created a major crisis in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP) rule and their ideological apparatus. On the one hand the present right wing regime which believes in traditional Vernadharma parmapara centered education cannot accept the present reservation system, which they opposed from the days of Ambedkar-Gandhi Poona Pact. Even as late as 1990 Mandal movement they opposed reservation system as a whole. Narendra Modi, who was one of the young drivers of the RSS/BJP agenda during the anti-Mandal- Kamandal movement in the L.K Advani’s team along with strong anti-reservation Pramod Mahajan is now forced to affirm reservation for the sake of votes and power. He himself played the card of Other Backward Caste (OBC) as that was the best card to harvest the national OBC dream of seeing their own Prime Minister at Delhi.
The Congress which was also not so very comfortable with the OBC reservation, as it never recognized that category within the party was caught unawares when RSS/BJP accepted Modi’s candidature as a certified OBC to be the PM candidate in 2014.
In the national central universities and major institutions like IITs, IIMs the liberal, left and the free thinking senior faculty had no different stand than RSS/BJP on the question of implementing OBC/Dalit/Adivasi reservation in those structures. Their pet theory was merit, and they had lot of respect for foreign degrees, as many of them possess one. Many of them, who critique the colonial Raj were lovers of Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Columbia or any other foreign university degree by the time the BJP came to power. Their own children were sent to UK or USA to get a degree. During in 2007 second Mandal discourse many of them opposed implementation of OBC reservations. Even now IITs and IIMs are asking for exemption from reservation. But the BJP, at least, the Modi team realized that if they go against OBC reservation they will not win the elections.
From 2008 onwards reservation posts of OBC category and backlog posts of the SC/ST category began to be filled in the central universities like JNU,Delhi University, Hyderabad University, Jamia Millia and Aligarh Muslim University Banaras Hindu University and all IITs and IIMs. The liberal, left and free-thinking professors refused to fill the vacancies, showing OBC/SC/ST candidates not suitable,even though they were qualified and some times more qualified with a Ph.D degree, which is not essential for an Assistant Professor post. According to many selection committees their standards do not suit their departments/centres, defining standards with their own yardstick.
It was an existential reality that hardly any OBC/SC/ST students could go abroad and get degrees as going to JNU or Delhi University or Jamia Millia or IIT Delhi was more difficult for them than the upper caste rich going to US or UK for higher education. The first generation educated lack good English language communication skills, even though they know the subject well. Many of us were like that when we entered into the teaching profession in the universities. But we picked up in the course of our career. But the left/liberal professors were not convinced.
Even many Jats, Gujjars, Marathas, Patels Shudras of Bengal and so on did not have foreign academic degrees. Hence they too are hardly found on the teaching faculty in these high end universities or institutions. They have become bastions of Brahmin/Bania foreign degree holders or of those who were educated in JNU or Delhi University, IIT,IIMs with good connections.
The RSS/BJP academic connection is through the Akhila Bharatiya Vidhyarthi Parishad (ABVP). Even liberals or serious free thinkers were not accepted by the RSS/ABVP networks. There are not many foreign degree holders in this network even from upper castes–leave alone OBC/SC/STs. Because the RSS/BJP considered Harvard,Cambridge or Oxford kind of university education as Christian or left/liberal. But the left/liberal intellectual families of the metropolitan cities were so conscious of foreign degrees, they had no problem with Christian/Left/liberal notions, as they know that all the top universities in West were started as Christian universities but they became very secular and liberal/left now. RSS/BJP forces were also very uncomfortable with secular education of the West as they have strong Indian traditional Sanskritic educational agenda.
Now the RSS/BJP regime is forced to fill the backlog OBC/SC/ST vacancies, lest they lose power. There is a dilemma within its Brahmin/Banaia cadre that what they were against are made to accept now because the PM himself is said to be an OBC. Many Vice-Chancellors having come from the dwija community background are forced to adjust with reservation ideology. Because the reservation legitimacy has settled down even among the rural OBC/SC/STs through Panchayat elections. There is a new consciousness among OBC/SC/ST families in villages that reservation is their constitutional right. Dr.B.R. Ambedkar is very popular in the villages because of reservations. RSS/BJP realized this, hence is made to grudgingly adjust with the issue of reservation. Every family now knows where that family locates in terms of reservation in the villages.
The problem is that the BJP Government is filling these vacancies with their ideological forces adopting to their own standard criteria. In this regime candidates with minimum qualification from OBC/SC/STs get posted more quickly than what during the UPA time academics were doing. During the UPA regime the professors–who were experts in selection committees– were very powerful. But now the recruitment is Government driven with their own ideology, and selection committees are nominal. The Vice-Chancellors do the selection based on the directions from above.
Those OBC/SC/ST students who survived with a feeling of totally undeserving to be a central university teacher but somehow managed to get basic qualification of MA/MSc/M.Tech with net, and worked around RSS/ABVP networks by attending shakhas and other activities are becoming associate professors in all central universities and institutes. Even in non-teaching positions, vacancies are being filled with their ideological Shakha trained candidates. RSS/BJP cadres think that for seventy years the liberals and left did not allow them to enter these educational institutes. Now it is their tern to fill every vacancy with a Shakha member who has the basic qualification. The backlog vacancies, left unfilled by the liberal/left and free thinking academia has become boon for the RSS/BJP cadres. If pure caste and individual subjectivity decided earlier what should be the standard in universities and central institutions now loyalty to RSS decides the standard.
But those who got supervised around the left/liberal or free thinking upper caste professors, with lot of struggle, who also carried the left, liberal or free thinking ideology with better academic standards, of course Indian degrees, are not at all favoured even from OBC/SC/STs by the present regime. Even though some of them want to shift to shakha training for the sake of job, the RSS is not trusting them as they get such long term cosy jobs which are of life time with huge benefits. They need well trained loyal cadre on the campuses. And all such candidates are getting teaching positions. The idea of ‘University’ is now being transformed to ‘’Nationsity’’. The new recruits, as the new administration is, are well versed in the education of mythology, parampara and mathrubhoomi. All subjects are compressed into these three ideological Nationsity courses–particularly in social sciences and languages. All their research should be around the modern Golden Age that began in 2014.
There is no doubt that RSS/ABVP trained qualified candidates immediately cannot handle classes in serious universities and institutes. But they do more of organizational work. Even within Indian university education the RSS/ABVP trained academics are not methodologically rigorous as the left liberals are, who have huge or some influence of Euro-American methodological rigor. According to the present regime methodological rigor is anti-national.
Any writing of RSS/BJP/ABVP intellectuals will show that fundamentally they are untrained without any rigor in methodology. From Hedgewar, Golwalkar to present they do not believe in academic rigor and modern methodology. Anything Western is an anathema to them. Their student intellectuals also follow the same model. They do not believe in reading books written by foreign authors , unless they are Hindu like Fancoisgautier. They mainly read mythology books, which are more poetic in form. There is no notion of theory among the RSS/ABVP trained intellectuals. Theory in their view is a Western left/liberal nonsense.
Even among the OBC/SC/ST scholars with a left liberal bent there is seriousness and are of better standards from the point of view of university education. But most of them remain unemployed because they did not get selected by the earlier regime. Now the left/liberal professors lost power even though many of them are still in service in many central universities and institutes. They are now upset, angry and are also part of the agitations standing by the students demanding for autonomy. But RSS/BJP will not give that kind of autonomy because that will come in their way of transforming universities into Nationsities. Like in Middle Eastern Islamic countries they hate secular education system as that does not allow the Bharatiya parampara imparted at all levels in its total Varnadharma form. That is the only way to fulfill Savarkar, Golwalkar and Deendayal Uphadhyaya’s Hindutva parampara philosophical dream. Their dream is totally opposed to Hegelian ideas of Spirit, Geist and Dialectics. They have a goal to abolish the notion of Dialectics form Indian social science discourses.
