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Shobha Warrier / Rediff.com 

Shobha Warrier / Rediff.com 

In 1999 Romila Thapar wrote disagreeing with the Aryan migration Theory used by Mahtma Phule and Prof. Kancha Ilaiah. This is what she said then. Now Tony Joseph has proved that even she was wrong with systematic genetic DNA study. 

“Apart from this, this was one theory that had a very widespread popular appeal. All kinds of groups, all over the country picked up this theory and built their political ideologies on the basis of this. Let me give you two extreme examples of the way in which the theory was used. First of all in the later part of the 19th century there was a very famous person called Jyotiba Phule in Maharashtra ,who accepted Max Muller’s theory and went on to argue that therefore, the inheritors of the land in India are the lower castes because they are the real, original Indians and the upper caste, particularly the brahmins are the Aryans that came as alien invaders. The Brahmins were aliens, they were oppressive and they imposed their rule.

So this becomes an ammunition in the hands of an ideology which is arguing for caste confrontation and saying that the Dalits and the tribals are the indigenous peoples, not the upper caste people. He uses a lot of mythology very interestingly. In fact it is quite fascinating. He uses for example the myth of Parasurama, who destroyed the kshatriyas twenty one times. And he says, there you see this is the clear example of Brahminical destruction of the indigenous Indians. This is now being woven into what is sometimes called the dalit version of the theory. Those of who you might have read Kancha Ilaiah’s book Why I am not a Hindu will find it plays an important part in that. Of course the weakness of the theory is that it avoids the discussion of how and why the lower caste became subservient. It is very easy to say X came in and conquered Y and therefore Y became subservient. It is much more difficult to try and explain the process by which Y became subservient. Now at the other extreme, giving a totally different interpretation to the theory, is the Hindutva version. First developed by people like Savarkar and Golwalkar and interestingly it very closely follows the theory that was put forward by the theosophists, particularly by a person called Col. Alcott who was a British theosophist and played an important part in the Theosophical movement”. This was the position of Romila Thapar in THE ARYAN QUESTION REVISITED, Transcript of lecture delivered on 11th October 1999, at the Academic Staff College, JNU

As against her position that Mahatma Phule and Kancha Ilaiah see the proof of Aryan migration in Tony Joseph’s article in the Hindu on 17 June 2017.

How genetics is settling the Aryan migration debate

New DNA evidence is solving the most fought-over question in Indian history. And you will be surprised at how sure-footed the answer is, writes Tony Joseph

The thorniest, most fought-over question in Indian history is slowly but surely getting answered: did Indo-European language speakers, who called themselves Aryans, stream into India sometime around 2,000 BC – 1,500 BC when the Indus Valley civilisation came to an end, bringing with them Sanskrit and a distinctive set of cultural practices? Genetic research based on an avalanche of new DNA evidence is making scientists around the world converge on an unambiguous answer: yes, they did.

This may come as a surprise to many — and a shock to some — because the dominant narrative in recent years has been that genetics research had thoroughly disproved the Aryan migration theory. This interpretation was always a bit of a stretch as anyone who read the nuanced scientific papers in the original knew. But now it has broken apart altogether under a flood of new data on Y-chromosomes (or chromosomes that are transmitted through the male parental line, from father to son).

Lines of descent

Until recently, only data on mtDNA (or matrilineal DNA, transmitted only from mother to daughter) were available and that seemed to suggest there was little external infusion into the Indian gene pool over the last 12,500 years or so. New Y-DNA data has turned that conclusion upside down, with strong evidence of external infusion of genes into the Indian male lineage during the period in question.

The reason for the difference in mtDNA and Y-DNA data is obvious in hindsight: there was strong sex bias in Bronze Age migrations. In other words, those who migrated were predominantly male and, therefore, those gene flows do not really show up in the mtDNA data. On the other hand, they do show up in the Y-DNA data: specifically, about 17.5% of Indian male lineage has been found to belong to haplogroup R1a (haplogroups identify a single line of descent), which is today spread across Central Asia, Europe and South Asia. Pontic-Caspian Steppe is seen as the region from where R1a spread both west and east, splitting into different sub-branches along the way.

The paper that put all of the recent discoveries together into a tight and coherent history of migrations into India was published just three months ago in a peer-reviewed journal called ‘BMC Evolutionary Biology’. In that paper, titled “A Genetic Chronology for the Indian Subcontinent Points to Heavily Sex-biased Dispersals”, 16 scientists led by Prof. Martin P. Richards of the University of Huddersfield, U.K., concluded: “Genetic influx from Central Asia in the Bronze Age was strongly male-driven, consistent with the patriarchal, patrilocal and patrilineal social structure attributed to the inferred pastoralist early Indo-European society. This was part of a much wider process of Indo-European expansion, with an ultimate source in the Pontic-Caspian region, which carried closely related Y-chromosome lineages… across a vast swathe of Eurasia between 5,000 and 3,500 years ago”.

