‘The caste system is India's unifying factor and anybody who attacks the caste system is an enemy of India’ : Panchajanya, the Hindi mouthpiece of RSS, has said as much in an editorial comment. There has perhaps never been such an open glorification of the caste system in recent years. That this editorial appeared on the eve of India's 77th anniversary of independence and that the RSS, which will celebrate its centenary next year, is today the custodian of India's 'official ideology', tell us why this cannot be brushed aside as just a stray rightwing regressive rant.
It is well known that the RSS vision of India has all along been antithetical to the vision of modern India that grew out of India's freedom movement and came to be upheld by the Constitution of India drafted under the chairmanship of Babasaheb Ambedkar. But this level of candour can perhaps only come from the arrogance and impunity bred by the organisation's growing grip on state power. Just the other day we saw the Union Home Ministry circular lifting the ban on government employees taking part in the RSS organisation and its activities.
In the formative years RSS ideologues never tried to hide their views and were quite open about their espousal of Manusmriti as India's ideal social code and the need to emulate the ideas and policies of Mussolini and Hitler. But for the sake of maintaining its legal status it has had to resort to a constitutionally compliant narrative in independent India. And then to win and stay in power, it has had to adapt itself further to the needs of competitive electoral politics. The brahiminical core of RSS has today perfected the art of sporting a deceptive SC/ST/OBC friendly image.
In the process the RSS has evolved a multi-pronged strategy to tackle the question of caste and reservation. Three decades ago, the Sangh brigade was known for its strident anti-reservation stand when the VP Singh government had first announced its decision to implement some of the Mandal Commission recommendations. But over the years, the Sangh brigade realised the futility of opposing reservation and instead began to specialise in using caste as a tool of divisive social engineering by pitting one section of OBCs against another. Ahead of the 2024 elections we even heard Mohan Bhagwat try and persuade upper caste Indians to accept reservation for 200 years to end the discrimination that lower castes have had to suffer for 2000 years.
Coming from Bhagwat this talk of two thousand years of caste oppression sounded like a belated confession after decades of denial. Now in power, the BJP of course has better means of truncating and negating reservation - by playing around with the system than by calling for its outright abolition. From the introduction of exclusive upper caste reservation in the name of EWS quota to leaving the SC/ST/OBC quota unfulfilled through the rampant use of the fake and flimsy 'NFS' (not found suitable) excuse to the outright circumvention of reservation by provision of ‘lateral entry’ and indiscriminate promotion of privatization, the Modi government has devised multiple ways to subvert the very system of reservation.
Yet the demand for caste census seems to have rattled the RSS. Afraid that a caste census will unleash the demand for fair representation in all institutions and spheres of society, the Sangh brigade seems desperate to discredit the very idea of a caste census. According to the Panchajanya editorial, caste is Hindu religion, caste is Indian nation and castes are all united in a harmonious order. But if caste is so central and omnipresent, why is the RSS afraid of an updated caste count? Because caste – along with gender - is the biggest marker of social inequality and imbalance in India. Just as the Sangh propaganda wants to hide India's obscene economic inequality by pointing to the overall size of the Indian economy, it wants to suppress the utterly skewed nature of social representation by selling the fiction of caste as the building block of a harmonious and cohesive social order and national entity.
Like caste, the Sangh-BJP establishment is equally defensive about India's crony capitalist order. Every question about Adani's meteoric rise and monumental corporate fraud and the central role played by the Modi-Adani nexus behind the phenomenal concentration of wealth and public assets in the hands of the Adani group is sought to be silenced by branding it as an act of anti-India conspiracy. The Adani-Ambani stories are essentially about state-sponsored aggressive accumulation of wealth and obscene exhibition of opulence, yet the Sangh discourse celebrates them as great national achievements and invokes these examples to hide the fact that if the richest five percent are removed, India's per capita income is on par with some of the poorest nations of the world. Indeed, caste and crony capitalism define the most telling trajectories of India's acute social and economic inequality, but to the Sangh vision of India, these are the two pillars of India's social stability and economic development.
This Sangh vision in which inequality is celebrated as an Indian success story runs absolutely counter to Ambedkar's egalitarian vision of India as a democratic republic based on the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity where the three features constitute an integral whole. For Ambedkar, the biggest threat to the political equality of 'one vote, one value' lay in India's deep rooted social inequality and growing economic disparity, and caste was the biggest impediment to the development of India as a unified modern nation. And here is the RSS which treats caste as the fundamental source of India's stability and strength.
However much Modi may pay lip service to the Constitution, the RSS worldview remains fundamentally opposed to the constitutional vision of justice and equality without which there can really be no united modern India. It was inspiring to see that the outrage against the horrific rape and murder of a young Kolkata doctor triggered statewide protests in West Bengal and countrywide solidarity, with the Independence Day eve observed as an unprecedented collective assertion of freedom for women through dozens of "Reclaim the Night" protest assemblies and loud "we want justice" chants. Independence today is not about remembering the past, it is about fighting for securing our constitutional goals and rights and India will have to decisively defeat the RSS design to march forward as a democratic republic.
