Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (4 page)

According to the CSDS study, 47 per cent of all Supreme Court Chief Justices between 1950 and 2000 were Brahmins. During the same period, 40 per cent of the Associate Justices in
the High Courts and lower courts were Brahmin. The
Backward Classes Commission, in a 2007 report, said that 37.17 per cent of the Indian bureaucracy was made up of Brahmins. Most of them occupied the top posts.

Brahmins have also traditionally dominated the
media. Here too, what Ambedkar said in 1945 still has resonance:

In 2006, the CSDS did a survey on the social profile of New Delhi’s media elite. Of the 315 key decision-makers surveyed from thirty-seven Delhi-based Hindi and English publications and television channels, almost 90 per cent of the decision-makers in the English language print media and 79 per cent in television were found to be ‘upper caste’. Of them, 49 per cent were Brahmins. Not one of the 315 was a Dalit or an
Adivasi; only 4 per cent belonged to castes designated as Shudra, and 3 per cent were Muslim (who make up 13.4 per cent of the population).

That’s the journalists and the ‘media personalities’. Who owns the big media houses that they work for? Of the four most important English national dailies, three are owned by Vaishyas and one by a Brahmin family concern. The Times
Group (Bennett, Coleman Company Ltd), the largest mass media company in India, whose holdings include
The
Times of India
and the 24-hour news channel
Times Now, is owned by the
Jain family (
Banias). The
Hindustan Times
is owned by the Bhartiyas, who are
Marwari Banias;
The Indian Express
by the Goenkas, also Marwari Banias;
The Hindu
is owned by a Brahmin family concern; the
Dainik Jagran
Hindi daily, which is the largest selling newspaper in India with a circulation of fifty-five million, is owned by the Gupta family, Banias from Kanpur.
Dainik Bhaskar
, among the most influential Hindi dailies with a circulation of 17.5 million, is owned by Agarwals, Banias again. Reliance Industries Ltd (owned by
Mukesh Ambani, a Gujarati Bania) has controlling shares in twenty-seven major national and regional TV channels. The Zee TV network, one of the largest national TV news and entertainment networks, is owned by Subhash Chandra, also a Bania. (In southern India, caste manifests itself somewhat differently. For example, the Eenadu Group—which owns newspapers, the largest film city in the world and a dozen TV channels, among other things—is headed by
Ramoji Rao of the
Kamma peasant caste of Andhra Pradesh, which bucks the trend of Brahmin–Bania ownership of Big Media. Another major media house, the Sun TV group, is owned by
the Marans, who are designated as a ‘backward’ caste, but are politically powerful today.)

After independence, in an effort to right a historic wrong, the Indian government implemented a policy of reservation (positive discrimination) in universities and for jobs in state-run bodies for those who belong to
Scheduled Castes and
Scheduled Tribes.
³³
Reservation is the only opportunity the Scheduled Castes have to break into the mainstream. (Of course, the policy does not apply to Dalits who have converted to other religions but continue to face discrimination.) To be eligible for the reservation policy, a Dalit needs to have completed high school.
According to government data, 71.3 per cent of Scheduled Caste students drop out before they matriculate, which means that even for low-end government jobs, the reservation policy only applies to one in every four Dalits.
³⁴
The minimum qualification for a white-collar job is a graduate degree. According to the 2001
Census, only 2.24 per cent of the Dalit population are graduates.
³⁵
The policy of reservation, however minuscule the percentage of the Dalit population it applies to, has nevertheless given Dalits an opportunity to find their way into public services, to become doctors, scholars, writers, judges, policemen and officers of the civil services. Their numbers are small, but the fact that there is some Dalit representation in the echelons of power alters old social equations. It creates situations that were unimaginable even a few decades ago in which, say, a
Brahmin clerk may have to serve under a Dalit civil servant.
³⁶
Even this tiny opportunity that Dalits have won for themselves washes up against a wall of privileged-caste hostility.

The National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, for example, reports that in Central Public Sector Enterprises, only 8.4 per cent of the A-Grade officers (pardon the horrible term) belong to the Scheduled Castes, when the figure should be 15 per cent.

