Ambedkar who had been an ardent and lifelong opponent of the Congress and its supreme leader Gandhi expectedly faced spirited opposition from the Congress legislature in Bombay when he made a bid to be part of the Constituent Assembly. He was eventually helped by Jogendra Nath Mandal, a Scheduled Caste Federation (SCF) leader in United Bengal, who prevailed upon the Muslim League to get Ambedkar elected from East Bengal.
The more impactful changes occurred during the colonial rule. It brought varied opportunities to the lower-caste people, especially the more populous untouchable castes, which did not have specific caste vocations. They entered British armies in large numbers and took up jobs in their clubs, households and industry. Most significantly, the doors of modern education were opened to them; first by the Christian missionaries and later by the government. The rulers undertook huge infrastructure projects such as building of ports, roads, canals, railways, to facilitate their colonial loot which however came as a boon for these people. Infrastructure further boosted industrial investment in a spiralling manner, opening up huge job opportunities for them. Many of them made good of these opportunities and switched to petty businesses. While many such unintended positives happened during the colonial rule, the intended colonial policy to control people by instituting various anthropological studies and caste censuses concretised the amorphous lifeworld of people into rigid hierarchies and live caste consciousness. The ease of communication and transportation and political integration of India unleashed new pan Indian caste dynamics, which for the first time transcended social sphere and entered political space. It is in such socio-political environment capitalism entered India. Capitalism instead of facing contradiction with the caste system, found it useful to keep the labour divided. However, it did impact the other segment of the society, the upper castes in the Dwija band based in major cities, who embraced capitalism and capitalist modernity. While capitalism kept people divided, it bonded capitalists into a class, transcending ritualistic differences among them. The imperatives of the supply chain in business to build and maintain relationship brought them in contact with people from different castes, albeit within the Dwija band, to which they largely belonged. Over the years the caste differences between them faded and were reduced to class differences. The validity of Marx’s observation that the growth “Modern industry, resulting from the railway system, will dissolve the hereditary divisions of labour, upon which rest the Indian castes, those decisive impediments to Indian progress and Indian power.” (On Colonialism, Moscow edition 1974, p. 85), needs to be reconsidered by people who uncritically lament that he was proved wrong on India.
Far more significant changes in the caste system than even those happened during the colonial period befell after the transfer of power. The native ruling classes made full use of the caste system with their characteristic intrigues to the detriment of masses, particularly Dalits and Adivasis, paradoxically posturing social justice. After assuming the power, the Congress began pushing the policy framework in favour of capitalists, camouflaging it with its high-pitched socialist rhetoric to address the mass aspirations which were built up during the freedom struggle. Notwithstanding its claim to represent all Indian people on the basis of Gandhi’s mass following, the Congress at its core was always representing the class of the incipient bourgeoisie. The best evidence for its pro-capitalist character comes out in the Bombay Plan episode. While the Constituent Assembly was still busy writing the constitution, Prime Minister Nehru had announced the launch of Five-Year Plans (FYP), which was associated in those days with Soviet Russia. It was designed to create an impression the world over that newly independent India was going the Soviet way. It reinforced the domestic rhetoric of socialism. The Bombay Plan was prepared by a group of Indian industrialists and technocrats in January 1944, proposing a fifteen-year investment plan for India when it became free. It is interesting to know that while there was general anticipation that the British would grant India freedom after World War II, there were no official clues as to what form post-colonial India would take. The Bombay Plan, however, had rightly factored in the partition, which very few people could have imagined then, in working out its figures. While this Plan was not officially adopted by Nehru, not only the first but all the first three Five Year Plans had almost the same sectoral outlay pattern as that of the Bombay Plan. It may be interesting to recall our learning in schools and colleges that our second FYP was supposed to be based on the home-grown development model given by P.C. Mahalanobis! Surprisingly, these intrigues of our ruling class to cheat the people remain largely unexposed by our intellectuals.
