Jakob De Roover

Not so long ago I read an online exchange that went as follows: (a) “Indians are lucky to have had the British as their colonizers since the British at least had a moral compass, in contrast to the Nazi Germans.” (b) In reply, someone pointed out that the British colonizers were responsible for the suffering and death of millions of Indians, not only by killing and torturing people but also because of the Bengal famines of 1770 and 1943. (c) The author of the first statement (an Indian by the way) then replied that nothing happened in India under British rule that could ever compare to the Nazi concentration camps and the millions who suffered and died there; besides, he added, the British could hardly be held morally responsible for natural disasters such as famines.

I remember being angered by these statements but not being able to explain what was wrong with this contrast between the Nazis and the British colonials. Vaguely, I had a sense that the way in which the British dehumanized the Indians is of the same nature as the way in which the Nazis dehumanized the Jews, Gypsies, and other human beings. S. N. Balagangadhara’s recent post on this blog about the controversy concerning the statue of Subhash Chandra Bose opens a route towards addressing this issue: there is no experiential difference between the Nazis and the British colonials from the perspective of those who suffered at their hands. 

What does this entail? Well, if a people has experienced no significant difference between the acts of the British towards the colonized Indians and those of the Nazis towards the Jews, it is likely that there must be a structural similarity between these events. “But how could one equate the unequivocal horrors of the Holocaust with the record of British colonialism in India?” you might wonder. After all, the images of the concentration camps as the Red Army found them in 1945 are etched into our retinas: the gas chambers and the emaciated bodies, dead and living literally heaped together; the many movies and books about the Holocaust; these have become part of a collective memory shared by many. We hardly have such collective images of British colonialism in India, do we? Well, that is exactly the problem: whether written by British academics or their Indian colleagues, our historiography has mostly denied the experience of the colonized and thus denied access to it.

We need to look elsewhere for records of the images of British colonialism that will be permanently etched into our minds.  Since the British like to trivialize what they did as colonial rulers to human beings in other parts of the world, I want to share the experience of a continental European: the observations of Jacob Haafner, a Dutch merchant who was in Madras during the famine of 1781. Visiting Madras some years later, he mentions that the city still horrifies him because of “the terrible famine that the British had caused here,” whose traces he could still notice everywhere. This is a very long passage but, after reading it, I think you will understand why I wanted to translate it and post it here. These are the experiences that were later forgotten and denied:

“Even on the faces of the natives I thought I could see a kind of inner bitterness and deep sadness; it was as though they blamed every Englishman walking past them for the death of a father, a mother or a child. The hatred that I always had for the British seemed to grow even stronger here – walking among them felt like walking in a desert, surrounded by wild animals that can devour you at any time.

All the horrors that I had witnessed in this city once again appeared before my eyes. I remembered how the streets were teeming with living skeletons who, tormented by the worst hunger, were swarming around each other like ants. Especially here, on the big square, the worst of fear and despair flowed together, while wealth and abundance reigned inside the imposing houses. Nothing is as chilling to see as a slowly starved human being. The deep-sunk eyes, the hollow cheeks, the dilated nostrils, the curled lips showing teeth to their roots, the unkempt hair, the protruding sternum, the belly shrunk to the spinal cord, the shapeless kneecaps, the sharp bones, the nerves and muscles, only covered by the dry, wrinkled skin – all of this marks the doomed starveling. One saw thousands of such human beings walk around, young and old, man and woman. With their last strength, they had come to the square for alms from the rich, but the doors remained shut, so that one after the other collapsed. Dead bodies and those dying lay on top of each other as on a battlefield, from all sides one could hear the crying of the suffering; begging they raised their hands to the inhumane Englishmen on their balconies, who stood there revelling with their whores, and who made the hunger on the square even more unbearable because of the food they held in their hands – it was the image of the rich man and Lazarus, a shameful contrast with which no decent man can live.

Dying is nothing. But to see your wife, your children, your parents waste away from starvation, and see them die in terrible convulsions, that is more than dying. Oh! If only I think of the ghastly images that I saw in Madras, chills run down my spine. Never will I be able to forget them, the veil of time is unable to cover them, the sight of the thousands of human beings who died in terrible need still haunts me on sleepless nights.