However, the Indian left/liberal and free thinking intellectuals hate the right-wing low standard teachers of all castes who are better trained in their shakha ideology (as they did in JNU recently) than teaching, writing and debating. The RSS/ABVP recruits cannot survive in those structures of serious reading and writing without changing the earlier culture of reading, writing global knowledge and debate. At best they can debate on mythology issues of India in the class rooms but cannot teach the existing syllabus seriously. Hence they need to change the basic structure of central universities–particularly that of social science education.
The RSS/BJP cannot afford to give autonomy because their academic pool is limited and mostly incompetent by left/liberal–that too foreign trained– standards and also as I said goes against their ultimate goal of reverse transformation.
The JNU crisis is only an expression of this dilemma of RSS/BJP higher education. They opposed reservation but now adjusted to that policy for votes and power. They also supported privatization of higher education. But there is catch there too. If it is pure science or medicine or engineering they have not much problem in private sector. But in social sciences those institutions also ape the West. RSS/BJP mythology centred social science finds no buyers in private universities because they have to pay and study. This is another dilemma.
However, the fear of left, liberal and free thinking merit loving professors is that they have to now live with colleagues who came from the opposite camp with no love of education at all–Indian or foreign– or else they will have to leave for private universities or foreign universities. The RSS/BJP will fill both non-reserved and reserved positions without leaving backlogs because the newly recruited teachers would be their future intellectuals of their own ideology, whatever could be their standards. They define standard in their own terms. They have clarity of their own ideological goal. Indian universities are in reverse march and that is what RSS/BJP want. But the process the whole education system will collapse.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author of many books, the latest being From Shepherd Boy to an Intellectual—My Memoirs
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Ambedkar’s Warnings About Three Types of Dictatorships
The iconic leader’s prescient observations about varna dharma and its threat to India’s constitutional democracy are there for all to see today.
While drafting India’s Constitution, Dr B.R. Ambedkar saw three types of threats to the democratic and egalitarian ethos that he wanted to infuse the nation with. Therefore, for him, the Constitution was not only a means to provide rights to the citizens, but was also meant to be a barrier to keep these threats from establishing any form of dictatorship.
When Ambedkar entered politics after he returned from his higher education in the US and UK, communist movements were sweeping the world. Communist parties of all countries believed that once the revolution succeeds, they could establish a proletariat dictatorship.
Since the proletariat refers to the working class, the poor and oppressed classes (castes in India) were mostly with the communist parties. Having come from an exploited caste – one treated as ‘untouchable’ – Ambedkar naturally should have been a communist. But because of their declared theory of proletariat dictatorship, he opposed communism in India.
Where did his opposition come from? He was by then a serious student of varna dharma, an India-specific, a violently exploitative system built on caste. He seems to have realised that the Indian working masses had been under the control of varna dharma for a long time. The varna dharma is all-pervasive in spiritual, social and political structures.
A significant speculative judgement he made was that since the Communist Party of India was also under the control of Brahmin leadership (P.C.Joshi, Dange and Randive were the main leaders at that time) they will be real dictators in the name of the proletariat. He seems to have understood that if communism succeeded, the exploited and oppressed castes would continue to be under Brahminic dictatorship.
Varna dharma as an exploitative ideological system was well established by Ambedkar’s time and all political formations were under the control of Brahmin intellectual forces, though all were not casteist. They were English educated intellectuals and leaders and did not fully grasp the seriousness of caste oppression. There was no intellectual force among the Shudra/Dalit/Adivasi masses then.
In modern times, any dictatorial system is operationalised by the educated elite. Naturally in India, Ambedkar saw that it would be mainly, even solely, Brahminic intellectuals who refuse to recognise caste-untouchability as a system of exploitation and oppression, who operationalise dictatorship. Thus, he felt, the so-called proletariat dictatorship of the communists would have also been a casteist dictatorship in a different form.
Those were the times in which Ambedkar got an opportunity to draft his anti-communist and anti-varna dharma Indian constitution that focused on welfare and social change. This was an accidental opportunity that he got at a critical time. Today, the oppressed Indian masses believe that his birth in that family and caste is because of divine providence, as he gave them what was unthinkable: the right to vote in a democracy.
The second type of dictatorship
What was the second type of dictatorship Ambedkar encountered through his life experience and study? This is an Indian variant called varna dharma dictatorship. A lot of study and scrutiny has been done on proletariat dictatorship, but varna dharma dictatorship has not been. In fact, this variant is the longest surviving form of dictatorship within India and has been in force for millennia.
He foresaw the danger of varna dharma dictatorship and avoided joining the Hindu Mahasabha or another political formation – the Indian National Congress – in his early years of political thought. Through the drafting of the Constitution and his politics, Ambedkar played a role in undercutting the possibility of varna dharma dictatorship getting established immediately after the British left.
For many years, political forces ignored him but are now realising the seriousness of this possibility when the RSS/BJP – essentially a social and political network of dwijas (Brahmin, Bania and Ksatriyas) – came to power, first in 1999, and again since. When in power, this network has been trying to push India’s constitutional democracy into a crisis, particularly so after the victory in 2019.
The RSS/BJP wants to establish its dictatorship through democratic means, like Adolf Hitler in Germany. Mohan Bhagwat himself said that their notion of ‘nationalism’ may be linked with Nazism. They too understood that there is global discussion that India’s future under their rule could have parallels with Hitler’s Germany.
File photo of RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat (C) during an RSS function. Photo: PTI
The credit for not varna dharma believers not gaining power in Delhi immediately after independence must go not only to Ambedkar but to Jawaharlal Nehru as well. Mahatma Gandhi gave enough scope for the establishment of varna dharma dictatorship, and knowingly or unknowingly Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was willing to allow that. The only Brahmin who was not willing to allow the establishment of varna dharma was Nehru, who had a deeper understanding of that system. Ambedkar not only had an understanding, but also historical experience of its oppression and exploitation.
What is the nature and character of varna dharna dictatorship? It works at various layers, but is more dangerous than any other from of dictatorship. All ideological and political decisions in this form of dictatorship are taken at the top by a small group of people, who are defined as perpetually on the top by very birth. According to Bhanwar Meghwanshi, who just released his autobiographic narration entitled I Could Not Be Hindu: The Story of a Dalit in the RSS, the RSS policymaking body called Akhila Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha (ABPS) consists of 36 people. Twenty-six of these are Brahmins, 5 are Vaishyas, three Kshatriyas and two Shudras and nobody from the Scheduled Castes. The non-elected head of the organisation is the sarsanghchalak, generally a Brahmin. When the BJP is in power at Delhi, the actual power is controlled by the ABPS of RSS.
Three small communities, called the dwijas, have all spiritual, state and financial powers. The entire Shudra masses have to serve their interests and the other layers of society have to obey them. Otherwise, spiritual, financial and state power would be used to attack them.
These three communities, whom we may call dwija bhadralok, controlled everything, without dirtying their own hands. When Muslim rule was established in India and later the British raj, the dwijas lost only state power. Spiritual, social and financial power remained with them, during these reigns.
By establishing the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in early 20th century, the dwija bhadralok wanted to establish a varna dharma dictatorship in a very subtle and modern way, once the British left.
In Ambedkar’s eyes, the Constitution would be a means to counter this ideology.
The third kind
The third dictatorship Ambedkar foresaw was of the Islamic Caliphate kind. Ambedkar realised that after Partition, there was no scope of Indian Muslims coming to power and establishing a caliphate type of dictatorship. However, he studied this system very closely while writing a book on Pakistan. He, perhaps, foresaw that the kind of democracy he wanted to establish in India would not be sustainable in Islamic countries, particularly in Pakistan. This too proved correct by the end of 20th century.
