Caste and the U.N. meet

By Kancha Ilaiah

NOW THAT the World Conference on Racism is allowing caste discrimination on the agenda as ``work and descent based discrimination'', the semanticists must stop hair-splitting debates on caste and race and allow the U.N. to focus on eradicating all forms of discrimination. The National Human Rights Commission must help in strengthening the agenda and see that caste discrimination is abolished in India in spheres, social, economic and spiritual.

It is laudable that the NHRC decided to take an independent stand. Its chairman, Mr. J. S. Verma, refused to join the national committee constituted by the Prime Minister, headed by Mr. Ranganath Mishra, to assist the Government in formulating its position on the question of inclusion of caste in the agenda of the Durban conference. The NHRC can and should formulate its own position on whether caste, as an institution that constructed descent-based intolerance and xenophobic discrimination, was a problem of human rights or not. Once the NHRC formulates its position and suggests instruments to eradicate this pernicious practice, steps by the Government of India have to follow.

To ascertain informed opinion about the caste-race relationship, the NHRC conducted a national seminar on August 3 at the National Law School, Bangalore. A public hearing on the intensity of caste discrimination was organised by it at Bangalore University. It also conducted a national seminar in New Delhi on August 11. Studies showing the historical relationship between caste and race and those holding that the caste system had no relationship with race were presented. However, it is important to look at the mindset of the Brahminic castes in clinching this issue.

Many reform movements including that of Swamy Dayananda Saraswati used the hegemonic racist notion of Aryan (the brown race of India) to construct an upper caste nationalist ideology. The social forces that joined these organisations even in South India came from hegemonic castes. The movements that sprung up from the South owning the Dravida (black) racial identity were joined and owned by social forces from Sudra and Dalit castes. The South Indian Brahmins and Vaisyas who share dark skin with other lower castes named their organisations Arya Brahmin Samajam and Arya Vaisya Sangham. We can see a very strong racist psyche in constructing symbols of sacredness and nationalism based on colour and caste.

Take, for example, the notion of the sacredness of the cow. The cow became a sacred animal with the Brahminic Aryanism that got constructed as hegemonic in civil society. Even now, the average Brahminic psyche treats the cow as sacred, but not the buffalo. The cow was the prime sacrificial animal when the priests were beef-eaters; it remains a sacred animal even after the priestly class gave up beef-eating.

In both the Gandhian and the RSS mode of nationalist thought, though both of them are vastly different, the cow not only remains sacred but is constructed as a constitutional animal as well. It is a known fact that in economic terms the buffalo contributes more to the Indian milk economy than the cow. Why then does the buffalo remain a non-sacred and most invisible animal? Why did it not get constitutional protection as the cow did in the Directive Principles of State Policy? Simply because the cow belongs to the white race in the animal kingdom and the buffalo belongs to the black race. This is an Indian variety of racism. All white races constructed their colour as superior, the Indian Aryans also made the colour sacred. The colour black in general and dark people, buffaloes and other animals, irrespective of their utility or beauty were/are condemned both in social and spiritual realms.

This psyche was not only ancient and historic but is continuously operating in our day-to-day life rendering black humans and animals unworthy of occupying national and international space. The Western mode of racism did not sink into the spiritual realm. It is this Indian racist spiritual and social psyche that is at the core of the caste system. Indian civil society, the state and the institutions such as the NHRC that operate as negotiating agencies between the state and civil society must address this racist and casteist psyche.

The Indian Government took an undemocratic stand and the national committee has failed in telling the nation, even after so many days of its Hyderabad hearing, what its opinion is. The NHRC being an independent body did well as Mr. Verma himself said that it did not mortgage its mind to any preconceived notion or thought on this issue. By formulating both short term and long term policies on the question of caste, as a historical institution of oppression, it can help the nation and keep the morale of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Castes up.

Human rights organisations in this country have not so far realised that civil societal oppression and systemic subjugation of SCs, STs, OBCs and women have more dangerous implications for social change and development than state oppression. With the help of U.N. bodies, the Government of India must evolve more instruments to tackle this historical problem.

If the NHRC takes a position on the question of caste and defines its very existence and day-to-day operation as a problem of human rights, it then becomes the bounden duty of the state to work out much stronger instruments to abolish this institution in all its forms. In fact, the NHRC should have formulated its position and educated the Government of India much before the world forums took it up.

It is an absurd argument that Governments, even though elected democratically, become responsive without pressure from both national and international agencies. The oppressive institutions that came into operation through the process of civil societal structuring need the pressure of outside agencies such as the U.N., because it is more difficult to address the civil societal agencies than the Governmental agencies from within. The U.N. Human Rights charter has been worked out to serve that purpose also. It hence thought of addressing the civil societal oppressions that emanate from race, religion, language, gender and so on. Unfortunately, caste as an institution of social oppression was not included in the charter at that time.

A body like the NHRC should have realised this and recommended to the Government of India a long time back that caste discrimination has many traits of racial discrimination and, hence, must become part of the U.N. Human Rights charter. Then the World Conference on Racism would have automatically included caste in its agenda. In this respect, the National SC, ST Commission and the Backward Class Commission have failed in putting caste discrimination on the U.N. agenda. The SC, ST and OBC MPs and political leaders have not shown any maturity in understanding the role of U.N. bodies in resolving certain historical problems and have remained blissfully indifferent to this process. They could have easily forced the Government of India to avoid all somersaults in the meetings of the Preparatory Committees of the World Conference.

Caste will be discussed in the inter-Governmental Conference at Durban under para 109 of the agenda which reads: ``to ensure all necessary constitutional, legislative and administrative measures, including appropriate form of affirmative action, are in place to prohibit and address discrimination on the basis of work and descent and such that measures are respected and implemented by all states, authorities at all levels''. The Government and other state bodies such as the NHRC must tell the nation that they will abide by the mandate of the U.N. Conference.

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