HAF criticizing alleged Hindu Casteism. HAF should withdraw the report.
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HAF criticising alleged Hindu Casteism. HAF should withdraw the report.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Forwarded herewith is a well-articulated monograph by Prof. Gautam
Sen ji (Special Rep, HDAS, UK) on the political implications of HAF
report on caste.
Methinks, HAF should consider withdrawing the report.
We don't need US Congress to adjudicate on matters concerning Hindu
samajam. Jaati ain't no human rights issue. Jaati is our social
capital, social security system. Hindu samajam is vibrant enough to
cope with socio-economic-political hurdles placed by motivated anti-
hindu hate groups. HAF as an advocacy group should stay focussed on
exposing these anti-hindu hate groups.
US Congress has no business interfering in Hindu affairs and we
should not walk into the trap of making them interfere especially in
the position of exalted judges who will judge us.
In Hindu tradition, jaati is a human responsibility issue, not a
rights issue. If there are issues of discrimination, the Hindu
samajam is capable of resolving the issues.
dhaynavaadaah.
- S. Kalyanaraman
--- Original Message ---
-Subject: HAF criticising alleged Hindu Casteism
-From: Gautam Sen
-Date: Thursday, December 16, 2010
The political implications of HAF on Caste and Hinduism
Any discussion on caste really pertains to India since it is of
marginal significance for Hindus in Europe and North America. One
must therefore provide an a priori justification as to why Indians
should be guided by measures recommended from abroad. This matter of
principle does not concern the substance of any recommended policies,
which may be good or bad, but the reason why they should be advanced
by Hindus from abroad, but adopted by Indians living in India. It is
a major issue of principle that cannot be evaded. And the fact that
it is easy to find Hindus from within India to offer validation to
proposals does not change the essential point because the initiative
lies abroad. Indeed garnering support from within India makes the
enterprise even more suspect as a consequence. My own concern is that
people living away from their homeland are necessarily susceptible to
socialisation by local ideological imperatives though it does not
mean every single individual succumbs. These ideological certainties
are likely to be hostile to the interests of their country of origin
and perspectives emanating from a locale like the US, which has
harboured incredible enmity towards independent India and continues
to do so, are potentially harmful as a result. One must therefore
exerciseb unusual caution although there is no good solution to the
issue since people of goodwill cannot be required to stop thinking
and writing.
However, I suggest that, as a matter of principle, any such attempt
to wade into issues with policy imperatives tagged onto them and
which might amount to injunctions or, worse still, diktats are
unacceptable. Only Indians living in India are qualified to initiate
and make policy for themselves because the outcomes primarily affect
them and that is the appropriate democratic procedure. And it is they
who have the right to make their own mistakes and experience their
own learning process. This is not to suggest that Indians abroad
cannot and should not hold opinions on subjects that interest them,
but it is beholden to them exercise more than a measure of self-
restraint when they take to preaching. And it is absolutely
imperative for them not to engage in cavalier fashion with issues of
paramount importance to people in India because that really smacks of
arrogance that could be regarded as stemming from the wealth and
status enjoyed by residing in a wealthy country as a professional. I
am one of these very people, who have lived away for nearly 41 years
and constantly write on Indian subjects. However, I regard myself as
a lowly foot soldier operating from what to me, metaphorically
speaking, is enemy territory and with due respect for those whose
personal interests are tied to Indian soil.
The issue that remains critical is the political context and the
consequences of particular debates and proposals. Nothing undertaken
is politically innocent and it is absolutely imperative to retain
this reality in mind when engaging with complex issues like Caste and
espousing positions and advancing recommendations. The issue of Caste
is a profoundly political question and not for the obvious reason
that it affects all Hindus in some way or another. Discussions on
Caste are, first and foremost, ideological weapons in the wider
struggle for political supremacy and domination between white
Christian nations, led by the imperialist USA and its victims,
Hindus. I do not mention Islam because its enmity towards Hindus is
unabashed and repeated in countless Pakistani and Arab publications.
