Fragments of a failed society

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The Tribune, September 20, 2018

Sewer deaths exemplify our pyramidal caste system with its oppressive feudal facets


Sanitation workers belong to the lowest of the low rungs in the caste ladder.



Rajesh Ramachandran

We ought to be a failed society to send our neighbours down the septic tanks to certain death or a life of filthy ignominy. Eleven people have died in seven days this last week in septic tanks and sewers, six of them in the national capital. Their corpses, their needless deaths are exemplifiers of our pyramidal, hierarchical caste system with all its oppressive feudal facets. We believe that a certain group of people are born to carry on their head others’ waste and excreta. When the dry toilets gave way to more modern ones with flush tanks, our modernity pushed the same old unfortunate people into newer septic tanks and municipal sewer lines. The IITian Chief Minister who wielded the broom — the symbol of the sanitation workers’ servitude — to seek their votes still has not thought about a mechanised alternative to people diving into pools of excreta. Did the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi or the Centre stop him from getting the Delhi IIT or the Kharagpur IIT to design robots to clean the clogged sewers? According to the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis, one sanitation worker has died every five days since January 2017.

Sanitation workers belong to the lowest of the low rungs in the Indian caste ladder, whatever their religion be. Hindu, Sikh, Christian, or Buddhist, the sanitation workers are discriminated against, often by even other Scheduled Castes. The worst aspect of Dalit politics is that it has always been dominated by the agricultural labour or cobbler castes like Jatav, Mahar, Mala, Pulaya or Holaya, to the extent of making the children and grandchildren of sanitation workers invisible in public life. So far, Valmikis or Madigas or Thotis have not really mattered in politics or bureaucracy. The token Dalit representative of the Congress was always from castes other than sanitation workers, so was the anti-Congress Dalit messiah Dr BR Ambedkar, a Mahar. India’s first Dalit President KR Naryanan, the celebrated Congress leader Jagjivan Ram, the BSP founder Kanshi Ram, his heiress Mayawati, the first Dalit Chief Justice of India KG Balakrishnan, the first Dalit Speaker of the Lok Sabha, GMC Balayogi, Bihar strongman Ram Vilas Paswan… the list of Scheduled Caste leaders from the agricultural labour class is endless. So was the case when the BJP chose a Dalit to be President of India.

Worse is the situation in bureaucracy. Some leaders listed above pushed their children into the civil services, cornering quotas and denying opportunities to the children of manual scavengers. Now, reservation in politics and bureaucracy is just preservation of privilege for the children of empowered people. Their politics, too, is a curious extension of the colonial constructs of the separate nation and separate electorate meant to Balkanise the idea of India. Gandhi’s idea of eradication of untouchability, which he believed was more important than Independence, was to live and work with sanitation workers, impart dignity to their work and confidence in them as fellow beings, while shaming the upper castes and forcing them to clean their own toilets. The British countered this with the idea of a separate electorate and rituals like celebration of the Mahar valour during the battle of Koregaon. The greater instance of Mahar valour was the battle of Srirangapatna, when on May 4, 1799, a grenadier of the Bombay Army, possibly a Mahar soldier, shot Tipu Sultan through the temple, thus silencing the roar of the Tiger of Mysore and helping East India Company take control of the western coast.

So, while creating separate electorates and separate nations for Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Anglo-Indians and SCs, Koregaon — and not Srirangapatna — was convenient for the British rulers to create a narrative of fractured identities, mutinying against one another. This colonial narrative cannot create an equal society, but only sharper divisions. Instead of militantly agitating against the state and the Centre for continuing with the inhuman practice of pushing men and boys into sewer lines, the so-called Dalit radicals continue sharpening the edges of the colonial percepts of our fractured identities, celebrating the victory of a British contingent against an imbecile Peshwa some 200 years ago, for what? About a century ago, identity politics of the Hindutva, Islamic and Dalit varieties have all been at the behest of the British. VD Savarkar had sought mercy and was granted freedom by the British, Ambedkar was a member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council and Jinnah was a British ally and all three were opposed to the Quit India movement. So, it was no surprise that while opposing Gandhi, Ambedkar had, in 1931, praised the Hindutva proponent Savarkar as a true friend of the Dalits, “I however wish to take this opportunity of conveying to you my appreciation of the work you are doing in the field of social reform. If the Untouchables are to be part and parcel of the Hindu society… you must destroy chaturvarnya. I am glad that you are one of the very few who have realised this.” According to Ambedkar’s biographer Dhananjay Keer, in 1937 Ambedkar’s publication Janata wrote that “Savarkar’s service to the cause of the Untouchables was as decisive and great as that of Gautama Buddha himself.”