It would not be correct to attribute Amebdkar’s knowledge, courage and confidence to tackle these forms of dictatorship solely to his US and British education. He made a special effort to learn, study, think, write and fight to counter these forces in India. Without the brilliant, bold and skillful Ambedkar, even Nehru would not have been able stop the varna dharma dictatorship and perhaps would even have been part of it if it had been established. His birth in that system would have allowed him to do that.
When Ambedkar became the chairman of the drafting committee of the Indian constitution, he proceeded with maximum care and caution. It survived for 70 years and improved the life of all sections of India, even the dwijas. Indian democracy survived in a region that had the proletarian dictatorship in China, Islamic dictatorship in Pakistan and Hindu varna dharmic dictatorship in Nepal. Now it appears that India too is at risk.
If this is not understood and the Constitution is not protected by people who fall outisde the RSS/BJP’s varna dharma ideology, its dictatorship will be reestablished and the nation will sink into medievalism. Once that happens, along with Muslims and Christians, the Shudras, Dalits and Adivasis – who have been historical victims of this ideology – will also suffer.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author.
https://thewire.in/politics/ambedkar-three-types-dictatorship
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Why Walls Around Gujarat Model Of Development?
Assume that Donald Trump is coming to address ‘Namasthe Trump’ meeting in Hyderabad or Vishkhapatnam or Bangaluru or to Chennai or Cochin there would not have been a need for building walls around the slums on the way to Airport or to his hotel or to the stadium where he addresses the meeting. But in Ahamedabad there is such a need because the way to any big hotel or to the stadium, there are full of slums which not only look very poor but stink very badly. Hence the PM Modi wanted walls to be built to cover up the Gujarat model of poverty and slum life. Slum life tells the story of development as the Slumdog Millionaire did.
This raises a more fundamental question: what was the kind of Gujarat development model he built for 12 years as Chief Minister and later his hand picked Chief Ministers? By no stretch of imagination Ahamedabad would match the capital cities of South Indian states. This being the reality, it would be interesting to take a note how the national media bought this propaganda and the RSS/BJP launched this campaign before and during 2014 elections and how the people in other North Indian states including South Indian Karnataka believed it and voted for that model. This only tells the story of ‘media myth’ making.
No doubt Gujarat has more number of top industries and many of them supported Modi and the BJP due to their displeasure with the Congress, which ruled for 10 years before 2014 elections. The Congress also got caught in corruption and the family control issues. The Gujarat industrialists at that time were visualizing a future for their economy to grow unchecked under the BJP rule. Some of the present Government supporters got more wealth than they could imagine. But the economy is in a bad shape now and many industries are in deep crisis. But how does the Modi Government and ruling party at Delhi justify the fact that walls are being built to cover up poverty from the gaze of not just Trump but from the gaze of the global media. It is true that media is now coming to its senses even in India.
Both Gujarat Government, the Centre under the leadership of Modi could not give a two bedroom house to those Ahmedabad slum dwellers as some of the South Indian states did. The most industrialized state of India could not do away stinking poverty in the capital city even with the benevolence of rich industrialists like Ambanis and Adanis who control massive wealth of the country. Anyway they do not share their wealth with the poor of India. There is no such moral and ethical commitment on their part. The Hindutva ethic does not demand that.
Gujarat stood at 22nd rank among Indian states in the Human Development Index for 2018. Yet the state which was show cased as the model for development just six years back also housed massive wealth by the rich of that state. This conundrum is getting exposed now.
Hence RSS/BJP which allowed Modi to show case that state seem to have realized that the nation does not believe that development model anymore and hence the communal card with CAA/NRC is deployed. But this agenda has invited more foreign criticism as the UN General Secretary himself said that the Muslims of India might remain stateless. This is a serious assessment of the UN. The whole nation should be concerned about this image of India among the comity of nations, which we are a part.
But the world today is rejecting such agendas because the largest democracy and the oldest democracy cannot engage with religious and communal cards in their hands. As India is slipping into theocratic discourse , America under Trump is pushing its democracy out of the boundaries of secular notions. Though Trump and Modi won their elections with America First and India First slogans but America under Trump changed the nation’s unemployment graph. America’s unemployment rate is 50 years low and India’s unemployment rate 40 years high under Modi.
Though Trump promised to build walls across the nation’s borders to check illegal migration he could not really start building such walls because of strong opposition from Democrats . The opposition to Trump is so strong that he was impeached in the Congress but escaped losing power in the Senate just by margin of six votes.
But Modi is building walls around slums to hide the stinking poverty in the nation yet there is no serious opposition. Any critic of Modi’s Government or party is being dubbed as anti-national. What does this nationalism indicate?
In the midst of so much nationalist euphoria why such slum life of people remains as it is? Anyone who travels across North India where the BJP got highest seats poverty and misery could be seen everywhere. This is not true of South India where the BJP cannot make much headway. Anyone who travels across South India would find much better living conditions, health levels and housing conditions. South India also accommodates social diversity much better.
What is the nationalist morality? Reducing inequalities and exploitation should be the primary goal of nationalist party and leader. Why there is no focus on that fundamental issue of improving the life of productive masses?
Building walls around poor people’s living localities does not improve our image internationally. It exposes the weakness not strength.
On the one hand the Prime Minister talks about India reaching 5 Trillion dollar economy from the present 3 trillion dollar economy. On the other he builds walls to hide poverty. Wealth cannot be produced from mythological sources. Masses have to work and produce wealth. The chief source of wealth is labour of masses. Their food intake, living conditions that include housing and educational facilities have to be good. There is no evidence that this central Government is working to improve them in a focused manner.
The focus is on other issues that do not improve the living conditions of the poor slum dwellers and villagers. Trump comes and goes but the walls that are being built in Ahamedabad to hide the stinking poverty of Gujarati working people will remain to tell the story of Modi Government both in Gujarat and Delhi for long time to come
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author of many books, the latest being From Shepherd Boy to an Intellectual—My Memoirs.
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Are OBCs Not Eligible To Be On Sri Ram Temple Trust?
After the Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the Ram temple trust the former Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, who over saw the Babri Msjid destruction, Kalyan Singh and Uma Bharati, who actively participated in that act, said that the Other Backward Classes (Shudra/ OBCs) are as much Ram Bhakts as Dalits are and demanded for inclusion of an OBC member on the trust. They held back from saying that they are as Ram Bhakts as the Brahmin/Bania/Ksatriyas are yet with a difference as the OBCs and Dalits contributed the man power needed for the destruction of Babri Masjid destruction and their physical labour alone will build the temple yet they are not in the Trust. This certainly is a caste conscious demand by the very same Sangh OBC leaders.
The members of trust so far declared are senior lawyer K Parasaran, Jagatguru Shankracharya, Jyothishpeethadheeshwar Swami Vasudevanand Saraswati Ji Maharaj from Allahabad, Jagatguru Madhavacharya Swami Vishwa Prasannatheerth Ji Maharaj, Pejawar Math in Udupi, Yugpurush Paramanand Ji Maharaj from Haridwar, Swami Govinddev Giri Ji Maharaj from Pune and Vimlendra Mohan Pratap Mishra from Ayodhya. The Dalit member is Mahant Dinedra Das from Bihar. The others would be Ex-Officio members from the Government structures. There is no single OBC member on the trust as this list shows.