But, one may ask, was it completely impossible to support these poor, innocent Indians? Were there no provisions in the city?

Oh yes! For those who had the money to pay the extortionate prices of the English and their agents there was food enough! The warehouses of the English Company and some English merchants were amply provided with all kinds of grains, sufficient to feed double the number of people who were then in the city and this for a longer period of time. The rich bought what they needed, but for the penniless Indians, who had left everything they possessed behind when they fled to Madras, there was no other fate but dying from hunger. No one cared. Their disastrous condition did not in the least impress the petrified hearts of the English, who made no attempt whatsoever to prevent the dying of these masses of people, and showed no compassion at all.

These Christians, who pride themselves on their humanitarian religion whose Founder embodied charity… alas, talking, singing or whistling they walked through the dead and the dying, with that rude and hurtful arrogance so characteristic of them. From their carriages and palanquins, they looked down on the perishing natives with a look of contempt, while the latter were lying in the dust, struggling with death, or convulsively breathing their last.

Seeing one’s comrades die on the battlefield without being touched by this, can be forgiven (the will to survive can make one insensitive temporarily), but to walk indifferently among thousands of moribund and dying human beings, that one can only do with the heart of… an Englishman in India. 

I paid close attention; sometimes I stood still for half an hour to observe the English passing by, and I cannot but declare openly that I saw no trace of compassion on the face of any of them, for the innumerable wailing beings lying on the ground before them. Even worse: I saw their ladies, those sentimental, tender-hearted creatures sit in their palanquins with the same cool indifference when they were carried right through this battlefield. Perhaps there were some among them who would faint at the sight of a spider or a mouse! Yes, I saw these European ladies strolling dauntlessly through this field of death, laughing, talking and frolicking with their company or lovers – shocking! 

And then the English are supposed to be a magnanimous nation of philosophers. Heaven knows how they got this name. In India, in any case, they are bloodthirsty tigers in human shape – if you really want to get to know them, you should go there.”

(My translation from Jacob Haafner, Exotische Liefde, Athenaeum, 2011)

S.N. Balagangadhara

There is a proposal to erect a statue of Subhash Chandra Bose at the India Gate and, expectedly, there are discussions about it. There are those who see the nationalism of Bose and then there are others who see a fascist in him seeking Nazi support. In the process of turning him either into a hero or a villain, I have yet to read anybody raise the following issue of importance.

In seeking Nazi support, is it possible that Bose was expressing our experience of colonialism, viz., that to us, the colonial subjects, there was no difference to be seen or experienced between what the British did to us over centuries and what the Nazis had done, were doing, and would do in the twentieth century? Is it possible that we could not differentiate between the British and the Nazis for the simple reason that there is no experiential difference between the two from the perspective of those who suffered at their hands?

That people do not seem to raise these questions in India while debating the statue of Bose is an indication of the impact of colonialism on us: this failure is a part of what I mean when I say that colonialism denies access to our experience. We cannot understand why Bose tried what he did. We fail even in asking this simple question…

by Sarah Claerhout and Jakob De Roover

Today, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the issue of a (lack of a) scientific mindset among the Indian people is omnipresent in the media. Almost everything that goes wrong in handling the crisis has been blamed on the absence of ‘scientific temper’ and ‘rationality’ in functionaries and uninformed folks. There is a hidden irony here.

During the 19th century, conversion crystallised as a theme of discussion in colonial India within the framework of a massive missionary-cum-educational project. The kind of debates about religion that the British missionaries, officials and orientalists were familiar with — e.g., conflicts about true religion between Catholics and Protestants in the post-Reformation era, disputations between Christians and Jews during the Middle Ages and later, controversies about heresy and apostacy — proved to be of no help as models in India. Missionaries soon began to admit that converting the heathen into the true religion did not happen as quickly or thoroughly as anticipated.

