Caste of Dignity: Ambiguity & Emotional Emancipation

The deliberate sagacity to subordinate the inferior non-dignified castes in the socially hierarchical rigid structure governing the dynamic politics became reportedly visible when the government appointed upper caste seven-term MP Bhartuhari Mahatab by snubbing the eight-time Dalit MP Kodikunil Suresh as the Pro-term Speaker in newly constituted 18th Lok Sabha by following principles of Westminster model.
SUMIT KUMAR BHARTI
New Delhi- Does dignity have any caste? What are the emotional and cognitive impact of the constitutional principles of positive affirmative actions on the young generation of students, after their first point of contact with the practicalities of reservation, in the milieu of ferociously savage competition for admission or state employment, without making them familiar with the philosophies and essentialities of equal protection of law in hierarchically stratified society?
The relegated Dalits have from the centuries ingrained the depraved debasement of caste degradation and humiliations to the extent of relegating them to a perpetual web of exploitation and subordination. The dehumanisation of their human existence due to astutely constructed lower strata in social construct has become a sense of common sense for their whole gamut of perseverance of life philosophy leading them into the crisis of contemplations. How does this feeling of generational low esteem self, guide the destiny of dignity of young girls and boys in a closed caste circumference with simultaneous existence of high caste pride and dignity of genealogy reflected in the egoism of excellence of imperiousness of substantial success?
The Derrida notion of deconstruction advocates that the human language is not yet developed to convey the real senses of human expressions, however, this paper contends to deconstruct the notion of dignity and cringworthiness related to caste and reservation on the opposite end of spectrums, focusing on the contemplation of young women, without getting into legal discourses.
Diwas Raja Kc, in his visual archive ‘Dalit- A Quest for Dignity’ elucidated that the “Dalit is not a caste that one inherits but rather an identity that one constructs”, as an empty, passive, voiceless mass of poor. India @75 still struggling to find the answer to why all the manual scavengers and menial workers are from the lower castes who are grabbed of dignity and why the maximum Judges of the higher judiciary, top secretaries of states and Union government and corporate houses are from the higher social strata, apart from the stereotyped trivial mention of existential castes. The two small instances bring two distinctive experiences of contemplation from two young women of Delhi University, taking their final semester exams to gain a degree in political science honours.
The first one claimed that she has superior genes of the Rajput clan so she is capable of fighting and winning against every odd. The second one asked the question of why no government post-independence had done anything for the welfare of the ‘general category men’ despite they being the good vote bank and still suffering in the absence of any welfare measures for them. One of the oddly occurring incidents during my lectures at college for women, was when I was having ‘deceit of duty’ of teaching and instead tried to learn new things from my students by engaging them in informal talks usually provoking them to narrate their journey and experiences.
The common complaint of many young ladies in that college was that they wished to pursue their degree from some highly reputed colleges of North Campus like Mirinda House or The Hindu College, but since they belong to the general category, so despite having good marks in CUET they have landed here. The student sitting next somewhere regrettably however courageously proclaimed that she wanted to join Delhi University colleges for a degree and since she had reservation, so she got admission easily. No rational mind can compartmentalise these statements into black and white, neither can prove these two young students completely wrong, however, the difficulty lies in proving their assertions utterly right. These three are not the exceptional insistence of self-esteem but the simplistic assertion of the narrative paradigm of the larger gamut of common sense of ‘general-upper category sense of dignity’ and insincerely enforced ‘reserved-lower caste sense of regret’.
Suman Lata Pathak in her study of ‘self-images of Scheduled Castes girl’s students of Chandigarh’ in the book titled “Struggle for Status” published in 1985, empirically noted that the “The Scheduled Castes, because of constant subjection to humiliation and having been given inferior status are bound to have a low self-image”. Without any astonishment, an Uber cab driver driving an air conditioner vehicle on the streets of the national capital often complains that he is doing this because all the ‘good education and government employment’ has been taken by scheduled castes and scheduled tribes (SCs/STs), while contradictory to this a three-wheeler E-Rickshaw driver belonging to deprived castes crush his destiny and poverty with special mention of lack of education and any employment due to inaccessibility and unaffordability.
Let us first try to address why reservations for women. The first girl school by Savitri Bai Phule in Poona was ‘an upper room with the doors shut’ to avoid the persecution from the lawmakers in society those has privileged the Dwij castes men the monopoly over education and established the Gurukuls since the Vedic ages for proliferation of exclusivist education, that’s why we now have a women reservation Act from Parliament to Panchayats, and not the men reservation Act, to uplift the former to narrow the gap with the latter.