The question is why any Shudra/OBCs that include Jats, Yadavs, Patels Marathas, Lingayat and Vakkalinga to whole of reserved OBC communities which were mainly responsible for the BJP victory did not find eligibility on the trust? The immediate reason is that the Shudra/OBCs are not such an organized national spiritual/political force as the Brahmin/Bania/Ksatriyas and also the Dalits. The modern Shudras never asserted their identity and demanded for their share in Hindu spiritual system, although they are the main stay of the religion. Brahmin presence in any Hindu activity is seen as Shudra presence as well. What about Dalits?
After Ambedkar’s emergence Dalits acquired new spiritual status and identity, though they still suffer massive oppression in the caste hierarchy. Sriram’s historical spiritual status as against Shudras also has something to do with the present exclusion of them. The Dalit issue never finds mention in Ramayan.
The dwija communities have a historical nexus with Sriram’ heritage, though mythological. Even when Sriram was king not God in the Ramayan narration the Brahmins were his gurus, the Ksatriyas were his caste community rulers. Yogi Adithyanath feels a strong bondage to Sriram because he comes from his caste-community heritage and even today that power parampara continues to hold true. Brahmins know that Sriram did not do anything without the approval of his Brahmin gurus. Vashisht played a key adviser role in every step of his life–both in war and peace times. Ram killed Shudra Shambuk with the command of Vashisht for he claimed a Brahmin status trying to perform a tapashya. RSS believes that that story narrative is part of Vedic parampara and needs to be preserved.
RSS treats Srikrishna, on the other hand, with a different view. Srikrishna did not accept any Brahmin guruship and declared him self the ultimate God. He has Shudra descendency. Perhaps, this could be the main reason why right from 1925 the Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh leadership conceptualized its Hindu Rastra in the image of Ramrajya but never used the idea of Krishnarajya, inspite of the fact Srikrishna is known as God and king of Dwaraka.
RSS strongly believes in Guru parampara wherein the Brahmin guru should be on the highest pedestal. The Bania nexus with Ram is very recent. Mahatama Gandhi also used the Ramrajya concept once Hindu Maha Sabha and RSS started using it, though he treated Gita as his sacred text. Gandhi made it acceptable to Banias and other Shudra nationalists during his mass mobilization. That base was very useful for RSS in the temple mobilization. Only Ambedkar kept the Dalit samaj outside that fold and Dalit samaj needs to be satisfied with this kind of identity tokenism. The Shudra/OBCs are seen as subsumed social force in Hindu brahminism while being unequals.
Prime Minister ignored the Shudra/OBCs while constituting the trust because they are not seen as a threat to BJP’s power and their spiritual ideology at the national level. They are taken for granted social agrarian lot. Though the Shudra/OBCs have regional political control in many states, they have never challenged the Hindutva ideology with an independent spiritual ideology of their own at at the national level. Dalits on the other hand used Buddhism and Christianity as alternatives. A direct threat to Hinduism. RSS/BJP dwija leadership is worried about that conversion threat, as their status of being historical untouchables now finds a global recognition and sympathy. This also worries the ruling RSS/BJP dwija leadership. Shudra/OBCs have never challenged Hindu dwija focres on spiritual matters. Kalyan Singh and Uma Bharati have raised a mild inside protest as they too were two Chief Ministers in big North Indian states and emotionally involved in demolition of Babri Masjid.
At the time Babri demolition since the OBC militancy in the so called movement was strong, greater was the acceptability in the RSS/BJP networks. Shudra/OBCs competed for that recognition. Kalyan Singh lost his Government, went to jail for a day and became a hero. Umabharati lead the demolition squads with a slogan ourek Dhakka maaro. From that position of more threats to Muslims she became the first OBC woman Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh. Sadvi Rithambhara another OBC women also became Sangh heroin with fiery speeches. In that atmosphere the Modi’s OBC certificate found resonance in the 2014 election.
Kalyan Singh and Uma Bharati are not spiritual thinkers. They are rabble rousers. RSS has not produced a single Shudra/OBC spiritual philosopher so far. Constant reading of spiritual or philosophical texts is not considered to be a Shudra/OBC job even now within the Sangh. RSS has not accepted the role reversal of castes and communities, because that goes against Hindu parampara. All Sarsanchalaks, including Mohan Bhagwat repeatedly stress on protecting Hindu parampara.
From Congress fold also a known Shudra intellectual like Shashi Tharoor who could raise philosophical questions on inside inequality in Hinduism eulogized the whole Hindu system in his book Why I am a Hindu without raising questions of caste and hierarchy. In private conversation at a Kerala Literature Festival recently he told me that Kerala Nairs do not consider themselves as Shudras, even though they are not dwijas with a right to sacred thread (jenevu). Nairs produced many writers on religion but they all see Hinduism without looking at caste differentiation. Hence the Kerala communists also do not talk about caste as much as Kalyan Singh and Uma Bharati do.
If only the Shudra/OBCs realize the caste exclusion in RSS/BJP parampara is a reality the principle of majoritarianism will find a social set back.
Unless there is a Shudra/OBC intellectual challenge to RSS ideology like the one that Ambedkar posed to the dwija hegemony in Hinduism in the name of parampara the RSS/BJP do not give any spiritual credence to Shudra/OBCs. Kalyan Singh or Uma Bharati cannot do that as they are not ideological thinkers even within their own framework. Shudra/OBCs need to produce an Ambedkar from among their agrarian brains.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author of many books, the latest being From Shepherd Boy to an Intellectual—My Memoirs
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Equality Labs Chases The Mother Of Inequality (Brahminism) In America
To the utter shock of American Brahminism an unusual organization called Equality Labs came into being in New York. IT was established by second generation, American born, Dalit women activists to chase it in America in every sphere of life, including in the digital media. Thenmozhi Soundararajan and few other US born citizens with amazing talents and were told by their parents that they belong to Dalits who suffered untouchability, caste brutality and poverty in their native land. Sharp young educated Dalit women and men were shocked that the caste discrimination operates in several subtle ways even in America in every sphere where brahminic people work.
These women and men are intelligent enough to understand the trauma of their parental history and identity when they were in their under-graduate and post-graduate courses in their respective universities. For example, Thenmozhi was a University of California Berkeley student who realized that their Brahminic teacher’s attitude changed towards her once she revealed her caste identity. Now she is dead bent on chasing Brahmnism in America along with others by establishing the Equality Labs.
The founding fathers of America declared that “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness….”. But the Indian Brahminic forces carried their God’s principle of unequal creation of human beings—the Brahmins from his head, Ksatriyas from shoulders, Vaishyas from thighs and the Shudras from feet. The untouchables according to their spiritual theory were born without their God’s sanction hence need to be treated barbarically even in America. The Indian Dalits/Shudras/Adivasis never knew what is life, liberty and happiness till today. A few of them came to America in pursuit of them. But there too the brahminism is haunting them.
The agents of brahminism in that country hardly acquired any civilizational change with all their modern English education and American life where there is a strong Christian ethic. Some of them are liberals but that liberalism does not go against caste and untouchability in a serious way. Brahhmism is quite safe in the garb of liberalism, a sad story indeed.
The brahminic forces are spreading into every structure of the American society. They do not have any respect to their Christian ethic of compassion, grace and humanness. They also do not have any historical sense of shame and guilt. If their ancestors committed sins of practicing human untouchability and graded inequality like the White Christians who felt shame for slavery and segregation of blacks and native Americans in earlier decades. The whites tried to fight it out, the evidence which could be seen in African American museum of Washington D.C
In spite of number of Brahmin female and male writers emerging from that land no one wrote like Harriet Beecher Stowe did in her Uncle Tom’s Cabin about the life and trauma of blacks in the US. When there are so many Brahmin women academics and writers doing a lot of writing on India from American land why they too did not write a single book about caste and untouchability, is million dollar question? The worst part is the caste and untouchability menace is spreading in America and it worries conscientious whites too.
