For those used to appreciating
India as the largest democracy in the world, Anand Teltumbde’s recent work, Republic of Caste:Thinking Equality in the
Time of Neoliberal Hindutva, will come as a rude shock. Teltumbde, a management professional, civil rights activist, and political analyst,
articulates timely arguments that put paid to the decades-long publicity
exercise that the Indian Republic has benefitted from. The book demonstrates
how caste, and the violent exclusions it effects, is not only an on-going
practice in the Republic, but is in fact hardwired into its operation. While some scholars have more recently suggested that the
observance of caste, especially in urban India, is declining, Teltumbde clarifies
that while the ritualist aspects of casteist exclusion are indeed waning, this
does not mean that caste is a spent force in India. On the contrary, as the
book elaborates, caste has taken on new and terrifying aspects in contemporary
India, finding new force and allies in the time of neo-liberalism.
If neo-liberalism rests, as
Teltumbde demonstrates in the evocatively-titled chapter ‘The Education Mantra
and the Exclusion Sutra’, on the privatisation of public goods, then the caste
system, which rests on the appropriation of surplus of those at the bottom of
the system is primordially suited to neo-liberalism. However, what the context
of neo-liberalism– i.e. the corporate requirement of the Indian market and
cheap labour, etc. – ensures is that now there is no criticism of the horrific
culture of savarnas, nor any State attempt to reform it. This is what fuels the
rise of Hindutva, which is gung-ho casteism of the Indian middle-classes,
overwhelming constituted by dominant castes, rather than earlier apologetic
casteism of the Congress.
But the renewed operation of
caste in the functioning of the Indian Republic cannot be put down merely to
the effects of this neoliberal time. Rather, ‘Reservations: A Spark and the
Blaze’, the first chapter in book, demonstrates how, through the provision for
caste-based reservations, the space for the legal operation of caste was
written into the Constitution itself. Teltumbde affirms the need for a
constitutional scheme of positive affirmation but suggests that the strategy
adopted in the Constitution, which extended reservations to Tribes and Backward
Classes, the latter being defined along caste lines has effectively reinforced
caste identities. This, Teltumbde argues, is due, in large part, to the fact
that the formulating of the Constitution and the schedules that identified
groups able to claim reservation was merely an exercise that “served the
Congress by exhibiting its commitment to social justice” (p. 51). As such,
reservation now works “simply [as] a mechanism to ensure dalit participation
[in the Republic], not a measure of justice” (p.59).
Refreshingly, Teltumbde does not
hesitate questioning the major symbols that have taken on added significance in
these troubled times. While there is no doubt that Teltumbde is committed to
what the Indian Supreme Court would call constitutional values, he points to
the largely undemocractic nature of the Constituent Assembly whose “members
were indirectly elected via a system of proportional representation from the Congress-dominated
provincial assemblies, which in turn had been elected in March 1946 on a
restricted franchise consisting of about 20 to 24 per cent of the adult
population” (p. 125); and the fact that the Constitution was “very largely a
rehash of the India Act 1935” (p. 126). This is a bold argument at a time when many
opponents and critics of the BJP government, including Dalit activists, base
their opposition on a fierce defence of the Constitution.
There is a method to Teltumbde’s
madness however, for he indicates that if we peel away the rhetoric and look
critically at the Constitution, we would realise that:
Instead of
being an instrument of change, it has, in operative terms, fortified the rule
of the entrenched classes. The first-past-the-post election system, adopted as
a method to effectuate democracy, is the primary mechanism that guarantees the
perpetuation of the status quo. The structural absence of the feature of checks
and balances between the three wings of the government – the legislature,
executive and judiciary – considered most vital for any constitutional
democracy, also furthers the same object. In India, the first two, i.e., the
legislature and executive, collapse into a single oppressive apparatus that
manifests in the nexus of police, bureaucracy and politicians at ground level,
playing a maleficent role in every atrocity case. The only hope for ordinary
people has been the judiciary, which for all its infirmities, has evinced a
certain independence of mind from time to time. However, if one takes a view
from the perspective of the exploited and the oppressed, its record is also
pathetic. Barring some honourable exceptions, the courts have always been
biased against the poor, tribals, dalits, and Muslims (p. 173).
Addressing those who uphold the
Constitution as the result of Dr. Ambedkar’s efforts, Teltumbde points out that
Ambedkar himself had disowned the Constitution soon after its adoption. Discussing Ambedkar’s politics, Teltumbde
stresses Ambedkar’s pragmatism, changing “opinions, decisions and actions”
(p.27) to grapple with evolving situations and whose theory emerged not from a
desire to craft theory, but was “the by-product of practical struggles that he
waged…” (pp. 140-1). This appreciation of Ambedkar, which suggests taking his
concerns as a starting point for our politics, offers a route away from
contemporary attempt to deify Ambedkar which Teltumbde argues only aids Hindu
nationalist attempts at controlling the “terms on which people engage with him,
replacing the uncompromising thinker with a deified object of rituals, a
saffron Ambedkar, a handy Trojan horse for gharwapsi” (p. 268).
