The poor defend caste system

By G.S. Edwin

JAKARTA (JP): An article in this paper on Dec. 21, 1996, called the Indian caste system a form of apartheid, chastised it as anti-human rights and proclaimed that international sanctions are required to fight its injustices.

The story is probably well meant but is an exaggeration and blandly ignores the sacrifices made by the upper castes in the last 50 years to improve the lot of the lower castes.

India's caste system did not come about casually. It owes its origin to a basic fact of human existence: humans are unequally endowed.

With due deference to this unalterable fact, a successful society must rest on a full-fledged division of labor. Thus, the original caste system of the Veda period provided for priests to promote learning and devotion; warriors to fight and sacrifice; traders to create and circulate prosperity; and the nondescript to perform menial functions, like scavenging, washing clothes, removing dead animals among other things.

In its pristine form, it was harnessed to social tranquility but things went wrong when, in due course, the caste structure became rigid, incapable of changing. The iron-clad rule of the system forbade movements between the functional orders and declared that occupations were hereditary. Birth, automatically and with a stark finality, decided those occupations.

Thus, for the performers of menial tasks, this heredity feature turned out to be a life sentence condemning them permanently to their "station in life". Realizing that any improvements in their status would only induce them to forsake their assigned occupations, they were ostracized and kept jammed in their slot through the practice of untouchability.

Untouchability stands for the category of people who do menial work and whom one from the upper caste should not even see; certainly not touch, not because of any apparent hygienic reasons, but for spiritual reasons. A touch is a spiritual pollution, dooming in its implication. Besides social sanctions, one who touches an untouchable puts his next life -- in a rebirth cycle -- in terrible jeopardy. Much of the caste system's ugliness and cruelty comes from untouchability.

Much has been done to minimize the evils of the system, and they were against difficult odds. The caste system and its fetid offspring, untouchability, is a national legacy that can't be just wished away. Its very age, more than 3,000 years old, makes it a citadel which has to be stormed. Its vast number -- more than 10,000 castes and subcastes -- makes it motley, militating against an easy consensus.

The upper-caste resistance tends to make the pace of reform slow and halting. Over-familiarity with it has numbed the Indian psyche, much the same as death by starvation -- as old and as bad as untouchability -- has left those with plenty unaffected.

The blemish of untouchability, a manmade cruelty, produced many Indian social reformers in the 20th century. The most notable was Raja Ram Mohan Roy. He was, however, far ahead of his time and he seemed like a voice in the wilderness. The cruelty of it also produced anger and freak reformers who shook the foundations of religious India. They denied the very existence of God, alleging that God was a plot of the priestly class, a fiction to subjugate the masses.

The most ardent and world-famous reformer was Gandhi. He was the first one who championed their cause, not through harangues but by his illustrious example: He cleaned public latrines to uphold the dignity of labor and to show solidarity with them. He exhorted his fellow men to do so as a penance for having perpetrated the cruelty of untouchability.

He called the untouchables, endearingly, harijans, meaning children of God, so that those who practiced untouchability could be encouraged to feel otherwise. He showed the harijans in a new light, as real people, not morons. They were weak and poor and truly reflected India. So, untouchability practiced on them only degraded India, diminished its vaunted claim to cultural superiority to a sham and pretense; showing its upper castes as monsters.

Shockingly, the least hurt by the odious practice were the harijans, who constituted 80 percent of the Indian population. They were more concerned with where their next meal was coming from rather than rubbing shoulders with any upper castes. Gandhi worked relentlessly to wipe out untouchability and to improve their lot.

With the ground prepared by Gandhi and with the dawn of independence, the evils of the caste system, particularly untouchability, which had frozen the harijans in a time warp of the Vedic age, were matters of concern to the government.

The essence of Nehru's socialism -- unless the harijans were emancipated, independence would have no meaning for India -- was rooted in this concern.

Competition not only helped the strong, it destroyed the weak. The Indian caste system was terrible proof of that. Nehru was positive that the vast majority of Indians had to be helped with quotas and affirmative actions, like a nascent industry needing tariff protection.

Accordingly, laws were made to make untouchability an offense. Harijans were given the right to enter places of worship. By way of affirmative action, a certain percentage of posts and promotions in government service and admissions to all educational institutions are reserved for harijans and for backward castes and was given constitutional protection. They are given free education, free books, boarding and lodging. Subsidized housing, land grants and many others measures were enlisted to the cause.

Taking into account what Gandhi had done to awaken the conscience of India; what Nehru and his successor governments have accomplished and are continuing to do; the many laws that exist to address the evils of the caste system; and the many improvements carried out to make menial work easy to perform, it would be wrong to compare the system to apartheid or depict it as hide-bound.

Unlike apartheid, the caste system does not deny rights. Indeed, with adult franchise, the poor people are not to be seen as prisoners of the caste system. They can set up a government of their choice to do their will and they have done so.

This puts the ball in the court of the so-called victims of the caste system, as their destiny is now in their own hands. The prime minister of India, Deve Gowda, is from a backward class. If his government thinks Nehru was wrong and that free-for-all competition and making Mercedes cars instead of building more buses would improve their lot, it is their choice.

The backward-class people have not been trapped in a situation where when they don't get buses or a few get cars. If the caste system is an anachronism, they can take steps to change it. But, on the contrary, they have developed a vested interest in it and are feeling free to milk it. Under the caste umbrella, avoiding the means test for gaining state benefits, the elites within the backward castes have now become the new upper castes -- Moghuls and satraps. Their leadership shows no zeal, only decadence; they squabble and compete for the lion's share of spoils, not to help their kinsmen.

They also make it a point to demonstrate their new found power in weird ways. Recently, one of their elected leaders stopped an express train in a way-side station and boarded it along with her supporters. This only makes a mockery of their purported mandate: to help their followers. In a milieu like this -- a classic case of "physician heal thyself", UN sanctions are not called for. There is no discrimination, no violation of rights.

There is something The Jakarta Post story does not speak of. In a strange twist, it is now the turn of the upper castes to complain about the evils of the caste system. If anyone at all can, they can seek UN intervention for gross discrimination. Merit, their only possession, is pooh-poohed. The accident of birth in the upper castes, to many, is a disaster. With everything beyond reach for them, ironically in the name of equity and justice, they are trapped in a bloodless holocaust.

However, the Indian caste system cannot be abolished. It is well entrenched and its roots are too strong. Even the backward classes and harijans have their own mini caste structures inside the caste system and none of them could be persuaded to give up the sense of comfort derived from this fragile sense of belonging.

The caste system, derided on the surface as something that brands India as feudal, is actively encouraged and fanatically protected as an inexhaustible gold mine of potent political capital. So, abolishing the caste system is not a practicable goal. Now that the victims of the caste system have the political power, they must harness democracy solely to the economic upliftment of the poor. Only this would make the sacrifices of the upper castes worthwhile and prevent any backlash. After all, the real evil of the caste system was: Under its dopey aegis many were chained to poverty for ages.