They spread brahminism of food, bed and everyday life inequality as their cultural character. Worst, they are spreading anti-Christian idol worship which the ancient slave Moses fought against and brought them into monotheism of high civilization. America is a direct beneficiary of the progressive Protestant ethic. If idol worship with brahminism of caste purity spreads and persists the capitalist-democratic structure of America will come in conflict with the ideals of its founding fathers’ philosophy who inscribed it on every major Government building —including on the building of the Supreme Court that –All Men Are Created Equal. It was this principle that gave enormous scope to blacks to liberate themselves from slavery and white racism. Many white women and men were collaborators in the fight against racism, including Abraham Lincoln. It was in this background that Martin Luther King emerged as young hero of liberation with whites giving him Nobel Peace Price before he died at the age of 39. That is grace.
The Indians spread brahminism into that progressive ethic not only in high end offices, white house portals, Capitol Hill corridors and also into all channels of digital media. They appear to be obedient to the whites, while cracking their civilization of equality from inside and want to see that the Dalits/Shudras do not enter those structures as their prejudices against them are spiritually ordained and unreformable. The Shudras do not confront them but the Dalits, though small in number, are fighting them with the weapon of Ambedkarism.
The Equality Labs has taken that fight to a higher level of modern operation in all sectors of life. Thenmozhi and Maari Zwick Maitreyi(a co-founder of the Lab) match them in all spheres of their operation. The power of their American education and realization of their ancestral oppression forced them to focus on casteism in that country and take them on in Twitter, Facebook campaigns , Wikipedia editing and so on.
The brahminic false nationalism of standing against the development of any other person of Indian ethnicity except the Brahmins is brought out in graphic details in a recent report that the Equality Lab brought out called Caste in the United State.
Equality Labs along with Ambedkar Association of North America, The Ambedkar International Mission, Ambedkar-King Study Circle, Boston Study Circle, Ambedkar-Periyar Association have started an impressive work of countering the spread of brahminism in America. The Shudras are still to wake up, as they are back in India. But they too will realize soon that their ancient productive and universally validated spiritual and food culture— meat, chicken, fish and so on—is being humiliated there too. Look at what a Shudra woman said:
“We are a Shudra Caste family. At Diwali and other festival potluck parties, I am really nervous about what I cook. The “upper” Caste folks may ostracize me for bringing nonvegetarian dishes on their “auspicious” day. One time, I cooked a chicken curry and they set my dish aside, all the way on the other side of the table, in a corner and labeled it “NONVEGETARIAN” in large letters. No one ate my curry and avoided me the whole night. I go to the parties for my kids so they won’t be isolated from their friends but I’d really rather not go altogether and I am considering that option more and more.
It is this pure vegetarian brahminism that is destroying India ever since the BJP/RSS came to power at Delhi in 1999 and 2014. Dalits and Muslims are being lynched for eating beef or for possessing cows as their property. The BJP/RSS use the Shudra muscle power for such inhuman acts without even granting them spiritual equality in the religion that they run as its custodians—Hinduism. No Shudra can become priest in Hindu temple even now. Once the Shudra self rebels against this ‘ vegetarian eating great’ culture as all Shudras are historically meat and fruit eaters foregrounding their multi- cuisine culture and civilization from the days of Harappan city civilization brahminism will be buried once for all. However, they still follow brahminism as God’s dictum.
But the Dalits world over are fighting brahminism in all its manifestations. The Equality Labs report recorded the statements of many Dalits living in America. It tells the world what strategies they adopt to discriminate them and practice new forms of untouchability in foreign lands too.
See the kind of school and college level caste humiliation that brahminic caste youth practice with their college or school mates. One college going boy told:
“Friends who came over to our house did not eat when they saw books on Dr. Ambedkar at my home and guessed my Caste”
Another person narrated
“Most Indians in my school were upper Caste Hindus and Brahmin families, so I never felt connected to them through “Indian culture”. They would make fun of the fact that I ate meat and was Christian. In that way, my religion and family history sort of alienated me from them. I did not know it at the time but they were Brahmin… and my parents hid from me that I was Dalit. But if I had known I could have called out their Caste bullying for what it was.”
Bullying a school child in America is a big crime. It is strange that the American brahminic mothers teach their children to bully the meat and chicken eating children. All American children, apart from the Dalit/Shudra American children, whether white or black are also meat, chicken and beef eaters. The Chinese and all Middle Eastern settlers are meat eaters. If all these children begin to bully the Brahmin/Bania children of Indian origin they will face a miserable life there. But they are gracious as that principle is taught to them as part of their Christian/liberal upbringing.
The Brhamin/ Banias of India once used to think that crossing the sea is a sinful act. Even learning English was thought to be sinful. But they overcame these hurdles but not casteism and pure vegetarianism which are not at all common human characteristic. Pure vegetarianism or pure meatarianism is an animal characteristic. For example, cow, buffalo, sheep, goat and so on eat only grass/leaves. But lion, tiger, jackal and so on eat only meat. But all humans eat both. Pure vegetarians should have understood this globally practiced food culture, at least while living in Euro-American soils. Constructing anything pure in food culture leads to cultural conflicts . If a counter bullying, based on universal food culture starts against them their life becomes miserable both in India and abroad.
The Equality Labs report tells several stories of Dalit discrimination of women and men in America. Such discriminatory practices are not uncommon in Canada, UK and other places. The question therefore is how to overcome this inhuman behavior of casteists and pure vegetarians who do not live a normal life. Brahminism seems to be an unreformable cultural construct. To understand why brahminism is behaving the way it does worldwide we need to examine how it reshaped itself up in nationalist English education period in India.
North America is a dream land of English educated Indian Brahmins ever since Lord Macaulay, whom they hate in home land, structurally instituted English medium education in India in the nineteenth century. Ever since the first English medium school was started in 1817 in Calcutta they only admitted their children in that school. They left their Sanskrit to their gods/goddesses and priests. This was sheer hypocrisy! Their children, youth, men and women should get easy wealth without soiling their hands in agrarian sector, which involves hard physical work. Avoiding labour as life and living leisure as life was/is their spiritual design. That forced them to play all kinds of tricks possible. But that process of life endangers any productive culture and civilization. That is what they are experimenting in America whose philosophy is labour is life. They do not believe in a God who tells people to live by the ‘sweat of their brow’.
The first unofficial initiation of teaching English to Indians was made by William Carey, an English cobbler turned Christian missionary, only to be hated by the English educated Bengali Brahmin pundits later. However, they adopted Rajarammohan Roy as the father figure of brahminic renaissance who co-operated with Carey and learnt English in the process in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries .
Roy was too eager to lift his own Sanskrit insulated Brahmin community to learn the so called colonial language and cross the seas to become modern and become global flying squads to spread birth based inequality in theory and practice in the world. He himself died in England only to be made the father of Brahminic nationalism after his death in 1833. They never recognized Mahatma Jotiorao Phule and his wife Savitribai Phule who initiated English education among the productive communities in Bombay province.
As I said Roy learnt English with the help of William Carey. This led to many Brahmins going to England and learning English not to give up Brahminism but to control the Dalit/Shudra/Adivasis masses of India at home and earn Pounds/Dollars from the West. But a parallel educational revolution was initiated by Dr.B.R.Ambedkar by studying in America and rose to write the Indian constitution and also many books to liberate the oppressed castes of India. The Equality lab is working with his banner in America.
