I don’t fully agree that Dalit Bahujans are sleeping. If that was the case, Dalit Bahujans would not have spontaneously formed caste armies in Rajasthan, Bhar and elsewhere. These Dalit Bahujan caste amies can and must be forged and united into a very tg all-India Dalit Bahujan Peoples’ Liberation Army. V has failed to highlight the heroic activities of such Dalit Bahujan caste armies.
such Dalit Bahujan caste armies can even totally finish ff our Manu wadi Brahminical fake Maoists.
and when such Dalit Bahujan caste armies get armed nd take to the streets, even the Indian Army will not e able to contain the mess. Gujjar agitation is the best evidence of this. Such mass Dalit Bahujan caste armies must be forged into a mass movement.
If and when our Brahminical rulers shoot or kill any Gujjar-like caste agitation, Mahars and Gujjar men in the Brahminical army will revolt against the Brahminical rulers-just like the Sikh Regiment revolted against the “Operation Bluestar”. Such a revolution is possible in India. In fact, it happened during “Operation Bluestar” and also the recent Gujjar agitation. See how the Brahminical rulers did not dare to mess with Gujjar agitation even when they held Delhi itself to ransom.
Even if they get the Sikh regiment, Mahar regiment or Maratha Regiment to kill Gujjars, they knew that Gujjars who form the majority of Rajputana Rifles would have surely revolted. So the Brahminical rulers alienated the suppressed castes and other religious minorities in no uncertain terms.
The extreme articulation of the two-nation theory’ by MA Jinnah and the demand for a separate electorate for Untouchables’ voiced by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar can also be seen as reactions to this dominant propensity in the movement.
POWER GOES FROM BRITISH TO BRAHMIN
Despite much rhetoric about inclusiveness and presentiveness utilized by the mainstream nationalist movement (represented by the Congress party), the apprehensions that power would ultimately be transferred from the British to the Brahmin-Bourgeois (i borrow this term from Gail Omvedt, 2004: 422) sections of India were too real to be missed by the Dalit leaders.
The Muslim League on the other hand, which saw India in communal categories and shared this trait equally with the Congress (with the difference that while the Congress claimed to represent all religious communities the League only represented the Muslim interests), was also sceptical about the prospect of power being transferred to Hindu’ hands.
GOMPARTMENTALISED SOCIETY
Hence the notion of secularism, as it evolved during the nationalist movement, draw its vocabulary from its encounter with the colonial discourse-India as a communally compartmentalized society incapable of developing a working secular democracy and also, a fact often underplayed, from the assertion of suppressed castes and other identities from below.
Consequently, to have abandoned the nation of secularism would have vindicated negative British opinions
and would have appeared a retrograde step in the eyes of the world. On the other hand, the adoption of the Western notion of secularism in any substantive way would have unsettled the politics historically organized by the elite in non-secular terms (identities) that often obscured the notion of ‘class’ and thereby their own privileged position
Thus the term ‘secularism’ was retained but was imbued with convenient meanings (Upadhyay, 1992).
GANDHI’S DISTORTIONS
Secularism largely came to mean, especially after the treatment it received at the hands of M.K Gandhi, a policy of religious accommodation which envisaged the independent Indian nation state as a coalition of communities. But rather than seeing the interests of these various communities as irreconcilable, a fundamentalist position, it stressed their unity and heralded the cooperation between them as the loftiest ideal
The phrase Sarva dharma Sambhav (let all religions prosper) best embodies this principle. It is another matter however that in actual terms the notion translated into what could be called majoritarianism in which ‘while all communities would be equal, one would be more equal than others namely the majority Hindu community” (Upadhyay. 1992:817)
Hence secularism, which become the central plank of the nationalist movement and later the free Indian nation state, has all along been a euphemism for majoritarian nationalism.
Subsequently, we have had a representative politics which is organized predominantly along lines of community, defined in religious terms, in which the majority community must always emerge victorious
NEHRU’S BRAHMINISM
This majoritarianism provides a semblance of democracy to a political system that claims to represent all identities whereas in substantive terms it only caters to the interests of a small minority of dominant castes/classes.
Interestingly, it becomes a cause of discomfiture to upper castes when the same langvage of community is used by lower castes to demand social and economic justice for themselves the protests against the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations, for instance (Upadhyay, 1992)
LOHIA’S SHOCK
It is interesting to note that while the views of Gandhi and Nehru differed widely on most other issues they were the joint architects of the Congress brand of majoritarian secularism. Can this be attributed to Nehru’s own Brahmanic social location? Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia mentions an event in one of his articles
“The president of the Indian republic Dr. Rajendra Prasad publicly bathed the feet of two hundred Brahmins in the holy city of Benaras” (Lohia, 1950: 101)
He further writes: “Pandit Nehru is on record for having extolled what he chose to call the Brahminic spirit of service. What Dr. Rajendra Prasad seeks to do by commission, Pandit Nehru achieves by omission” (Lohia, 1956. 104).
Khalid Anis Ansari is a member of a research-activism group called The Patna Collective. However, the views expressed here are personal and may not necessarily be shared by the organization
(He can be contacted at khalidanisansari@gmail.com)