In an email exchange, Prof. Richards said the prevalence of R1a in India was “very powerful evidence for a substantial Bronze Age migration from central Asia that most likely brought Indo-European speakers to India.” The robust conclusions of Professor Richards and his team rest on their own substantive research as well as a vast trove of new data and findings that have become available in recent years, through the work of genetic scientists around the world.

What’s happened very rapidly, dramatically, and powerfully in the last few years has been the explosion of genome-wide studies of human history based on modern and ancient DNA, and that’s been enabled by the technology of genomics and the technology of ancient DNA….” David Reich, Geneticist and professor, Harvard Medical School

Peter Underhill, scientist at the Department of Genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine, is one of those at the centre of the action. Three years ago, a team of 32 scientists he led published a massive study mapping the distribution and linkages of R1a. It used a panel of 16,244 male subjects from 126 populations across Eurasia. Dr. Underhill’s research found that R1a had two sub-haplogroups, one found primarily in Europe and the other confined to Central and South Asia. Ninety-six per cent of the R1a samples in Europe belonged to sub-haplogroup Z282, while 98.4% of the Central and South Asian R1a lineages belonged to sub-haplogroup Z93. The two groups diverged from each other only about 5,800 years ago. Dr. Underhill’s research showed that within the Z93 that is predominant in India, there is a further splintering into multiple branches. The paper found this “star-like branching” indicative of rapid growth and dispersal. So if you want to know the approximate period when Indo-European language speakers came and rapidly spread across India, you need to discover the date when Z93 splintered into its own various subgroups or lineages. We will come back to this later.

So in a nutshell: R1a is distributed all over Europe, Central Asia and South Asia; its sub-group Z282 is distributed only in Europe while another subgroup Z93 is distributed only in parts of Central Asia and South Asia; and three major subgroups of Z93 are distributed only in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Himalayas. This clear picture of the distribution of R1a has finally put paid to an earlier hypothesis that this haplogroup perhaps originated in India and then spread outwards. This hypothesis was based on the erroneous assumption that R1a lineages in India had huge diversity compared to other regions, which could be indicative of its origin here. As Prof. Richards puts it, “the idea that R1a is very diverse in India, which was largely based on fuzzy microsatellite data, has been laid to rest” thanks to the arrival of large numbers of genomic Y-chromosome data.

Gene-dating the migration

Now that we know that there WAS indeed a significant inflow of genes from Central Asia into India in the Bronze Age, can we get a better fix on the timing, especially the splintering of Z93 into its own sub-lineages? Yes, we can; the research paper that answers this question was published just last year, in April 2016, titled: “Punctuated bursts in human male demography inferred from 1,244 worldwide Y-chromosome sequences.” This paper, which looked at major expansions of Y-DNA haplogroups within five continental populations, was lead-authored by David Poznik of the Stanford University, with Dr. Underhill as one of the 42 co-authors. The study found “the most striking expansions within Z93 occurring approximately 4,000 to 4,500 years ago”. This is remarkable, because roughly 4,000 years ago is when the Indus Valley civilization began falling apart. (There is no evidence so far, archaeologically or otherwise, to suggest that one caused the other; it is quite possible that the two events happened to coincide.)

The avalanche of new data has been so overwhelming that many scientists who were either sceptical or neutral about significant Bronze Age migrations into India have changed their opinions. Dr. Underhill himself is one of them. In a 2010 paper, for example, he had written that there was evidence “against substantial patrilineal gene flow from East Europe to Asia, including to India” in the last five or six millennia. Today, Dr. Underhill says there is no comparison between the kind of data available in 2010 and now. “Then, it was like looking into a darkened room from the outside through a keyhole with a little torch in hand; you could see some corners but not all, and not the whole picture. With whole genome sequencing, we can now see nearly the entire room, in clearer light.”

Dr. Underhill is not the only one whose older work has been used to argue against Bronze Age migrations by Indo-European language speakers into India. David Reich, geneticist and professor in the Department of Genetics at the Harvard Medical School, is another one, even though he was very cautious in his older papers. The best example is a study lead-authored by Reich in 2009, titled “Reconstructing Indian Population History” and published in Nature. This study used the theoretical construct of “Ancestral North Indians” (ANI) and “Ancestral South Indians” (ASI) to discover the genetic substructure of the Indian population. The study proved that ANI are “genetically close to Middle Easterners, Central Asians, and Europeans”, while the ASI were unique to India. The study also proved that most groups in India today can be approximated as a mixture of these two populations, with the ANI ancestry higher in traditionally upper caste and Indo-European speakers. By itself, the study didn’t disprove the arrival of Indo-European language speakers; if anything, it suggested the opposite, by pointing to the genetic linkage of ANI to Central Asians.