By the time the Bharatiya Janatha Party came to power with full support of national and global money of Bania/Brahmin forces in 2014 they spread the poison of caste in the West—USA,UK,Canada—to create a crisis in the transformed culture of human equality. The Western intellectuals so far have not seen that danger to their civilization. The Dalits, however, are letting the world know what kind of poison of inequality can be spread in the Western civilization that taught the notion of equality and grace to the world that it would face.
Brahminism in the post-colonial India adopted a double edged strategy to see that the oppressed castes do not get English education and compete with them in the national and global markets. It kept English medium in private sector and saw to it that all the Government schools teach only regional languages to the working caste/class children.
The RSS/BJP recruited most Shudra youth into the muscle power squads, not to learn English in schools, but to persecute minorities in India. Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizenship (NRC) are best examples of that process.
In the urban areas the very Brahmin/Bania children studied in the best Christian schools and best institutes of India and went abroad settled in America and UK. They themselves were/ are in touch with Western liberal/left educationalists. The West hardly had any knowledge of the other side of India.
According the report of the Equality Labs the first man who took American citizenship in late nineteenth century was A.K.Mozumdar, who obviously was an Indian Brahmin by claiming that he was an Indian Aryan born in a high caste blood pool, which according to him was very close to the European Caucasian blood. The then racist Americans agreed to give him citizenship on that ground. Since then they began to move there with their temples and priests and caste system with them.
The white racism has now changed so much that many whites fought for liberation of the blacks from slavery and segregation. But hardly any major Brahmin/Bania intellectual worked for abolition of caste. They have not shown that grace. William Wilberforce, a British white parliamentarian turned against the barbaric slave trade by using the same Bible and became the harbinger of ‘Amazing Grace’ in the Christian civilization. Why not a single Brahmin used their own spiritual texts against human untouchability and caste based slavery in India? Why for three millennia the Brahminic men and women never showed such grace?
In America there are extreme right wing brahminic intellectual forces like Rajiv Malhotra and other members of extreme right wing supremacists working from American Hindu Foundation , Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh and other spiritual institutional structures. They are spreading the poison of caste, untouchability pure castesist vegetarianism into the Western world with a clear long term design. The Equality Lab and other Dalit organizations are chasing them but the brahminism’s future in the West depends on how and when the Westerners realize the real danger to their civilization itself with the spread of caste, untouchability and pure vegetarianism.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author of many books, the latest being From Shepherd Boy to an Intellectual—My Memoirs
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Make Reading Preamble of the Constitution Compulsory
The Government of Maharastra has made reading Preamble of the constitution compulsory in the school assembly meetings every morning. From primary school to high school, students must remind themselves that they live in a democracy under this constitution. This is a great nationalist step. Every state Government in the country must do this needful thing at this juncture of our national crisis.
The Preamble and the portrait of Ambedkar became the symbols in all protest meeting against CAA and NRC. Women, especially Muslim women who never used to come out are on the streets. The university students also came out into streets trying to save the nation from slipping into anarchy. They are also trying to save India from international calumny about Indian democracy and its functioning by making Preamble and Ambedkar, the father of the constitution symbols of this struggle.
The Preamble of the constitution is the oxygen mask at a time of deadly anti-Indian disease that was let loose in the form of CAA and NRC by the Delhi Government. The future survival of this constitution is based on our children’s belief in the constitution and the constitutional morality that our founding fathers gave us as the national spirit and life blood of the democratic state and society. Neither the nation nor Indian democracy will survive if Mahatma Gandhi and Nathuram Godse, who killed him, are seen as equally patriotic. Our children should be able to distinguish between good and evil at an early stage in life. They should learn that a killer and killed can never be equated. They should learn the protagonist of non-violence and a protagonist of brutal violence cannot be respected at the same time and at the same level. The nation is being pushed into that kind of mental disorder where Gandhi and Godse could be equated.
The Preamble declared that “We the people–all of us without looking at what our religion, caste, race gender is—gave this nation to ourselves” on 26 January 1950. From that day the so called parampara of early India which operated with all kinds of inequalities caste, religious, colonial and gender brutalities, was replaced with a principle of what Ambedkar called ‘liberty, equality and fraternity ‘ of every individual. These rights are inalienable rights of every caste, religion, race and gender persona of our nation. It cannot be taken away with NRC. It cannot be not given to new comers, whether born here or migrated, for some reason with CAA.
Those who migrate from other countries for some reason and if we are convinced that they need protection and livelihood India should give citizenship to them without looking at their religion. We should look at their humanness but not religion. That is against the Preamble—what we call the Spirit–of our constitution.
The Preamble declares that India is a secular nation. The children from primary school onwards should know that religion is an individual choice and a private affair. Once the religion becomes a ground for granting citizenship the constitutional guarantee of secularism gets violated. Whoever wants to impose their private religion on the nation should be opposed based on our constitutional morality.
The idea of socialism in the preamble though does not speak of communist socialism, but lays a strong ground for modern democratic welfare system that we are using. The right to education and employment and right to dignity of labour and housing, old age pensions that Governments are giving today flow from this guarantee by the Preamble.
That we are a democratic republic is a foundational principle of the constitution. If our future citizens constantly do not fight and work for protecting democracy and republican form of Government the system can be driven in any direction. Democracy can be abolished and dictatorship could be brought about.
When the rulers are becoming more and more unpredictable the schools, colleges and universities are only the hope of the present democratic and republican system. This is where every young man/woman learns about the importance of the struggle of our freedom fighters, their sacrifices in the fight against the colonial rulers. They should know that hundreds died in the cause of establishing a democratic constitution.
The view that courts will protect the constitution and the people do not have to bother about it is not a correct idea. Judiciary is also headed or run by humans who have their own views and ideologies. People’s alertness makes judiciary also more responsible and functioning protector of the constitution. Educational institutions play a key role in educating people and keeping them informed.
Indians as people historically are not habituated for regular book reading and keeping books at home. Time has come that our children should be taught that every Indian must read constitution as duty. Normally people think that reading of the constitution is a work of lawyers and political science teachers. That is absolutely wrong. Every Indian must read constitution as part of the school education and also later in life.
Books of religion are read by people who belong to that particular religion. But Indian constitution is every Indian’s book–whatever could be ones religion or language. Making the constitution available plays a key role and the State Government must provide the constitution in all languages.
Though there was some debate on constitution during emergency between 1975-77 the number of educated people at that time was very limited. This much schools, colleges and universities were not there at that time in India. Now the situation is different.
When educated people take a selfish view they can participate in the activities of dismantling constitution students should act as a bulwark against this very idea. Education in itself is not a guarantee for sustenance of the principle ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’. Educated people themselves created caste and untouchability in India. They asked others to practice it as our parampara. Our constitution opposes that paramapra. It declares that all Indians are equal. It initiated a new parampara of equality and well being of all. Many oppose this constitutional principle. We should oppose such forces of evil.
Now educated people must think about good of all, equality of all and welfare of all, not just of the rich and powerful. Constitution is meant to make people to live for the good of all. Everyday reading of the Preamble by young children and reading of the constitution by every young man/woman will save India from many dangers.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author of many books, the latest being From Shepherd Boy to an Intellectual—My Memoirs
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CAA-NRC debate: If religion is allowed to colour civil rights, India’s democracy will be imperiled
After the Citizenship Amendment Act became a reality in the middle of December, protests broke out across India. By now, about 25 people have been killed around the country, most of them falling to police bullets. Even in the Jayaprakash Narayan movement against Indira Gandhi in the mid-1970s and the subsequent Emergency, such massive nationwide protests and police killings did not take place.
Despite the government’s claims that the Opposition is behind the protests, they mostly are spontaneous. Again, contrary to the government’s suggestion, it is not just the Muslim community that is demonstrating. People of all religions – especially students – have participated in a big way.