Regularly ‘surprised’ or ‘baffled’ by the arguments of Indian scholars, the British made sense of their experiences using the only way they knew: “The heathens lacked the right way of thinking about religion”. They believed that the deficient state of ‘the Hindus’ made the latter blind to the falseness and corruption of ‘Hindu religion’ and ‘superstition’. Neither explicit proselytising and preaching nor debates about religion had generated the desired result, namely, removing this blindness and creating openness to Christianity.

British missionaries and scholars identified a specific deficiency even among ‘the most learned of Hindus’ — a defect in the latter’s reasoning on matters religious. The gist of their analysis consisted of the following points: the ‘Hindus’ have not studied their religions well; they do not consider conflicting opinions about religion as problematic; they fail to see that Christianity and Hinduism are incompatible and that different religions cannot be true at the same time; they merely accept the words of their parents and priests on their say-so and do not critically assess arguments based on oral testimony and tradition; they do not ask for — or even appreciate — evidence of various kinds (e.g., historical, geographical and scientific) in matters of religion; they cannot think rationally, logically or morally about their traditions, deities and texts; they never test the credibility of traditionally-received histories.

This deficiency in the ‘Hindu’ had to be addressed to find a way of making Indians ‘see’ the falseness and corruption of their traditions. Indians needed to be taught to think the right way. And that is what missionaries and colonial officials set out to do.

From reason to religion…

John Muir (1810-1882), a civil servant and orientalist, wrote an important work called Matapariksha  that compared Hinduism and Christianity in a series of Sanskrit shlokas to point out to learned Indians the inadequacies of the former and the truth of the latter. In his introduction, Muir noted that his line of reasoning ‘will seem familiar and natural to the Christian reader’, but not to the ‘learned Hindus, who are not accustomed to see such rules and principles applied to test the credibility of traditionally-received histories, and the merits of theological doctrines’. In his book he developed a dialogical model where the opponent is slowly and patiently countered and convinced. Before gaining the ability to reflect and debate about religion, the Indians should first learn to reason in a specific way.

Another figure, the missionary John Wilson, believed the Hindus and Parsis had not studied (their) religion well and were far removed from true learning. From Wilson’s perspective, then, the problem was clear: the natives never asked for ‘evidence’ and simply accepted the claims of their elders and priests. Hence, he was convinced that the dissemination of true learning and evidence (not only religious but scientific also) would prove to be the death of the local religions. According to him, science would have the impact of showing to the Indians that their sacred texts are incompatible with true and superior knowledge and, therefore, must be false and could not be divinely revealed. This way of reasoning entailed an obvious solution to the ‘problem’, also promoted by Wilson: true learning “is doing much to overturn the Hindu religion”.

Via the route of education

One of the significant results of the 19th-century interaction was a fixation on the need for instruction, education and reform of the Indian population. Whatever the specific motives and contexts of individual authors, whichever their preferred terms and descriptions, the 19th century saw the percolating of the idea that the deficient situation of the Indians was related to their ‘religion’ and needed to be remedied by education and reform.

‘Evangelism, education and salvation’, Mark Chapman suggests, ‘came to be understood as aspects of the same process, which did not necessarily require explicit acceptance of Christian doctrines’. The preoccupation was to teach Indians how to deal with religion and related aspects of society in a better way. Writings on this subject repeated a specific set of ideas: true learning and evidence will counter the attitude of simply accepting the claims of parents and priests; teaching science will show the incompatibility between scientific facts and ‘facts’ postulated by Indian scriptures; true learning is needed to overturn the ‘Hindu religion’ and teach ‘the Hindu’ how to question and then to reject his religion; Indians should be trained in historical consciousness so as to distinguish between myth, fiction and historical fact; they should also gain proficiency in basic skills of reasoning and the rules of evidence. As some authors explicated, knowledge, including the sciences, would thus function as the handmaiden of true religion. 

