Social Status within Caste and Resistance to Hindutva Fascism
Pramod Sankaran
Ambedkar gives a warning about the danger that India is going to face in the future. There is a chance for two types of majorities to come to power in the country. One of them comes through political majority. Political majority is not permanent. It can be ousted by another political majority. But apart from the political majority there is a communal majority. Communal majority is constant. Although Hinduism is a disjointed caste in India, it has the potential to become a majority religion and come to power permanently. Ambedkar gave this warning to be cautious against the threat that India is going to face. Today, when the Sangh Parivar-controlled Modi government continues to rule India, democratic India needs to seriously discuss Ambedkar’s vision and the fundamental nature of Indian society.
Hinduism rests on a religious foundation falsely constructed between social classes divided into many castes and discriminated against each other. Therefore, there is a need to deeply discuss the caste structure in the Hindu social structure, where brotherhood and justice are not naturally distributed. Only a democratic political society formed through such discussion can ultimately effectively counter the threat of Sangh Parivar Hindutva. All the people of India were not given an equal share of power and resources, and wealth, power and status were monopolized by the caste Hindus. During the formation of modern India, social classes and religious minorities, who were subject to social marginalization, got a limited share in the powers once held by the upper castes through reservation. This constitutional right caused widespread opposition among upper castes. Later, power-sharing was made available to the backward people, who were the vast majority of Hindus, through the Mandal Commission. The upper castes, who were only 10% of the Indian population, occupied the lion’s share of the government jobs, and unleashed a widespread revolt in India against this. The issue of reservation kept the upper castes of 10% as enemies against the large majority backward Dalit population. Or the reservation issue was kept as a caste issue all along as a hindrance to the integration of the so called Hindus. Therefore, it has been an all-time political requirement of the Sangh Parivar that Hindu integration should be possible instead of the reservation equation. To solve this problem, the Modi government came up with upper caste reservation in the name of economic reservation. All the political parties, except the Muslim League and Owaisi’s All India Majlis-e-Ittahadul Muslimeen Party claiming to be secular parties in India were seen surrendering to Sangh Parivar politics that day in Parliament. If the so-called secular political parties aimed at 10% upper caste vote, the Sangh Parivar’s demand for Hindu integration was fulfilled by resolving the internal conflict between the socially backward masses and upper castes.
Hindu assimilation must be prevented to eliminate the power stability of the communal majority. This requires active discussion of the caste problem, which is divided into many castes and does not interact socially with each other. Such a discussion can foster the growth of a new democratic political community and thereby defend the Sangh Parivar Hindutva politics. For that it is important to recognize the nature of the caste system and the underlying nature of the social structure. Caste communities that exist in a hierarchical relationship have a fundamentally common character. It is a common characteristic of castes to be oppressed and oppressor at the same time. For example, there are many caste groups among the Brahmins themselves whose social relationship is to receive discrimination from the upper caste and discriminate against the Brahmin castes of lower social status among them. Caste is more of a stratified social status than anything else. Therefore, it is necessary to form a democratic society with the realization that no one is recognized as equal in the caste system. The reason for saying this is that there is a common sense that caste is understood only as a Dalit tribal power resource issue or as a human rights issue. In order to overcome that common sense, anti-caste ideas have to be developed by placing the concept of equal human rights as the core problem of modern value concepts. That does not mean that Dalit tribal land issues and issues related to caste oppression should be avoided or downplayed. It is the responsibility of the governments to resolve the Dalit tribal power and resource issues in terms of social justice. It can be solved through a political process. But the problem of hierarchical social status maintained by the caste system is one that modern democratic society must deal with. While the caste problem in a broad sense is a social problem related to social privileges, it is seen only as a tribal problem even by upper castes and backward communities uniting in anti-caste struggles. The problem with this kind of unity is that he doesn’t feel internalized the struggle for himself, but he feels that he is parenting the survival problem of a community outside of him. Such custodial solidarities cannot undermine the foundations of the caste system of hierarchical social status. For one who participates in the struggle for equal social status against the caste system, the struggle becomes not a struggle for outsiders but for oneself. Even if the participants in the anti-caste movement were from among the Brahmin castes, he would be speaking against the system that does not recognize him as an equal human being. Therefore, only people from all caste groups who come forward for their own human status can create a new social democratic society.Therefore, the caste problem should be presented and understood not only as a Dalit problem. The anti-caste struggle needs to be transformed into one for the human status of all social classes.