However, this theoretical structure was stretched beyond reason and was used to argue that these two groups came to India tens of thousands of years ago, long before the migration of Indo-European language speakers that is supposed to have happened only about 4,000 to 3,500 years ago. In fact, the study had included a strong caveat that suggested the opposite: “We caution that ‘models’ in population genetics should be treated with caution. While they provide an important framework for testing historical hypothesis, they are oversimplifications. For example, the true ancestral populations were probably not homogenous as we assume in our model but instead were likely to have been formed by clusters of related groups that mixed at different times.” In other words, ANI is likely to have resulted from multiple migrations, possibly including the migration of Indo-European language speakers.

The spin and the facts

But how was this research covered in the media? “Aryan-Dravidian divide a myth: Study,” screamed a newspaper headline on September 25, 2009. The article quoted Lalji Singh, a co-author of the study and a former director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad, as saying: “This paper rewrites history… there is no north-south divide”. The report also carried statements such as: “The initial settlement took place 65,000 years ago in the Andamans and in ancient south India around the same time, which led to population growth in this part. At a later stage, 40,000 years ago, the ancient north Indians emerged which in turn led to rise in numbers there. But at some point in time, the ancient north and the ancient south mixed, giving birth to a different set of population. And that is the population which exists now and there is a genetic relationship between the population within India.” The study, however, makes no such statements whatsoever — in fact, even the figures 65,000 and 40,000 do not figure it in it!

This stark contrast between what the study says and what the media reports said did not go unnoticed. In his column for Discover magazine, geneticist Razib Khan said this about the media coverage of the study: “But in the quotes in the media the other authors (other than Reich that is – ed) seem to be leading you to totally different conclusions from this. Instead of leaning toward ANI being proto-Indo-European, they deny that it is.”

Let’s leave that there, and ask what Reich says now, when so much new data have become available? In an interview with Edge in February last year, while talking about the thesis that Indo-European languages originated in the Steppes and then spread to both Europe and South Asia, he said: “The genetics is tending to support the Steppe hypothesis because in the last year, we have identified a very strong pattern that this ancient North Eurasian ancestry that you see in Europe today, we now know when it arrived in Europe. It arrived 4500 years ago from the East from the Steppe…” About India, he said: “In India, you can see, for example, that there is this profound population mixture event that happens between 2000 to 4000 years ago. It corresponds to the time of the composition of the Rigveda, the oldest Hindu religious text, one of the oldest pieces of literature in the world, which describes a mixed society…” In essence according to Reich, in broadly the same time frame, we see Indo-European language speakers spreading out both to Europe and to South Asia, causing major population upheavals.

The dating of the “profound population mixture event” that Reich refers to was arrived at in a paper that was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics in 2013, and was lead authored by Priya Moorjani of the Harvard Medical School, and co-authored, among others, by Reich and Lalji Singh. This paper too has been pushed into serving the case against migrations of Indo-European language speakers into India, but the paper itself says no such thing, once again!

Here’s what it says in one place: “The dates we report have significant implications for Indian history in the sense that they document a period of demographic and cultural change in which mixture between highly differentiated populations became pervasive before it eventually became uncommon. The period of around 1,900–4,200 years before present was a time of profound change in India, characterized by the de-urbanization of the Indus civilization, increasing population density in the central and downstream portions of the Gangetic system, shifts in burial practices, and the likely first appearance of Indo-European languages and Vedic religion in the subcontinent.”

The study didn’t “prove” the migration of Indo-European language speakers since its focus was different: finding the dates for the population mixture. But it is clear that the authors think its findings fit in well with the traditional reading of the dates for this migration. In fact, the paper goes on to correlate the ending of population mixing with the shifting attitudes towards mixing of the races in ancient texts. It says: “The shift from widespread mixture to strict endogamy that we document is mirrored in ancient Indian texts.”

So irrespective of the use to which Priya Moorjani et al’s 2013 study is put, what is clear is that the authors themselves admit their study is fully compatible with, and perhaps even strongly suggests, Bronze Age migration of Indo-European language speakers. In an email to this writer, Moorjani said as much. In answer to a question about the conclusions of the recent paper of Prof. Richards et al that there were strong, male-driven genetic inflows from Central Asia about 4,000 years ago, she said she found their results “to be broadly consistent with our model”. She also said the authors of the new study had access to ancient West Eurasian samples “that were not available when we published in 2013”, and that these samples had provided them additional information about the sources of ANI ancestry in South Asia.

