Caste is once again the main menu on the professional middle class table, with the Supreme Court clearing 27% quotas for OBCs in education. There is heartburning over whether educational backwardness ends at the graduate or post-graduate level. This time, however, caste identities and animosities are definitely muted, with the rise of a tacit consensus to affirm the legitimacy of merit without casting stones at reservationists. This is a positive development.
In this backdrop, Mr. Buta Singh’s decision to take up the issue of Mr. Mahendra Singh Tikait’s casteist slur against Ms. Mayawati triggers emotional ambivalence. As chairman, National Commission for Scheduled Castes, Mr. Singh is duty-bound to uphold his constitutional mandate; he made dogged efforts to secure a copy of the FIR filed by a police inspector who allegedly witnessed the event. Ironically, this has displeased the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, who had decided to heed the advice of BJP president Rajnath Singh and Samajawadi Party leader Amar Singh to defuse a possible caste confrontation in the state.
Certainly Mr. Tikait should have conducted himself with decorum, and not used language tolerated only in an era in which Scheduled Castes were denied the right to cast their votes. Mr. T.N. Seshan’s spectacular leadership of the Election Commission ended this menace, and after two short coalitions, Ms. Mayawati is chief minister in her own right. As one who has risen from the bottom to break the proverbial glass ceiling, the BSP leader has no patience with the humility and gentility that characterized far more intelligent and capable SC leaders like Babu Jagjivan Ram. She is a warrior-politician, and one who may have acquainted herself with the Arthasastra during her stint in the wilderness.
Hence, when Mr. Tikait’s loose tongue raised hackles in her core constituency, she responded with a studied show of force married to unusual restraint. A 7000-strong armed police force, including commandos, arrived at Sisauli village, but held the peace for three days to allow the Jat leader to surrender in court, where he promptly secured bail. Ms. Mayawati ensured no untoward incident occurred in this period, and made a subdued statement that had the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act been implemented properly all these years, no one would have dared use undignified language against a person holding the office of UP chief minister. This astonishing maturity is in sharp contrast to her last tenure as chief minister, when all Jat Superintendents of Police in western UP were removed after one Jat SP allegedly misbehaved with her father!
The show of force chastened Mr. Tikait, who apologized for his ‘slip of the tongue’ and said the BSP leader was “like a daughter” to him. This is the Hindu way of resolving conflict – to accept someone as a member of one’s family, fully deserving of the love and affection mistakenly denied so far. This sense of speeding reconciliation among groups, rather than promoting strife, prompted Mr. Rajnath Singh to risk springing to the Kisan leader’s defense by urging a policy of forgive and forget. Ms. Mayawati conceded this to avoid eroding her new ‘sarvajan’ constituency, and fobbed off the NCSC request for a copy of the FIR. So when the NCSC succeeded in getting a politically ignorant SP to fax a copy of the FIR, the latter was promptly removed the same day and replaced by an officer from the Jat community!
Such deft manoeuvres will take Ms. Mayawati far. Mr. Tikait, however, must learn moderation. I was at the Shamli power station in the mid-1980s when Mr. Tikait first burst into the limelight demanding power and irrigation for farmers; he then called Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi ‘dilli mein driver’ (an allusion to his previous profession as an airline pilot). Possibly the Kerala MP recently in the news was unconsciously inspired by this when he called an airline pilot a ‘glorified driver.’ In Hindu tradition, rishi Veda Vyasa recruited the god Ganesh as stenographer to transcribe the Vedas; as a nation we must overcome the tendency to use legitimate professions as terms of abuse.
Mr. Tikait later called Ms. Mayawati “Chengis Khan” and blasted the government’s indifference to farmers’ interests. This was probably no more than “saving face”, and hence rightly ignored, while articulating the legitimate concerns of farmers. The BJP intervention also serves the farmer constituency it embraced in a very timely manner with the Vidarbha padyatra. Farmers span myriad lower, middle and upper castes, and offer a constituency to counter Ms. Mayawati when disillusionment with her rule sets in. With Congress in disarray and the Samajwadi Party leaning towards it, BJP needed a distinct identity; Mr. Tikait’s iconic status as a farmer leader can help.
But BJP must understand that, unlike secular parties, it cannot disown the institutions of jati, kula and varna, which are the millennia-old ordering and organizing principles of Hindu society. These were lumped together as ‘caste’ by colonial officials who gave caste a bad name when they realized it was the bulwark against evangelical success. For Hindus, however, kula and jati are intimately linked to familial and social identity in a hoary past, and are intrinsic to self-respect. The Purush Sukta (Rig Veda) accords simultaneous divine origin to all varnas; it does not even remotely allude to untouchability or lowliness in any being. When jati and kula were fitted into the varnas as an organizing principle of society, the varnas alluded to a hierarchy of values. This ensured that intellectual-religious, military-political, commercial, and other wealth-generating orders were not monopolized by any family or social group, a far more egalitarian and just system than that prevailing in western nations.
While jati, kula and varna are linked to Hindu dharma, untouchability is a social invention to punish transgressors. It has no dharmic sanction, particularly as practiced from the medieval era onwards, when non-Hindu groups entered the land and came into conflict with an otherwise homogenous society. Today, it is high time we ended social disabilities associated with jati and varna. Interestingly, Ms. Mayawati blames Mahatma Gandhi for fostering social divisions by coining the term “Harijan,” thus freezing Scheduled Castes in a distinct and inferior ranking. Mr. Buta Singh rightly directed the States to stop using the term ‘Harijan’ as only the term ‘Scheduled Caste’ has constitutional validity.
The Pioneer, 29 April 2008
