This quote from Thucydides with which B.R. Ambedkar, who exposed the numerous Hindu myths, mysticisms and mumbo-jumbo justifying the injustices of Indian society, and tried to instil in the vast masses of India's “outcasts” a sense of confidence, defiance, dignity, freedom, and hope, began his controversial work, What Congress and Gandhi have done to The Untouchables, is as relevant today as in 1945 when he wrote it.

However, convinced as he was that India's pernicious caste practices have been part of the malignancy of Hindu society which can be extirpated only on Indian soil and only through social reforms and constitutional means, it cannot be gainsaid that in India's changed stature as a sovereign democratic republic Ambedkar himself would have found it ludicrous and even abhorrent to showcase caste, even as tableaux, in an alien land and through a world body of which India is a member-country. More so, as it was mainly because of Ambedkar's initiative that the numerous safeguards for the Untouchables and the other weaker sections were enshrined in the Constitution.

The reference is to the United Nations' World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, to be held in Durban, South Africa, from August 31 to September 7, the confusion and controversy about caste and race as discriminatory categories, and the furore in India and abroad on inclusion of caste in the conference.

Understanding the fallacies underlying this confusion and controversy, and their fallout for India calls for understanding the widely varying postures on caste and race by the proponents and opponents for inclusion of caste in the conference, and the pretentious role of the UN as a global “do-gooder”.

Going by press reports, there has been widespread support through social mobilisation, meetings, conferences, and writings in the press for inclusion of caste in the conference. The most prominent and vociferous proponents are the “Dalit activists”, who are a heterogeneous ensemble. The organisations purportedly representing them include the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights, the Republican Party of India, People's Watch, the National Council of Churches in India - the highest body in the country representing different denominations of the Protestants - and so on. Whether the “Dalit activists” are leaders from among the Dalits, or non-Dalits feigning to be self-appointed Dalit leaders of pressure groups, or both is a moot issue.

This issue is, however, very important for at least two reasons. One, if the Dalits could spawn such aggressive, articulate, globe-trotting, internationally acclaimed and influential leaders, they would have overcome long ago their precarious plight as the despised and the damned, the depressed and the downtrodden of the caste-ridden Indian society. Two, if evidence and experience are any indication, the “Dalit cause” is hard currency for “Dalit activists” operating in developed countries, though it is questionable how far the Dalits themselves have been beneficiaries of the Western dole.,sup>1

Sources would have it that in Geneva several NGOs in special consultative status with the U.N have been spearheading the movement for inclusion of caste in the agenda for the conference, and a number of organisations have joined forces to form the International Dalit Solidarity Network.

As notable among them are the World Council of Churches, the Lutheran World Federation, and similar organisations from Europe and the U.S., their involvement and vociferous claims are certainly grist to the Hindutva mill. While the initiative of the Church-related organisations is laudable and hopefully indicative of the revival of the long-dormant liberation theology, ignoring for the time being the Hindutva monster, one might ask what the Church-related organisations have been doing to overcome the discriminatory practices among the Indian Christians, in particular Christian converts of Dalit origin, the persistence of whose disabilities and plight as “twice alienated” have necessitated their organised demands for at least the last ten years for treatment as Scheduled Castes (SCs) so as to enable them to take advantage of the State's affirmative action and special treatment programmes, though here again the initiative of the Church-related organisations has been commendable.

Whether by the Church Council or other organisations, the claims for inclusion of caste in the conference are of two broad streams. The first would have caste as race, caste as worse than race, caste discrimination as racism and more. The second would have Dalit oppression as worse than racial discrimination; Dalits as victims of centuries-old polluting and stigmatising occupations such as scavenging, persistent discrimination and atrocities, untouchability, social segregation and denial of access to public places and spaces forcing them to live at the margins of society; and the history of Dalits as a genealogy of pain captured in the very etymology of the word.