Savarkar’s followers claim that Ambedkar tried to help him while he was being tried for Gandhi’s murder. Manohar Malgonkar in The Men Who Killed Gandhi quotes the Savarkar Memorial Committee publication to claim that Ambedkar told Savarkar’s counsel in January 1949, “There is no real charge against your client; quite worthless evidence has been concocted… But take it from me there just is no case.” This may not be true at all, but it is sadly true that some Ambedkarites do celebrate East India Company’s victories and worship Mayawati’s statues, instead of forcing her to disassociate forever from Hindutva forces and to rescue manual scavengers from the sewers.

After Sabarimala, women priests

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The Tribune, October 15, 2018

It is for all religions now to embrace the spirit of the SC verdict


No science here: If faith becomes rational, can it be termed faith?



Rajesh Ramachandran

The Sabarimala verdict is being treated as a gender issue and a victory for women’s rights. As a Sabarimala pilgrim since my childhood, I can vouch that this verdict allowing fertile women access to the hill shrine is neither. The petitioners are not devout women devotees who are dying to seek Ayyappa’s blessings, or demanding rights of temple entry for their comrades-in-faith. In fact, they remind one of the BJP’s concern for Muslim women and triple talaq. The ban on menstruating women to the Sabarimala temple is a mix of a pre-modern sense of hygiene, tradition and superstition, which have all come to be packaged as faith. In Kerala, most Hindu households used to light a lamp in the evening, when the elderly and the children used to sit down to chant shlokas, recite spiritual Malayalam poetry or simply sing devotional movie songs (depending on the relative education of the household).

The woman of the house usually lit the lamp. And she didn’t do it during her periods. In an era before sanitary pads, the womenfolk probably thought it better to keep away than soil the puja room with bodily fluids. This applies to boys and men too, who were debarred from anything pious without a bath. Obviously, the logical extension was to keep off temples, too, during menstruation. The Sabarimala trek used to be a long arduous one through dense forests. The difficulty, the longevity and the unpredictability of the trek, and the Buddhist origins and traditions around the temple could also have been a deterrent for women. So, only girls below 10 and menopausal women used to make the trip; though there have been exceptions galore.

Whatever was the reason that kept women out of the temple for so long, the verdict is welcome as a judicial intervention in faith. It is difficult for a society to reform itself without an outside agency. Here the Anglo-Saxon law, the Constitution and rationalism displayed by judges, who probably do not believe, have decided to force open the closed minds of the faithful. Women are doing everything that they should wearing sanitary napkins. Now, why should the menstrual cycle stop them from going to a temple? It is very difficult for a woman devotee to logically shake off centuries of habit and traditions, which have the force of superstition. A belief becomes an oppressive compulsion when it is accompanied by fear. The wrath of God has kept societies in darkness. Unfortunately, rationalism is often the privilege of the entitled class. A weak person, miserably poor, with nothing but blind faith to help her suffer the ignominies of life cannot obviously afford to take the risk of inviting God’s displeasure.

The Supreme Court has now asked the women of Kerala to do exactly that. And that is why this verdict is indeed path-breaking. Otherwise, not going to Sabarimala is not like being thrown out of the marital home without alimony or becoming the fourth wife of a wife-beating, marital rapist or being denied equal property rights or representation in elected bodies or raping a nun. Not going to Sabarimala was part of a ritual for a devotee, just like going to Sabarimala was. There are women who wait for their hysterectomy to make the trip. If faith becomes rational, can it be termed faith? For instance, there is a Devi temple in Kerala where the goddess is believed to menstruate and the idol won’t be available for darshan those four or five days in the temple’s calendar.

Every religion has such quaint practices that seem abhorrent to someone from an alien culture. The verdict is an outsider’s gaze into the temple practices of Kerala. Only an outsider can easily pick out what is outlandish in customs that are the norm for a society. Now, this gaze has to be consistent in two ways. We need to look at all religions from a gender perspective and only then will we see the repressive patriarchy that rules all religious institutions. Menstruating women going to Sabarimala is a very minor issue when compared to the misogynist tyranny of the temples, mutts, deras, churches and mosques. Kerala has been a progressive state for all reasons. The Kerala society, instead of hanging on to moth-eaten traditions of a pre-napkin era, should herald a revolution by appointing women head priests in all temples. The majority community should always take the lead in social reform measures, for only then will the minorities gain confidence in its motives in bringing in a positive change.