One fervent advocate of this approach was James Ballantyne, the Scottish orientalist and principal of the Government College of Benares for many years. He was known for his respect for the best in ‘Hindu thought’ and was critical of the methods used by Christian missionaries, who, too eager to multiply conversions fell into the ‘imprudences which attend an unenlightened spirit of proselytism’. In his Christianity Contrasted with Hindu Philosophy (1859), he proclaimed that one should pin one’s hopes on the dissemination of knowledge. Pondering upon the goals of the British educational efforts in India, Ballantyne described the process as follows:

“Shall our absolutely ultimate end, then, be the production of a first-rate engineer, or of a valuable revenue officer, or of an accomplished native magistrate? With this I am not prepared to be satisfied. My proposed end is the making of each educated Hindu a Christian, — on principle and conviction. This end, as I propose here to indicate, implies everything that the amplest course of education can comprise. Let us trace the assertion backwards, — as thus. That a Hindu should on principle and conviction, embrace a religion which, like Christianity, bases its claims on historical evidence, presupposes not merely an acquaintance with historical assertions, but a cultivation of the critical faculty, so as that the force of the historical evidence may be intelligently felt. The immediate preparation for a critically intelligent study of history, is the study of Physical Geography.”

James R. Ballantyne, The Bible for the Pandits (London and Benares: James Madden and E.J. Lazarus & Co., 1860)

The goal of education in India was not to simply train the Indians in a profession, but also to make them Christian in ‘principle and conviction’. But embracing Christianity presupposes an acquaintance with ‘historical assertions’ and a ‘cultivation of the critical faculty’, so that ‘the force of historical evidence may be intelligently felt’, Ballantyne said, and this requires knowledge of a range of sciences.

This is the irony referred to in the title: in Europe, ‘religion’ and ‘science’ opposed each other. Locked in a seemingly endless battle, they allegedly became ‘mutually incompatible’. The irony in India is that the missionaries had to take recourse to science to convert ‘the pagans’ to Christianity. Thus, something strange occurs when Christians meet the pagans. (See Balagangadhara’s “The Heathen in His Blindness…”: Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion (2nd revised edition, New Delhi: Manohar, 2005).)

Scientific temperament

Let us finish by briefly indicating some continuities from 19th-century colonial India to the Indians of today. Most notably, English-educated Indians adopted a new way of looking at their traditions, texts and practices, as the colonial educators had intended.

First, they accepted terms such as ‘idol worship’, ‘religion’, ‘superstition’, ‘cruelty’, and ‘priesthood’ as valid terms to describe and denounce traditional practices. The implication was that these practices required reform. This situation is so extreme that some Indians now ask ‘why should we cede control over the word religion?’ ‘Religio’ is a Latin word and ‘religion’ is its English translation. These are the terms the Europeans used to describe Indians. Who holds which control over what?

Second, sections of the Indian intelligentsia learned to view the content of traditional texts in a particular manner:

• The texts were seen to comprise factual claims about the world. Some derided them because of their incompatibility with the facts of science and history; others defended them by looking for historical, archaeological, geographical, and scientific ‘evidence’. Here also, the attempt of the colonial educational project to make Indians see the conflict between ‘the facts of science’ and ‘the claims of Hinduism’ appears to have borne fruit.

• The texts were also seen to found actions and beliefs. Indians accepted the Christian notions that actions embody beliefs and are ‘prescribed’ by ‘religious’ texts, which the Europeans feverishly translated and interpreted. The hysteria that surrounds Manu and his smriti is a good example.

Third, there is a firm conviction among educated layers that the Indian people lack something essential: the spirit of inquiry and reforms should throw off the stifling hold of tradition and superstition. As Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in his Discovery of India (1946), ‘the scientific temper’ and its ‘refusal to accept anything without testing and trial’ should become ‘a way of life, a process of thinking, a method of acting and associating with our fellowmen’.

This is even enshrined in Article 51A of the Constitution of India which declares it the fundamental duty of every citizen ‘to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform’. In other words, the stance that British missionaries and officials sought to introduce as a necessary step towards dissolving the hold of ‘Hinduism’ and civilising and Christianising ‘the Hindus’ has been declared a constitutional duty in post-Independence India.