While all this is true, the claim that the justification for inclusion of caste in the UN Conference is to “internationalise” Dalit discrimination, raises several issues. One, equating caste with race. As Dipankar Gupta observed in Interrogating Caste (2000: Chapter 4) despite some commonalities between caste and race, particularly between the bottom-end of the caste system and the segregationist racism, caste and race are vastly different, for which reason, they should not be collapsed into a single analytical category. Important among the differences are: the caste system is about 3000 years old, extremely complex based on multiple hierarchies, characterised by the pervasive purity-pollution dichotomy, and graded discrimination. In contrast, racism is of recent origin, and as race is based on phenotypic criteria there can be no dispute about where one belongs in the race hierarchy.

Caste has been under extensive debate and in-depth research for several decades now, and the literature on it is probably much more burgeoning than on race. Though race has also been under extensive debate and in-depth research and Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma, followed by Oliver Cromwell Cox's Race: A Study in Social Dynamics, are still the most important works on it, racism is predominantly an American and South African problem. Even here race relations have undergone tremendous changes during the last three decades. So a UN Conference on caste or race may not add up.

Two, equating the caste system with Dalits, as if it comprises only Dalits and none else. This is political appropriation of the caste system by “Dalit activists”. Though Dalits are certainly the worst victims of discrimination, and account for about one-fourth of India's population, their existential problem cannot be isolated from that of the rest of society.

Other traditional caste groups barring Brahmins and other upper castes have also been victims of the caste system. It is recognising this pervasive nature of discrimination, disparities, and disabilities, that the first All-India Backward Classes (Kaka Kalelkar) Commission of the 1950s recommended reservation for a separate category just above the SCs; and it is in keeping with this recommendation that some States such as Tamil Nadu have created the Most Backward Classes (MBCs) category for reservation purposes.

If these lower castes have not been included among the SCs it is for the reason that they were not identified as Untouchables - a requirement for inclusion in the Constitutional category of SCs. However, it is officially recognised that most of them have been as backward as Dalits and are also victims of most of the same disabilities. The only difference is compared to Dalits most of them are minuscule, disparate groups, such as washermen and barbers, and certain nomadic groups known in colonial officialese as “criminal tribes”.

In Tamil Nadu, these groups together account for about one third of the population eligible for 20 percent of the State's 69 percent reservation. It is in recognition of these groups apart from Dalits, and also other disabled groups in the traditional caste hierarchy, that the Supreme Court ruling of November 16, 1992, approved, with modifications, the Government of India's notifications for reservation for the backward classes.

A third issue which can be raised about the justification for inclusion of caste in the Durban conference on racism is: as no other social institution in India has been so much internationalised as the caste system along with its attendant evils, first by the Christian Missionaries , then by the British administration, then by the nationalist leaders in particular Ambedkar himself, then by Western (followed by Indian) scholars, will a UN Conference add any new perspective to the issue and transform possible solutions and the progressive provisions of the Indian Constitution from rhetoric to reality? As the UN does not have a magic wand for this dramatic change, is it not for the victims themselves, their political leaders, the Dalit activists and the Central and State Governments to tackle the problem?

Closely related to the justification of the “Dalit activists” for internationalising caste discrimination is that of sections of the intelligentsia that bringing up caste at an international forum like the UN will increase global pressure (read pressure from the Master World) on the Indian Government to protect the lower castes. This claim is tacit admission that even as an independent nation India should continue to be the “White man's burden”, and continue to have a big brother to clean up its Augean Stables. If the Government of India is insensitive and irresponsible to the problems of Indian society, which it is supposed to be governing, no external power on earth can make it sensitive and responsible to these problems. It may introduce cosmetic changes to appear civil in the comity of the Master World, but going by the fate of the welfare commissions not much can be expected from such changes.

