The Hindu Caste System – India’s
Safety Valve?
Written by Dr. Seshadri Kumar, 29
April, 2016
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© Dr. Seshadri Kumar. All Rights
Reserved.
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*********************************
Caste is one of the
most infamous aspects of Hinduism. The caste system of Hinduism segregates people into hierarchies that are
defined by birth and which are impossible for one to get out of. Innumerable
injustices have been carried out over millennia on the basis of caste
discrimination by people who belong to castes considered superior to others. Even
today, cases of extreme injustice keep
appearing regularly in the newspapers.
However, on careful
examination, one has to wonder if these divisions have not resulted in a safer
situation in India relative to what could have been. In what follows, I explain
why I think caste discrimination may have had an unintended positive consequence
for India.
Religious
Intolerance Worldwide
Religious intolerance
has led to the persecution of minorities in countries worldwide. This has been
going on for millennia. Let us take a look at just some of these:
· Wars between Christians and Muslims, Slavs, Jews, and Pagans
in the Crusades for
centuries
o
5000 Jews
were killed in the People’s
Crusade in 3 months in 1096
o
10000 Muslims
were killed when Jerusalem was
taken by the Crusaders in 1099
o
6000
Pagans were killed in the Battle of
St. Matthew’s Day, which was fought to convert the pagans of Livonia
(present-day Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia)
o
3000 unarmed captive
Muslim soldiers, as well as women and children, were massacred by King Richard the
Lionheart of England during the Third Crusade following
the Siege
of Acre
o
Many more
examples of unprovoked aggression in the name of religion during the Crusades
o
About 2000 Jews expelled
o
Forced conversion of 100,000 Jews and forced expulsion of
100,000 Jews
o
Removal of 500,000 Muslims from Spain and eradication of
Islam
o Tens of thousands of Catholic
Irish massacred by Cromwell’s forces at the battles of Drogheda, Wexford, Waterford, Limerick,
and Galway
o Expulsion of large numbers of
Catholics from Ireland to work as indentured labourers in the West Indies
o Hundreds of thousands of
Catholic Irish killed by a forced famine caused by the destruction of their
food stocks
o
The banning of the Catholic faith and the execution of any
Catholic priests found
o
Approximately 50,000 Native Americans were forcibly
evicted from their homes in the 1830s by an act of the American Congress
authorizing military force to do so. Thousands of them died in forced marches
in winter without food and adequate clothing in what has been called the Trail of Tears. This
act arose from racial hatred of the Native Americans
· The post-Ottoman Empire ethnic cleansing of Bulgaria,
Greece, and Serbia between 1821 and 1922
o
130,000
Muslims living in Slavonia in Croatia ethnically cleansed and exiled to Bosnia
and Herzegovina
o
Almost
300,000 Crimean Tatars expelled by the Russians from their homes
o
Expulsion
of 1.5 million Bulgarian Muslims after the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78
· The killing of ethnic Armenian Christians in the Ottoman Empire
o
The genocide of up to 1.5 million Armenian Christians of
the Orthodox Faith by the Ottomans in Armenia
· The Chinese policy towards Tibet, from the days of the Kuomintang to modern
Communist China – a policy based on religious intolerance towards the Buddhist
Tibetans
o
Up to 1.2
million Tibetans killed by Chinese governments
o
Six million Jews, comprising two-thirds of the Jewish
population of Europe, and including 1.5 million children, murdered in cold
blood
o
Over 250,000 Tamil citizens killed in a 25-year long civil
war
o
The state has sanctioned the genocide of more than a
million Muslims
o
Forced
name changes for the entire ethnic Turkish population of Bulgaria (about
900,000 people) and their replacement by Christian names as part of a “rebirth”
process
o
Banning
the use of the Turkish language
o
Banning the
use of Turkish ethnic dress
o
Closure of
all mosques
o
Mass
expulsions of those who did not comply to Turkey (about 360,000 Bulgarian
Turks)
o
More than 100,000 citizens of Bhutan of Nepalese descent were
expelled from Bhutan between 1992 and 1996
o The genocide of more than 8000 Bosnian
Muslim men and boys by Serb troops in the town of Srebrenica in 1995
o
The ethnic cleansing of more than 2000 Bosnian Muslims
in the Lasva Valley
genocide from May 1992 to April 1993
o
The Prijedor Massacre of
1992, in which over 5000 Bosnians and Croats were massacred
o
The Visegrad Massacre
of 1992, in which around 3000 Bosnian Muslims were killed by Serbs
o
Many more incidents…
· This is just a partial
list, and highlights how dangerous life can be for religious minorities in any
country.
India has, for the
most part, been spared of this kind of violence (I will discuss the exceptions in what follows), in spite of its status as a nation with the largest Hindu population in
the world – a religion with a dominant majority (80%).
Going by the kind of violence that religious
minorities in so many countries have faced, one would not be wrong in thinking
that India might have become a theocratic Hindu state a long time ago following
an orgy of violence that eliminated, ethnically cleansed, or forcibly converted
its minority religions.
But this has not happened. Why?
