During the 2019 election campaign, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi was projected as a Brahmin who wears janeu. Narendra Modi, on the other hand, projected himself as a member of the most backward class (MBC). He started declaring his caste backwardness publicly with apparent pride. To convince the MBCs that he is truly one of them, Modi called himself a chowkidar in addition to calling himself a chaiwala.

Now the world knows who won.

The Congress projected Rahul Gandhi as a Brahmin who wears janeu in the run-up to the 2019 general elections. (Photo: @INCIndia)

As the discourse remained stuck in the ‘Rahul is Brahmin’ and ‘Modi is MBC’, the regional Shudra leaders remained in oblivion. It is important to remember that they were the leaders who took on the powerful Congress for over decades. They were finally crushed by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah’s strategies.

The duo mobilised castes around the BJP and almost finished the Shudra regional powers along with the Congress. The Congress intellectuals, whether Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge or Indian educated, do not know how to understand, or break, the combined might of the two.

The Shudra regional parties started emerging in the 1960s. The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) emerged and captured political power in Tamil Nadu in 1967. The DMK was born and grew as an anti-Brahmin party.

The same year Chaudhary Charan Singh became the first non-Congress chief minister of Uttar Pradesh after leaving the Congress, which was under the control of the Brahmins from UP.

Both CN Annadurai, the first non-Congress chief minister of Tamil Nadu, and Charan Singh were Shudras who fought against the Brahmin hegemony in Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh, respectively. Subsequently, NT Rama Rao, Sharat Pawar, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar emerged as Shudra leaders in opposition to the Congress that was generally headed by Brahmins.

In Punjab, the Akali Dal also rose in response to Shudra oppression. In the united Andhra Pradesh, the Telugu Desam, Telangana Rashtra Samithi and YSR Congress are Shudra political formations.

They all came into power in their own respective states with a regional feudal economic power base. All these parties weakened the Indian National Congress step by step in the 1980s and 1990s. Apart from the regional Shudra political forces in Uttar Pradesh, the Dalit political formation, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), headed by Kanshi Ram weakened the Congress further.

The Bahujan Samaj Party weaked the Congress further. (Photo: Reuters)

The Congress was always Brahmin-centric, apart from being Nehru-Gandhi family-centric. While Shudra regional leaders were accommodated in the party since the pre-Independence years, they never really had an ideological grip on the party.

Though Sardar Vallabhai Patel and K Kamaraj, both Shudras, had a major role in the party at the national level, no Shudra could emerge in the Congress as a towering leader with an all-India vote base. The pan-India vote base remained only in the hands of leaders who emerged from the Nehru family. This gave enough scope to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to attack it as the Nehru dynasty party.

The Congress leadership projected Indira, Rajiv, Sonia and Rahul Gandhi as part of the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty and the Gandhi in their name meant Mahatma Gandhi. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its political wing, the Jana Sangh, which later became the BJP, consistently tried to delink the Nehru family from Mahatma Gandhi’s legacy.

The sole purpose of this delinking exercise was to weaken the Congress and gain a political foothold across the country. The RSS-BJP would not have succeeded if the regional Shudra forces wouldn’t have weakened the Congress in several states.

The unsaid opposition to the Mandal Commission report, which sought reservations for the marginalised communities among other welfare measures, both by Indira and Rajiv Gandhi (by not tabling the Mandal report) made the Shudras think that the Congress does not want Brahminism to be weakened in bureaucracy and educational institutions.

The Congress Brahminism was accommodating elite Muslims and some SC/STs, but not Shudra-OBCs in any significant way. Given their numbers in the Indian population, they were feeling the neglect significantly. One former Congress OBC leader once told me that Rajiv Gandhi used to get furious even upon hearing the idea of reservation. He was strongly against any discussion on the caste question. He never studied the caste system as he won that massive 1984 victory because of Indira Gandhi’s assassination.

This apparent anti-OBC reservation stance of Indira and Rajiv convinced the Shudras that they cannot progress under the Congress. So, the Shudras who had an agrarian feudal base, and the lower Shudrasm who saw government jobs as the only means to salvage them, slowly moved away from the Congress.

The BJP, which was by then emerging as the Brahmin-Bania party, was also not in support of reservations. It was the Congress, however, which was the ruling party and when VP Singh was implementing reservations, Rajiv Gandhi was the opposition leader.

The BJP was initially not supportive of caste-based reservations. (Photo: Reuters)

A section of Shudra/OBCs, meanwhile, made its way into the BJP and that section slowly forced the Sangh to come to terms with the reservation issue. By promising 10% reservation for the Economically Weaker Section (EWS), the BJP neutralised the issue of caste-based reservation and got Congress into its trap.

Post-Mandal, the BJP tried to project Sardar Patel as a better leader than Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. The strategy was first used by LK Advani, who was later compared with Patel. Advani is a Sindhi Marwadi. The BJP needed a national icon to be pitted against Nehru because they do not have one in their ideological fold.

That Patel, a Gujarati Shudra, contested Nehru on many fronts is well known. Maybe Advani and later Modi and Shah owned Patel becausehe also came from Gujarat and was a pro-RSS Shudra leader. This helped Modi more than anybody else as he claimed that he is a Gujarati OBC.