Among the opponents to the inclusion of caste in the conference are also NGOs. An example of this is a letter from Teheran purportedly by 35 NGOs, addressed to the Chairman of the Asian Preparatory Meeting on the Conference. The letter vehemently opposed the inclusion of caste in the conference, gave twelve reasons for doing so, and conveyed “the firm view” that since caste and race are different, caste is beyond the domain of the conference theme and caste discrimination cannot be treated as racial discrimination.

The most important opponent, however, has been the Government of India itself, whose posture is hamstrung. The views of Andre Beteille (“Race and Caste”. The Hindu. March 10, 2001), who, stung by criticism by the pro-inclusion camp, resigned from the committee set up by Prime Minister, A.B. Vajpayee, to draft India's posture, are eloquent on the committee's claim that equating caste and race is harmful to national interest.

Beteille would have it that race is a biological category having distinctive physical markers whereas caste is a social category; treating caste as a form of race is politically mischievous and scientifically nonsensical, the consequences of which will be fabricating or inventing more divisions in Indian society.

While both the arguments may be valid in theory, they sound hallucinatory. For, caste has been discussed in any number of international conferences, and no debate has so far caused, and no debate in future is likely to cause, any harm to national interest unless of course it is understood as interest of the upper castes. While the Government could have certainly seen the UN Conference as an important opportunity to sensitise itself and sensitise all those concerned with the caste problem, in the event of its reluctance to do so, it could have at least come out with a detailed well-informed document on caste vis-à-vis race, the constitutional provisions for redress of historical wrongs and for correction of traditional social distortions, presenting a self-appraisal of its own performance, and what it proposes to do to place the provisions on a fast track ensuring effectiveness and continuity in future implementation.

In this context, it is relevant to note that India has had a well-conceived pragmatic programmatic for at least the last 50 years to tackle caste-based exclusionary and discriminatory practices. In fact, India is probably the first country in the world to devise reservation policies, and as Marc Galanter wrote in Competing Equalities (1984: 1), “India's system of preferential treatment for historically disadvantaged sections of the population is unprecedented in scope and extent”.

In contrast to the gradual dismantling of Affirmative Action in the US, and weakening of Black politics, over the years India's reservation policies and caste politics have been gaining in strength and popular support. This is only to be expected considering that American society is fundamentally and foundationally individualistic and even the socially neglected and victimised Blacks would prefer to be “achievers” to “beneficiaries” of the stigmatising Affirmative Action; whereas in India caste continues to shadow the individual, so much so that despite the constitutional provisions on fundamental rights of the individual, group is still the unit of State action and the individual is still subsumed under it.

If Dalits and other disprivileged castes have not benefited much from the constitutional provisions and are still victims of discrimination, it is not so much the inclusion of caste in the UN Conference but identifying the fault lines in India's governance that needs emphasis. In this sense, the pressure should be on the Government of India to convene a summit to take stock of what the state has done hitherto with the Constitution in relation to the disprivileged groups.

Turning to the UN, which Christian Gauss in an Introduction to The Prince by Machiavelli (1980: 9) characterised as “a more determined attempt to create a “super-state” which to succeed must have at least some power in the interest of peace and human welfare”, (emphasis added) its role as a “global do-gooder”, especially in the context of its recently-invented exclusion-integration rhetoric and the related summit humanitarianism, is farcical. Given its track record as an active (or passive if you wish!) agent of the US and its allies, which have been active in their attempts to exterminate countries such as Iraq, the UN cannot be seen as working for the well-being of the victims of various forms of discrimination and disparities, and its summits and conferences are too routine and ritualistic often ending up in glossy reports released with much fanfare and distributed in select circuits with hardly any follow-up action.

So, the UN summits and conferences, whether on racism or reptiles, should be non-issues to India's “unwashed millions”. If they want to improve their lot and if the changes for it have to be substantive the victim groups and those concerned about them should directly take on the might of the Indian State and make it work, transparent, and accountable to the public. How they will do it is a larger issue.

Copyright ©2005 Dr. P. Radhakrishnan.   About The Author