Triggers for
Religious Pogroms Worldwide
The cases of extreme
religious discrimination mentioned above all had potent triggers. The enmity
between the Jews and Christians goes back to the Christian Bible, where Jews
are held responsible for the execution of Jesus. But many other conflicts have
much more recent triggers. Consider the Bosnian Civil War as an example.
The trouble in the Balkans that led to the Bosnian
civil war of 1992 can be traced back to Muslim invasions of the region and wars
in the middle ages involving Christians and Muslims. Yugoslavia was a former
colony of the Ottoman Empire, and so contained both Christian and Muslim
populations that were well-mixed. One of the key historical events leading to
the inflammation of tensions in Kosovo, for example, is the fact that Kosovo
was the site of a major war between the Ottomans and the Serbs, which resulted
in Serbia becoming part of the Ottoman Empire – the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. As a result, religious tensions were always
quite high in this region. However, with the rise of Josip Broz Tito at the end of World War II, anyone trying to cause religious trouble was
put down with an iron hand. But after his death in 1990, the floodgates opened,
leading to the division of the country and genocide.
Compared to this,
India has plenty of historical baggage that could be the basis of a lot of bad
blood between Hindus and Muslims. From the 11th century onwards,
large parts of India were conquered, looted, and ruled by foreign rulers of the
Islamic faith. Hindus lived as second-hand citizens in the country in which
they were a majority; they had to endure forced conversions; their temples were destroyed and
mosques built over the ruins of their temples; and they had to pay a discriminatory, religion-based tax to their Muslim rulers. For 300 years, most of
India was ruled by the Islamic Mughal Empire. Some of these are disputed by certain
scholars, but these are generally accepted as having happened in the popular
narrative, whatever their historicity. There is, thus, plenty of fuel to throw
into a raging inferno of incendiary claims whereby a few million Muslims can be
killed and the rest forced to leave India.
However, this has not
happened. This is not to suggest that Hindu-Muslim violence has not happened in
India or is not a routine occurrence. Violent incidents happen, but their scale
is relatively small. One notable “large” incident was the partition of British India into an India and a
Pakistan – but this was
a very emotive issue that forced people to leave their land and possessions
behind to migrate to another place almost as penniless beggars – a time and place of extreme personal
hardship, where emotions naturally ran high. This is by far the most
significant incident of religious violence in the Indian subcontinent, leading
to the speculated deaths of two million people. But apart from this event which
was for the most part forced by a violent partition of the land, most other
religious riots cause deaths at most in the tens or hundreds, with very few
touching a toll of thousands. For example, the most well-known incident of
religious violence in recent years is the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat,
in which about 2000 people were estimated to have died. Deaths resulting from religious
violence in India are only about 0.01 per 100,000, as compared to a world
average of 7.9.
So why is religious
violence in India so low?
It is very tempting to
suggest that this is because Hinduism is a very tolerant religion. There is some truth to this because of Hinduism's (quite exceptional) attitude that God exists in many forms and that there are many paths to God, all equally valid - quite unlike the "my way or the highway" attitude of Christianity or Islam, both of which believe that salvation is obtained only by belief in the specific God of their religion and by acceptance of their specific doctrines.
But this is not the only reason, as I explain below.
But this is not the only reason, as I explain below.
One important aspect
of all the cases of religious discrimination worldwide, mentioned above, is
that the oppressing group saw itself as largely homogeneous. For instance,
Irish Protestants see themselves as largely a monolithic group when compared
with the Irish Catholics. Shias and Sunnis see themselves as largely monolithic
and oppress the other when one is in a majority in a state. Neither of them recognize the Ahmadiyyas, another sect in Islam, as Muslims at all.
During the Crusades, all Christians banded together as working for a common
cause against the Arabs who controlled Jerusalem. The Spanish who expelled the
Jews and Muslims from Spain towards the end of the 15th century saw
themselves as a monolithic Catholic state and saw the Jews and the Muslims as
the “other.” The Buddhists who persecuted the Hindus in Sri Lanka, whatever
minor divisions they might have had within themselves, saw themselves as one
against the “other” of the Hindus; the same can be said of the Buddhists in
Myanmar who discriminated against the Rohingya Muslims. Similarly, in all the
historic injustices towards the Jews over the centuries, including those by the
Nazis, they were seen as the “other” by a largely united Christian majority.
The Lack of
Homogeneity Among Hindus
But Hindus, by and
large, do not see themselves as a monolithic block. And the reason for this is
the infamous caste system. Not only do the four major categories of castes –
known as the “varnas”
– the Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (merchants), and Shudras (labourers), plus the
fifth category of outcastes or untouchables – known variously as panchamas,
oppressed castes, depressed castes, ati-Shudras (archaic terms), or Dalits (modern
term) – not traditionally mix with each other socially, but even within a given
varna, different jatis
(castes) generally don’t mix socially in traditional environments.
Hindu society, as Ambedkar famously said,
is a collection of castes. The Hindu cares only for his or her fellow-caste
person; other Hindus do not mean anything to him/her. While things have changed
a lot at a microscopic level since Ambedkar wrote about Hindu society, his
observations are still true at the larger level. The one aspect of social mixture
in which this is most obvious is marriage. Hindus still marry, by and large,
within their caste. Urbanization and the presence of more women in the working
force has changed this to some extent, but the majority of marriages, even
today in Hindu society, are “arranged” by the parents based on caste
compatibility.
