When India’s Lie Ends: A review of Republic of Caste: Thinking Equality in the Time of Neoliberal Hindutva by Anand Teltumbde

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)

Shades of casteism

It is often the case that when speaking about caste-related problems one is accused of being casteist.  This is also true in Goa, where any discussion about the realities of caste power evokes accusations of being motivated by a personal dislike for brahmin groups, or of constantly “targetting” brahmins, especially—so the argument goes—given that the Saraswats are but a minority community; so any polemical attack on them amounts to casteism or communalism.

 But it is not casteism to speak about the violence of unequal power relations engendered by the presence of the caste system and the identities of caste. Rather, the conspiracy of silence around unequal power relations and the dominance of a single group, or a couple of groups, through caste privilege is what constitutes casteism. There is generally a deep silence about the violence of caste, and casteism operates when those who seek to speak about this violence, and challenge it, are accused of being casteist.

Let us be clear that in Goa, the Saraswats may be a small community, but they are a powerful community who hold much social, cultural and economic capital, and whether consciously or unconsciously, they wield power to ensure their continued hegemony. They fulfill the sociological category of “the dominant caste” constructed by the famous sociologist M. N. Srinivas. To expose the manner in which this power is wielded is not, to my eyes casteism. 

There are often suggestions, that “to be proud of one’s origins is not casteism”. Rather, casteism is when one “belittle[s] the origins of others”. This is an ingenious strategy beloved of many supporters of the caste system.  These proponents of the caste system fail to recognise that any identity of the self is invariably linked to identities of others. Thus, one can be brahmin only because others are not. Further, as a result of the operation of history, the brahmin identity is not an innocent identity. It is invariably the identity of oppressors. This is more so the case in Goa, where groups that claim a Saraswat identity, whether Catholic or Hindu, have controlled property, people tied to those properties, and attempted to control the rest of society too. There is not the space here to demonstrate fully how the assertion of a brahmin identity in Goa is invariably at the cost of demeaning a non-brahmin one, but any honest look at our society and history will bear this out.

It needs to be stated clearly, however, that the problem in Goa is not just with brahmins alone. There are other upper-caste groups, like the Chardos and the Desais, who despite their limited size similarly exert power owing to the manner in which they not just control landed property, but enjoy social privilege. Indeed, as the case of the Konkani Bhasha Mandal (KBM) will demonstrate, it is possible for Chardos to operate with the brahmanical matrix that the KBM embodies. As friend once commented, “for the Chardos, to be anti-brahmin is to be anti-caste”. What they all too often ignore is that they are a part of the problem, along with the brahmins.

It is this limited anti-brahmin agenda, instead of an agenda of anti-brahmanism that has ensured that the bahujan movement in Goa has missed a historical opportunity to forge a democratic polity. Instead, they have slipped into Hindu nationalism, precisely because the brahmanical logic of Indian nationalism have not been challenged. Take the constitution of the Bharatiya Bhasha Surkasha Manch (BBSM), which includes not just brahmins like Bhembre, but leaders of the bahujan castes, like Shashikala Kakodkar and Vishnu Wagh. Once again though, it is impossible to have Brahmanism, without the body of the brahmin, and it is precisely through the presence of brahmins in the BBSM that it gathers its symbolic strength. This is so because historically, it has been dominant caste groups, and especially brahmins that have set themselves up as arbiters of style and standard.

The power that Bhembre, Bhatikar, and other brahmins, Hindu or otherwise, claim to determine “standard”, whether of Konkani or otherwise, flow from the way in which upper caste individuals asserted their claim over languages in the late nineteenth century. In this context I would like to refer attention to the work of Veena Naregal in Language, Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere (2001) where she points out  that

“By the later decades of the nineteenth century, drawing on philological beliefs about the essentially interrelated genealogy of the Indian vernaculars and their common descent from the immaculate purity of the great and ancient Sanskrit language, English-educated individuals in different parts of the subcontinent could claim to constitute a transregional kinship with an immaculate high' cultural pedigree. An important part of this elite self-image was their shared status as custodians of 'correct' cultural practices. Thus, when giving the Wilson philological lectures in 1877, claiming descent from the noble brahmins of the 'ancient aryavarta' was, for the well-known orientalist scholar Bhandarkar, clearly, a way of enlarging through their dominance over the regional vernacular spheres”(p. 48).

It has been suggested that Uday Bhembre and Arvind Bhatikar are ‘good’ persons who have “the highest respect” for the Christian community in Goa. If they do, they have a very strange way of showing it, given that they have been suggesting Goan Catholics are anti-national merely for asserting their right to educate their children in the same English language that Bhembre and Bhatikar’s families are being educated. One wonders if these good persons have directed similarly vituperative language at the members of their own families. In any case, the assertion of the patriarchal right to dictate to other local communities is very much a part of brahmanical arrogance. An ideal way to show respect for the Christians in Goa would be for Bhatikar and Bhembre to cease their frightening hate-speech and support the right of these communities to determine the path of their own future.

(A version of this post was first published in the O Heraldo on 18 Sept 2015)