Today, almost every educated Indian connects the impact of the pandemic on India with a lack of a ‘scientific mindset’. This pandemic has brought the absurdities and foolishness of all countries and people to the surface. There is not a single country that can claim to have handled this situation perfectly. India is no exception. Europe has seen absurd protests against mask-wearing, a fixation on going on vacation abroad, and scepticism about vaccinations almost on par with American stupidity. Yet, it is only the Indians who constantly shame each other as people ‘lacking in scientific temperament’. With generous help from the media and its fondness for sensational and salacious stories from the exotic East, peppered with tired tropes of funeral pyres, cow-urine and gatherings of half-naked sadhus.

As Balagangadhara put it:

“Colonization was not merely a process of occupying lands and extracting revenues. It was not a question of us aping Western people and trying to be like them. It was not even about colonizing the imagination of a people by making them ‘dream’ that they, too, would become ‘modern’, developed, and sophisticated. It goes deeper than any of these. It is about denying peoples and cultures their own experiences; of rendering them aliens to themselves; of actively preventing any description of their own experiences except in terms defined by the colonizers.”

S.N. Balagangadhara, Reconceptualizing India Studies (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012)

[Based on excerpts from a forthcoming book Religious Conversion: Indian Disputes and Their European Origins, under contract for publication with Routledge.]

S.N. Balagangadhara on June 2, 2021

Replying to the question: “(a) Do you mean Islamic colonial rule affected our attitude towards knowledge (how we learn)? And (b) How do we fix the colonial era bureaucracy?”

To begin answering these huge questions, we must look at the world in terms of “tendencies” (both social and cultural) at a high level of abstraction. An example of what it looks like.

What did Islam do? It destroyed native intellectuals in India (the Gurus, the prajnajivis) and replaced them with Pundits (as the Buddhijivis of India). The colonial rule forced the culture to go into a defensive mode: protect, preserve, and transmit the traditions and not allow a disintegration of the culture. The pundits succeeded in doing this through their ‘shastric’ ways of teaching, which, among other things,  consisted of building layers of walls that prevented the impingement of forces from the outside world. Neither of the two colonialisms destroyed our culture because of what our ancestors did and how our pundits conserved what they inherited.

But this conservation, which turns inwards in the process of protecting a culture, also inhibits emergence of novelties. All research introduces novelties and ‘the shastriya’ prevents this. While this was necessary during the colonial rule, today, it is a big hindrance. We need, to use a phrase current today, lateral insertion here: an insertion of questions and stories from the western intellectual traditions into a process of the shastric education that bows down to Saraswathi, the embodiment of knowledge. Without it, the ‘shastriya’ will go the way of all has-beens, sooner or later. The British colonial administration introduced its education system into this defensive attitude against the Islamic colonial aggression. It failed: not spectacularly but with a whimper. Our current education system sustains itself as a social parasite that generates more parasites upon the organism that our body politic is. When an organism is overwhelmed by parasites, the way it is today, the organism dies. So will the parasites. That is the future for India without changes.

The bureaucracy is a structure on which society has been built. If it is not destroyed, our society will disintegrate and fall apart. One cannot destroy a social structure through a ‘lateral entry’ of individuals and groups of individuals into that structure. It will absorb and crush such insertions in no time, as people are discovering only now. To use a biological metaphor, such a structure must be (a) destroyed through necrosis (by starving it of its lifeblood) and (b) by building an alternative structure at the same time (in the same place) as the necrosis itself. As the corrupt and inept bureaucracy begins to die, a healthy and new structure must begin to take over the functions of holding the society together. To understand how this is to be done, we need people who have made it their ‘job’ to study the structures and institutions in societies and cultures. Such people exist (a few in India but mostly abroad). We must draw in such people, make them do the research and feed their results to those capable of initiating such changes in the society. They exist too. The problem is to bring these people together, which, given the current state of Indian society, is next to impossible. We will continue to produce “mouse charmers” (instead of “snake charmers”) long after the world does not need people to write independent mouse drivers to use a mouse. Today, already, the OSes take care of using the mouse to navigate. But we are still busy creating IT institutions that teach our students to write bad mouse drivers and shout about our “soft power”.