By deploying Modi at the forefront in the battle against the Congress, the BJP has taken away all OBCs from the fold of the regional Shudra leaders. In UP, Bihar, Maharashtra, Haryana, and to some extent in Karnataka, the Shudra leadership has been weakened now. It still remains somewhat stable in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. In West Bengal, and Odisha power continues to be in the hands of Brahmins.

The regional Shudra forces weakening the Congress in many states helped the BJP. The revival of the Congress is impossible without this support group coming back in its fold. The only way the Congress can do this is by inviting all regional parties with Shudra leadership into its fold.

But the Congress would need a leader like Mahatma Gandhi to convince all those leaders to come together. Rahul Gandhi can at least try to do it.

Kamala Harris, one of the top four Democratic candidates in the US presidential elections, recently made Indians and Jamaican people proud.

She also made globally discriminated people, including the Indian Shudras, Dalits and Adivasis, who have no recognition worldwide, prouder after her June 27 debate on the NBC news channel.

Kamala Rising! Joe Biden and Kamala Harris locked in a fierce debate on June 27. (Photo: Reuters)

After the debate, her rating is rising — she seems to be second only to Joe Biden.

Kamala is the daughter of an Indian Dravidian Tamil woman, Shymala Gopalan, a breast cancer scientist, and a Jamaican economist, Donald Harris, a Stanford University professor.

Donald Harris wrote an essay titled Reflections of a Jamaican Father, for Jamaica Global Online, in which he revealed that he descended from Irish slave owner Hamilton Brown, while Shymala’s ancestry is not very widely known.

Shymala’s biographical details tell us that her father, PV Gopalan, was a diplomat from Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Even assuming that Gopalan comes from a Tamil Brahmin background (we do not know his exact caste), his daughter Shyamala chose to represent the black slaves of the world due to her identities of a Dravidian black person and a woman.

All Indian women were/are equivalent to Shudras as per ancient tradition.

It is important to understand how the Indian caste system shares a common cultural trait with that of white racism in America.

What Kamala is today is because of her bold mother — Shyamala chose to marry a Jamaican black person and worked as a civil rights activist for blacks and other people of colour living in America. Hardly any Indian settled in America associated with the black civil rights movement as Shyamala did. She was living through Martin Luther King’s times and she dared to oppose white racism when she was a student at the University of California, Berkeley. Shyamala comes across as an independent woman who believed in the idea that ‘black is beautiful’.

Bold and Brilliant: Kamala Harris with mother Shyamala Gopalan, a breast cancer scientist. (Photo: AP)

Her daughter inherited the intellectual and ideological heritage of her mother and father. Her father was a Left economist with a serious concern for human equality.

While her mother was a serious scientist, apart from being a civil rights activist, her father was a fine economist who wrote books on comparative economics. One title, The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class, which he published still attracts the attention of any serious student of economics.

Kamala proved to be a true daughter of her mother and father — she has worn her blackness on her sleeve.

She said, “I am black and I am proud of it.” She also claimed that like Barack Obama, she belongs to the American Baptist church which has trained many black activists in American history to be great leaders. We know that Martin Luther King himself was a Church preacher in Alabama.

After the June 27 debate, there is an attempt to attack her by the right-wing black supporters of Donald Trump. They are arguing that she is not an African-American black woman.

This is nonsense.

She is also competing with Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizebeth Warren, with the same spirit that Obama once fought with.

If she gets the Democratic party’s nomination and incidentally wins the election, defeating a very unstable Donald Trump, the US will have a black woman President from two black immigrant parents — this will have implications for global democracy too as the system would achieve what has so far remained unachievable.

India is proud of Kamala Harris. The first caste liberator, Mahatma Jyotirao Phule, wrote his book Gulamgiri in 1871 and dedicated it to the struggles of the people then called Negroes in the America of his time. In Tamil Nadu, Periyar EV Ramasamy built a Dravidian movement by sporting black Shudra slavery on his sleeve — he always wore a black shirt as a symbol of the Dravidian identity. Though racial discrimination was not accepted by Dr BR Ambedkar, both Phule and Periyar strongly saw the link between caste and race discrimination in India.

A Visionary: Jyotirao Phule dedicated his book Gulamgiri (1871) to the anti-racism struggles of America of his time. (Photo: PTI)

In 2001, the Indian Dalit-Bahujan activists, including me, took the caste issue to the UN Conference against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. At that time, the government of India, headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee and pro-government intellectuals, argued that race has nothing to do with caste. Many of us felt that both caste discrimination and untouchability came into being because of the Dravidian and Aryan race divisions in India over a period of time. Now, DNA studies have also proved that.

Shyamala and Kamala Harris have proved that whatever their caste origins back in India, racial discrimination is a global phenomenon. Kamala Harris made her race question more central than Barak Obama did before the 2008 Femocratic primary debates.

The way Kamala challenged Joe Biden, the former Vice-President of America, on his position on racism shows that she has decided to win the primaries on her own terms.

The fact that she is a senator already and was always forceful about her black woman identity shows that she will definitely make history in this election.

Her fight in the US will encourage many more world over. From the days of Abraham Lincoln and his murder by a group of white racists, and the murders of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King to Barak Obama’s election and his safe retirement, America has transformed quite a lot.

Much like Obama’s Audacity of Hope, Kamala is showing her own audacity. American society’s deeply entrenched patriarchy came to the forefront when it did not allow even a white woman to become President. Kamala’s victory won’t just be a victory for the oppressed sections in the US — but those historically discriminated against across the world.

Indians will be the proudest people then.