One by one, therefore, every single one of the genetic arguments that were earlier put forward to make the case against Bronze Age migrations of Indo-European language speakers have been disproved. To recap:

1. The first argument was that there were no major gene flows from outside to India in the last 12,500 years or so because mtDNA data showed no signs of it. This argument was found faulty when it was shown that Y-DNA did indeed show major gene flows from outside into India within the last 4000 to 4,500 years or so, especially R1a which now forms 17.5% of the Indian male lineage. The reason why mtDNA data behaved differently was that Bronze Age migrations were severely sex-biased.

2. The second argument put forward was that R1a lineages exhibited much greater diversity in India than elsewhere and, therefore, it must have originated in India and spread outward. This has been proved false because a mammoth, global study of R1a haplogroup published last year showed that R1a lineages in India mostly belong to just three subclades of the R1a-Z93 and they are only about 4,000 to 4,500 years old.

3. The third argument was that there were two ancient groups in India, ANI and ASI, both of which settled here tens of thousands of years earlier, much before the supposed migration of Indo-European languages speakers to India. This argument was false to begin with because ANI — as the original paper that put forward this theoretical construct itself had warned — is a mixture of multiple migrations, including probably the migration of Indo-European language speakers.

Connecting the dots

Two additional things should be kept in mind while looking at all this evidence. The first is how multiple studies in different disciplines have arrived at one specific period as an important marker in the history of India: around 2000 B.C. According to the Priya Moorjani et al study, this is when population mixing began on a large scale, leaving few population groups anywhere in the subcontinent untouched. The Onge in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands are the only ones we know to have been completely unaffected by what must have been a tumultuous period. And according to the David Poznik et al study of 2016 on the Y-chromosome, 2000 B.C. is around the time when the dominant R1a subclade in India, Z93, began splintering in a “most striking” manner, suggesting “rapid growth and expansion”. Lastly, from long-established archaeological studies, we also know that 2000 BC was around the time when the Indus Valley civilization began to decline. For anyone looking at all of these data objectively, it is difficult to avoid the feeling that the missing pieces of India’s historical puzzle are finally falling into place.

The second is that many studies mentioned in this piece are global in scale, both in terms of the questions they address and in terms of the sampling and research methodology. For example, the Poznik study that arrived at 4,000-4,500 years ago as the dating for the splintering of the R1a Z93 lineage, looked at major Y-DNA expansions not just in India, but in four other continental populations. In the Americas, the study proved the expansion of haplogrop Q1a-M3 around 15,000 years ago, which fits in with the generally accepted time for the initial colonisation of the continent. So the pieces that are falling in place are not merely in India, but all across the globe. The more the global migration picture gets filled in, the more difficult it will be to overturn the consensus that is forming on how the world got populated.

Nobody explains what is happening now better than Reich: “What’s happened very rapidly, dramatically, and powerfully in the last few years has been the explosion of genome-wide studies of human history based on modern and ancient DNA, and that’s been enabled by the technology of genomics and the technology of ancient DNA. Basically, it’s a gold rush right now; it’s a new technology and that technology is being applied to everything we can apply it to, and there are many low-hanging fruits, many gold nuggets strewn on the ground that are being picked up very rapidly.”

So far, we have only looked at the migrations of Indo-European language speakers because that has been the most debated and argued about historical event. But one must not lose the bigger picture: R1a lineages form only about 17.5 % of Indian male lineage, and an even smaller percentage of the female lineage. The vast majority of Indians owe their ancestry mostly to people from other migrations, starting with the original Out of Africa migrations of around 55,000 to 65,000 years ago, or the farming-related migrations from West Asia that probably occurred in multiple waves after 10,000 B.C., or the migrations of Austro-Asiatic speakers such as the Munda from East Asia the dating of which is yet to determined, and the migrations of Tibeto-Burman speakers such as the Garo again from east Asia, the dating of which is also yet to be determined.

What is abundantly clear is that we are a multi-source civilization, not a single-source one, drawing its cultural impulses, its tradition and practices from a variety of lineages and migration histories. The Out of Africa immigrants, the pioneering, fearless explorers who discovered this land originally and settled in it and whose lineages still form the bedrock of our population; those who arrived later with a package of farming techniques and built the Indus Valley civilization whose cultural ideas and practices perhaps enrich much of our traditions today; those who arrived from East Asia, probably bringing with them the practice of rice cultivation and all that goes with it; those who came later with a language called Sanskrit and its associated beliefs and practices and reshaped our society in fundamental ways; and those who came even later for trade or for conquest and chose to stay, all have mingled and contributed to this civilization we call Indian. We are all migrants.

