Caste
oppression in South Asia is a social evil whose depth and scale is at
once obvious and difficult to grasp. It is inseparably linked with
women's oppression on the one hand and the oppression of the rural
masses with regard to land rights on the other, and these three social
problems, together with the oppression of religious and national
minorities, form the main pillars of class society in the region.
Smashing the material basis of the caste system is a central task of the
Indian revolution.
Caste
in South Asia grew out of the archaic division of labor on which the
traditional mode of production was based. Today it serves to maintain
the remnants of that system in the countryside along with the modern
forms of exploitation that have by now eroded and partially replaced it,
while in the cities it plays an indispensable role in dividing the
working class. Despite the fact that many—and, in fact, most—of those in
the upper castes are poor or working-class, social power remains
concentrated in upper-caste hands, especially in rural areas where,
according to a recent report by an Indian government committee, "large
landowners invariably belong to the upper castes, the cultivators belong
to the middle castes, and the agricultural workers are largely dalits
and tribals."
Caste
is not class, but the caste system has the material function of
legitimizing the power of the exploiters and obscuring the common
interests of those whose labor they live off, and it will persist as
long as an exploiting class exists to wield it for this purpose. Doing
away with it will take an agrarian revolution, combined with the
qualitative development of all aspects of production so that individuals
and small groups are no longer driven to compete for scarce
resources—an impossible dream in a backward country subordinated to
imperialism. Only through proletarian socialist revolution and its
extension to the centers of world capitalism can the liberation of those
oppressed by caste ever finally be achieved. But only a party that puts
itself in the forefront of the fight against caste oppression and all
other basic democratic struggles will be able to lead the multi-caste,
multi-communal, multi-national proletariat of India to power.
The
institution of caste rests on women's oppression and the control of
female sexuality; in South Asia it forms an integral part of the
fundamental institution oppressing women, that of the family, which will
be replaced as an economic unit under socialism as its functions are
collectivized. Caste cannot simply be abolished, but a revolutionary
proletarian government will immediately proceed to dismantle the
material basis of the caste system and the family itself, while
vigilantly guarding against any remnant of caste oppression and
caste-based discrimination.
Marxists
seek to unite all workers across caste lines in common struggle against
their class enemies. This entails an ideological struggle within the
workers' movement against the caste-chauvinism and caste-based bigotry
that pervades South Asian society. While dalits and tribals, being
excluded from the caste system proper, suffer the worst forms of
segregation and stigmatization, they are far from the only groups to be
specially oppressed by caste. The great majority of Indians are born
into castes and tribes officially classified as backward or worse.
Dalits,
or untouchables, are those born into castes whose traditional
hereditary work, such as waste disposal, leather-work, and agricultural
labor, is classed by religious tradition as ritually unclean. Making up
one-sixth of the population, they are routinely segregated and
humiliated, and commonly subject to violence. The depth of this
oppression has kept dalits from joining the industrial working class in
proportion to their numbers. In cities most dalits do casual work if
they are able to find any employment at all, and in the countryside,
where the dalit masses are concentrated, they are overwhelmingly small
and landless peasants. There is also a proportionally small but
significant layer of urban petty-bourgeois dalits that has developed
over the last sixty years as a result of a nationwide affirmative-action
program called reservations.
Reservations
is a constitutionally mandated scheme to reserve seats in state-run
higher education and public-sector jobs for dalits and tribals. This
system, which faces periodic political attacks backed up by
mobilizations of upper- and middle-caste bigots, is a modest gain for
the oppressed won through the mass social struggle against British
colonialism. That this reform was intended to defuse further struggle as
well as to guarantee a national electoral constituency for the main
party of the Indian bourgeoisie does not make it any less supportable.
This is the only way any gains for workers and the oppressed are ever
granted under capitalism. At the same time, the limited reforms that are
possible under capitalism are not what revolutionaries fight for. While
defending the gains of past struggles, Marxists would raise demands for
open admissions in higher education and jobs for all at union wages which can only be achieved outside the framework of capitalism.
Reservations
has produced (and is now monopolized by) a so-called "creamy layer" of
educated, petty-bourgeois dalits. It is quite wrong to think that this
section is not oppressed by caste. To take just one illustration, the
journal Aspects of India's Economy
(summarizing the findings of the 2007 Thorat report) notes that at
"India’s premier medical school, the All India Institute of Medical
Sciences, Dalit students are beaten, physically tortured, humiliated,
insulted, and segregated into separate hostels by upper caste students,
and the top faculty encourage anti-reservation agitations." The dalit
petty bourgeoisie, having made substantial but narrowly rooted economic
gains and finding further mobility checked and real social integration
impossible, forms the main base of the bourgeois dalit parties.