Kerala had the first Dalit vedic priest in a traditional temple. Why not women? There ought to be a 50 per cent reservation for women in all big temples of India. Women priests should worship God, just as they fly aircraft, send rockets and run this country. As a next step, the Supreme Court should take note of the anti-women activities that are going on within other religious denominations, particularly the Catholic Church. In the very same state, five nuns had to do a sit-in for a fortnight for a rapist bishop to get arrested. The alacrity shown by the petitioners in the Sabarimala case ought to have been repeated here, but was sadly missing. It took almost three months for the bishop to get jailed and no Marxist leader of Kerala found it amiss.

The Sangh Parivar has all along thrived building a Hinduism-under-siege bogey. This narrative has started playing out in Kerala, highlighting the differentiated approach by the law-enforcing authorities towards Sabarimala and the bishop’s rape case. The Sabarimala petitioners can restore the balance by seeking to intervene in two issues: the treatment of nuns by the ruling clergy, and misuse of confession, a holy sacrament, by some unscrupulous priests to blackmail and rape the faithful women. Here, too, the solution is pretty simple: allow women to become priests in all denominations. Let the petitioners demand women bishops for the Catholic Church in India.

Truth and reconciliation

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The Tribune, August 31, 2018

Khalistan agenda is not a freedom of speech issue as UK tried to make out


Rajesh Ramachandran


Last year, around this time, a convicted rapist and a murderer, Gurmeet Ram Rahim, managed to get about 36 of his own followers killed to prove his clout. Recently, a bishop brought in busloads of his flock of faithful sheep to show his strength when he was getting questioned in a rape case. We, as a society, are so blind, ignorant and greedy that any felon could get a few truckloads of supporters to defend him. Religious and social organisations have copied the depraved politicians so well that the charlatans have all become one indistinguishable vile whole. What fuels these tricksters is money. The pro-Khalistan sloganeers among the Punjabi diaspora are no different. When a poor Punjabi is offered asylum in the name of religious persecution, he is forever obliged to shout the slogans of those who made him a citizen of the first world. The logic is so simple and compelling that the Khalistan 2020 rally in London was merely a rerun of many things past.

Why just blame the asylum-seeker? Even a well-heeled columnist while seeking foreign hospitality recently snarled at The Tribune for this very same reason. The Tribune has been taking on foreign governments in its editorials and news pages for supporting, sponsoring and sheltering religious secessionists. So, like one of those faithful in the bus (business class for sure), this columnist too shouted slogans against The Tribune. Ideally, such people ought to be writing for The Civil and Military Gazette (the pro-British newspaper which was The Tribune’s competitor in Lahore) or its contemporary Internet versions. The Khalistan agenda is not an issue of freedom of speech as the UK government recently tried to make out. The Khalistan religious secessionist movement has claimed the lives of a Prime Minister, a Chief Minister and thousands of innocent Punjabis, mostly Sikhs. So, a Khalistani flag symbolises two decades of terror, deprivation and death. And that was unfurled early this month at Trafalgar Square because the UK government seems to be completely unaware of all those years of murder and mayhem in Punjab and thought it was the secessionists’ right to “gather together and demonstrate their views, provided that they do so within the law”.

Whose law? The imperial law obviously, which did not apply to the colonies. The religious secessionist militancy is truly dead and buried in Punjab. All the attempts to revive it are only being made abroad, primarily in Canada and the UK. In fact, the religious fanatics seeking a separate Islamic state of Kashmir, too, made common cause with the Khalistanis in London. Well, the British policy on J&K was explicit from the days of the initial trouble in October 1947. “It would have been natural for Kashmir to eventually accede to Pakistan on agreed terms,” Narendra Singh Sarila quotes the then British secretary of state for Commonwealth relations in his brilliantly researched book, The Shadow of the Great Game.

The creation of Pakistan, this former ADC to the last Viceroy Mountbatten argues quoting chiefs of staff, was a British strategic requirement. General Leslie Hollis even predicted an India-Pak war as early as May 1947: “Our link with Pakistan might have a stabilising effect on India as a whole, since an attack by Hindustan on Pakistan would involve Hindustan in war, not with Pakistan alone, but also with the British Commonwealth.” The Partition was done not out of love for Jinnah but for strategic facilities like the Karachi port and the north western air bases. The Muslim League was routed in the 1937 elections, winning just 108 out of the 408 seats reserved for Muslims. Even the North West Frontier Province, with 95 per cent Muslims, had overwhelmingly voted for the Congress, thus proving beyond doubt that the separate electorates did not automatically endorse the two-nation theory. Yet, the British nourished and nurtured Jinnah to the eventual strategic objective of India’s Partition. General Hollis had explained it plainly: “Quite apart from the positive arguments in favour of this course we would draw your attention to the sorry result of refusing an application by Mr Jinnah — which would, in effect, amount to ejecting a numerous and loyal people from the British Commonwealth. We should probably have lost all chances of ever getting strategic facilities anywhere in India (the subcontinent); we should have shattered our reputation in the rest of the Muslim world and could not look for the continued cooperation of Middle Eastern countries. From the military point of view such results would be extremely bad.”