Alec Fyfe in his work of 2005, ‘Compulsory Education and Child Labour’ designates India as the country having the largest population of child-labours. Fyfe also analysed the effect of caste and sex matrixes on the phenomenon of these ‘nowhere children’ employed in child labour and concluded that “a boy from a non-poor upper caste family has a 75% chance of attaining the eighth grade while a girl from a poor scheduled-caste family has virtually no chance of reaching the fifth grade”. The situation has not transformed even after two decades and poor women from all sections of society and men from the SCs/STs are prime targets of negative discrimination.
For instance, as per the World Bank estimates, 80 per cent of all employment losers due to COVID-19 were women and 62 per cent of them are above the age of 30 years with insignificant future prospects of returning to the workforce. There is no proper study to ascertain the social background of migrant labourers who suffered the blot of lockdown, however, given the socio-economic correlations in India, it is not difficult to assume that most of them were from the deprived social castes.
Carol Hanisch’s ‘Personal is political’ reverberates in the daily lives of women, where access to political power remains obstructed or delusionary as in the case of proxies of women at panchayats- Sarpanch Patis holding the real power, the dynamism at the top level are not radically different. The 17th Lok Sabha just have 14.4% of women members and the upper house encompasses even lower (10.71%) women members. The newly constituted 18th Lok Sabha will have 73 women members, one lower than the 17th Lok Sabha despite the passage of the Women Reservation Act- the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam (yet to be implemented) and many State parties offering tickets to women constantans are per their own prescribe percentages.
Mudit Kapoor and Shamika Ravi in their study of 2013 titled ‘Women Voters in India Democracy: A silent revolution’ question the charisma of India’s representative democracy when “65 million women around 20% of eligible voters are missing from the India’s electorate’s”. The economic disparity, unfortunately, as per the International Labour Organisation report -2019, is starker than the socio-political outlook.
The Gender wage gap in India is the highest in the world where women are paid 34% less than their women counterparts. The scenario in rural India is more pathetic, where women despite comprising around 42% of the agriculture labour force, as per the India Human Development Survey, own less than merely 2% of farmland. The rural realities of Dalit women, specifically are as inevitably present in today’s society as reflected by Sharan Kumar Limbale in his Akkarmashi- the autobiographical account published in 1978.
The stratified urban landscape of progressive modernisation also compelled Dalit women to hide their castes to get an equitable workspace, as reflected in Yashica Dutt’s memoir ‘Coming Out As A Dalit’.
Two quotations by George Orwell, the renowned English Novelist need simultaneous reading, quotes that “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows” and another being that “if liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”. In India, we historically have a direct parallel association between the low economic status and lower caste social paradigm, failing the economic determinism of Karl Marx, as here caste determines both economic and political credentials, which has also engulfed the other religious denominations other than the Hindus. This is the reason why caste, and not class was chosen as the basis of reservation in the original constitutional scheme of things.
However, the social forces of caste hierarchies are so significantly potent that the original schemes of quotas- the word which has acquired a derogatory connotation in majoritarian discourses of orthodoxy by calling reserved category candidates as Quota’s candidates or ‘Quota’s children’ have been firstly extended to OBCs and later to EWSs by subsequent constitutional amendments. The societal intellectual hierocracy can be ascertained by the fact that the introduction of OBC quotas has generated widespread opposition and agitations, while the implementation of EWS quotas generated no heat and was readily accepted by the forces which are traditionally opposed the quota system. The logical and valid argument for the EWS reservation was that it did not alter the quotas already allocated to SC/ST and OBCs.
Let’s take a simple mathematics to understand the representative democratic logic of ‘who’s participation, so much her share’:
Let us suppose there are 100 seats for a particular admission or employment, 50 seats are reserved for the already reserved categories, and the remaining 50 seats are unreserved- popularly known as general seats or seats for the higher castes. Now the EWs reservation simply allocates the 10 seats to the relatively deprived and improvised among those 50 general seats. This means 10 seats will go to the poorer among the general category and the remaining 40 to the non-poor unreserved candidates, without disturbing the former 50 reserved seats and this was unanimously welcomed by all the holders of power as the most essential measure towards an egalitarian and advanced society.
The same constitutional logic applies to the reserved quota seats, where they contend on the proportionality low numbers of seats reserved for them based on their proportion of the population, without disturbing the non-reserved seats. After all, democracy follows the authoritative allocations of values of education and employment and these are public goods, not the private property of any specific group of society, to be allocated on the principles as enshrined in the constitution of India. Thus, if any person from the reserved category has been allocated a government seat after the due competition in her domain, it’s not by the mercy of the state or sympathy of general castes, but because she is entitled to the same being a foundational member of society and state.
Professor N. Sukumar in his seminal work “Caste Discrimination and Exclusion in Indian Universities: A Critical Reflection” surveyed 600 Dalit respondents across Indian Universities to re-establish the concept of ‘Cultural Capital’ of Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu defines it as “non-material resources which may be passed on from generation to generation to preserve power and privileges, that may include non-material goods like educational credentials, type of knowledge and expertise, verbal skills and aesthetic preferences”, leading to, in Professor Sukumar terms, ‘accumulated caste privileges’, thus perpetuating inequalities at the subconscious cellular level.
Sumeet Mhaskar while reviewing the “Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India” by Ajantha Subramanian, has noted the violent history of this perpetual process of caste accumulation in Indian Society where the upper caste religiously guarded the domain of education to systematically exclude the lower castes and women from gaining any access to education, thus deploring them to eternal darkness of ages.
Professor Sukumar explains the quotas syndrome in today’s educational setup by taking the evidence from the Ambedkar journey of school education through his concept of ‘Caste Habitus’, the influence of caste on students/ Individuals cultural, social and economic outlook guiding their attitudes and performance, for instance barring few exceptions, non-Dalits by default have their internal groupings during schools and colleges, segregating and outperforming the Dalit students.
However, paradoxically if a daughter of a reserved category officer becomes an I.A.S., she is disgracefully demeaned and questioned why she has taken the benefit of reservation when she has all the facilities at her disposal, the case of UPSC CSE-2015 topper Tina Dabi is a strafing reminder of the certified casteist mindset of the society, even when she was continuously proving her metal from being ‘student of the year’ in her prestigious Lady Sriram college to topping her training batch at LBSNAA. The same society, however, takes pride if a daughter of a high caste doctor becomes a doctor or a son of a temple priest takes his job eruditely reserved for him for centuries.
I have conducted a silent study of the academic behaviour of class students in 1ST Semester Political Science (H) at Kamala Nehru College for women by observing the phone calls and WhatsApp texts. About 90 per cent of phone calls and texts regarding academic or co-curricular work were from the general category students. These were also the same students who remained active participants during class discussions and never hesitated to approach their teacher (rightly so) for any confusion or doubts and often outperformed others in visible excellence.
This subconscious excellence is credited to their determined hard work but also added by their cultural capital. However, the semester-end examination, where you have to work hard at your place and put your brilliance of mind on paper at the examination hall, could not show any noteworthy difference between the performance of reserved and non-reserved students. The satisfying thing about women students is that they have diminishing contempt for fellow Dalit students, nevertheless, they retain and often acclaim their higher social status whenever required or desired supported or even sponsored by a few caste-minded academic intellectuals.
The controversial-seminal work of French sociologist Louis Dumont ‘Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications’ categorically established the fact that the caste is not only a system of social stratification or division of labour but a closed ideological system based on the civilisational proclaimed notion of pollution and purity, in stark contradiction to progressive ethos of the democratic egalitarian constitution of post-colonial India.
The constitution has provided progressive affirmative policies of positive discrimination in terms of reservation in government educational institutions and the employment domain, which is obviously visible. The contradiction is, however, visibly hidden socio-political and economic realities prompting the negative discrimination towards the poor, marginalised and deprived subaltern sections hardly become the subject matter of mainstream discourses and deliberations. The annual NCRB report- 2022, quantifies this negative discrimination in increasing rate of crimes against women, Children and SC/STs.
The political power and offices of authority drive not only the destiny of society but minutely influence the flow of individual life and livelihoods. The minuteness of caste dynamics at the larger socio-political canvas can be effortlessly ascertained by the fact that the maximum members of the constituent assembly were from the dignified castes, that till no prime minister of the Indian republic belonged to SC/ST and only a handful of Chief-ministers were from the purported Dalits, and till now there is no Dalit head of RSS or VHP, the most potent Hindu organisations.
The deliberate sagacity to subordinate the inferior non-dignified castes in the socially hierarchical rigid structure governing the dynamic politics became reportedly visible when the government appointed upper caste seven-term MP Bhartuhari Mahatab by snubbing the eight-time Dalit MP Kodikunil Suresh as the Pro-term Speaker in newly constituted 18th Lok Sabha by following principles of Westminster model.
Shikha Mukerjee in her paper titled ‘Politics of deep divides, prejudices & reservation’ alleged this as a deep divide in “social prejudices, justice and a dynamic interpretation of equality”. Dr Ambedkar called Villages a den of ignorance; however, it is an astonishing fact to reconsider that staking 41.14%MPs in the 17th Lok Sabha and 33% in the 18th Lok Sabha are from the profession of agriculture. The understandable factor is the largest demographic coverage and the maximum number of electorates in rural India; however, the collaborative coalition of Bullock Capitalism and Caste domination remains the open secret behind such an algorithm of hegemonic domination of higher castes having a monopoly over ‘dignity’.
The Economic inequalities preserve the prevalence of ancient socio-economic realities in 21st-century modern India denying constitutional justice and its principles of prudence. Amit Thorat & Omkar Joshi in their 2015 paper ‘The Continuing Practices of Untouchability in India: Pattern and Mitigation Influences’ defines the Indian Caste system as one of the “Longest survival system of stratification in the world”.
A recent paper by Jyoti Thakur and Prabir Kumar Gosh titled ‘The Shadow of Caste’ examined the consumption patterns within the social groups of SC, ST, OBC and general category using Periodic Labour Force data from 2017-18 to 2022-23. As per their findings in 2022-23, the STs which constitute 9 % of the population have a consumption share of only 7%, the SCs accounted for 20% part of the demography have a consumption share of 16%, the OBCs which constitute 43% part of population shares 41% of consumption and the leftover general category which constitutes 28% of the population commands a notably higher consumption share of 36%.
The Oxfam International Inequality Report -2019 concluded that in India upper-caste households earned 47% more than the national average household income. This disproportionate consumption pattern gets transformed into the concentration of wealth both social and economic among high-caste elites, which shapes the Hierarchical-Intellectual Hegemony of the current generation.
As per many studies like ‘Inequality in Contemporary India: Does Caste Still Matters?’, more than 60% of SCs and 70% of STs are engaged in daily wage agriculture labour in rural India and unskilled or low-paid semi-skilled occupations in the informal sector.
The constitution as curated by the Dr Ambedkar envisioned the caste-based reservation for ten years to bring parity in the graded society. This temporary provision of affirmative action of caste-based reservation has been eternalised further by class-based and gender-based reservations. The original notion of reservation which was intended to remove social distinction, however, consolidated in perpetuity, the compartmentalisation of the society on the lines of Quotas.
The emergence of Dalit-Brahmins or Dalit-elites who have sidelined the maximum benefits of reservation leaving their fellows as impoverished and deprived as they were historically, has led to the demand for the categorization and subsequently exclusion of the creamy layer from SCs/STs reservation, so that the indented advantage can percolate the bottom layer of the society.
Reservation as a political apparatus towards egalitarianism, with political leaders banking their political imminent on the politicization of their caste, without the parallel social construct of equality will only create fissures in an already divided society. The critical analysis of Japan’s experience of the abolition of untouchability against Burakumins (pollution abundant) under the Emancipation Act of 1871 following the banning of feudalism, where despite the legal prohibition without the much-needed social stimulation, the Burakumins or Eta’s (full of filth) are yet to be completely assimilated in their modern society, offer a case study to India’s Scio-political establishments.
The struggle for survival and prosperity is an internal part of the Indian way of life, the difference is only of degree and nature on the gamut of caste lines, not of the substance. The subconscious feeling of dignity of high caste and beggarly contemptibility contrarily associated with the caste and reservation should be eliminated to promote the sense of egalitarianism and esteem, what Ambedkar calls for an ascending sense of reverence and descending sense of contempt.
India being an ancient land of civilisation provides ample opportunity for several groups and social arrangements to develop and flourish, resulting in every single caste having a grand legacy to take pride in, a research domain for subaltern historians, fast proliferating into the phenomenon of ‘rediscovering dignity’, where every caste now celebrating the tales of their heroes and Virangnas (women warrior’s) like Jhalkaribai.
The developed India@ 47 shall be free from the reincarnated notion of pride in caste, for that society and state need to dismantle the falsehood prevalent concerning reservation by igniting constructive debates on the discourses of the reservation to make it compatible with contemporary socio-political realities.
In India Ambedkar called for the Annihilation of Caste along with other progressive Hindu reformers advocating unity within the society on equality of an individual with individuals, and Constitution abolishing the untouchability, however, the caste system has shown uninterrupted resilience because it provides not only the material privileges to the elites but the spiritual and psychological containment with emotional emancipation.
Precisely this is why youngster from deprived social identity make counter-currents to establish their self-esteem by invoking ancestorial heritage and asserting it through songs, social media and public display, many a time producing friction and social skirmishes. Thus, the dismantling of the mindset of caste-based emotions of pride, the virtue of worthiness and the cognitive superior self is imperative to have evocative deliberations on the reservation, not only to find out answers to questions of young minds but to offer a considerable resolution.
The imperative is to make our young generation in our schools and colleges inculcate the constitutional philosophies and virtues of freedom fighters, to imbibe the spirit of comradeship and fraternity, to ensure that they can associate ‘Dignity’ with determined-destined actions free from what Sigmund Freud called ‘obsessive-compulsive disorder’, of castes, class or gender.
-The author is a Senior Research Fellow and adjunct faculty, Department of Political Science, University of Delhi.
Courtesy : The Mooknayak
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