The ruling class intrigues were also at play in the constitution-making, starting with its strategic masterstroke to induct Babasaheb Ambedkar, who had gained an iconic stature among the majority of Dalits, into the Constituent Assembly and thereafter making him chairman of its most important drafting committee. Ambedkar who had been an ardent and lifelong opponent of the Congress and its supreme leader Gandhi expectedly faced spirited opposition from the Congress legislature in Bombay when he made a bid to be part of the Constituent Assembly. He was eventually helped by Jogendra Nath Mandal, a Scheduled Caste Federation (SCF) leader in United Bengal, who prevailed upon the Muslim League to get Ambedkar elected from East Bengal. This success was to be short-lived, however. Soon the partition plan was announced and he lost his membership. By then, the Congress had realized his strategic importance and arranged for his election from Bombay. They further surprised him by making him chairman of the drafting committee.
With regard to castes, the Constitution outlawed untouchability, which was what the upper-caste reformers as well as apologists of the caste system led by Gandhi always hankered for. It however preserved castes with an alibi to make special provisions in favour of the Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST). As a matter of fact, these provisions in the form of reservations and other concessions for the SCs were instituted during the colonial times itself. Even the initial preferential policy was transformed into today’s quota system by Ambedkar while he was the labour member in the viceroy’s executive council. The identity of these beneficiaries was also frozen into an administrative category, ‘Scheduled Caste’, way back in 1936. As such, the castes could also have been outlawed if the Constituent Assembly so wanted. But they were not. The Constituent Assembly wanted to extend these provisions to the tribal people, which it could without needing the castes to stay as the tribes were not a caste. But it created another schedule, the ‘Scheduled Tribe’ for them, knowing fully well that there could not have been a foolproof definitive criterion like untouchability used for identifying the SCs, for the tribals. Whatever may be the way of identifying these people, if they were to be provided with identical concessions, they could have been very well merged with the inmates in the existing schedule, possibly renaming it as something else sans the caste indicative nomenclature. It would have helped in diluting the traditional caste identity of the erstwhile untouchables in the schedule and divested the schedule of social stigma as, unlike the Dalits, the tribals did not carry it. But it was not to be. By creating a separate schedule the ruling classes provided space for any caste to claim Scheduled Tribe status as it happened in the agitations of the Gujjars in Rajasthan in 2008 and currently of the Dhangars in Maharashtra. Interestingly, no one wanted the Scheduled Caste status.
Capping all these intrigues, the Constitution included a still vaguer clause that the state would identify as Other Backward Classes (to be read castes) who were ‘socially and educationally backward’ and extend them adequate concessions. In a backward country like India in which almost all people could be construed as being socially inferior to someone in a caste hierarchy and educationally backward (which all were), this provision as such was hugely problematic. After all, reservations are not the only measure to help people. Rather, reservations were meant to be an exceptional measure to be used for exceptional subjects, as was rightly done during the colonial rule. For a backward country like India, the state, if it was really sincere in helping the people, could have implemented redistribution of wealth, ensured basic empowering inputs like health and education, and followed socialistic policies. Ambedkar was for such a reform and had provided a theoretical rationale for state socialism too in his very first speech in the Constituent Assembly. Obviously, it was not their intention to help the people but use them to perpetuate their rule. The entire exercise was to construct a can of caste worms for the rulers to be opened at an opportune moment as was done by V.P. Singh in 1990.
Soon thereafter, the government undertook land reforms in a convoluted manner. The real intention, as can be seen with hindsight, was to carve out a class of rich farmers in rural India which would serve as an agent of the central rulers, while pretending to respond to the voiced expectations of people that land would be distributed to the actual tillers. Land distribution did take place in varied proportions in various states (land being a state subject!)—to the tillers on paper, who happened to belong to the most populous Shudra castes that were preferable to the erstwhile landlords, many of whom fancied continuing their control over such lands. Although land in many cases was actually tilled by the Dalits, they did not get any. This half-baked land reform was immediately followed by the Green Revolution, supposedly to quench the widespread mass hunger prevailing then. While the Green Revolution would raise the productivity of agriculture, it would significantly transform the agrarian relations and thereby castes. The Green Revolution was actually a capitalist strategy which would create input, output, credit, implement, and services market and cash economy in rural India. It would hugely enrich the Shudra landowners and transform some of them into rich farmers who would assume social control of villages having wielded the baton of Brahmanism from the upper-caste landlords.
....CONTD>>>>>

Understanding Castes for their Annihilation part-1

Understanding Castes for their Annihilation part-2
O- Anand Teltumbde
Anand Teltumbde is a writer and civil rights activist with the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, Mumbai.

Hastakshep