Radharao Gracias’ article (No legislation can stop people from renouncing their religion), is both amusing and upsetting; assuming as it is intellectual vacuity passing off as serious critique, upsetting as it does injustice both to Indian traditions and to that heroic Jewish revolutionary who challenged the mighty Roman Empire. His first point is that it was the weakness of Hindutva, which he identifies with iniquitous casteism, as responsible for the continued success of foreign invaders. Second, that the caste system was broken by Christ acting through the agency of the British Empire. Both these are extremely dubious propositions.
Hindutva is a 20th century (C.E.) phenomenon that arose to assert Indian identity by giving a colonised people the confidence to face adverse political order. To hold Hindutva responsible for the success of foreign conquerors a thousands years before is ahistorical. Second, while the caste system was regressive, it was not static. Sub castes rose and fell, and even social relations were surprisingly dynamic and open. The Meenas ruled over Jaipur till late middle-ages, and the Gurjars over most of Gujarat and Rajasthan; by the time the British finished tampering with Indian society, the Meenas landed up as Scheduled Tribes and the Gurjars as backward castes. These examples can be seen all over the country.
Three, assuming it was the caste system that led to the success of foreign invaders, but this can be true only once. Why did non-Hindu rulers lose out to subsequent invaders? Surely caste system was not responsible for Adil Khan’s loss to Tiswadi to the Portuguese?
Moving on to Christ as the liberator of India’s oppressed Dalits and OBCs, it is astonishing that Mr Gracias asserts that the British ruled as agents of Jesus, and of Christianity. His argument is that it was the British who smashed the caste system that enabled a Dalit to be the prime mover behind India’s Constitution, and of an OBC chaiwala to become India’s prime minister. British rule in India was notable for de-industrialisation and famines leading to deaths of millions.
Lastly, on the specific dimension of the relative advance of Dalits, OBCs etc, it is useful to see what the British attempted to do. Not satisfied with separate electorates for Hindus and Muslims that later led to the partition of India, the British in furtherance of their policy of divide & rule, tried in 1932 to separate the ‘Depressed Classes’ from the rest of ‘Hindu’ society by legislating separate electorates. Gandhiji opposed it and went on a fast. The result was the Poona Pact. It is these safeguards within a common system, the mass movement of the national movement and democratic mobilization in independent India that has opened up social, political and economic space for the erstwhile oppressed castes. Not some benign efforts of a brutal coloniser who did not hold that all men are equal, contrary to what Mr Gracias states.
(The author is a former civil servant who has worked in Goa (1985-92))