Interferences that are done in such a way as to establish the caste system as a problem of the Dalits alone without valuing the caste system in its entirety will only lead to the non-Dalit communities becoming gentrified.In the caste system, which operates on the basis of hierarchical and graded inequality, the caste system maintains a sense of privilege over the castes immediately below it, while all castes are discriminated against. This social structure is trained to treat each other discriminately in the order of lower and upper castes, even among the Brahmin castes. A mass unity against the caste system is possible only when all the people who live by accepting insults and believing that they have the opportunity to treat their inferiors with contempt, join themselves in the construction of an anti-caste democratic collective. The privileged communities of the caste system must unite in the anti-caste struggle not only as a demand for the liberation of the Dalits but also in the consciousness that the caste system is something that does not treat them as equal human beings.
On the other side of caste criticism, which focuses only on the historical experience of caste oppression of Dalits, what has happened is that the historical experience of other backward/Shudra castes has been kept invisible. As a result of presenting caste oppression as a laughable experience of Dalits alone, there has been a large-scale gentrification of the privileged backward sections over Dalits. As a result of the strengthening of Hindu consciousness among the Shudra castes and the backward castes, it is evident that Sangh Parivar Hinduism had a great influence in these sections. Such social groups are led towards soft Hinduism by being gentrified, but ultimately it forms the basis of the radical Hinduism of the Sangh Parivar. Beyond the reality that Hinduism is a group of unequal castes that do not distribute justice equally, they shift to religious consciousness and to protect the Hindu way of life, becomes a moral responsibility of theirs too. In such a situation, if the Sangh Parivar spreads the word that Ram and the cow are in danger, the victims of caste violence come to the streets in large numbers to protect the system. In such a situation, if the Sangh Parivar spreads the word that Ram and the cow are in danger, the victims of caste violence come to the streets in large numbers to protect the system. It is necessary to stop the backward communities and upper Shudra groups from being Hindutized and make them part of the anti-caste struggle. Therefore the caste system needs to be explained in its entirety and how each caste has gone through historical experiences in oppressive caste systems in modern times.It is important to note that the content of such explanatory efforts should not be offensive to any caste group. Rather, ironic explanations of caste criticism should be emphasized in such a way that members of privileged castes are made aware that they are not treated equally in the social structure of inequality.
In this way, the escalation of anti-caste struggle to social status undermines the unification of many castes and Hinduism, which Sangh Parivar aims at. It is a social reality that Hinduism is unified as one fraught with caste conflicts that discriminate against each other. The political debate over social status ultimately sharpens the antagonism over the caste structure within Hinduism. When social status comes into the discussion as a central issue, even among the upper castes, their social status and the subtle issues of discrimination they experience come to the fore. In this way, a mass public front in the anti-caste struggle, which has the potential to undermine neo-Hindu politics internally, is possible.
Ambedkar observes that the caste system in India is not a division of labour but a division of labourers because castes are hierarchically arranged by social status. It has been argued that caste communities were formed by ancient labour groups. If the labor groups have become the caste, then the fact that the social status of the castes has remained unchanged in modern society despite the change of the clan occupation is breaking the tip of this argument. Ambedkar clearly says in the work called ‘The Caste Annihilation’ that Marx’s slogan ‘Unite the workers of all countries, you will lose only your chains’ is not applicable to India. The reason for this is that the worker in India has not only the economic chain to lose but also the social status classified by the caste system. The working class in India is divided by social status as opposed to worker unity. Therefore, anti-caste politics must destroy the social status that is the foundation of the caste system. It serves as a prerequisite for the unity of the working class and the development of a broad mass front against fascism and the creation of a democratic society by resisting fascism.