The same report has some disturbing statistics about the representation of Dalits and
Adivasis in India’s judicial services: among Delhi’s twenty High Court judges, not one belonged to the Scheduled Castes, and in all other judicial posts, the figure was 1.2 per cent; similar figures were reported from Rajasthan; Gujarat had no Dalit or Adivasi judges; in Tamil Nadu, with its legacy of social justice movements, only four out of thirty-eight High Court judges were Dalit; Kerala, with its Marxist legacy, had one Dalit High Court judge among twenty-five.
³⁷
A study of the prison population would probably reveal an inverse ratio.

Former President
K.R. Narayanan, a Dalit himself, was
mocked by the judicial fraternity when he suggested that Scheduled Castes and Tribes, who according to the 2011 Census make up 25 per cent of India’s 1.2 billion population, should find proportionate representation as judges in the
Supreme Court. “Eligible persons from these categories are available and their under-representation or non-representation would not be justifiable,” he said in 1999. “Any reservation in judiciary is a threat to its independence and the rule of law,” was the response of a senior Supreme Court advocate. Another high-profile legal luminary said: “Job quotas are a vexed subject now. I believe the primacy of merit must be maintained.”
³⁸

‘Merit’ is the weapon of choice for an Indian elite that has dominated a system by allegedly divine authorisation, and denied knowledge—of certain kinds—to the subordinated castes for thousands of years. Now that it is being challenged, there have been passionate privileged-caste protests against the policy of reservation in government jobs and student quotas in universities. The presumption is that ‘merit’ exists in an ahistorical social vacuum and that the advantages that come from privileged-caste social networking and the establishment’s entrenched hostility towards the subordinated castes are not factors that deserve consideration. In truth, ‘merit’ has become a euphemism for nepotism.

In
Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)—which is regarded as a bastion of progressive social scientists and historians—only 3.29 per cent of the faculty is Dalit and 1.44 per cent Adivasi,
³⁹
while the quotas are meant to be 15 per cent and 7.5 per cent respectively. This, despite having supposedly implemented reservation for twenty-seven years. In 2010, when the subject was raised, some of its Professors Emeritus said that implementing the constitutionally mandated reservation policy would “prevent JNU from remaining one of the premier centres of excellence”.
⁴⁰
They argued that if reservation was implemented in faculty
positions at JNU, “the well-to-do will move to foreign and private universities, and the disadvantaged will no longer be able to get world class education which JNU has been so proud to offer them so far”.
⁴¹
B.N. Mallick, a professor of life sciences, was less shy: “Some castes are genetically malnourished and so very little can be achieved in raising them up; and if they are, it would be undoing excellence and merit.”
⁴²
Year after year, privileged-caste students have staged mass protests against reservation across India.

That’s the news from the top. At the other end of New India, the
Sachar Committee Report tells us that Dalits and Adivasis still remain at the bottom of the economic pyramid where they always were, below the Muslim community.
⁴³
We know that Dalits and Adivasis make up the majority of the millions of people displaced by mines, dams and other major infrastructure projects. They are the pitifully low-paid farm workers and the contract labourers who work in the urban construction industry. Seventy per cent of Dalits are by and large landless. In states like Punjab, Bihar, Haryana and Kerala, the figure is as high as 90 per cent.
⁴⁴

There is one government department in which Dalits are over-represented by a factor of six. Almost 90 per cent of those designated as
sweepers—who clean streets, who go down manholes and service the sewage system, who clean toilets and do menial jobs—and employed by the Government of India are Dalits.
⁴⁵
(Even this sector is up for privatisation now, which means private companies will be able to subcontract jobs on a temporary basis to Dalits for less pay and with no guarantee of job security.)

While janitors’ jobs in malls and in corporate offices with swanky toilets that do not involve ‘manual scavenging’ go to non-Dalits, there are (officially) 1.3 million people,
⁴⁶
mostly women, who continue to earn their living by carrying baskets
of human shit on their heads as they clean out traditional-style toilets that use no water. Though it is against the law, the Indian Railways is one of the biggest employers of manual scavengers. Its 14,300 trains transport twenty-five million passengers across 65,000 kilometres every day. Their shit is funnelled straight onto the railway t
racks through 172,000 open-discharge toilets. This shit, which must amount to several tonnes a day, is cleaned by hand, without gloves or any protective equipment, exclusively by Dalits.
⁴⁷
While the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Bill, 2012, was cleared by the Cabinet and by the Rajya Sabha in September 2013, the Indian Railways has ignored it. With deepening
poverty and the steady evaporation of government jobs, a section of Dalits has to fiercely guard its ‘permanent’ state employment as hereditary shit-cleaners against predatory interlopers.

A few Dalits have managed to overcome these odds. Their personal stories are extraordinary and inspirational. Some Dalit businessmen and women have come together to form their own institution, the
Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DICCI), which is praised and patronised by big business and given plenty of play on television and big media because it helps to give the impression that as long as you work hard,
capitalism is intrinsically egalitarian.
⁴⁸

Time was when a caste Hindu crossing the oceans was said to have lost caste and become polluted. Now, the caste system is up for export. Wherever Hindus go, they take it with them. It exists among the brutalised Tamils in
Sri Lanka; it exists among upwardly mobile Indian immigrants in the ‘Free World’, in
Europe as well as in the United States. For about ten years, Dalit-led groups in the UK have been lobbying to have caste discrimination recognised by British law as a form of racial discrimination. Caste-Hindu lobbies have managed to scuttle it for the moment.
⁴⁹

Democracy hasn’t eradicated caste. It has entrenched and modernised it. This is why it’s time to read Ambedkar.

Ambedkar was a prolific writer. Unfortunately his work, unlike the writings of Gandhi, Nehru or
Vivekananda, does not shine out at you from the shelves of libraries and bookshops.

Of his many volumes,
Annihilation of Caste
is his most radical text. It is not an argument directed at Hindu fundamentalists or extremists, but at those who considered themselves moderate, those whom Ambedkar called “the best of Hindus”—and some academics call “left-wing Hindus”.
⁵⁰
Ambedkar’s point is that to believe in the Hindu shastras and to simultaneously think of oneself as liberal or moderate is a contradiction in terms. When the text of
Annihilation of Caste
was published, the man who is often called the ‘Greatest of Hindus’—Mahatma Gandhi—responded to Ambedkar’s provocation.

Their debate was not a new one. Both men were their generation’s emissaries of a profound social, political and philosophical conflict that had begun long ago and has still by no means ended. Ambedkar, the Untouchable, was heir to the anticaste intellectual
tradition that goes back to 200–100 BCE. The practice of caste, which is believed to have its genesis in the Purusha Sukta hymn
⁵¹
in the
Rig Veda
(1200–900 BCE), faced its first challenge only a thousand years later, when the Buddhists broke with caste by creating sanghas that admitted everybody, regardless of which caste they belonged to. Yet caste endured and evolved. In the mid-twelfth century, the
Veerashaivas led by
Basava challenged caste in South India, and were crushed. From the fourteenth century onwards, the beloved
Bhakti poet-saints—
Cokhamela, Ravidas,
Kabir,
Tukaram, Mira,
Janabai—became, and still remain, the poets of the anticaste tradition. In
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came
Jotiba Phule and his
Satyashodhak Samaj in western India;
Pandita Ramabai, perhaps India’s first feminist, a Marathi
Brahmin who rejected Hinduism and converted to
Christianity (and challenged that too);
Swami Achhutanand Harihar, who led the
Adi Hindu movement, started the Bharatiya Achhut Mahasabha (Parliament of Indian Untouchables), and edited
Achhut
, the first Dalit journal;
Ayyankali and
Sree Narayana Guru who shook up the old order in
Malabar and
Travancore; the iconoclast
Iyothee Thass and his
Sakya Buddhists who ridiculed Brahmin supremacy in the Tamil world. Among Ambedkar’s contemporaries in the anticaste tradition were E.V. Ramasamy Naicker, known as ‘Periyar’ in the Madras Presidency,
Jogendranath Mandal of Bengal, and
Babu Mangoo Ram, who founded the
Ad Dharm movement in the Punjab that rejected both Sikhism and Hinduism. These were Ambedkar’s people.