Casteism has been a problem in India, and it continues to
be so in certain quarters. No impartial observer will
disagree with that statement. What I personally find
ironic is where such attitudes are found: not only amongst
the usual suspects, but amongst the angels, as it were,
too.
Here I mean 'casteism' in the broad sense of the term,
where people are discriminated against on the basis of
some wholly arbitrary criterion which may have nothing to
do with their contribution to society or worth to mankind.
Incidentally, I have to confess my own failings in this
regard -- I generally support, as a matter of principle,
the causes of "lower-castes"; and I have spoken up for
Rabri Devi in a previous column (Speaking of Women). I
have now come to the sad conclusion that Rabri Devi and
her husband Laloo Prasad Yadav are intolerable. Sigh! One
lives and learns.
If I am not mistaken, there is a short fable by Count Leo
Tolstoy by the title What is the value of a man's life? I
vaguely remember something about angels and so forth -- I
studied this in school quite a long while ago. But the
upshot is the splendid moral that we are all born with
equal rights as human beings. As of course, the American
constitution grandly proclaims this, too -- something
about the self-evident proposition that all men are born
equal.
This is magnificent philosophy, you might say, but we are
painfully aware that things have not been that
straightforward in practice. To quote Kerala: Radical
Reform as Development in an Indian State, a fine short
report with a strong left-wing orientation, here are some
of the trials and tribulations faced by the so-called
"lower castes" in Kerala a hundred years ago:
* "They were tied or bonded to particular high-caste
households for whom they were always on call as
labourers or servants.
* They lived on land owned by the master households and
could be evicted at will if they displeased them.
* They were forbidden entry into the main Hindu
temples.
* They were not allowed in the public markets.
* Neither men nor women were allowed to wear shirts,
blouses, or a covering cloth above the waist.
* They were forbidden to come physically within
prescribed distances of higher-caste members and
could be punished by death for violating this taboo.
* They had to use extremely self-debasing forms of
speech when talking to members of castes above them.
* They could not take water from wells belonging to
other castes."
Things are rather better in most of India now, at least
overtly, whatever people may feel covertly in the privacy
of their hearts -- and by all accounts, there is plenty of
communalism in people's minds. But overt casteism is,
shall we say, unfashionable.
So far, so good. But where is casteism 100% visible?
Surprisingly, it is amongst the self-proclaimed
'progressives' and 'secularists' of the English-language
media. The very last people one would expect to show these
biases, based on their pronouncements and frequent
displays of righteous indignation. But consider the
following facts and conclusions -- I have been studying
the media carefully during the recent uproar about alleged
atrocities against Christians. Also see Francois Gautier's
February 1 article in theHindustan Times and my previous
column, J'accuse.
In increasing order of 'caste', then, the media values
these:
* A dalit Hindu's life. On February 11, when several
dalits were murdered in Bihar (reportedly by the
right-wing Ranbir Sena), they were mere statistics.
21 dalits murdered, 12 dalits murdered, etc. Aren't
these real people who had real names, and real lives
and real relatives who mourn them?
* An Indo-American man's life. On December 4, 1998, in
Jackson, Mississippi, Charanjit S Aujla was shot to
death by six sheriff's deputies (see
http://www.iacfpa.org ). Aujla, working as a clerk in
a convenience store, was shot twice in the back of
the head. A man with no prior criminal record, a
husband and father who held a master's degree in
education, Aujla was possibly the victim of racism
directed at Indians -- after all, we are talking
about the racist Deep South of the US. Not a single
Indian newspaper reported Aujla's death. Nor did the
Indian ambassador demand an explanation from the US
government. Why not? Was Aujla the child of some
lesser god?
* A Hindu tribal's life. In the Observer of February 8,
I read about the Reangs, a group of Hindu tribals who
have been ethnically cleansed from Mizoram. According
to this solitary report -- I have seen no other
report on them elsewhere except the US state
department's report on human rights in India dated
February 26 -- 45,000 Reangs have been driven
forcibly from Mizoram, with the active connivance of
Christian missionaries. They apparently refused to
convert, unlike most other tribals in Mizoram, during
the recent conversion-spree that has made Mizoram
almost 100% Christian. (The US report coyly blames
'sectarian strife' for 30,000 Reangs being in Tripura
-- naturally they are unlikely to say American
Christian missionaries were on a Taliban-like
ethnic-cleansing spree.) The Reangs now live
miserable lives in refugee camps in Tripura and
Manipur. They tell stories of rapes, violence,
murder, torture. But this is not news for the
mainstream 'secular' media.
* A Kashmiri Hindu's life. On February 14, 5 people
were killed in Udhampur district. According to the
Indian Express, "several members of the minority
community, including a teen-age brother and sister
and a five-year-old, were hacked to death by
militants." The Hindu gave their names: "Ashok Singh,
Maya Devi, Mohinder Singh (5), Inder Singh." All this
in a short paragraph, in terse officialese. No
details, no anguished breast-beating. On February 19,
20 Hindus were massacred. Again no response. I combed
the Indian newspapers looking for the 'secularist'
brigade's responses. Not surprisingly, none came from
Shabana Azmi or Teesta Setalvad or SAHMAT. I have
seen Asghar Ali Engineer express his horror; that
marks him as a decent person.
* A Christian tribal girl's life. In late January,
there was a tremendous fuss made about how a teenaged
tribal Christian girl and her brother were murdered
in a forest. There were loud outcries about "yet
another atrocity directed at Christians." I am sure
the American ambassador took note. It was, of course,
explicitly blamed on Hindu extremists. Until, that
is, in a couple of days, it became clear that it was
the girl's Christian tribal uncle who had murdered
her. All of a sudden, nobody cared so much about the
dead girl! The news item and the anguish disappeared.
Odd, isn't it?
* A Christian nun's life. In the celebrated Jhabua
case, several Christian nuns were raped. This was
condemned, rightly, as an assault on women's rights.
But the religious angle (militant Hindus allegedly
raping Christians) was played up in a big way, until
it turned out that half of the alleged rapists were
in fact Christians. At which point the media started
ignoring the story. Another nun in Orissa was
allegedly raped by a group of men who dressed up as
women. Rediff carried a story on how this nun was
refusing to eat or drink, and was praying non-stop.
Then it turned out, on medical examination, that the
nun had not in fact been raped and her wounds were
self-inflicted or self-generated. There is a clinical
term for this -- hysteria, where a person develops a
physical symptom based on mental stress. Of course,
one could wonder about the mass hysteria on the part
of the media, too. Incidentally, there was an
infamous murder of a nun in Kottayam, Kerala, a few
years ago -- the Sister Abhaya case, where a nun was
found drowned in the well of a nunnery. (Other dead
nuns have turned up in wells periodically). Somehow,
this has not been considered newsworthy. I wonder
why.
* A white person's life. It is big news if a white
person dies in India. Of course, this may have some
scientific rationale: it has been calculated that
every resident of the US (of whatever colour) causes
35 times more damage to the planet's environment than
a resident of India. Therefore 1 American = 35
Indians. So if the dead white person is an American,
you have to give 35 times the importance to his/her
death. But here too I see disparity. There was poor
Christian Ostroe, a 25-year-old Norwegian tourist who
had spent months travelling around India, learning
kathakali for instance. He was generally sympathetic
to Indian culture. This, and the fact that Norway is
a relatively small nation, must have entered into the
calculations of the Pakistani-funded terrorists who
beheaded him in Jammu and Kashmir in 1994. For some
reason, the Indian media was strangely reticent about
this man's gruesome murder. No long eulogies, no
condemnation of the explicitly Islamic-terrorist
antecedents of the perpetrators. Shabana Azmi and
SAHMAT did not see fit to notice Ostroe. Some whites
are more equal than others, I suppose.
* A white missionary's life. Graham Staines' murder has
attracted tremendous attention. If Staines had been
such a great champion of the poor -- as alleged by
the press after his death -- why haven't we heard a
peep about him all these years? I suspect Staines was
just another missionary, doing some good, sort of
incidentally, but with the main focus being on
conversions. The deaths of Staines' young sons have
been roundly, and correctly, condemned. But then why
does Mohinder Singh (5) (see the bullet above about
the latest massacres of Hindus in Jammu and Kashmir)
not even deserve a paragraph for his short life, so
brutally extinguished?
* A Nobel Prize-winning white missionary's life.
"Mother" Teresa has been lionised beyond all sense.
The Marxists fell over themselves in their eagerness
to provide a grand Catholic funeral for her -- I
wonder who paid for all that pageantry: Indian
taxpayers, surely not the Pope. The irony of the
Marxists supporting a competing religion so lavishly
must have been lost on them. There is also a
dissenting opinion, for example from Christopher
Hitchens writing in The Nation, a seriously
'progressive' US journal: see Ghoul of Calcutta and
Mother Teresa on a Roll
(www.thenation.com/issue/970317/0317hitc.htm). He
wrote the book The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa
in Theory and Practice (see also an interview with
Hitchens at
www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/hitchens_16_4.html)
and consulted on the related film made for the BBC by
Tariq Aziz, where the soon-to-be-sainted MT does come
across extremely poorly. For some reason, the
Nehruvian Stalinists in the Indian media have chosen
to ignore the famously 'progressive' Hitchens. And
why Baba Amte, who has done more good with no fuss,
gets no Nobel Prize nor any press coverage is I guess
not very mysterious -- he's a brown guy, and horrors,
a darned devil-worshipping Hindoo [sic] at that!
Christopher Hitchens is a real secularist -- in that he
objects to all religions. In addition to his objections to
MT above, he recently participated in a Berkeley seminar,
where he roundly criticised Buddhism; I have no doubt that
he views all religions as undesirable. This sort of
secularism -- equal objection to or equal support to all
religions -- is acceptable. But the 'secularists' of India
only believe in putting Hinduism down. That is probably
why they don't like Hitchens.
The 'secular'-fundamentalist casteists in the
English-language media put even Bill Clinton to shame in
their thick-skinned hypocrisy. Doubtless, they will
continue to indulge in their one-sided and casteist
reporting, despite all their loud protestations about
human rights and other motherhoods and apple pies.