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From Global Ambedkarites, a US Ambedkarites Collective :
Ambedkar International Mission(AIM), Ambedkar International Center(AIC), Begumpura Society, NY, Boston Study Group(BSG), Ambedkar Association of North America(AANA)

Global Ambedkarites demand urgent attention from the government of India on the death threats of Prof Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

It is with grave concern that the Global Ambedkarites — a collective of several Ambedkarite organization in North America notes the recent updates on the violation of constitutional rights by the Indian state.

The murder of rationalist and freethinking individuals starting from Dabholkar, Pansare, Kalburgi, Gauri Lankesh, Shantanu Bhowmik and now death threats to Prof Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd evidences the retrogressive policies of the Indian government. Repeated death threats and cowardly attacks on a leader of the academic world is alarming. We are concerned about this situation, and so is the world.

Prof Ilaiah Shepherd is India’s leading critical thinker and an authority on religion, caste, communalism, social-cultural politics of India among others. His established rapport and best selling scholarship has added value to India’s academic scene world-wide. His recent work, Samajika Smugglerlu Komatollu is of immense value to understand the caste derived modes of class oppression. We congratulate him for producing such an outstanding body of work.

Prof Ilaiah Shepherd is also a notable activist of Dalitbahujan and minority rights cause who has upheld the constitutional principles throughout his life.

The present BJP government, backed by a Hindutva outfit RSS and its allied organizations, came to power by proposing development models as a way to solve India’s problems. However, its failure to comprehend with its goals — of return of black money, secularism in India, protection of the SC/ST/OBCs, minorities among others has put the future of the present government into question. It is therefore now actively seeking to sell lied promises. These blemishes were exposed by the courageous commentators and activists that cost their lives.

The government has to firm up its role in protecting its citizens who do not agree with its Brahminic models of governance. It has to work closely with the critics who have immense potential to contribute to the overall development of government’s mandates.

Failure to do so will lead to further tensions and unrest in the Indian socio-political space. It will also suggest government’s ghastly failure to outperform its promises. We are watchful over such incidents and are ready to take the government that is selling out to the Brahminic and Capitalist forces of power, all at the cost of poor and subaltern citizenry, to the international courts for justice.

The Global Ambedkarites calls upon the government to ensure the safety, dignity and security of Indians as the highest priority.

We send our love, strength, and regards to the profound courage and infallible thoughts of Prof Ilaiah Shepherd and all the dissenting academics invested in researching the rational truth and historical pragmatism.

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Author: Dr. Suraj Yendge, Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

The murder of Masonda Ketanda Olivier, a 24-year-old Congolese student studying in Delhi, is a reminder of how deeply intolerance and lack of empathy are rooted in our psychosocial make-up. It also suggests how much India as a State needs to explore the possibilities of educating its gullible masses on the cultural significances of tolerance. India, which is still grappling with caste prejudices, is yet to mentally break free of the European constructs of pale dominance/White supremacy and the non-personhood of the darker-skinned. The ethnocentrism of race combined with a virulently casteist culture creates a deadly environment for African immigrants.

What’s up with Indians in relation to Black people?

It isn’t just racist attitudes that are at the crux of this predicament. It is an extension of ignorance, a lack of access to other world cultures that creates an insular bubble where casual racism and anti-Black sentiments are repeated ad nauseam. Urban, middle-class Indian society is hungry for Western pop culture, but it has not shown the same receptiveness to even tepid Western liberal attitudes that pay lip service to the problem of racism. Instead, this section of society continues to peddle lame propaganda about Sanskritised ideas of “Indian culture” and invokes narcissist nationalism at the drop of a hat.

 ” While there are active campaigns in India that challenge the cultural disparagement of darker skin, these do not take into account the stubborn casteism at the core…”

The ultra-racism in India is closely intertwined with the wretched caste system. The internalized violence is reinvigorated and reproduced through the repetition of xenophobic stories, where an easy scapegoat is the darker skinned foreigner. Experiences of race and caste have in common the perpetuation of violence, perpetrated with impunity, against an “inferior being”.