Tony Joseph is a writer and former editor of BusinessWorld. Twitter: @tjoseph0010

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By Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, Source: The Hindu

KANCHA ILAIAH SHEPHERD

Monday, April 10,2017

Published at The Citizen

WORSHIPPING THE WORD MOVEMENT

By Prof. Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

Worshipping the word is a movement that needs to strike  its roots in Indian culture. Historically India is a country, wherein the Adivasis and Dalitbahujans, who constitute more than 85 per cent of the population lost out their own worshipping the word culture. They have not been allowed to use a written word as a tool to communicate between one another and also with far off people of Dravidian races, Tribals and the Dalitbahujans. This was done by evolving a caste structure and racial discrimination that got imposed on this nation by the migrant Aryans.

The Aryans, who slowly evolved themselves into Brahmins, Ksatriyas and Viasyas ( who in the modern period described themselves as Arya Vaisyas) have controlled the written word, as it is known as God among the native Indian people. Even today the Dalitbahujan masses respect the written word as the true message of God. The Aryan Brahmins misused this belief of the Indian masses for millennia.

The Dravidian symbolic word was known as the Indus script.  It was  a corpus of symbols produced by the Indus Valley Civilization during the Kot Diji and Mature Harappan periods between 3500 and 1900 BCE. This form of word and the evolving culture of worshipping the Dravidian WORD was attacked by the Aryan Brahmins. And over a period of time they worked out their own word ‘OOM’ as a word of their own worship. But quite cruelly they did not allow the Dravidian and the native tribal masses to worship that WORD and did not allow them to remain as the worshippers of their own native word.

The native people had to suffer the double denial. Slowly this very selfish and anti-human (anti Dalitbahujan) culture lead the Brahminic Aryans into idol worship on a perpetual basis. Their own misdeed encircled them as their ever haunting SIN.

Though the Aryan Brahmins wrote all types of books later they could not get out of idol worship, as a key civilizational practice. They in a way suffered from the curse of denying others the word of their own and not allowing them to worship the word that the Aryans constructed.

Subsequently the native Dalitbahujans developed their own pan Indian Pali word, which later became the Buddhist scripture. But the Pali word also was killed within the Indian main land.

Till the English universal WORD reached India in 1817 with a generous preaching of William Carey the Indian Adivasi and Dalitbahujan mass were confined to local religion and languages without allowing them into the Brahminic Sanskrit. Hence they suffered from localism and superstition.

However, the Adivasi and Dalitbahujan liberation from the grip of their dis-connectivity and the Brahminic fear started evaporating with NEW WORD reaching India.     .

The worship of the word movement that some of us started in India is to see that the vast masses of India get out of the slavery of Aryan Brahminism, and instill a massive book reading and book writing culture among them.

The mass surrender to caste inequalities, human untouchability and women’s degradation is because of lack of  worshipping the WORD culture among them.

In our view the WORD IS GOD. The children of India must be taught to only worship the WORD and imbibe a culture of reading, writing about every work their parents do as dignified and god given.

The Indian Brahminical forces are out of the culture of WORK IS WORSHIP. For them production is pollution. But for the working masses food comes out of mud and hence they work in all spheres of production.

This movement propagates the culture of Worshipping the WORD. Physical labour and treating every human being as equal partner in worshipping are God given cultural values. This movement cherishes those values.

It also propagates READ, WRITE AND FIGHT as a core ideological principle. This movement opposes all forms of violence, at home, between groups and groups and also in public life. It also opposes war between nations and nation

KANCHA ILAIAH SHEPHERD

Monday, January 16,2017

50 Days: Is PM Modi A Messiah Or a God?

KANCHA ILAIAH SHEPHERD

Friday, December 30,2016 Source

After the demonetization surgical strike of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the nation is reeling under starvation, job loss, labour loss and more than anything loss of confidence in the institutions of the nation itself.

The banking system, the Income tax officialdom, the minting system and also the technological framework of the country have come under severe suspicion. Even Parliament has failed to do the duty that is meant for—re-instilling confidence among the people.

PM Modi has suffered a huge image setback with demonetization strike. He failed even to confidently face Parliament. The demonetization effect on the nation is more harsh on the poor, labour, small businesses, beggars, physically handicapped people, farmers than the Emergency that Indira Gandhi imposed on the nation in 1975. Emergency’s harsh effect was on the political opposition, media, civil rights of intellectuals. The economic system had not faced a major crisis during the Emergency, unlike today where the informal sector and the poor are badly impacted.

