TRYSTS AND TURNS: Adding caste to creed deepens disunity

NOW that Rahul Gandhi has decided to become a full-time politician, he can pose a challenge to Narendra Modi's leadership. His choice of caste politics to combat the communal politics of Modi and the Sangh Parivar is, to my mind, a dangerous one. To add casteism to the two main evils that the country faces — communalism and corruption — will prevent our country from progressing, and is certainly a dangerous move.

As endemic corruption weakens the moral fibre, communalism and casteism militate against unity that is essential to make India stand up as one against poverty, illiteracy and the feudal mentality that presently pervades the national psyche.

Religious and caste identities are not going to disappear in the foreseeable future. It is a fact of life in India, been there for centuries. In rural India, where more than half of our people live, caste is a factor of daily existence. In urban India, where interaction is perforce impersonal, caste and even religious identity was slowly losing its relevance.

The attempt by Opposition parties to further divide the majority Hindus on the basis of caste for electoral gain is going to end in disaster.

I live in a building that boasts of 20 flat owners belonging to different religions (Hindu, Muslim and Christian); different castes (brahmins, SCs and OBCs, rajputs, khatris, kayasthas). They hail from different states of India — Maharashtra. Punjab, UP, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Gujarat and Goa. All of us get along famously with each other, eat together once a year on the terrace of the building and settle quarrels among the grandchildren by asking them to settle their quarrels themselves. You may have guessed it right — we are all educated, middle-income citizens. So, we have a headstart on integration.

In 1981, I was a guest of the Japanese government, attending a seven-week workshop on the judicial process system in Asia. The other participants were from the US, Australia, the Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Samoa, Malaysia, Singapore and the host country, Japan. On one Sunday in Tokyo, I went to a church, accompanied by the Australian, who was a judge, and the Samoan, who was a police chief. Returning to our hostel after the Service, I noticed a couple who was obviously Indians walking on the other side of the road. I waved to them. They waved back. My companions asked me if I knew them. I replied I did not. Then, why I had greeted them, they asked. It surprised them when I said that I identified with them at once as not many of my countrymen could afford to be travelling in an affluent foreign land.

That feeling of being Indian, first and foremost, is sadly being eroded. First, it was the Hindu-Muslim divide accentuated at the time of elections and now, this attempt by Opposition parties to further divide the majority Hindus on the basis of caste for electoral gain. That is going to end in disaster, like the division on religious grounds is leading us to.

If dividing and weakening India on religious and caste lines was not enough, the Supreme Court, in a six-to-one decision of a seven-judge Constitution Bench, overturned its own 2004 ruling that had pronounced that all SCs constitute one homogenous body. By that ruling, the more educated units of SCs, like the Mahars in Maharashtra or the Chamars in Punjab, cornered most of the reserved seats allotted to the Scheduled Castes, leaving the less educated bereft of the benefits that reservation promised.

The 2024 Supreme Court majority verdict, of which the CJI was a part, argued that the categories of SCs who had not benefited from reservation should now be treated separately so that the principle on which reservation was conceived was upheld. This judgment will further divide Indian citizens and produce demands for inclusion from sub-castes whose existence itself was not known to most citizens.

Five years ago, just before Covid struck, I broke the neck of my femur bone after a fall in the bath. The result was that I needed a young man, full time, to help me with my daily physical chores. He was a Dalit from Bihar, but just before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, I learnt he was a "maha Dalit", a category that I was not aware of. There could be such neglected elements in Maharashtra also.

Be that as it may, the presence of these dispossessed sub-castes of SCs, obviously quite numerous in the north of the country, has been noted by the Supreme Court. The court has rightly deigned that they, too, should be given a part of the reservation pie. The enforcement of the court's order is not going to be easy. More difficult will be to calculate the political fallout of this further divide in the polity.

Last Saturday, the KES (Kandivali Education Society) College of Law in Mumbai invited me to interact with their students online. I answered a volley of questions shot at me by the students. Many of them concerned reservations in college admissions and jobs with the government. I explained the rationale behind affirmative action but was at a loss to justify the heady mix of rectifying centuries-old injustices with the necessity of maintaining higher standards of service, which the common man was entitled to.

Both factors need to be kept in mind by the decision-makers while formulating a "via media". Political parties, starting with the Congress under Jawaharlal Nehru right up to the BJP under Narendra Modi, have neglected education and health, the bedrocks of a successful society. China has stolen a 50-year march over us in ensuring 100 per cent literacy, as now exists in the advanced countries of the West.

If we had achieved total literacy, we could have selected the really bright boys and girls from the neglected castes and enrolled them at the State's expense in the best schools to ensure that they could compete with their sisters and brothers of the advanced castes on an even plane. The problem of admitting a candidate who achieved rank 821 in the civil services exam into the IAS would not have arisen, as it did in the recent case of Puja Khedkar.

Recently, Rahul Gandhi predicted an ED raid on his premises for criticising the government for some action it had taken. He need not lose sleep over such an arrest. It will boomerang on the government — it will increase his slowly rising popularity, accelerate it a bit. But if the ED conjures up a case for a raid because of his raking up the caste issue, I, for one, will not defend him.