S.N. Balagangadhara on June 2, 2021

Responding to the statement: “Indian culture lacks free independent thinking and discourages innovation.”

In order to think in a serious fashion about the current Indian situation, you better begin taking the comment seriously (with some nuance about ‘culture’ though).

In the first place, this is what the British discovered about Indian students a century after they introduced the English university education in India. By the time they left India, they concluded that the university education had failed here. Indian students, they discovered repeatedly, were interested in acquiring a piece of paper (the degree certificate) and not in knowledge or research. (Please read the book by Sashikala Srinivasan, Liberal Education and Its Discontents: The Crisis in the Indian University, Routledge 2018, where she talks about the British experience, among other things.) It would be correct to say that the education system of India (of the last 200 years) “lacks free independent thinking and discourages innovation”.

The problems, however, do not begin with the British: they encountered this when they introduced scientific education. It was there for almost 700 years before that: the Islamic rule generated and cemented this over centuries. In this sense, it is now a part of Indian ‘culture’, even though our culture is intrinsically inimical to this tendency. How do we know this? Almost every Indian student who goes abroad is capable of doing (and does) original and interesting research. Had they stayed in India, they would have been unable to do this. You need to look at the number of Indian researchers in industries abroad (or in scientific institutions abroad) to understand and be amazed by this.

Those small groups of individuals (small in percentages but huge numerically), who are forced to go abroad because of the twin problems of the inept bureaucracy and reservation system in India, flourish and do research abroad. Those who are forced to remain in India (mostly) are either third rate researchers (not all but most) or stop doing research because of how India has developed since her independence.

Thus, a thousand years of “lacking free independent thinking and discouraging innovation” weighs on Indian students. Most industries do not invest in R&D: think of the auto industry before the so-called liberalisation of Indian economy when every few years Ambassador and Fiat cars would change front grills and present them as ‘new’ models or what happened to the Indian smartphone industry when the Chinese, the US and the Koreans entered the Indian market. Indian managers, ex-students from the Indian education system, find that R&D reduces profit and is inimical to quarterly results. (But they talk the management bullshit of doing R&D.)

Researchers, who remain in India, become n-th rate business ‘managers’ and follow the IAS bureaucracy that leads research institutions in India. Illiterate and corrupt people become ministers of education and slavishly follow the clerks (namely, the IAS) because that administration shows the way to become rich for these politicians. Neither scientific education nor the Sanskrit education goes beyond the strict limits drawn by 1000 years of colonization. (Yet, Indians excel when they go abroad for higher studies.) That is why Indian education will soon resemble Black Africa of the 1920s and 1930s.

This degeneration of Indian education system (that began under colonialisms) also seeps very deep into society. Most business firms want to make a quick buck: Indian business has the reputation of being dishonest, cheats, liars, etc. abroad. (Contrast this with how the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. business is known.) Because it is the dream of the youth to become entrepreneurs and begin start-ups, the ‘astute’ businessmen are being overrun by people who want to make a million by beginning a start-up with a “‘game-changer’ business plan”. I have lost count of engineers setting up SMBs, sending good products in their initial batches but sending cheap and defective products once they got the contracts. Most also have gone bankrupt.

Just when China and others (even Vietnam) are following the path of growth, India is very rapidly retrograding. In both classical and scientific education, we are producing incompetent people. If we do not change these processes urgently, we will only be left with loudly shouting ‘make in India’ and cheering the reservation system on. Every other good and beautiful thing will begin to disintegrate.

By M. S. Chaitra and Ashwini B. Desai

The recent judgement by the Supreme Court of India regarding the entry of women into the Sabarimala temple has generated an acrimonious debate in India. The secularists (a broad group including, feminists, liberals, leftists, …) believe that, if women of any age group are not allowed to worship Sabarimala Ayyappa, this action amounts to gender discrimination. Therefore, they believe it necessary to reform Hindu religion to ensure equality in worshipping Sabarimala Ayyappa.