While there are active campaigns in India that challenge the cultural disparagement of darker skin, these do not take into account the stubborn casteism at the core of this phenomenon. We need to come to terms with the fact that people are discriminated against not solely on the basis of their complexion, but caste, a marker of which is often colour.

The foreign policies of post-Independence India were very much in the spirit of Third Worldism sans Europeanism that concentrated on the issues of racism. The powerful Havana Declaration of the Non-Alignment Movement’s (NAM) proclaimed its intention to ensure “struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, apartheid, racism including Zionism and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference, or hegemony, as well as against great-power and bloc politics.” India was an active party to this. However, these grand statements, which post-colonial rulers supported, concealed the social disparities that were rooted in the native societies themselves. Hence, the NAM debate on self-recognition and dignity translated into the self-recognition and dignity of the elite representatives vis-à-vis Europeans, rather than a genuine interest in uprooting the social hierarchies in their own backyards. It was dismally alienated from the everyday lived realities of native subjectivities. Caste, for example, was never part of the discussion.

In challenging the White dominance over the world, Indian critiquers comfortably assume the position of oppressors in their native society. One needs to implant a thorough critique of experience of living in a hierarchical society like India. Once these layers are teased out, then only will we have the flexibility to argue for the equality of all.

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Racism: A subconscious, conscious act

To understand the aggressive masculine violence inflicted upon easily targeted bodies, we need to reframe the focus on human consciousness. Discrimination goes deep into the subconscious; it may not even be apparent to those who harbour it. I’ve met many diaspora Indians in Africa. They come usually from the urban centres of India — Pune, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi, Chandigarh – and bring with them a sense of superiority. They use racial epithets casually — the vernacular usually has a generous lexicon for such terms. In jocular tones, they subject their African domestic staff and gardeners to racist insults. They speak of Africans as an “other” that lacks agency. The African is the problem — the thief, unacceptable, uncivilized. The metaphors of segregated domination persist in the minds of working professionals and skilled labour force arriving on African shores.

“The Trumpified nationalism in the US, the FPO in Austria, Jobbik in Hungary, BJP in India are providing fertile soil for growing forms of race violence.”

Very little, it appears, is welcomed into the sacred fortified spaces of once-a-week fasting Indian families. Even Gandhi, it is apparent from the book The South African Gandhi was immune to such proclivities in his thinking.

Racism is embedded in complex differences. Race, as Stuart Hall once commented, is an incomplete phenomenon. Frantz Fanon, a keen observer of racial dynamics in the intersectional conceptions of capital, gender, and colonialism observed race as a historically embedded category that has cultural specifications. The cultural construction of race has to do with the lack of acknowledgment by the oppressor (race). Racializing the ‘other’ strips one of human agency — often darker race is institutionalized in the pedagogic manufacturing of myths and narratives. These national mythologies are put into comparison with other cultures, trying to prove how much ‘our’ culture is superior to others.

The global xenophobia axisymmetric with the emergence of neo-nationalist ideologies is gaining increasing coinage. The Trumpified nationalism in the US, the FPO in Austria, Jobbik in Hungary, the Swiss SVP, Perus in Finland, FrP in Norway, FN in France and BJP in India are providing fertile soil for growing forms of race violence.

Courtesy: Source

 

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Author: Dr. Suraj Yendge, Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

After every reported Dalit atrocity, impassioned pronouncements are heard on the condition of Dalits in the public realm. Before we start rambling, let us practice speaking truth to the present — the moment we are all co-makers of.

” Those who claim a generalized, uniform Hindu identity are actually well aware of the non-existence of such. Caste is the real identity for a Hindu.”

The problem of Dalits is not the problem of/for Hindus. Those who claim a generalized, uniform Hindu identity are actually well aware of the non-existence of such. Caste is the real identity for a Hindu. That is why we rarely see Hindus marrying each other outside caste. It is the Jatt marrying a Jatt, Kokanastha Brahmin marrying another Kokanastha, or Kapu marrying another Kapu. Often, when a marriage beyond caste and sub-caste boundaries does take place, it is soon followed by news of an honour killing.

