Communities must undertake internal reform: K Satchidanandan

I belong to a generation that found carrying caste tags disgraceful. I do not say every one in my generation did, but a lot of them did. Even our parents did not add our caste name to our names when they got us admitted in schools. And we never thought of tagging them when we grew up. But now it has even become fashionable among males  to sport one's caste name, especially if they belong to the so-called ‘higher’ castes.  As a consequence  we have plenty of five-year old Menons and Panikers and Namboodiris. This has something to do with the decline of the values upheld by Kerala’s renaissance. Communities then had organised themselves for internal reform  which also implied critiquing their existing practices, attitudes, conventions etc. Sree Narayana Guru  declared that he had no caste  and kept away from the SNDP when he found it had become a caste organisation - probably he knew the trajectory  it would follow and foresaw its present decadence.  

V. T. Bhattathirippad began with the slogan , ‘Transform the Namboodiri into a human being.’ Chattambi Swamikal also never flaunted his caste. Ayyankali , Sahodaran Ayyappan, Poykayil Appachan, Makti Thangal, Abraham Malpan etc  criticised caste practices from their subaltern/ minority locations. But gradually the reform element grew weak; the humanist spirituality that characterised the thought of Sree Narayana Guru and Chattambi Swamikal got lost in caste politics and the rationalism of leaders like Sahodaran Ayyappan gave way to irrational ritualism. Caste became a platform for bargaining and the raison d'etre  for political formations. Many political parties, even secular ones, allied with them for temporary gains, considering them vote banks that could easily be tapped.  

No, this has nothing to do with globalisation. One cannot fight globalisation by retreating into old feudal identities; that demands different strategies including a counter-globalizing and egalitarian internationalism that does not believe in the superiority of any one country or culture, but respects sovereignty and diversity.  Dalit or minority identity is more a political necessity and not   a retreat to casteism- one needs to make a distinction between  upper caste flaunting of identity as a show of racial and cultural superiority  and the solidarity of the dalits, adivasis and minorities that is meant to fight their centuries-old sequestration, marginalisation and  and deprivation. The question of secular forces’ failure to check the growth of the right wing majoritarian politics in the country demands an elaborate answer which is not just possible  here.

The use of Hindu symbols and rituals  in the freedom struggle, the idolisation of the nation in the form of a Hindu Goddess, the colonial division of Indian history on the basis of the hegemonic religions, the dominance of the upper castes in the bureaucracy in the post-Independence era, sustained efforts by the right-wing to ‘catch them young’ and infuse hatred of other religions through the SaraswatiVidyalayas and the RSS Shakhas, the aura of heroism that they gained during the emergency when they worked from  underground , the use of traditional public spaces  like temple premises to propagate their divisive ideology, the decadence of the Indian National Congress and its compromises that weakened its secular orientation in the post-Nehru era, the left's lack of vision, its inability to develop   a language to address the believers who form the vast majority of our population  and its strategic failure in understanding and combating the growing Hindutva ideology and its hydra-headed organisational structure, the incompleteness of the bourgeois revolution in India due to the colonial  intervention and the resulting survival of feudal structures that privileged the upper cate Hindus, that delay in the awakening and organisation of dalits  in spite of the eforts of early visionaries like Jyotiba Phule, Savitribai Phule and  Ambedkar besides many regional leaders and even greater delay in the self-awareness of the adivasi communities, the reactionary role played by the media, the monstrous marriage between Hindutva ideology and corporatism and the economic, political and media-power it gave to Hindutva ideologues, the othering of Muslims made easy by the growth of extremism among a small section of  the Muslim community, the general illiteracy of people in many states that made them vulnerable to dishonest demagogy and false rhetoric, the manufactured communal riots and  the trumped up controversies around the Babri Masjid, Godhra etc that led to genocide and bloodshed, the withering of the Welfare State consequent upon the withdrawal of the government from its welfare functions like health and education and the rampant privatisation promoted by  the later congress regimes led by Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh, and the conscious image -building of the present Prime Minster managed by companies like Apco and by a huge IT army : these in sum are some of the reasons behind the unchecked growth of Hindutva.