As one would expect from someone
who engages with the work of Ambedkar, Teltumbde is critical of Gandhi. But
this critique could be sharper. Right in the first chapter, Teltumbde has the
opportunity to point out that it was Gandhi’s stubborn refusal to allow for a
separate electorate for the depressed classes, and his desire to constitute a
Hindu majority that caste is at the beating heart of the Indian Republic. It is
only in the twelfth chapter that he comes close to pointing this out, that
thanks to the Poona Pact “The entire scheme of political empowerment of dalits
conceived by Ambedkar was thus reversed to become its opposite, political
enslavement” (p. 373), and this too is not satisfactorily articulated.
While a critical contribution to the appreciation of
Indian politics, one cannot help feeling that the book lacks a coherent and
systematic development of an argument. For example, the term Ambedkarite
consciousness in used in the fifth chapter, even though criticised in an
earlier chapter. In an early part of the
book he argues that the Green Revolution resulted in the “the erosion of an
ethos of economic interdependence in the countryside” (p. 157), postulating
later that “Economic interdependence is an aspect of liberty and its absence,
as a corollary, spells slavery” (p. 211), dangerously suggesting the autonomous
village as an arcadian paradise. These, inconsistencies probably result from
the fact that the book is a collection of essays previously published in the
author’s monthly column in the Economic and
Political Weekly. A little more attention to the text would have gone a
long way in making a more forceful argument.
The book is also marked, at
times, by a bitterness, which is unsurprising given that Teltumbde admits to
being misunderstood by many. The misunderstanding arises from Teltumbde’s challenging
the prevailing understanding of both the Dalit and the left movements, when he
sees caste and class as intertwined. There will be no resolution, he argues, to
the pervasiveness of caste in the operation of the Indian republic until Indian
citizens are able to follow Ambedkar’s lead in recognising the violence of
caste but challenging it through harnessing of the language of class. Teltumbde’s
argument for creating a class identity among castes comes out clearly when he
analyzes the reasons for the Bahujan Samaj Party’s (BSP) limited success.
Harshly critical of the forging of caste identities by groups such as the BSP,
Teltumbde warns that “Castes are inherently divisive, they can never integrate.
Nor can they be equalized” (p.366) and that the BSP’s formula of “caste-based
coalition ends up deepening casteism – in ways antithetical to any social
revolution” (p.364). He argues that the BSP’s formula could only be short-lived
and tied to the context of Uttar Pradesh. Further, as the history of the BSP
evidences, in the absence of a class agenda, the manipulative tactics would
work against social revolution to privilege an elite within the party.
While critical of the functioning of Kanshi Ram and
Mayawati of the BSP, Teltumbde also points out that their pragmatic politics
are products of the Indian electoral democracy, where there is a grotesque and
cynical use of the system to further feudal power. Their crudeness only
highlights the rot of the system, for “when corruption is traced to a dalit, it
gets amplified; when non-dalits engage in it, corruption appears muted or is
simply dismissed as being of little consequence”(p.251).
The Republic of Caste makes for depressing and disturbing reading.
The varied examples of castiesm that Teltumbde assembles fall like one bludgeon
after another, revealing the quotidian violence that is the foundation of the
Indian state. Is there a route out of this rot? Perhaps; Teltumbde suggests the
rejection of mobilization along caste-based identities, the embrace of ethical
politics, and above all revolution. At the close of the fifth chapter, he
rightly observes that “Middle class attempts at tweaking the system appear
trivial and ill-judged” (p. 201) an analysis that continues in his very perceptive
analysis of the Aam Aadmi Party in the final chapter, and that it is only the
Maoists who with their agenda of revolution “appear to have comprehended the
dimension of the problem”. But the revolution he proposes is not necessarily
the violent overthrow of the state. Rather, it revolves around the
revolutionary – or dramatic – change in economic relations. In chapter six,
where he lauds the movement in Una, Gujarat, he is clear that changing patterns
of land ownership, where Dalits gain access to productive land, instead of the
usual waste land, is at the heart of the revolutionary change he proposes.
Placed at the current moment,
where the possibility of ethical politics in the face of contemporary Indian
politics is remote, if not a joke, it appears that there is no hope in
electoral politics and the only possible road to revolution would be to return
to the moment before Gandhi wrecked the possibility of double electorates, i.e.
to rework the Indian electoral system.
Republic of Caste: Thinking Equality in the Time of Neoliberal Hindutva
By Anand Teltumbde
Navayana, 2018, New Delhi, 432
pp., Rs 600 (HB)
ISBN 978-81-89059-84-2
(A version of this text was first published in Biblio: A Review of Books Jan -Mar 2019)
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