Political lead-err-ship

Indian parliamentary democracy is neither parliamentary nor democratic. How can one justify the over representation of specific caste groups in almost every corridor of Indian democracy, be it social, political, religious, cultural or media? Brahmins, for example, constitute close to 3% of India’s population. This caste group is overwhelmingly seen occupying important government positions in the legislature, in government services, academia. It enjoys absolute control over religious institutions and even dominates debates on the cause of marginalized people. Do we have a rationale for this kind of democracy?

In Modi’s cabinet and in all the other preceding cabinets starting from post-independent India, Brahmins occupied important portfolios. In India’s first cabinet, the overwhelming representation of Brahmins is incontestable — the first President, the Prime Minister and other important ministerial positions were seized by the demographically miniscule Brahmins. Clearly, Brahmins were overrepresented. Present conditions continue this shameful history. Look at various regional and national political parties… they are dominated by Brahmin leaders. The premiers of at least four states — Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Haryana — are Brahmins. This trend is replicated in the bureaucracy and judiciary too.

” The regularly aired opinion of the Guptas and Sinhas and Mehtas on the condition of Dalits is another perverted version of privileged caste rhetoric.”

Dalits on the other hand constitute close to 16.6% of the population. Due to the advantages of reservation, 84 Members of Parliament are elected to the Lok Sabha under the Scheduled Castes quota. If Schedule Tribes are added, the SCs and STs together form a strong contingent of 131 seats. Simple arithmetic suggests these MPs have the constitutional status to redeem Dalit-Tribal misfortune. However, owing to party codes of conduct they remain largely ineffective. The incapability of the MPs partly has to be blamed on the election process and the electoral system that binds the MP to party protocols and answerability to the chief whip, who usually belongs to a privileged caste. Thus, important and timely deliberations by willing Dalit MPs are often curtailed. Ask individual Dalit MPs in person and they will lament over such malpractices. Thus, the only democratically accessible recourse for Dalit liberation — Parliament — is obliterated. The ineffectiveness of the Poona Pact is all too obvious.

Toppling the edifice

India has a strong culture of perpetuating violence upon its “second-class citizens”. The beliefs of the larger culture are reiterated in everyday acts. To counter this, a call for an oppressed caste revolution has to materialize. If society and the State want to address the question of caste, then they have to discuss it not only in the context of Dalits but also in terms of those reaping the benefits of it. Who is benefitting from the hierarchal organization of Hindu society? Which are the groups enjoying unquestionable authority for centuries and who wield disproportionate control over the spaces of religion, polity and economy? The regularly aired opinion of the Guptas and Sinhas and Mehtas on the condition of Dalits is another perverted version of privileged caste rhetoric. It is merely gossip that subsumes the gruesome experiences of Dalits without acknowledging self-privilege. It distorts a view of the ideal panacea.

The Dalit is an isolated impediment. The Dalit is the “them”, the “other”. Hindus who expound on the great Indian ethos are actually referring to the greatness of Brahmins and other allied castes. That is why when the privileged castes talk about working for the nation, they do not refer to abolishing caste. Because the subjects of caste — the Dalits — are not in the realm of their nationhood.

Caste India can never be a utopia. If caste exists, then the onus is on silent beneficiaries to take simple steps to abnegate from partaking of it. Here are a few suggestions to banish caste in addendum to The Annihilation of Caste, since many are talking about it without offering workable solutions:

  • Exchange occupations to topple caste structures in society. Let the religious institutions and other spaces of power be overtaken by those usually at the receiving end. Let the “humiliating” jobs be taken by the Brahmins and other allied castes. This experience will help drive in an understanding of the brunt of being in a caste Hindu society.
  • Submit property to the land labourers who have been toiling for generations for meagre wages.
  • Give Dalits their due share in every dimension of society.

Being Dalit is being urgent. Being Dalit is being now. The Dalit problem needs to be addressed without further ado. To annihilate caste is to abandon caste privileges. Let’s start the story anew. Let all means of productions be distributed equally without any dividend frauds. If you think these suggestions are farfetched, then stop the empty chatter of a caste-free India from comfy quarters besmirched only by the ruinous inheritance of monstrous guilt.

Courtesy: Source