In order to assess the claim about gender discrimination, one must examine what is believed about the rituals of Sabarimala Ayyappa. Every devotee knows that Sabarimala Ayyappa is ‘Naishtika Brahmachari’. That is, Ayyappa in Sabarimala follows a ‘Vrata’, namely a Brahmacharya of a kind. In Indian traditions, individuals often follow different vratas, which demand that the individual follows strict procedures of living in the world. For example, we are familiar with Rama, who was an ‘Ekapatni vratasta’: his vrata allowed him only one wife. In the same way, Harischandra was ‘Satyavratasta’; therefore, he was a truth-teller irrespective of the situation. In the same way, Brahmacharya is also a vrata. There are different kinds of Brahmacharya that are followed by different traditions. In case of Naishtika Brahmacharya, a vratadhari will not look upon women of a certain age, i.e. women of menstruating age, which is the case with Ayyappa.

This vrata is not ‘other’-directed but ‘self-directed’. That means Ayyappa does not have a problem with women. But because of his vrata, he will not look upon, meet and touch women of certain age. If one knows that his vrata is self-directed, how could this be a case of gender discrimination? Surely, Sabarimala Ayyappa can follow Naishtika Brahmacharya, if that is what he chooses.

In the agitations, one notices that women too are protesting the temple entry of women of a certain of a certain age group. Why do these women oppose enforcementof the law? Here is one way to make sense of their behaviour: if someone (like Ayyappa) follows a vrata, one should not disturb it. That means one should not wilfully bring about a vratabhanga (breaking the vow). For most people in Indian traditions, vratabhanga is a paapa and an adharma. Thus, women of a particular age do not go to this temple precisely because an Indian avoids disturbing the others’ vrata and thus becoming responsible for vratabhanga. No one belonging to the Indian traditions would call vratabhanga a ‘good thing’. Because it is an adharma, one does not consciously commit vratabhanga. A simple understanding of Indian traditions tells us that women do not go to this temple because it amounts to vratabhanga and not because of a male prohibitory order of Hindu religion; in fact, many people do not see this as a case of gender discrimination at all.

However, what happens when gender discrimination is alleged with respect to such a practice? In such a story it appears as though Ayyappa should seek ‘permission’ (whose?) before undertaking this vrata, which implies gender discrimination because he vows not to ‘look upon’ or meet women of a certain age group. Thus, the argument has to be that Ayappa’s vrata is bad or evil and, therefore, justice requires interfering in this practice to bring it to an end. This means that vratabhanga, which is considered as an adharma in our traditions, becomes ‘an attempt to enforce justice’ in the secularist arguments. Strangely enough, the Sangh Parivar, an organization which intends to protect and defend Indian culture, has fallen prey to the same story. The Rashtriya Swayam Sevaksangh’s  (RSS) executive body resolution and the subsequent statements by others have affirmed that not allowing women into this temple is unjust and must be reformed through dialogue in society. This essentially means Ayyappa’s vrata in Sabarimala is an unjust practice, and they want to reform people and their traditions such that vratabhanga rectifies the unjust and evil vrata that Ayyappa practices. That is, these organizations apparently believe that doing adharma is necessary to reform Hinduism and that encouraging people to do adharma and breaking vratas preserves dharma!

Further, many have argued that women have a right to worship and that women must, therefore, be allowed inside the temple. Though it is unclear what worship means in this case, the question remains: who has given this right and what exactly does it imply? In Semitic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), God enjoins human beings to worship Him in the ways that He instructs them. No human being has the right to interfere in the worship of the other.  However, we cannot straightforwardly translate Semitic religions to Ayyappa even if the secularists (and the courts) believe that Ayyappa, by “excluding women of a certain age”, is giving unjust and evil instructions about how to worship him! From what other source might this right to worship be derived? To appeal to the Indian constitution or to the UN human rights instruments is to go far beyond the absurd: the Indian constitution (or any such secular document) cannot dictate how human beings ought to worship God. Therefore, in the case of Sabarimala, one cannot talk about the right to worship. One can still ask the question whether women have freedom to worship or not. Of course, they do have the ‘freedom’ to worship Ayyappa the way they have the freedom to worship anyone or none. But how do we know which mode of worship is to be followed? How do we know that vratabhanga is the mode of worship of Ayyappa?