The US and India have been at loggerheads since the early 1950s and
those unfamiliar with this history should desist from pontificating
on intellectual cleavages that are part of the arsenal in the
struggle between the Hindus of India and the imperialist USA. The
Church is a mere subaltern agent in this deadly contest for
domination and subjugation and primarily an instrument of State
policy, as it has been since the loss of its ability to dictate to
European States several centuries ago. The fact that individual
Christian participants in this arena may be morally upright and
motivated to spread the word god, though that itself is an expression
of sectarian intolerance, is irrelevant. The aggressive protagonist
is unfailingly the State and as it happens in this particular
competition, the US State. Hence, the idea that decent conduct and
carefully delineated argument will alter the course of this contest
is naïve in the extreme. The USA is a country that inserted live
snakes into the private parts of captive Vietcong women and has had
no compunction recently presiding over the murder of 1.4 million
Iraqis. Hindus are not special in any sense in their scheme of things
except that are proving difficult to subjugate, despite determined
efforts for over 60 years. If living in the USA makes it difficult to
swallow this harsh truth nothing more remains to be discussed.
Neither is the issue of who can presume to speak on behalf of the
Hindus of India is not an abstract matter of principle alone though I
regard the principle involved as paramount. It is a conviction that
stems from direct personal experience of the serious problems that
arise when Indians abroad seek to act on behalf of their brethren in
India. On two separate occasions, during the last decade or so, Hindu
activists in the UK sought to sign accords with the Anglican Church
concerning what legitimate forms religious conversion could take. I
was staggered when the already initialled document was sent to me by
a lawyer opposed to it. The document could have been regarded as
laughable had it not entailed the potentially serious consequence of
politically compromising Hindus permanently.
The accord amounted to acceptance of conversion as legitimate,
provided there was no coercion involved. Of course what amounted to
coercion was undefined and it contained choice phrases like 'freedom
to share one's religion', which is a standard Church code for
legitimating evangelical activity. There was no recognition that it
is the legitimacy of evangelical activity (as distinct from religious
conversion, per se) that is in insurmountable dispute, closely tied
as it is to coercion, when the latter is carefully enumerated. And
nor is it an established right under Indian law, though evangelists
constantly assert to the contrary. But this was being bartered away
by people who did not have command over the English language and
could not comprehend the many loaded phrases the document contained.
They were all virtually semi-literate, which I state as a matter of
fact rather than mere prejudice though I do not deny the latter
sensibility when dealing with such nonsense. The signing was vetoed
by the late Seshadri-ji of the RSS and I earned the ire of many
British Hindu activists. I subsequently learned that an American
Hindu 'convert' of some considerable public fame had been counselling
them to sign the accord. I therefore concluded he was an intelligence
infiltrator and that should surprise no one. Hindus are at war, a
reality difficult for many to swallow, and the enemy is engaged in a
no-holds barred effort to dis-empower Hindus. Caste issues are a
handy weapon being deployed by them as it has in the long history of
deadly conflict between Hindus and Christian militarism.
Let me add that virtually an identical attempt was made yet again in
the recent past by the very same people to sign almost the same
accord on religious conversion. This time it was unceremoniously
halted by an unambiguous imprimatur from the most senior leader of
the VHP. I am therefore led to believe that some of these earnest
British Hindus active in official bodies had been compromised by
local intelligence services (a good number are engaged in VAT fraud
and susceptible to blackmail) and/or in receipt of bribes from Church
quarters. Let me remind you once again that the most prominent Hindu
political activist in Europe had once publicly proclaimed that in the
event of war between India and the UK, Hindus should fight for their
country of adoption, Britain. I won't repeat my earlier political and
sociological analysis of this remarkable statement, but only point
out that any invasion of India, resulting from military conflict,
would occur with Pakistani help through Karachi and into Gujarat. It
is poignant to imagine members of Britain's East African community
emerging from barges en route to kill their own kin! The simple fact
of the matter is that there can be no dialogue with any Church
denomination or Islamic institutions despite the penchant of so many
Hindus for something called interfaith dialogue. Neither of these two
dispensations has officially and formally affirmed the legitimacy of
Hinduism and thus all interaction with them is in utter bad faith.
They first need to make a grovelling apology for their legion crimes
against Hindus and polytheists and amend their founding texts before
they dare engage us! And Hindus should acquire spiritual, political
self-confidence as well as the coercive means to dispense with the
need for certification from their duplicitous sworn enemies, the
Church in all its forms and Islam.
I regret that the HAF document fails in its basic duty of care
(reason enough to be struck off practising medicine for anything
analogous) and demonstrates a lack of essential knowledge and
elementary logic. The first and most blatant ideological difficulty
is that Caste does not define Hinduism, but the critics of Hinduism,
both Christian and Muslim antagonists and Hindus dependent on them
for their livelihood, have long defined Hinduism in terms of Caste.