So the “Hindu” sees
himself first as a caste entity and then in the broader sense as a Hindu. As
Ambedkar says in The
Annihilation of Caste, “A Hindu’s public is his caste. His responsibility
is only to his caste. His loyalty is restricted only to his caste. Virtue has
become caste-ridden, and morality has become caste-bound. There is no sympathy
for the deserving. There is no appreciation of the meritorious. There is no
charity to the needy. Suffering as such calls for no response. There is
charity, but it begins with the caste and ends with the caste. There is
sympathy, but not for men of other castes.” The Hindu’s hatred for
a non-Hindu, specifically a Muslim, is only marginally greater than his hatred
for Hindus from other castes.
Again, I am talking about real “social mixture.” Specifically, I want to focus on the
arranged marriage. I myself was married through an arranged marriage, and since
I belonged to the Brahmin Varna and the Iyer caste of Tamil Brahmins, my bride had to belong to the Tamil Iyer caste. Only in extreme
situations (such as, say, I fell in love with a girl) would they have
considered my marrying a Tamil Iyengar
(another Brahmin caste) girl; and my marrying a non-Brahmin girl would be
almost as distasteful to them as my marrying a Muslim.
This mutual hatred and
distrust of the different Hindu castes has prevented them from engaging in
large-scale, organized displays of bigotry and hatred against non-Hindus. Since
Hinduism itself is quite loosely defined and contains deep divisions within,
uniting together to oppress other minorities is a much lower probability event
than, say, the Shias in Iran uniting to oppress non-Shias and non-Muslims, or
the Sunni majority in Pakistan uniting to oppress non-Sunnis and non-Muslims.
For, the Sunni, the Shia, or the Christian has a very clear idea of who he is –
the “Hindu” has only a very vague idea of what makes him a Hindu.
How
Caste-Based Division of Hindu Society Prevents Genocide
For every Hindu-Muslim
riot in India, one could list half a dozen inter-caste violence incidents,
whether between Kammas
and Kapus, between Marathas and Mahars,
between Vanniyars and Parayars, and so on. It should be pointed out that most
inter-caste violence incidents in India have been of upper castes or “caste
Hindus” (those belonging to the four castes) committing violence against the
Dalits. These constitute an effective “safety valve” against Hindu-Muslim
violence – one can only have so much anger, after all, and a lot of it goes
away after you kill a few people. In effect, the Dalits form a sacrificial
group that bears the brunt of the prejudice of the Hindus.
While the killing of
Dalits is despicable and cannot be condoned, it cannot be denied that it probably
prevents larger-scale Hindu violence against non-Hindu minorities, and that it
is also much smaller in scale than the international pogroms that have been
discussed earlier. One reason for this is that anti-Dalit violence is usually
local and small in scale; it is usually related to local and specific hatreds
between communities that may go back a long way. Anti-Muslim violence, on the
other hand, can be easily generalized to a national scale and does not need
specific triggers – one can easily inflame passions by talking about how India
was ravaged by Muslim invasions, for instance, without going into specific details.
In addition, caste-based
discrimination goes far beyond only violence. Inter-caste hatred is prevalent
in all aspects of Indian society. Wherever there is a discretionary role, there
is a high chance that caste will be the basis of discretion. Many employers
(when they legally can) will
prefer a person of their own caste rather than a person of a different caste.
Many
housing societies will not prefer to have
members who belong to a caste they look down upon. These divisions ensure
that Hindus are sufficiently divided among themselves to resist forming a
united group with a single overriding identity.
So, despite Indian
liberals’ deep misgivings about the caste system and the discrimination and
cruelty it engenders, they should probably be grateful that Hinduism contains
within itself the seeds of its disunity and, as a result, prevents Hindus from
organizing themselves to the level of being able to orchestrate the scale of
pogroms that other religions have done so spectacularly. That the most
talked-about pogrom in recent times, the 2002 Gujarat Pogrom, only led to an
estimated 2000 killed in a
city (Ahmedabad) of more than 5.5 million people and containing more than
300,000 Muslims, and not tens of thousands dead, is evidence of the fact
that Hindus do not act in a united way on issues of religion. Horrified as we
should be that 2000 people might have been killed, we should be grateful for
the caste-mediated fracturing of the Hindu population that prevented this death
toll from being at least ten times greater.
It should be pointed
out that, in recent years, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its political
arm, the ruling party in India, the Bharatiya Janata Party, have tried very
hard to unite Hindus over a common front motivated by hatred of Muslims and
Dalits. It is a very worrying sign that a growing number of Indians are subscribing
to this negative philosophy.
However, as long as
Hindus continue to marry by looking at matrimonial columns that first and
foremost advertise the caste and sub-caste of the individual, the bark of the
Hindutva movement is worse than its bite.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank
my wife, Sandhya Srinivasan, for her constructive comments on this manuscript
and her helpful suggestions. I would also like to thank Ganesh Prasad for
helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this article.
