Commentary/Dilip D'Souza

In India, the fundamental reality is not religion, not class, but caste

It's a short book. It's polemical, almost deliberately provocative. It glosses over many things, glorifies others, paints too-rosy pictures: has problems, in short. But all through, it asks some extremely uncomfortable questions. I have no answer for them. Nor yet have I seen anyone trying to answer them.

Maybe they cannot. For what answer is there to thousands and thousands of years of oppression? This is why it's quite clear that Kancha Ilaiah's Why I Am Not A Hindu is, above all, a statement of intent, a rallying call to those he calls Dalitbahujans: "people and castes who form the exploited and suppressed majority."

Ilaiah is a fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi. He also teaches political science at Osmania University and writes frequently in the Economic & Political Weekly, Mainstream and other journals.

To me, his book was a stunning eye-opener. Somewhere at the back of my mind, I suppose I knew the point Ilaiah makes with it. But Ilaiah makes it with breathtaking force: in India, the fundamental reality is not religion, not class, but caste. Pure and simple. It's caste that permeates lives across the country, as it has done for millenia without a break. For Ilaiah, there is no other way he has known. But this is not a lament, oh no. Ilaiah also makes clear that there is no other way he would rather be. He articulates these two truths angrily, but eloquently. And in the end, he leaves you reeling.

Because left blasted into rubble by his book is every single notion that the Sangh Parivar, in particular, has tried to sell us over the last several years: of Hindutva, their claims of nationalism, casteism, of Hinduism itself. Viewed through Kancha Ilaiah's Dalitbahujan eyes, the Parivar's offerings are shown up for the empty pretensions they really are.

Not that others are left alone, not at all. To Ilaiah, political power in this country has always been just a translation of the same old upper caste Hindu domination that Dalitbahujans have suffered for thousands of years. Gandhi, Nehru and the Congress party simply institutionalised it after Independence. Under the Congress regime, says Ilaiah, Dalitbahujans "were never allowed to be equal partners... the gap between Hindu upper castes and the non-Hindu Dalitbahujans has never been bridged."

And Communists? Even that movement "started functioning in two separate camps -- the upper caste leader camp and the Dalitbahujan cadre camp." Dalitbahujans "never found an equal place in the leadership structures."

More about the politics later. First, a little about where it is rooted, in being entirely separate from Hinduism.

As I mentioned, Ilaiah simply tears apart every self-righteous myth the Parivar has wrapped itself in. The first is that the great majority in this vast country is Hindu. Which is nonsense, because Ilaiah sees himself and Dalitbahujans as profoundly distinct from Hindus. As a Dalitbahujan, he follows an entirely different culture and religion. This theme runs insistently through the book, starting from its title. "The Dalitbahujan spirit is a non-Hindu spirit"; " (A)t every stage in the human life cycle... the Dalitbahujan and Hindu approaches to life are totally different." And this: "(T)he opposite of Hindu culture is actually Dalitbahujan culture."

He also demolishes that antiquated myth we are supposed to swallow without question: Hinduism's famed tolerance. The caste system, with its horrible treatment of lower castes that continues even today, tells us exactly how tolerant that tolerance really is. "Hinduism has never been a humane philosophy," Ilaiah writes. "The Dalitbahujan castes of India are the living evidence of its brutality." And elsewhere: "(O)ur childhoods were mutilated by constant abuse... For hundreds of generations, the violent stoppage of the entry of the written word into our homes and our lives nipped our consciousness in the very bud."

The truth is, every single religion is rampant with intolerance; the sooner Hinduism's devotees throw off the cloak that theirs is more tolerant than the others, the sooner its problems will be addressed. But Parivar believers like to wave off any mention of problems. "We're taking care of our own problems," you'll hear them say. They don't see the simple truth: for centuries, that has not happened. It shows no sign of happening now. And it's immaterial anyway, because Dalitbahujans like Ilaiah are not waiting around any more for the problems to be taken care of. They fully intend to assert their rights on their own terms. That's the only way they see to bettering their lives.

Then there's Hindutva, the "new" nationalism the Parivar parrots day in and day out. Ilaiah points out repeatedly that this is just stale feni in a new bottle: the ancient upper caste order all over again. He rejects it emphatically for its inequity (or should that be iniquity?). "Suddenly since about 1990," he writes, "the word 'Hindutva' has begun to echo in our ears, day in and day out, as if everyone in India who is not a Muslim, a Christian or a Sikh is a Hindu." He goes on: "This totally baffles me... (T)he very sight of this saffron-tilak culture is a harrassment to us."

But there's another reason he scorns it: Hindutva's main purpose is to subvert rising Dalitbahujan political assertion.

The vital point about Hindutva that Ilaiah makes is: it was a calculated response to the watershed year of 1990, when reservations and Mandal hit the national agenda. To him, Mandal was the start of the lower castes's struggle for power and representation. Seeing the danger in this, the Sangh Parivar quickly raised the banner of Hindutva to divert the caste struggle into a communal one. Seen this way, Hindutva was set up purely to oppose the pro-reservation movement. The destruction of the Babri Masjid and the subsequent murderous violence was the outcome of this deliberate strategy of diversion.

"The more aggressive form of Hindutva (is represented)," Ilaiah writes, "in the anti-Mandal ideologies, the Ayodhya-based Rama slogan, as well as in the Sangh Parivar's theory of 'Akhandabharat' and 'minority appeasement'. All these are part of the anti-Dalitbahujan package."

Page after page, Ilaiah's little book takes your breath away. As a reviewer pointed out in the Economic & Political Weekly, Ilaiah gives us an entirely new angle on Hindutva: more than communal, Hindutva is fundamentally about caste. Parivar people like to use the word "casteist" to label parties that are raising Dalitbahujan issues like Mandal, but the real casteism is what Hindutva seeks to perpetuate.

And what about those parties? Speaking for myself, I find it very hard to swallow that Dalitbahujan aspirations have found leaders as devoid of principles as Kanshi Ram and Mayawati. But that's the way it is now, and perhaps better leadership will emerge in time. No longer can Dalitbahujan assertion be suppressed or wished away, as the Hindu caste structure has done for so long. It's here, now. Theirs will be the agenda, the questions, over the coming years and decades. Which is just as it should be. Frankly, I cannot imagine a better portent for the country than the awakening of a too-long silenced majority.

And the questions that Ilaiah poses will need answers. The Hindutva we see today, the one that claims facilely to speak for the whole country, cannot give us those answers. Because, in a very deep sense, it does not and cannot speak for the country to begin with. No doubt its protagonists, angered by what they will see as an attack on Hinduism, will ridicule Ilaiah, attack him, dismiss what he says as irrelevant or lies. All that, but will they try doing what they really need to do -- listen to and answer Ilaiah?

"For about three thousand years," Ilaiah says to the upper castes in his introduction, "you people learnt only how to teach and what to teach others -- the Dalitbahujans. Now in your own interest and in the interest of this great country you must learn to listen and to read what we have to say. People who refuse to listen to new questions and learn new answers will perish and not prosper."

A better epitaph for the Hindutva that's on view today, I could not hope to write myself.

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