It recalls a telling point made by Voltaire that the term Pagan, now
an established ascription, was never used by polytheists as a
description of themselves, but a term of abuse employed against them
by Christians. In this context, despite citing Nicholas R. Dirks'
important book you do not highlight his main contention that colonial
enumeration of Caste identities to categorise Indians, to better
exercise political control over them, hardened its previously fluid
boundaries.
Furthermore, HAF's eagerly announced opposition to Caste-based
discrimination, a phrase that recurs constantly in the text, is not
defined except to occasionally conflate it with untouchability. This
is very important because in all types of discrimination between
social groups, some are types of discriminatory conduct are unethical
and others illegal, but they are not identical and India has outlawed
virtually all conceivable acts of discrimination susceptible to legal
remedy. It appears what you might have in mind is more accurately
identified as segregation. Paradoxically, in opposing Caste
discrimination you are effectively opposing the positive
discrimination in favour of Dalits and other supposedly backward
groups in Indian society that dates back to the 1930s. All the
contemporary legislative discrimination (don't use a term that
instantly controverts your fundamental stance) is against the
demonised upper Castes, already in itself the counterpart of anti-
Semitism because of its egregiously indiscriminate and timeless
ascription of alleged crimes of oppression to whole groups of people.
No matter how impeccably an individual member of the upper castes may
behave in their personal life they are imputed the alleged
criminality of their forebears, stretching back to time immemorial.
This is how it was for Jews throughout their history, with
accusations of cannibalism to poisoning wells that ended in genocide.
You also appear to believe such Caste discrimination is widespread in
rural India, a typical urban prejudice though actual variations in
the prevalence of Caste consciousness are most clearly geographical,
least prominent in Bengal, the Punjab and Maharashtra and urban
conurbations increasingly.
The mundane and vicious politicisation of India's Caste politics,
long promoted by the very evangelists you approvingly credit with
mitigating Caste discrimination, has made a mockery of the carefully
engineered social change sought on behalf of Dalits by its original
protagonists, including the astute B. R. Ambedkar. Perhaps your
proposal to end all Caste discrimination is intended to favour
disadvantaged children of the fifty or so Brahmin public latrine
cleaners in Delhi who might then be treated like human beings and
allowed entry into higher education on par with those of wealthy OBC
Yadav ministers! Often their crime is to emerge from modest socio-
economic backgrounds to excel in public examinations, of which
Muslims complained bitterly even in the late nineteenth century and
demanded quotas. The assumption that Brahmins were always privileged
oppressors is an evangelist Christian libel that one should
absolutely refute without compelling empirical evidence to the
contrary. A study by Cambridge historian Anil Seal, a reliable
informant in this regard since he holds no brief for India or Hindus,
being unscrupulously hostile to them both, found that half the
Brahmins of Calcutta in the first decade of the twentieth century
were cooks, for reasons that were clearly religious in origin. But
hardly the profession of a powerful oppressor group, deserving of the
ugly pogroms that targeted Brahmins in Maharashtra after 1948!
But is there such ignorance that it cannot recognised that the same
Christian Churches that seek to deploy India's Caste fractures to
promote the political goals of their own home governments, had little
trouble with lynchings in the America south only forty or so years
ago and South African apartheid? Nothing Hindus have done compares
with the role of the Catholic Church in the genocide in Rwanda during
1994 and its massive perpetration of paedophilia across the world.
And why are Christians not demonstrating outside the White House
against the scale of imprisonment of African Americans within their
own Christian country instead of shedding crocodile tears about
alleged Casteism? The need for Hindus today is to be ruthlessly lucid
and politically focused in the way Stalin's generals were as they
faced the threat of physical extinction as a people and responded
with merciless determination against the Nazis as well as enemies
within.
It is imperative to note that Christian evangelists never refer to
the massive social changes that have overtaken India during the
twentieth century and the relentless efforts of Hindu reformers (many
of the them upper caste) for the upliftment of the downtrodden in
their midst, beginning with Gopal Krishna Gokhale (not Mahatma Gandhi
as it happens) and Ram Mohan Roy earlier. But the efforts of Hindus
themselves to combat the evil of untouchability and social iniquity
and the political empowerment of Dalits in Indian states like UP and
the fact of OBC-dominated polities across Indian is studiously
ignored. They are an inconvenient reality when the main purpose is to
harvest souls because Hinduism is beyond the pale and cannot do
anything for itself. And the moment Christians (or Muslims) are in a
majority in any part of India (e.g. Nagaland and Mizoram, parts of
Bengal) the celebration of Hindu rituals is prevented by armed gangs
of Christians and Muslims, their co-conspirators when it comes to
shafting Hindus! As one Mizo Christian woman in Delhi explained to me
politely last year: 'they are uncomfortable with the Hindu ethos'.