The
urban petty bourgeoisie is an intermediate strata of small businessmen,
shop owners, managers, professionals, and bureaucrats that is
distinguished from the two main classes in modern society, the
bourgeoisie who own the means of industrial production and finance and
the proletariat who live by selling their labor power for wages. There
is no contradiction in the idea of a party based in the petty bourgeoise
being a bourgeois party: i.e.,
having a pro-capitalist program and administering the capitalist state
when in power. As explained by the Trotskyist militants of the
Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India in 1941, "[b]ecause of their position
of dependence on the capitalist class, and in the absence of a real
challenge to their leadership from the proletariat, the various elements
of the urban petty bourgeoisie and of the petty-bourgeois
intelligentsia have always played a satellite role to the bourgeoisie."
(Actually, it's quite possible for a bourgeois party to be based in the
working class when the mass organizations of the workers are under
pro-capitalist leadership, the British Labour Party being one example.)
Marxists
would give no support of any kind to capitalist parties claiming to
represent dalits, whose petty-bourgeois cadre exploit caste solidarity
to tap into the enormous vote bank of the masses of dalit poor with whom
they have no social contact. In Uttar Pradesh, a backward, populous
northern state where dalits make up an unusually high proportion of the
population, the dalit-based Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) has come to power
four times in the last decade and now rules with a narrow majority, led
by the country's first dalit woman chief minister, Mayawati Kumari. The
BSP has made electoral alliances with Brahmin chauvinists and the
fascistic Hindu right, its coalition partner in three previous
governments. In 2002, nine months after 2,000 Muslims were massacred in
Gujarat by state-sponsored Hindu-right death squads, Mayawati campaigned
for the chief minister who oversaw the killings. Under Mayawati, Uttar
Pradesh continues to have the highest rate of anti-dalit atrocities
(lynchings) in the country. Her government dismisses dalit cooks from
schools when the parents of caste-Hindu students complain and bulldozes
settlements occupied by poor dalits and Muslims that it decides are
illegal. Like all bourgeois political formations, the BSP exists to
uphold the class relations that create the conditions for caste
oppression, and like caste-based parties of any kind it perpetuates
divisions in the working class and contributes to the hardening of caste
lines generally.
The
way for revolutionaries to politically undermine the corrupt and
reactionary pro-capitalist parties pretending to represent the interests
of the dalit masses is to make themselves the best and most consistent
fighters against caste oppression.
They would educate workers and raise their consciousness to oppose any
manifestation of bigotry or caste privilege within the labor movement,
explaining that caste divides the working class in the interest of the
class enemy. They would call on unions to make special efforts to
recruit and train dalit and low-caste workers. They would call on the
labor movement to organize the unorganized, including casual workers and
the unemployed, many of whom are dalits and women—these workers should
be seen not as competitors but as allies in the class struggle.
Revolutionaries in India would organize labor-based actions in defense
of the rights of dalits and other backward castes and tribes and take up
the legal and social defense of victims of caste oppression at the
hands of casteist thugs or the capitalist state. And at every point they
would explain that real liberation from caste oppression can only be
achieved through international socialist revolution and the resulting
egalitarian order founded on abundance.
Proponents
of petty-bourgeois dalit politics claim the legacy of B.R. Ambedkar,
who emerged as a spokesman for the rights of untouchables during the
independence struggle. A bourgeois liberal reformer and confirmed enemy
of Marxism in both theory and practice, Ambedkar charted an erratic
political course, collaborating at various times with the Stalinists and
the colonialists, sometimes seeking to organize dalits separately and
sometimes together with other laborers and poor peasants on an
ostensible class basis. Despite his having been a bitter opponent of
Gandhi and the upper-caste-led Congress Party throughout the struggle
against colonialism, he was invited to join the Congress government as a
law minister and drafted the Indian constitution. It should be noted
that a few weeks after Ambedkar was appointed to Nehru's government, its
army intervened in the state of Hyderabad to crush the heroic Telangana
peasants rebellion. Though confined to the countryside, subordinated to
the interests of rich peasants, and betrayed by its Stalinist
leadership, this movement mobilized the rural masses against the
landlords and their state-sponsored militia to seize feudal estates and
do away with the caste-based bondage of labor under the vetti system.
However,
those who recognize the centrality of the caste question in India and
the simple fact that Ambedkar was the first and only national figure to
consistently raise it (if only within the limits of a bourgeois
framework) must acknowledge that he made a contribution. In fact it is
one that the left in India has not assimilated to this day. So without
giving any political support to either his program or his actions as a
bourgeois politician and government official, Ambedkar can be valued as a
personally sincere and frequently powerful spokesman for the oppressed
and as an outspoken critic of the high-caste-dominated Congress Party on
this question. This assessment of Ambedkar's historic role emphatically
does not
extend to those who now claim his legacy while peddling petty-bourgeois
quota politics. Those attracted to Ambedkar's perspective of the
"annihilation of caste" should take up the only program that can
actually realize it, that of international proletarian revolution.
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