We know that the sycophancy of the Congress leaders during the Emergency had crossed all limits. It was in this atmosphere that Dev Kant Barooah, the then Congress president, uttered the famous words, ‘’Indira is India and India is Indira’’. Let us not forget that Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister of India for about 8 years by then. She was backed by the Bangladesh liberation victory of 1971. She was the direct inheritor of her father Jawaharlal Nehru’s raj, added to by her association with Gandhi. Her marriage with Feroz Gandhi was performed in the presence of Gandhi himself. She herself had a young volunteers role in the freedom struggle. This all was sufficient to generate sycophancy amongst the weak minded Congress men/women that went on to cause major damage to the nation.

Ever since Narendra Modi became the PM of India Venkaiah Naidu, a senior minister, in his Cabinet was regularly saying that “Modi is a God Sent Gift’ to the Indian people. After Naidu became the Information and Broadcasting minister he praises the PM in every press conference with epithets that are normally not used for human beings.

After this major disastrous demonetization move Naidu has been repeatedly saying that ‘’Modi is Messiah’’, ‘’Modi is God Like’’and words to that effect. His sycophantic imaging of PM Modi is away from actually saying Modi is God himself. But when Naidu said Modi is Messiah it actually means the same. Naturally he cannot be God to Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists of India where the terminology of Messiah is fitting. For the Hindus, Naidu continues to project PM Modi as a god. The larger Indian populace and those within the Sangh Parivar must realize what implications this has on their own religion.

We have seen some childish Congress men of Telangana during the Telangana agitation characterizing Congress president Sonia Gandhi as a goddess in small circles. One mad fellow even tried even to build a temple of Sonia Gandhi in Karimnagar. But these were local leaders at best.

Venkaiah Naidu is a central minister and a nationally known leader. He is not at all ashamed of projecting a politician as god. The question is not how strong PMModi is. It is also not of how bad or good he is. The question is can political leaders go down to this level in an exercise of sheer scyophancy, and destroy all ethics built around spiritual systems that have a longer historical value than individuals, parties, governments and even states?

At times BJP President Amit Shah also tends to compare PM Modi with divine figures. Reports published in the media indicate that the way Shah was trying to extol the Prime Minister and convince his own party leaders who were against demonetization—despite the fact that it has destroyed many lives and at least 100 persons have died in queues as a result—shows that Shah is in the same frame as Dev Kant Barooah. As is Venkaiah Naidu.Barooah’s sycophantic remarks was more political in one sense, Naidu’s language has a spiritual sycophantic dimension.

Naidu knows when he said that ‘Modi is Messiah’ that the concept of Messiah in Judaic and Christian ethics is God who is considered to be far greater than Jesus Christ. When Christ was called Messiah by some of his followers he objected saying repeatedly that he was only the son of Messiah (God) and not the Messiah himself.

The name Mesaiah is that of a Supreme God in Judaic history. It is not at all Hindu in its evolution. How is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh allowing him to use this term for PM Modi, whom they consider as a pracharak or karyakartha?

If vote mobilization for capturing power at Delhi can elevate political leaders to the status of god then the BJP leaders are entitled to call Modi their Rama of Kaliyuga. That gives a lot of clarity to the masses and also to their own activists. Then the Muslims of India need not worry about the birth place of Kritayuga Rama.

During PM Modi’s rule only they can build a bigger temple at Vadodra—the birth place of the Prime Minister. Let us not forget the fact that these very same people who attacked BSP leader Mayawati for building a statue for herself when she was in power are projecting Modi as god. All this in just a two and a half year rule. Is this good for the country, culture and civilization.

( Prof. Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is the Director, Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy,Maulana Azad National Urdu University at Hyderabad. The views above are his own)

Caste in Demonetization: Economic Power Shifts

By Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

Souce

The Demonitarization process set in motion by the first ever strong Hindutva Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, has a different economic dimension, which he and his government would never state in public. But they would pursue it to the logical end.

The real intention is to transform the Indian economy into a fully Bania controlled monopoly economy. The Bania model of Indian business and economic activity is not new. A slightly different model was experimented by the fifth century Gupta rulers of India. Whatever the Gupta rulers wanted the Brahmin pundits were made to do. The Jain vegetarian cult was projected as the most sacred spiritual food culture model and even the meaterian Brahmins were forced to praise that food culture, as against their own meaterian food culture. The Brahmin pundits of the court praised that period as the ‘’Golden Age’’ of India.

During that period caste system was made more rigid, untouchability was implemented in all its pure form. Bania Hindus followed a more ruthless caste hierarchy than Brahmin Hindus.

In a way Gandhi changed that mode of Bania-ism into a more humanitarian order, as he did not handle hard political power in his life. But PM Modi, though an OBC Bania, is a hard core political man with a monarchic bent of mind. Fortunately for him, and unfortunately for the people, he was elected as the Prime Minister of India.

Though demonetisation and the corporatisation of the Indian business model seems to have the approval of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh headed by a Marathi Brahmin, Mohan Bhagwat, the real designers of it are the two Ambani brothers, Adani CEO, Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. To be more precise Mukhesh Ambani, Gautham Adani, Narenda Modi and Amit Shah strategized this mammoth plan.

The Brahmin control in Delhi was three fold. It had a Congress component, BJP component and bureaucratic component. This has developed from Jawaharlal Nehru’s days and sustained through all other regimes, more particularly during the terms of P.V Narasimha Rao and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Though during the UPA period its vigor was reduced as both Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh are not from that fold, it was sustained through bureaucratic and political channels of the BJP and Congress. The Pranab Mukherjee-Arun Jaitley friendship was never disconnected.

The Bengali, UP and Punjabi Brahmins have a strong hold on Delhi even now. In a way Narendra Modi, Amit Shah and Arvind Kejriwal (a powerful Bania leader now in Delhi) have weakened the Brahmin political clout in Delhi. This does not mean it has completely collapsed.

If the demonetisation agenda fails, the Brahminic network may stage a comeback. The Bania monopoly capital is trying to manage the crisis that has been created through its grip on the media. Millions of poor people have lost their livelihood but they being fed with the falsehood of future swarga sukhas.

More than half the media channels in the country, including several regional channels, are in the hands of Banias as of now. The most powerful English and Hindi channels are in the hands of the Reliance and Adani networks. Many English and regional news papers are in their hands either directly or indirectly.The indirect control comes from advertisement money. More than 75 per cent of advertisement revenue is in the hands of Bania controlled business. Hence even the channels and news papers outside their control cannot oppose these forces and survive.

The Bania control of business and the capital that accrued through business has a long history. In a way, it tried to establish its exclusivity, through the Hindu spiritual social order, which ordained that only Banias must do business. This dictum was authenticated during the Gupta period through their own political power. In the then emerging village agrarian economy no other caste was cleared for business. The rest of the caste-communities had no spiritual or social strength to oppose that dictum and that process continued through the ages.

As a result even by my childhood days in the 1960s, in the villages, only a single Shahukar family used to control all the buying and selling. With this kind of village level monopoly the village Shahukar alone would have a good bungalow when the rest of the villagers would lived thatch roof houses. Only after the Shudra landlords emerged, they through their political control and agrarian untaxed money subordinated the village Banias. However, their spiritual status as Hindu business hakhdars along with Brahmin priesthood hakhdars remained intact. The Shudra village rulers even in a Muslim ruled state like Telangana held sway, even as the Brahmin-Bania control of two areas, temple and business, continued.

Even a century before my generation Mahatma Phule recorded the control of Shetji and Bhatji in Maratha rural economy. Interestingly he used the Shetji exploitation as primary and more harsh than Bhatji’s spiritual exploitation. This micro economic control has been disturbed in several parts of India in the post-Independence period. In Tamil Nadu, for example, the Nadars, a very lower Shudra community and the Patels of Gujarat, emerged as business castes challenging the Bania local business.

Though quite a lot of small trade is in the hands of Marwadis, the Bania monopoly capital does not want to allow a chiller money based shopping system in the country.

The Indian ‘Gang of Four’ has seized the opportunity that the BJP gave. They have done this as part of the package of Hindu Nationalism. Now no force can reverse it.

(Prof. Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is Director, Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy,Maulana Azad National Urdu University in Hyderabad) 

How protection of cow has come to mean oppression of Dalits

In the present mood, one can go to the TV debate, even critique Narendra Modi but not gau mata. If one does that, he/she may come out with his/her skin peeled.

Written by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd | Updated: August 1, 2016 9:23 am

Appeared in Indian Express

India is a unique country. This is the only nation in the world to have passed laws that protect one animal and its progeny even if it means the death of human beings, Dalits and Muslims. The first incident of the killing of Dalits when they skinned a dead cow took place during Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s rule, in Jhajjar. Now in the Narendra Modi regime, the beating of Dalit men for skinning a dead cow that was killed by lions in Gujarat and of women for possessing buffalo meat in Madhya Pradesh, is part of the spreading narrative. Abusing Mayawati is also part of the same pattern. If Dalits are part of the nationalism professed by the Sangh Parivar, why have there been so many incidents in the short period of their rule? Is Dalit skin equivalent to cow skin? Where lie the roots of this ideology?