Church representatives in the UK and their shameful Hindu/Sikh
collaborators have been active since last year, seeking to outlaw, by
including 'Caste discrimination' (the very unfortunate phrase HAF
employs) within the all-encompassing Equality Bill that will conform
to a host of broader EU directives. Outlawing of alleged Caste
discrimination in the UK, for which there is no evidence whatsoever,
is clearly a conspiratorial prelude to its official repudiation by
the UN, a measure being mendaciously thrust forward by the deracine
ex-Hindu, South African High Court judge, Navi Pillay of the UNHRC.
One particularly malicious Indian member of the British parliament
has been mobilising alleged Sikh Dalits (a non sequitur) against
mainstream Sikhs, falsely accusing their Gurdwaras of 'Caste
discrimination' though Caste issues are of infinitesimal significance
within Sikhism. This vile conspiracy is not an accident or
misunderstanding since that is exactly what the Church has been doing
for centuries to demoralise Hindus and occupy their country
permanently. Ask yourself why Korean Buddhists, who have become a
minority in their own home, are up in arms today about the deliberate
abandonment of their public rituals in what is now effectively a
Christian country? For them it is always, 'I am the way' and the only
way! There is absolutely no point for Christian evangelists to engage
in discussion of Caste unless its enables the harvesting of souls and
the political subjugation of Hindus to white Christian imperialism,
namely the USA. I am waiting to have a Hindu from the US correct me
on this score by berating me for not recognising that these vicious
evangelists are only trying to reform Hinduism, an underlying
implication of the deeply troubling HAF praise for their work in
India.
The British and American governments have actively promoted
Khalistani terrorists in the past and their leader, Jagjit Singh
Chauhan, declared independence from British soil (the city of
Birmingham) the day Dhaka fell to Indian forces and the surrender
document was extracted from the defeated Pakistani army by General
JFR Jacob. Creating lethal divisions within Sikhism would open
another devastating front inside the Indian body politic on behalf of
Pakistan by its Anglo-American patrons. And I see no compelling
evidence of a change in Anglo-American policy despite the
expectations of many to the contrary in the aftermath of 9/11. In
case you are unaware, the Khalistani bombers who downed Air India's
Kanishka over the Irish Sea were sent from Pakistan to the US and
trained by the CIA (confirmed on camera by a senior CIA official and
the evidence is in the possession of the GoI). As a consequence, the
inference of one interlocutor that this flawed mea culpa on Caste
will prompt invitation to the HAF by the US Congress is naïve in the
extreme. The US Congress is an organ of a racist, imperial power and
their invitation to vicious nonentities like Angana Chatterji (whose
hostility towards US institutions does not deter invitations to the
US Congress because she is specifically tasked to undermine Hindus)
and John Dayal is not the product of ignorance or inadvertence. Such
anti-Hindu creatures are chosen with care because they promote an
evangelical agenda wholeheartedly supported by most US Congressional
members.
I am elaborating this material at some length because the political
context is vital when the real or imagined ills of a society are
publicly scrutinized in conjunction with third parties that are
actually your enemies. For the first time in its independent history,
the government of India has failed to officially oppose the
egregiously deadly proposal floated by the lowly Navi Pillay of the
NHRC to condemn Caste as a form of racism, presumably because India
has been seized by a Catholic dynasty from within. Is this the
company HAF has inadvertently ended up joining by virtue of sheer
ignorance and political cupidity? Is HAF unable to recognise that at
this moment Hindus are fighting for their very survival as a
religious dispensation under the shadow of the Nehru dynasty and in a
way that had not occurred even under the sword of Aurangzeb because
that asuric demon was successfully confronted on the battlefield by
Maratha, Jat and Sikh warriors?
White Church representatives are in Iraq and Afghanistan at this very
moment, supporting their own governments, engaged in something akin
to genocide in the case of Iraq, with a 1.4 million dead (John
Hopkins study, using US DOD methodology) owing to the Anglo-American
invasion.
