By T K Arun
A sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic Republic — this is what India is supposed to be. Republic, it certainly is, and sovereign, too. Socialist is a stale joke. Secular and democratic are works in progress, too rudimentary to save the lives of Mohammad Akhlaq, lynched over beef at Dadri, or Rohith Vemula, Dalit student who penned his suicide note in English, the language of power in post-colonial India.
Power is the key to the Dalit’s plight. He lacks social power, others have more than their fair share. This unequal distribution of power in society is what makes India a democracy still in the making. Democracy is not just about holding elections to choose representatives of the people. It is also about reconfiguring the relations of power in society, to deliver equality to individuals as citizens.
Fight for Democracy…
Equality does not mean an end to hierarchy. Functional hierarchies are needed, to get things done in any complex organisation. But, in a democracy, these hierarchies are meant to be context-specific, to melt away and reconfigure in a different context and be non-existent in terms of political rights.
Your boss might be your boss at work, but an accommodated extra in the play you direct after work, and both of you get just one vote each to elect your MP, and are equal before the law. This is the ideal, but mere fantasy, in reality. If we understand democracy as an ongoing process, its goal is to realise this fantasy.
Indian society has traditionally been hierarchical, with pure Brahmins at the top and polluting Dalits and tribal people at the bottom. The hierarchy had religious sanction. Manusmriti — which codifies the rules of propriety for Hindus — hails the Brahmin as the lord of all creation and enjoins the rest to see their duty in serving him.
Birth defines your status in life and your job, to do which is your dharma. Failure to do your dharma is what gets you born into a lowly caste. Rohith Vemula apparently did not subscribe to this causal explanation for his plight: he called his birth a fatal accident, not any result of culpable delinquency in his previous birth. This rejection turns the focus on a conflict between the democratic project and the Hindu tradition that justifies present inequity in terms of sins of the dead past.
This theory of transmigration of souls across time, species, caste and status, guided by achieved adherence to dharma, is preached day in and day out across India, in the name of Sanatana Dharma. To accept it is to accept one’s lot in life as the just desserts of the past, to question no iniquity and simply put one’s nose to the grindstone, to earn some reprieve at least in the next birth. This is inimical to democracy and must be resisted by Dalits and all the rest who find themselves on the bottom rungs of the traditional social hierarchy. Does this mean one must resist Hinduism to achieve democracy? Not really, at least, not all its forms. Vedanta, for example, holds Brahman to be the only reality and posits all things living and dead to be manifestations of Brahman.
If you accept that the Dalit and the Brahmin are both manifestation of the selfsame Brahman, there is no reason to adore the one and shun the other. Sankara, the foremost philosopher of Advaita, accepted as much, so goes the story, after being scolded by a chandala, lowest of the low, for shrinking away from him.
…And Participatory Growth
But Sankara did not do anything to resolve the gap between his theory of the world and the discriminatory practice of the religion.
It took social reformer Narayana Guru to challenge the caste system in terms of Advaita. The same understanding of unity of all things that led him to say that caste divisions are invalid also led him to say that what is important is for people to be decent, whatever their religion.
Such a vision of Hinduism is at radical odds with Hindutva, as espoused by the Sangh Parivar, which sees non-Hindus as potential anti-national threats and any political action outside the framework of conflating the nation with Hindus as treason that has to be put down.
While Narayana Guru’s conceptual framework was consistent internally and with Advaita, he did not succeed in eradicating caste in his land. That is because of the lived reality of the lower castes and the upper castes being at two ends of a division of social labour, which valorised intellectual labour and demeaned physical labour. The means of changing that reality did not exist in his time. It is at hand now.
Mass education, the internet and globalised growth make it eminently possible to break the correlation between birth and occupation, the material basis of caste. Hewers of wood can and do turn computer programmers and entrepreneurs. But participatory growth is not sufficient to empower Dalits. They need more democracy, to dismantle the present oppressive power structure.
Democracy in every sphere of life and aggressive participation in the new global division of labour — these hold the key to India’s redemption, so also the Dalits’.
This story was first appeared on economictimes.indiatimes.com