The panicked Bharatiya Janata Party-controlled Central government has let the police loose on protesting students and general public in states ruled by the party. But the police baton-charges, teargas shelling and firing have failed to cow down Indians: to the contrary, they have resurrected the spirit of Indian democracy.
State and society
In Hindutva political theory, there is no discourse about citizenship of human beings in relation to state and society. The concept of citizenship first formulated by Aristotle in Greece. He defines citizen “as a person who has the right to participate in deliberative or judicial offices of the state”. According to him aliens and slaves have no citizenship rights.
This idea was developed by later European thinkers, who broadly defined a citizen as a person who could vote and receive the benefits for continuing life and making the life better in the process of living in a given state. Immigrants were given the right to ask for citizenship based on their contribution to that society and state through their labour power, not based on religion or creed, caste or race.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Bharitya Janata Party want to rely on ancient Indian literary sources for their understanding of the concept of the citizen. But there is no proper definition of citizenship in moar ancient Indian texts: they all support caste-based karma theory but not a rational theory of citizenship. Even Kautilya’s Arthashastra, a treatise about statecraft, fails to define who a citizen is.
A protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act in Chennai. Credit; PTI The only book that talks about the citizen, known as the nagarika, is Vastyayana’s Kama Sutra. But it offers a rather perverted definition of the role: the nagarika is a householder and enlightened person. What should he do? According to Kama Sutra, “having put his clothes and ornaments, [he] should during the afternoon converse with his friends. In the evening there should be a singing and after that the house holder, along with his friends should await in his room, previously decorated and perfumed, the arrival of a woman who may be attached to him.”
The woman with whom the nagarika is supposed to engage with is a ganika – a courtesan. But there is no discussion about the state and its membership in this text at all.
A theocratic law
No democratic state should give citizenship to either migrants or to refugees based on their religious background. But the Citizenship Amendment Act provides a fast track to citizenship for undocumented migrants from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh – if they are not Muslim.
This is a theocratic law, to say the least. According to Hindutva theoreticians like Subramanyan Swamy, no Muslim is persecuted in these Islamic nations so they have no need to seek residence in India. If so, why mention religion in the Act at all and arouse the ire of India’s Muslims? The mention of religion in the Act provides serious grounds for Indian citizens belonging to that religion to be anxious that all of them could be rendered stateless. That suspicion has deepened now.
Even considering that Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh discriminate against their minorities, why should a mature democracy like India, which has well-acclaimed Constitution, do the same? Our founding fathers would not have wanted this.
A danger to democracy
Assuming that the US decides tomorrow that illegal migrants of all religions will get citizenship, except if they are Hindu. Hindus who are already US citizens will realise that they are being told they are unwanted.Once such a law is enacted, how do they think that non-Hindus will treat them as good citizens? This is the main problem that the Indian Muslims will face with the country’s new citizenship law.
Even though India has functioned as a constitutional democracy for seven decades, our idea of human rights and citizenship remains underdeveloped. We need to evolve in our understanding of several matters, particularly how to negotiate between civil rights and religious faith. If the line between religion and civil rights is erased, our democratic system will collapse.
Though India’s ancient and medieval texts do not provide us a sophisticated theory of citizenship or on how democratic institutions should function, modern Indian thinkers like BR Ambedkar have provided some guidance on these matters. Still, to sustain democracy, we needs to read and re-read the western theories of human and civil rights.
The foundational principle of democracy is that though majority elects government, the minority that voted to the opposition should always feel secure in every institution of the nation. A government should never equate itself with nation, as the BJP-RSS are doing. That is self destructive.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author and the Former director, of the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy at the Maulana Azad National Urdu University in Hyderabad.
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In Mohan Bhagwat’s India, Everyone Is a Hindu
The RSS head’s recent speech is testament to a vision where the lines between being Indian and being Hindu are blurred haphazardly.
The Sarsanghchalak of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Mohan Bhagwat, gave a speech in Hyderabad in which he defined Hindus and Hinduism totally differently. The speech was delivered on Christmas day, when the world was celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, an universally recognised prophet of peace and non-violence.
According to him, all Indians i.e. 1.3 billion people, are Hindu. A Hindu is one who lives in this (Indian) land and must worship Bharat Mata and also love the soil and water. That means all Indians, apart from worshipping or praying to the god that they believe in, must also worship Bharat Mata as the goddess that RSS has constructed.
Therefore, all Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Sikhs, Parsis and so on should worship two forces, one god and another, Bharat Mata.
More in Home While registering their names in the National Register of Citizens or in school or in any other record as against the column ‘Religion’ they must write Muslim-Hindu, Buddhist-Hindu, Christian-Hindu, Sikh-Hindu, Parsi-Hindu and so on. They can then follow their book, their food culture, their marriage system.
This time he has not asked them to worship the cow and give up eating beef. He has also not talked about Uniform Civil Code.
Whosoever now wants to take to Islam anew or Christianity or Buddhism or Sikhism or any other religion must mention Hindu invariably as part of their religion.
Mohan Bhagwat has departed from the earlier definition of Hindutva given by Savarkar, Gedgewar, Golwalkar and so on. Earlier Hinduism and Hindutva appeared in some sense, different.
Bhagwat has taken out the political ideological content from the discourse. This formulation, according to him, sustains the inclusiveness that Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, and Sikhs want. Maybe this will also solve the CAA-NRC problem. Those Muslim migrants or refugees should simply mention against their names, ‘Muslim-Hindu’. They then can pray to their Allah in Arabic but at the end of the prayer they must, perhaps, say ‘Bharat Mata ki jai’.
It appears that Mohan Bhagwat has emerged as greatest theoretician of Hindu philosophy, after Kautilya and Manu. Both Kautilya and Manu provided the basis for the kingdoms of Maurya Chandra Gupta and Pushyamitra Shunga by writing their own theoretical texts, Arthashastra and Manudharma Shastra. As Kautilya and Manu brought Chandra Gupta and Pushyamitra to power with their theories, Mohan Bhagwat has brought Narendra Modi to power. In his living times Amit Shah is likely to become Prime Minister after Narendra Modi. The existing BJP majority in the parliament and two term rule itself is Mohan Bhagwat’s philosophical strategic contribution.
According to Mohan Bhagwat, as he expounded his new theory at the Hyderabad meet, human beings of the world could be divided into three categories. They all desire three kinds of victories. They are:
“Asura, Rajasika and Dharma. People belonging to the Asura category lived in sadness, made others sad, caused violence, yet achieved victory, which would, ultimately cause the destruction of everything. And those belonging to the second category did things that were self centred. They used others to gain riches and pride for themselves. The Sangh and India believed in Dharma victory, where people lived for the happiness and well being of others, and did not want heaven, kingdom or anything for themselves.”
This is a highly creative theory that protects believers from the belief of heaven and kingdom. Mohan Bhagwat has liberated his Hindus from the desire of heaven and also kingdom.
These two desires caused so much violence that genocides took place because of them. As of now whether they are Muslims, Christians or Buddhists or Sikhs living as pure Muslims, or pure Buddhists, or pure Sikhs ‘they want heaven after death and kingdom (political power) in this life.’
According to him such forces also commit violence. For the first time he has told the world that RSS and BJP karyakartas (workers) do ‘not want heaven and kingdom’. Like the RSS karyakartas, people who want to get out of the desire of heaven and kingdom should have a Hindu tag along with any other religious tag that they have. He is not asking them to either convert to Hinduism, nor is he asking those who converted from Hinduism to re-convert.
They should simply add a new tag ‘Hindu’ to their existing religion. If they do not do so, there will be serious consequences, of course only of ‘Dharma’ violence.
The only question is, why did RSS establish the BJP if not for capturing the state power (kingdom) and why does it keep on working for its victory, as against other political parties, which believe in secularism and state power, which, according to him, are sinful activities?
