The West is coming to terms with racism, but India continues to block discussions on caste discrimination. By Kancha Ilaiah in the Deccan Herald. Read the full article by clicking here
In the last week of February 2007, the UN Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) held a meeting to discuss whether the question of caste discrimination should be treated on par with race and racial discrimination.
India sent a team that included Deepankar Gupta, a JNU based sociologist, to give his neutral expert opinion. This expert, it appears, argued that caste discrimination is not equivalent to racial discrimination and therefore the UN should not have anything to do with caste discrimination.
His stand was that caste is India’s internal matter and it would work out its ways and means to solve that problem. This has been the stand of some such well-known upper caste sociologists even in 2001 when the UN was proposing to include caste discrimination in the agenda of the Durban Conference. Thus, there is consistency in their approach. But that consistency itself is based on the conspiracy of the Brahminic ideological hegemony. There is also dualism in their existence and consciousness.
In a recent debate about racial discrimination against Shilpa Shetty, when she participated in the Celebrity Big Brother programme of UK, there was enough elite and intellectual protest against Goody’s language of racism. Our newspapers wrote several editorials and our TV channels conducted a series of discussions on the racist culture of the West. Our External Affairs Ministry took up the matter with the British government.
Why were our upper caste elite so angry and upset with mere racist comments of just one white woman against an elite Indian woman? Quite interestingly the British mass were as angry as the Indian elite were and voted Goody out of the contest. They not only did that, but voted Shilpa as the winner of the contest. They proved that Britain has a great positive will and anti-racist consciousness to wash its own sin. Do the Indian upper castes show the same grace and vote out the casteists, who practice untouchability and casteism?
No historical hegemonic force will enhance the strength and vision of the nation if it does not show the grace and sense of shame and guilt for the crimes it committed against its own people. Of all the nations in the world, India is the only country which does not have any sense of shame and guilt for continuing the practice of caste and untouchability. Look at the American white media’s treatment of Barrack Hussein Obama, the first ever black planning to contest for the Presidency. The Time magazine, before even he started dreaming about being the nominee of the Democratic Party, projected him with a cover story The Fresh Face with his full cover page photograph.
There is a feeling of guilt among the American whites that they could not make a Black president so far. It was with this sense of shame and guilt that America, Britain and other European nations allowed the racial discrimination question to be part of the UN agenda. After all, the whole white racism discourse is against the Euro-American whites and their racist life processes. And they were the ones who headed the UN bodies when the UN resolved to admit the resolution to make a frontal attack on racism.
No American sociologist went to the UN forum to oppose the racial discrimination being taken up by the UN. Even the worst of sociologists, who supported the agenda of Klu Klux Klan, also did not dare to go to the UN to oppose racial discrimination. But Indian sociologists never became part of the movement to combat casteism. On the other hand, they quite shamelessly argued that caste and race are different things and they should not be confused with one another.
Now, a senior professor of the Jawaharlal Nehru University goes to the UN to oppose the inclusion of caste discrimination in the UN agenda. In fact, JNU should be ashamed of having a so-called leading sociologist of this kind on its rolls. Not that one would oppose any academic’s freedom to have one’s own views. But one who is known as progressive doing this kind of reactionary representation to oppose the rights issue of untouchables going global is being a green snake in green grass.
Why do some of these so called Left and democratic academics take this position and oppose the caste question getting addressed by the UN bodies? They simply want to follow the orientalist methodology and do not want to see what is the sociological reality around them.
The much bigger question is why the UPA Government that claims to stand for democratic and secular values is opposing caste discrimination being taken up by the UN bodies? What is the stand of both CPI and CPM, who are part of this Government? If they think that the UN is an unnecessary organisation, why do China and other Communist countries remain in that organisation? If they too think like the NDA Government that opposed the caste issue being taken up by the UN at the Durban Conference on Racism and Xenophobia in 2001 as it was seen as a national issue of India, the same is true of the race problem as that problem exists in other nation states as well. Let there be one more round of debate on this question.
