False Economy - Alan Beattie [145]
Some of the most famous independence leaders also had an ambiguous attitude toward caste. Outside the four varnas lie two other groups: the "untouchables," today generally known as Dalits, a caste below the four others; and the "tribals," people outside the caste system altogether. These two suffered the most disadvantage and discrimination. Historically confined to unpleasant, low-status jobs, often shunned by higher castes and denied access to village wells and other public places, they were also routinely deprived of education. It was estimated in the early twentieth century that only 0.13 percent of Dalits were literate. The British had created an extensive Indian civil service, staffed for the main part by Indians, but it drew disproportionately from the higher and better-educated castes, further entrenching their privilege.
Mohandas Gandhi, the most famous independence leader of all, decried the concept of untouchability as a stain on Hinduism and renamed the caste Harijan, or "Children of God." Yet his solution was religious, not political: he aimed not to abolish caste but to raise the status of untouchables within the faith. Gandhi still defended the concept of varna classifications for providing essential order to society. So-called uplift campaigners claimed to be agitating on behalf of Harijans but in practice frequently hectored them to clean themselves up and act more like their "betters."
It is a painful historical irony that the man who may unwittingly have helped to entrench caste into the politics of independent India was himself a Dalit and bitterly critical of Gandhi on the issue. B. R. Ambed-kar, from a modest background in an "untouchable" caste, managed to overcome huge educational disadvantages to earn a doctorate from Columbia University, in New York, before returning to India. By the late 1920s, having become a provincial legislator in Bombay under the limited self-government permitted by the empire, he became one of the country's best-known independence activists. In 1935, through the Government of India Act, the last big gesture of devolution before the end of colonial rule, the British created separate electoral representation for minority religious communities. Ambedkar demanded, and got, the same for untouchables.
This necessitated a giant census exercise by the colonial authorities, which listed nearly four hundred separate untouchable communities and dozens of tribal groups. From that colonial classification come the terms "Scheduled Caste" and "Scheduled Tribe," corresponding respectively to the untouchables and the tribals, that pepper modern Indian political discourse.
At independence, in 1947, the net results of India's history were twofold with regard to its economic and political future. One, a minority of Indians were literate; two, Indian society, apart from the divisions of religion and language, was splintered by hundreds of caste identities. The path India had taken to independence would shape the way it went thereafter.
The constitution of the new republic, which came into force in 1950, was drafted mainly on the lines supported by Jawaharlal Nehru, who became India's first prime minister. It was based on the rights of people as individuals, not as members of a community. The concept of untouchability was outlawed, and with the support of later legislation, the physical segregation of Dalits supposedly ended. But even with the best intentions, footholds remained that enabled caste divisions to predominate. The constitution, at Ambedkar's urging, enjoined the state to "promote with special care the educational and economics interests of the weaker sections