Thanks to B.R. Ambedkar and the Dalit movement, the unique status of this social force that constitutes about 200 million people is known all over the world. When birth-based discrimination against these groups was sought to be taken to the United Nations Organisation Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia in 2001, in search of a global solution to the problem of untouchability and caste discrimination, there was huge opposition from upper caste forces. The then NDA government strongly resisted the effort (I was part of the team that made the effort), arguing that this problem would be solved by using constitutional tools, within India.

At that time, the non-Hindutva upper caste intellectuals, considered to be liberals, argued that taking the caste and untouchability issue to the UN is morally unethical and politically anti-national. The main opposition party, the Congress, also argued on similar lines.

Sadly, the Congress itself initiated enactment of cow protection laws in different states that have negative implications for Dalit and Muslim livelihoods. But the Congress did not implement such laws forcefully as long as it was in power at the Centre and the direction to the states was to wink at them. The police must have also been given a direction to go slow on the implementation. Not that there were no “gau raksha” minded officers who did not book cases with the help of cow protection squads. There were some, but they were few and far between.

The serious implementation of the Congress cow protection laws with some new BJP cow protection laws started during NDA I. A new ideology called “skin for skin” (like eye for eye), if Dalits skinned a dead cow, took shape. The underlying message: A dead cow’s skinning is equivalent to the skinning of living Dalits. The first major case of “skin for skin” was that in Jhajjar, Haryana. On October 15, 2002, five Dalits were killed for skinning a dead cow. Till today nobody knows what happened to those who killed the Dalits.

Under NDA 2, the gau raksha programme assumed force because now the BJP is in full control of the levers of power. This time gau raksha means Dalit bhakshan. In state after state, very strong laws of cow protection have been brought in, affecting Dalit and Muslim economy and employment.

The Sangh Parivar networks deploy a large number of private armies as gau raksha samitis with full powers and weapons to implement the programme. They are provided resources that help these armed squads run after the suspects with lathis to beat them up. In fact, if Dalit youth skin the dead cow as part of their economic activity, the “Start Up” teams of gau raksha beat them till their skin peels off. Several such incidents have been reported in the last two years. The cow has become a metaphor for the strategy of skin for skin.

If anyone opposes these private squads, they will be dubbed as anti-gau mata and anti-Bharat mata. These new codes of abuse have impacted civil society. I encounter BJP spokespersons on English TV channels, who deny the link between the gau raksha force and the democracy raksha party. Their English-speaking spokespersons are soft, sometimes sophisticated too, but those in other languages shout and scream and generally win the argument. The TV owners are happy. The more they shout, the more TRPs they get. In the process, Dalit bhakshan is guaranteed. In the present mood, one can go to the TV debate, even critique Narendra Modi but not gau mata. If one does that, he/she may come out with his/her skin peeled.

The skin for skin approach is dreadful. But the gau rakshaks believe that gau mata democracy is like that only. It is our culture and heritage, they say. Indian democracy itself is conceptualised by gau mata, they say. If Ambedkar were alive and were to oppose these laws of cow protection, he too would have been declared “anti-gau mata” and therefore, “anti-Bharat mata”.

One can see Modi is a changed person ever since he embarked on his prime ministerial campaign. He focused his campaign around development and Sabka Sath, Sabka Vikas. That was the reason why many Dalits and Muslims also voted for him. How is it that private squads roam so freely after he became prime minister?

BJP spokespersons argue that the country was run with “no PM” during the 10 years of the UPA regime, and that now every citizen will be safe under “our” strong PM (he is PM of the Dalits and Muslims too). But where is the strong PMO when such skin for skin ideology is in operation on a daily basis? Yes, vikas is the PM’s agenda. But is it the agenda of the whole Sangh Parivar?

The parivar network was never trained in the issues and vocabulary of economic development. Except for a small English-educated section, they were trained to do gau raksha, desh raksha, varna raksha. Some Non-Resident Indian ideologues imported from the West know what it is because they have some training in vikas raksha in the West — particularly in the US. But the foot soldiers of the Sangh Parivar were never taught about human raksha as the key link in development.

The moment a Parliament session begins, the programme of skin for skin, the abuse of Dalits, begins from its ranks, reflecting the training of decades. At least now, when the abused have voted them to power, is it not possible to re-train the Sangh’s cadre to respect humans more than animals?