It was the British military goal of containing a rising Soviet Union and manipulating the oil-rich Muslim world that led to the holocaust and the forced migration of millions of people. But why should the UK host the Khalistan 2020 meet now, particularly when the Indian agencies are shouting from the rooftop that they have proof of ISI involvement in the entire enterprise? Now that Pakistan and China are staunch allies and Russia is supplying hardware and training the Pakistanis, does it really serve the Anglo-Saxon purpose to keep mutilating the Indian soul? The assault on the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee head in the US and the heckling of Congress president Rahul Gandhi in the UK by Khalistanis are proof of the hospitality offered to them.

No people have loved their old colonisers as much as Indians. Our national movement was a strange combination of admiration for colonial institutions like the judiciary and hatred for foreign rule. Shakespeare is more important for us than Bhasa. But as a society we need to rethink whether it is a good idea to invest in countries that promote religious secessionism in India. You can always get a few people in your bus to call us names, but that only underscores our integrity.

Maitreyi College Governing Body Membership

I had declined the membership of the Governing Body of Maitreyi College, Delhi University, as soon as I got to know about the nomination. I had sent an email and also a letter by post informing the college about my decision in August, 2015 itself.

Why bypass due process of law to term Rohith non-Dalit?

Polibelly/Economic Times
February 1, 2016
Rajesh Ramachandran
It doesn’t make any sense for BJP to accuse the family of Rohith Vemula of forging a caste certificate. Rohith is a victim of our academic system, political interference and campus rivalry. His victimhood does not get altered because he was pitted against ABVP. By claiming that Rohith was not a Dalit, the BJP leadership is questioning the victim’s integrity and terming the family frauds.
This political strategy can only further alienate from BJP those who are grieving for Rohith. 

There is a legitimate method to probe whether a caste certificate is genuine or not. The government of Andhra Pradesh can ask the district collector of Guntur to verify the caste certificate issued to Rohith. The district collector after hearing Rohith’s family can present his findings to the government, which at the highest level can decide to set aside Rohith’s caste certificate. There are guidelines for issuing, questioning and cancelling caste certificates, endorsed by the Supreme Court.
BJP is bypassing this due process of law to jump into a conclusion based on some secret police reports, why? It seems BJP believes that if Rohith is proven to be a non-Dalit, the issue will lose its political gravitas. Well, every unlettered Dalit is aware of the threat of an enquiry into his or her caste certificate. It is but natural for a desperate Dalit to hide his caste to escape oppression and then to reveal it to get governmental benefits. 

So, an attack on Rohith’s caste certificate will make ordinary Dalilts bristle because the only identity that Rohith held dear as a student was that of an Ambedkarite. As a meritorious student who did not use his caste certificate to get into the University of Hyderabad, he had the option of calling himself an OBC Vaddera as his estranged father was a Vaddera. But he chose to uphold the Dalit Mala identity of his mother. An offspring of a mixed marriage, Rohith could have got his caste certificate because he was brought up in a Mala neighbourhood as a Mala. 

Whatever be the reason, Rohith chose to be a Dalit and an Ambedkarite. Sure, there are non-Dalit Ambedkarites, but in this caste-ridden society no non-Dalit would want to be called a Dalit. When Rohith calls himself a Dalit, without using or misusing his caste certificate, he has every right to his identity. For someone from the lowest stratum of the society, there is nothing to be proud about being an outcast. Only burning idealism could have turned him into a fullfledged Ambedkarite. 

Forget for a second Rohith was a Dalit. There cannot be any argument over his identity as an Ambedkarite and that is the most potent political label for a Dalit. BJP should understand that it is not reassuring the Dalit masses by questioning the dead student’s caste and by challenging an Ambedkarite’s identity. The BJP leadership, instead of taking on its political rival, Rahul Gandhi, is wasting its time targeting Rohith.

http://epaperbeta.timesofindia.com/index.aspx?eid=31815&dt=20160201