It is worth recalling that the Archbishop of Canterbury's envoy to
the Lebanon in 1987 turned out to have been hand in glove with Anglo-
American intelligence services, held hostage himself when the
kidnappers of the journalist whose release he was sent to negotiate,
found a tracking device in his matted hair! The various Church
denominations are all pretty much integral to the Western state
system and their imperialist activities (is this something HAF
declines to recognise as a historical phenomenon?) and have been from
the time of Emperor Constantine. The Vatican was and remains a state
that had armies, participated in wars throughout its long and ugly
history and illegitimate heirs of supposedly celibate Popes often
succeeded to rule. Their great thinkers, including both Thomas
Aquinas and the dissident Martin Luther, approved torture and brutal
murder of apostates and pagans and that is exactly what the
Portuguese followers of the former practised with blood thirsty
enthusiasm on invading Goa, burning, flaying and spearing alive
Brahmins and their families with abandon. They were extinguishing the
leaders of Hindu society and then quickly enslaved the supposed
victims of Caste oppression once the conquest had succeeded.
Condemnation of alleged Caste oppression by a basically powerless
group, the Brahmins, living under the shadow of brutal Islamic rule,
was a handy ideological weapon. Today, the dominant political forces
in India are OBCs, Dalits and Muslims, for whom communists are quite
openly surrogates (Maoists praised the 26/11 massacre and only
regretted that Muslims also died) and the real nerves of political
power at the Centre reside with covert representatives of the
Vatican. The ideological ruse of denouncing Upper Caste oppression
remains alive and well though it is now couched in drawing room
politesse, but on the entry of imperial soldiery into a conquered
country old-fashioned mass murder, rape and mayhem will resurface.
To return to what appears to me to be the essence of the HAF's
apologetic mea culpa on Caste, which in the way it is articulated
seems not-so subliminally addressed to a racist Christian audience. I
use the term racist very consciously because I wish to counter pose
it ideologically to Caste though the latter is not its Hindu
counterpart as the repository of a virulent creed. White races still
wield most instruments of political, military and ideological power
in the world that imposes their hierarchic racist vision of social
and economic organisation. Although racism has gone underground
somewhat in the past two decades, supremacist racist ideology
absolutely defines Western European culture regardless of its
geographical locale and is always ready to reassert its inhuman
prerogatives. The reach of this self-serving ideological perspective
of a racially defined Western human architecture is almost universal
and not merely confined to white societies, which means that even
small town India has been penetrated by its pervasive distorted
ideological consciousness. Non Europeans unthinkingly echo and repeat
the dominant white ethos that affirms their own subalternity. Indeed
both Caste consciousness as well as the resistance to it derives from
the profound impact of colonisation itself. And virtually every
Indian social science academic in Anglo-American universities
constantly reiterates a critique of India and all things Hindu
prompted by the writings of British colonialists or American Cold
warriors. It is not so very complicated at all.
In this context it should be recognised that many of the documents on
Caste to be found on the Internet, adorning innocuous institutional
affiliations and titled academic respectability, seem to be generated
from the same evangelist database. I sense an echo of their
calculated machinations in the HAF report since they are easily
picked up by scribes looking for quotes and information with which
they are unfamiliar themselves. In addition, the paradox of the HAF
plea on Caste is that it espouses a set secular sentiments and
prejudices unconsciously inspired by socialisation within the
instrumental Western political paradigm of domination and its
associated intellectual milieu. And it seeks to validate them through
an extremely superficial reading of Hinduism and without any serious
grounding in the complex secular intellectual discourse on Caste and
practice that it wants to influence. Since others have pointed out
the gross intellectual failings of the HAF exegesis on Caste I
reserve myself to expressing surprise that the august experts, who
have supposedly examined it thoroughly, have made a multiplicity of
faux pas in their scholarship. Mention is made of M. S. Srinivas and
Nicholas R. Dirks on Caste, though why not the theorist G. S. Ghurye
is unclear, but nothing is said of their central contentions on
Caste, suggesting they have been cited to insinuate intellectual
legitimacy without really bothering with what they have had to say.
For example, Srinivas highlighted the fluid and dynamic essence of
caste as a social institution and also rejected the notion of a
rigid, pan-Indian caste system and these aspects of his analysis are
pertinent to the idea of Caste discrimination. The most elementary
blunder has been the failure to consult more widely, which suggests
both ignorance and over confidence. In passing it might be noted that
the literature on the phenomenon of white Christian domination I
refer to is vast and need not detain us here. However, anyone
interested might wish to consult Franz Fanon's writings and the Afro
American civil rights literature of the 1960s, all of which remains
imperative for contextualising the cynical discourse on Caste.
Dr. Gautam Sen,
President, World Association of Hindu Academics,
Special Representative, HDAS, UK.
16th December 2010
(Since the HAF document has disappeared from their website I have
been unable to re-check some specific facts that I become aware of
during my first encounter with it in entirety.)
End of forwarded message from S. Kalyanaraman
Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti