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A reply to Soli J. Sorabjee,
Attorney General of India
by Basil Fernando, Executive Director, Asian
Human Rights Commission
The Regional
Preparatory Meeting in Teheran for the forthcoming World
Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and
Related Intolerance in Durban in September witnessed a
repetition of the Indian Government’s position against the
inclusion of Caste in the agenda of this conference. India’s
Attorney General, Soli Sorabjee, in a Times of India
article entitled Racism, Name Changing & Toilets, has
revealed the reason, which may have turned Mahatma Ghandi in his
grave. Says the Attorney General “None of this capitalist
obscene toilet opulence for socialist India. We will rest content
with clean functioning toilets. Is this an Utopian fancy?” A
video production entitled Less Than Human has depicted the
way Brahminism has condemned vast sections of untouchables just
to collect shit. One of the scenes shows an untouchable being
forcibly submerged in a shit pit. The Attorney General is saying,
“that is how it’s going to be in future also”. To
prevent the untouchables from walking out of their toilets is
what the Brahmins and their spokespersons are struggling for at
this conference and outside. A world where caste will be
annihilated is seen by them as a Utopia for these discriminated
masses, and seen as a smelly place for themselves.
The Indian caste system has been the means
by which vast sections of the Indian population were submerged
into a condition of servitude to serve the interests of a small
minority who claimed their privileges on the basis of a special
birth through the mouth of their god. However, the real issue was
not from where they were born but who could posses land in India.
So long as the untouchable was confined to the toilets, they were
also confined to the Indian Ghetto. Thus land and everything that
goes with it were in the easy possession of a minority.
A few days after publication of the Attorney
General’s letter on toilets, the Washington Post revealed
that a four-day meeting intended to bring some coherence to the
agenda of an international conference on racism in August ended
today (9 March) in Geneva without success. One of the
few vociferous states at the meeting was India, whose sole
interest was to prevent caste being discussed at the world
conference. Battalions of Indian diplomats are now being put to
this task. The reason for such a massive operation is not
difficult to understand. Many of India’s claims are under
threat of exposure: that it is the world’s largest
democracy; that it has a great civilisation; that it even has a
right to enter the United Nations security council. That it has
practised one of the crudest forms discrimination for millennia
can make all these claims sound hollow.
Like the Attorney General, everyone has
only one argument: Caste and Race are different. These good
gentlemen are only opposed to name changing. What they seem to
forget is that whatever the name, the game is the same; the game
is one of discrimination of a type similar to or worse than
apartheid. The Attorney General even tries to cite the Indian
constitution in his favour. In that he gets into a serious
difficulties with anyone who knows that constitution and its
history.
The makers of the Indian Constitution had
some idealism. The constitution recognised caste as a curse of
India and deliberately tried to address the issue. Running
through the constitution is the theme of equality and ways to
address the problem. The very fact that these founders who
represented divergent opinions agreed to have B.R. Ambedkar, an
untouchable and worse the undisputed leader of these to be the
chief draftsman of the constitution showed a remarkable degree of
appreciation of the caste issue in the Indian Nation.
Such leaders as Swami Vivekananda and
Mahatma Ghandi, two great influences in the Indian independence
movement reflected this idealism. Swami Vivekananda wrote “unless
they [Untouchables] are raised, the mother land of ours will
never awake.” His remarks on caste discrimination
remain a bitter critique of the Indian Hypocrisy on this issue.
Mahatma Ghandi, who liked to be seen as the champion of
untouchables, condemned caste discrimination as a form of
leprosy. Though their visions for the eradication of caste
may have been limited, their acknowledgement of caste as the
great Indian contradiction cannot be denied.
This Indian Idealism is now dead. The
fundamentalist Hindutwa movement represents the
contemporary equivalent of the ideology of Godse, Mahatma Ghandi’s
assassin. This ideology is no different to the ideologies of
white supremacy movements. It is an ideology of complete racism.
What this ideology represents is not India’s pride but its
shame. Damn the nation and save caste is, in short, the ambition
of those who represent this ideology. It is the ideology of India’s
current ruling party.
The Attorney General and Indian Diplomats
derive their mandates from this vicious ideology. They are
whole-heartedly committed to preventing a global debate on the
most wretchedly exploited sections of Indian society, who
constitute at least 160 million people. The efforts and
expenditure that is put to this operation are enormous.
However, in their great enthusiasm to make
untouchables invisible, they have already lost the battle. The
world now knows about the deep divisions that exist in India on
that issue and how sensitively the present BJP government
perceives the issue. If someone thought that caste is something
of the past or an exaggeration they will now know that their
perceptions were wrong. The realisation that this most primitive
type of exploitation still exists, affecting a large section of
people, will visit many people as they read their newspapers or
see TV screens reporting on the World Conference Against
Racism. The Indian diplomacy has been counter-productive for
the BJP government. However, it has unwittingly contributed to
the expansion of the campaign against caste.
The Attorney General’s article ends
with a pathetic question, “Is this an Utopian fancy?”
Keeping caste in place and enjoying other people cleaning his
toilet has a quality of the Utopian dream to him and his like.
Will this be lost? That simply is inevitable. It is time
for him to find another way to keep himself clean.
Posted on 2001-07-16
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