Deeper than skin

Indian version of democracy is determined overwhelmingly by divisive identity politics. The biggest divider is caste.

Down south in Bangalore, a new chief minister has taken charge of the BJP-led government. Jagadish Shivappa Shettar, who will replace Sadananda Gowda, is neither more capable nor popular, but belongs to the Lingayat caste that controls the BJP in the Indian state of Karnataka. Shettar’s rise to the top seat is being noisily challenged by fellow-caste followers of Gowda, who belongs to the challenger Vokkaliga community.

After 65 years of the practice of democracy, it is clear now that the Indian version of it is determined overwhelmingly by divisive identity politics. The biggest divider is caste and it is indeed impermeable. In his 1883 census report from the ‘Panjab’ (Panjab Castes), colonial British administrator Sir Denzil Ibbetson sets out to challenge the assumption that caste is immutable and an institution peculiar to the Hindu religion: “Caste is a social far more than a religious institution ... it has no necessary connection whatever with the Hindu religion ... the fundamental idea which lay at the root of the institution in its inception was the hereditary nature of occupation.” Ibbetson even went on to assert that the term “Sudra has no present significance save as a convenient term of abuse to apply to somebody else whom you consider lower than yourself”. Sir Denzil is now rendered hopelessly wrong.

Lord Lytton, viceroy from 1876 to 1880, who had put in place laws to suppress the vernacular press and stage performances, had frowned upon this tendency among British officials to go ‘soft’ on India. “Great mischief has been done by the deplorable tendency of second-rate Indian officials and superficial English philanthropists to ignore the essential and insurmountable distinctions of race qualities, which are fundamental to our position in India; and thus, unintentionally, to pamper the conceit and vanity of half-educated natives, to the serious detriment of common sense, and of the wholesome recognition of realities,” he had declared.

Lord Lytton’s views have been endorsed by Indian democracy and “common sense and reality” have indeed prevailed. The Manmohan Singh government has been persuaded to conduct a national caste census for the first time after 1931. Classification under the lower castes could mean much-coveted reservation of party tickets for poll candidates of certified castes, government jobs and seats in schools and colleges.

When the VP Singh government sought to implement the recommendations of the Mandal Commission in 1990, Other Backward Classes made up more than 50 per cent of the population and 27 per cent of federal government jobs and college seats were reserved for them. Nobody saw this as a subversion of the very notion of ‘minority’ because political parties see castes as vote-banks. Even the legal challenge to the reservation was about numbers and the Supreme Court simply asked for more reliable data.

Sir James Hutton, the commissioner of the 1931 caste census, had apparently observed, with the possible feeling of guilt: “A certain amount of criticism has been directed at the census for taking any note at all of caste. It has been alleged that the mere act of labelling persons as belonging to a caste tends to perpetuate the system.” No such trepidation is felt by the authorities of independent India. Caste is real, caste is common and caste is forever. Matrimonial advertisements in leading Indian newspapers, a major revenue source too, are neatly divided into caste sections — Mythili Brahmin, Vanniyar Tamil, Aggarwal Jain — and, on introduction to a stranger, the first three questions will always be about nativity, caste and occupation. The fourth is about salary and fifth, “own house?” You could die, dye your skin, change your religion, but caste clings to you.

The real change from Hutton’s times is that during the 1931 caste census, respondents claimed caste identities to move up the social order. Now, given the benefits of reservation, large sections of the population will likely claim greater backwardness. This is the fear of any ruling party in a country that is in perpetual election mode — the caste census could render old poll formulae irrelevant.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 16^th, 2012.