He tells the world that his organisation never participated in Asura and Rajsika activity in its lifetime of 95 years. Does he not consider its rioting period before 2014 as a period of Dharma? Does he mean that Advani’s Rath Yatra and the riots that followed in the 1990s are Asura and Rakshasa activities? Then why does his own BJP government does not send Advani and his team to jail?
Bhagwat’s new Hindu theory gives an interesting twist that Asuras and Rajsikas are not in Bharat, as the ancient Hindu texts told us. They are neither lower castes nor Muslims nor Christians of India but they are outside India. If the Indian Muslims, Buddhists, or Christians do not add Hindu to their religious tag perhaps they would be considered as Asuras and Rajasikas who have migrated from outside.
He has given enough scope for their transformation with a new mode of conversion. If they do not transform, perhaps, his Dharma violence follows its own course.
This is a new Bharat of Mohan Bhagwat. He has a grand design for the future of the children of the nation. The Hyderabad theory will be interpreted and re-interpreted. Media has reported his theory very prominently. The TV channels telecast his speech live.
Let us wait and see how other religious intellectuals, secular intellectuals and the Western scholastic scholars react to this theory. His theory has thrown a serious threat to Indian minorities. Many minority leaders have already expressed serious apprehensions about this kind of one Hindu nation theory.
For the first time in known Indian history, millions of people, and especially minorities, have come out to the streets to oppose the CAA and NRC. Mohan Bhagwat scares them more with this theory.
Earlier he scared the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes with a theory of ‘no reservation in India’ in the garb of reviewing the reservation system itself. The question is: can India as a nation survive with this kind of dangerous religious theories? What happens to our secular constitution? My fear is that the very idea of India is in serious threat and Mohan Bhagwat has very deliberately posed that very threat from his position.
Social activist and author Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist who taught at Osmania University till 2012.
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RSS/BJP Ideology Is No Spiritual Citizenship To Shudras And No National Citizenship To Muslims
The Hindutva, a political child of the Brahminic Hindu religion, denied spiritual citizenship to Shudras historically. Now it has decided to deny national citizenship to Muslims. The Brahmin/Bania forces want to consolidate their power with an iron grip on all sections of India by denying basic citizenship to different sections of India in different modes. Shudras and Dalits were denied all basic rights for millennia through the Hindu spiritual system. Now through the Hindutva school they are going after Muslims with a nationalist agenda. In this agenda even the Shudras/Dalits/Adivasis do not get anything but their muscle power will be used for fighting Muslims and vote power will be used for Brahmin/Bania/Ksatriya empowerment.
The citizenship Act 2019 bans migration of Muslims from only three countries—Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Why only these three countries, not from other Muslim countries? The reason is that these three countries are part of Hindutva Akhanda Bharat. Hindutva ideology still believes that Islam has taken away the Shudras, Dalits and Adivasis, who would have been under the thumb of the Brahmin/Bania/Ksatriyas of India as a great majority. All of them went into Islam and carved out their own nation states based on the religious ideology and philosophy.
From these three countries over a period of few decades many Brahmin/Banias migrated to India under the rubric of Hindus. They got the best of the resources in North India and most of such migrants got, with the help of the central Government, English medium education and got into bureaucratic positions, politics and so on. L.K.Advani (Sindhi Bania) is one such leader who came from Pakistan. He organized the Banias around the RSS/BJP networks. Now Narendra Modi, a Bania (with OBC certificate) and Amit Shah, a Jain Bania, who are his disciples doing yet another level mobilization of their own forces. Mohan Bhagwat as the head of the RSS and Modi and Amit Shah, as the rulers of the Indian state and while controlling their party, are moving with a design. Though many labouring non-Muslims– who are lower castes– migrated from these three countries they were left in the labour camps.
RSS/BJP never believed in all caste equality with all spiritual, social and political rights for everybody . Till today the Sangh Parivar did not discuss about the question of abolition of caste which was the source of expansion of Islam in the Indian sub-continent. Even now the Shudras/Dalis/Adivasis have no basic spiritual citizenship rights in Hinduism. RSS/BJP forces are trying to build a massive Ram temple with the labour power of the Shudra/OBCs but they cannot become priests in that temple. Even now RSS basically is Brahmin controlled network. BJP is a structure of Brahmin/Bania controlled political formation.
The nation knows how Hegdewar, Golwalkar, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, Deendayal Upadhyaya to Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the Brahmin saga established its hegemony in the RSS/BJP structures. Now the Brahmin/Bania combination is working with a clear cut direction. But no Shudra/OBC/Dalit/Adivasi was allowed to come to any Brahmin-Bania leader’s status. Yet most Shudras/Dalits/ Adivasis were/are set against Muslims believing that they are their enemies.
For this situation the Muslim elite of India, who are mostly upper caste converts, are also responsible. We all know that Mohammed Ali Jinnah was Gujarati Bania convert and Allama Iqbal was Kashmiri Brahmin convert. Many Muslim leaders working around Congress now are from the brahminic family converts and the masses are from the productive castes background.
The pattern of the Brahmin/Bania migration from Afghanista, Pakistan and Bangladesh as Hindus was the same as what happened in Kashmir in the 1990s. All the pundits migrated in the name of Hindus. Who remained in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bandladesh as Hindus till date, and what is their social status, apart from minority status, is not known. If the ‘Persecuted Hindus’ as the Act defines once migrate to India if they get citizenship would they get some caste status or not. Suppose all of them claim that they are Brahmins or Banias or Ksatriyas. In which case they would be automatically granted the status spiritual equality but not for those Shudra/OBC/Dalit/Adivasis even if they want to claim that status while living in India from the days building the Harappan civilization they will not get. That is caste and Hinduism.
Shudras within Hinduism do not have spiritual citizenship. Whether they are Jats, Patels, Gujjars, Marathas, Yadavs, Reddys, Kammas, Lingayats, Vakkalingas, Naykars, Nairs who are known as upper Shudras also do not have the spiritual citizenship, leave alone OBCs of India.In West Bengal broadly Shudras who are Bengali agrarian communities also do not have spiritual rights. They cannot aspire for priesthood and a spiritual philosophical position in Hinduism. The RSS/ BJP would not like to discuss this question because that would create a condition of conflict that would result in overthrow of the Brahminic hegemony.
The Muslim citizenship question will have to be clubbed with Shudra/Dalit spiritual citizenship question. Whether Muslim elite would support such broad equal rights within political society, spiritual society is a fundamental question.
The Indian Muslims never understood the caste nature of Indian society and never stood by the untouchables and Shudras in the modern period. Their intellectuals and leaders remained caste blind and also class blind. They were living within the fold of their religious institutionalism. Both Hindutva forces and communal Muslims were locked up in the rioting process for quite long time. Muslims never realized the importance of democratic mobilization, in spite of Ambedkar repeatedly telling them that democratic struggles are more important than communal fights.For the first time they realized.
At least now they have to realize the importance of democratic mobilization against Hindutva brahminism on consistent basis.
If the Shudra/OBC/Adivasi get spiritual equality; if they control every institution, including Hindu structures, that would remove the fear of Hindu conversion to Islam or other religions. But the Brahmin/Bania forces would not like such transformation because their spiritual, social and political hegemony will collapse. Once spiritual democracy gets established and the Shudra/Dalit/Adivasis control Hindu spiritual system there will not be anti-Muslim thinking among Shudras/Dalits/Adivasis as there is food cultural commonality, though they belong to different religions. Indian Brahminism, then, will be put in its proper place.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author of many books, the latest being From Shepherd Boy to an Intellectual—My Memoirs
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd 