R Jagannathan: The reinvention of caste

MICROVIEW

In a few weeks from now, Bihar will prove""yet again""the importance of caste in politics and power. It is not my purpose here to speculate on which castes will vote for whom.

But I must point out what should have been obvious to anyone who cared to see: we have all abandoned the ideal of a caste-free society. On the contrary, caste has become central to the lives of the intermediate and lower classes, especially Dalits, and less so for the rest.

The reason for this is the need for identity""personal and social. It is stereotypical to see caste as purely a mechanism of oppression.

Less well acknowledged is the overwhelming need of various communities for unique identities. Today, it is the previously oppressed castes that need caste most, and not the upper classes.

Consider the evidence: Dalits need caste to establish their underdog status. Despite their rhetoric against the upper castes, they do not accept the ideal of a casteless society.

What they really want is power and an aggressive assertion of their own identities. Many Dalits see Gandhi""the one person in pre-independence India who really empathised with them ""as their enemy for trying to obliterate the lines separating castes.

Ambedkar is important to them precisely because he was inimical to Gandhi. Mayawati is important because she can abuse the upper castes, never mind her own megalomania and inability to raise the economic status of Dalits.

As for the OBCs, their larger numbers and growing economic strength are already obvious""and today they are the most aggressive oppressors of Dalits.

That's why neither Mulayam Singh nor Lalu Prasad is capable of working with Mayawati or Ram Vilas Paswan. OBCs and Dalits are into mutually-exclusive identity politics.

Witness also the growing dominance of OBCs in the Hindutva movement""whether it is Pravin Togadia or Narendra Modi or Uma Bharati or Vinay Katiyar. Caste and religion are coalescing in Hindutva as part of the greater need for community identity.

The evidence from south India is even sharper. The Dravidian movement's so-called anti-Brahminism is fast becoming a farce. Most Brahmins have been migrating out of Tamil Nadu to other parts of the country or even abroad, but anti-Brahminism lives on.

This, despite growing evidence that the biggest oppressors of Dalits in Tamil Nadu are not the so-called upper castes, but the middle and lower-middle castes.

After the recent tsunami, the Meenavar community of fishermen is reported to have commandeered most of the relief, pushing Dalits out of the reckoning. If the Dalits had been stronger, they would probably have done the same to the Meenavars.

So what am I getting at? Basically this: The old assumption that casteism is primarily a plot by the upper castes to subjugate the lower orders is wearing thin.

This is not to deny that this form of oppression also exists, but the more important truth is that caste has metamorphosed into a form of identity assertion which has nothing to do with its historic evolution.

In other words, casteism has developed a life of its own""and, at least in the foreseeable future, it is going to be a greater force than it ever was.

In one of my earlier columns, I had quoted Peter Drucker as observing that the more global we become, the more tribal we also become. I suspect this is what is happening to caste in India.

As the Indian economy grows in strength, and more and more people migrate to urban areas in search of jobs, they lose their earlier sense of community and identity.

This makes it important for them to recreate a new sense of connectedness with others, and caste provides the easiest option for everybody""whether you are upper caste, OBC or Dalit.

It is interesting to note that Ambedkar asked Dalits to go to the towns to escape casteist oppression in the villages. Gandhi would have liked people to work in self-sufficient village republics. History has proved both of them wrong.

More and more people have indeed moved to urban areas for jobs, proving that Gandhi's assumptions about village life were wide off the mark.

But Ambedkar's Dalits, far from moving to the cities to lose their caste status, are doing the opposite: they are using caste to establish their identities. They revel in their underdog status to put the upper castes on the defensive and give themselves a political advantage.

Caste today is being reinvented for political and social purposes that have little to do with its past history of oppression. Even as globalisation and urbanisation are reducing the importance of caste, social factors and identity politics are working in the opposite direction.

It would be interesting to see how the rest of the story unfolds in the years ahead.

rjagann@business-standard.com