Caste: A best-in-class political asset

'Defying Nehru and Ambedkar, caste is stronger today than ever before', says the author

Of course it’s apocryphal. But the story of P C Sen, a former Congress chief minister of West Bengal, turning up when Promode Dasgupta, the Marxist supremo, was being cremated because, as he explained, he always attended any event concerning his caste brethren illustrates the power of the ancient bonding.

Caste is no joke. It’s deadly serious. As the late Bal Thackeray put it, Indians “don’t cast their vote, they vote their caste.” It’s the instrument through which politicians win votes and extend control, the channel that enables the populace to extract favours. As the uproar over the Mandal Commission report confirmed, it sparks violent conflict and foments deadly enmity. Makes and breaks political careers.

B R Ambedkar called caste “a disease of the mind” that is “positively pernicious”. Nehru’s abhorrence of caste explains the Constitution’s commitment to its abolition. But H H Risley, one of India’s earliest ethnographers, held that since “caste forms the cement that holds together the myriad units of Indian society”, the end of its cohesive power would mean social chaos.

Defying Nehru and Ambedkar, caste is stronger today than ever before. Thackeray’s stricture applies to all political parties even as they denounce caste.

No one can be certain of the outcome of a caste census for which demand is growing. Some think it will only acknowledge reality. Others fear it might be dynamite. If Narendra Modi is serious about minimising the scope for friction, he should take a leaf out of Singapore’s book and look for solutions that soothe and heal instead of punish and provoke, like Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s proposed Maintenance of Racial Harmony Act.

Referring to a spate of racist incidents and inter-ethnic tensions amid the Covid-19 pandemic, another Singaporean celebrity, Ong Keng Yong, warns that Singaporeans must “play a proactive and constructive role to counter external menaces and means that threaten the mosaic of our multicultural society”. By mosaic, Ong, who was high commissioner to India during 1996-1998, means Singapore’s demographic mix — 76.2 per cent Chinese, 15 per cent Malay (Muslim) and 7.4 per cent Indian.
 

Britain, too, relied on the public response when its 1965 Race Relations Act outlawed discrimination on “grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins”. The expectation was that if discrimination became illegal, law-abiding Britons would shun it. “While laws can help address racism in both work and social settings, they would be meaningless if they stood on their own without support from the community,” says Singapore’s law and home minister, K Shanmugam.

Singapore’s new law will, therefore, depend on non-punitive sanctions rather than legal deterrents to induce behavioural change. The Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act initiated this imaginative approach 31 years ago by allowing offenders to make amends through a public or private apology or by taking part in inter-religious events.

This novel approach was adopted under the aegis of a former chief justice, Yong Pung How, who first visited India in January 1959 with Lee Kuan Yew and his wife (all Cambridge contemporaries) to hear Jawaharlal Nehru speak on the “Rule of Law in a Free Society.”

It has been the carrot and stick ever since. The law punishes those who contravene the norms but agrees that shaming people with jail sentences and criminal records can be counter-productive. Instead, the system recommends alternative dispute resolution mechanisms like mediation, family courts and community service.

Clearly, such understanding would have been of no avail in the face of an outrage like the Madras High Court’s acquittal in 1975 of 25 landlords accused of burning alive 44 Dalit men, women and children on the grounds that people in their position do not commit such crimes themselves — they hire others. But it might have spared India a staggering backlog of 43.9 million pending cases.

However, public cooperation demands a political lead. That is where the challenge lies. Continuous propaganda about “love jihad”, “gau raksha” and “Partition Horrors Remembrance Day” has created something like a siege mentality with the majority community manifesting minority fears. It’s not enough to shun casteism only because the law demands it. True multiracialism and multiculturalism demand indifference to caste distinctions. That will remain elusive in India so long as politicians encourage people to strengthen and perpetuate traditional collective identities. Caste is capital in India. It is convertible into cash. Why should anyone surrender such a valuable asset?

That is the great difference between two post-colonial societies that should resemble each other. One sees the pressures and prejudices of the past as weaknesses to be eradicated so that good and enlightened governance can be established uniformly. The other seeks strength from the pressures and prejudices of an obscurantist past, which are becoming more and more the patterns of the future for politicians playing to the majoritarian gallery.