The entire discussion seems to draw upon arguments that emphasize a need to reform Hinduism. The questions of the reform of Hinduism emerged in 18^th– and 19^th-century India when Christian missionaries were trying to understand India and deal with Indian religions. In Indian society, they saw a false idolatrous religion called Hinduism, corrupted over millennia.  For Europeans, most of the Indian ritual practices were corrupt and superstitious. While responding to such criticism, 19^th-century reform movements like the Arya Samaj, Brahmo Samaj, Prarthana Samaj, etc. developed ‘criticism’ of Hindu religion. They had an action plan to reform it in the backdrop of what they saw as corrupt practices of Hindu religion. Today, scientists, courts, secularists, liberals, Hindu nationalists, etc. are all in a race to continue the reform agenda that the British had set. But this reform agenda is breaking India and her traditions. What we see today in Sabarimala is that one treats the vrata of Ayyappa as an unjust and evil practice and celebrates the vratabhanga of Ayyappa as a socio-religious reform. This is sensible only against the background of Europeans’ understanding of a false heathen religion that requires reform, which essentially requires the destruction of Hindu practices. Consequently, in contemporary, independent India, what we see is a race to destroy India and her traditions.  The irony is, this time the leaders of such activities are not Muslims or Christians but Hindus themselves!

Author details:

M. S. Chaitra is the Director and Fellow, Aarohi Research Foundation, Bangalore. Email: chaitra78@gmail.com

Ashwini B Desai, is Research Fellow at Aarohi Research Foundation, Bangalore. Email: ashwini.b.desai@gmail.com

by Sufiya Pathan

Opposition to the Supreme Court judgment on the Prevention of Atrocities (PoA) Act revolves around the premise that it is against the interests of the Scheduled Castes (SC). Does placing some checks on the non-bailable detention for a PoA charge of any kind (whether a serious charge or not), compromise the interests of the SCs? Why so? Does upholding SC interests require compromising the rights and interests of citizens at large? And if we do take this route what kinds of ripples are we setting off in society? Surely, these are the kinds of questions that we need to discuss in the wake of the judgment. Yet, the most widespread reactions that have emerged vis-à-vis the verdict are stories of misuse of the act from some corners and vulgar chest thumping from political parties falling over each other in their bid to “fight for the SCs” while really just fighting amongst themselves.

While the upcoming elections in some states and the national elections of 2019 appear to provide the immediate context for agitation against the Supreme Court’s decision, digging deeper reveals systemic problems and concerns about the long-term interests of the SCs for whom so many tears are being shed for their ostensible protection. This article points to at least three additional scenarios where we have to look closely to assess why we have a worrying structural problem on our hands. Despite widespread assumptions to the contrary, the statistical picture provides no grounds to assume that SCs are subject to any more violence or crime than other segments of the population. Yet the very same statistics are used to project an image of India as a country ridden with caste violence and discrimination. Meanwhile, the continued set of attempts to build a picture of SCs as a uniquely and disproportionately targeted group in India is building a new type of resentment against the very same groups for whom protective measures have been spuriously justified. This does not bode well for India or the SCs.

Purported rise in atrocities against SCs

Figures have been bandied about in the Press about rising atrocities against SCs as the context for ‘SC anger’ (see, for instance, these articles in the Times of India and The Week). The simple truth is that this country does not produce any reliable documentation of atrocities against SCs. Why so? The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) annually reports the total number of cases registered under the PoA and PCR (Protection of Civil Rights) Acts. As per legal definition, these are the only cases that qualify as ‘atrocities’. However, scholars and activists have always been dissatisfied at the ‘low level of reportage’ under these sections and have rejected these figures as unreliable measures of caste atrocities in the country. Yet, large figures are constantly quoted in the press and by caste scholars in relation to atrocities. How so? Very simple.

Since 1995 the NCRB was asked to report separately on the total crime faced by ‘vulnerable sections’ of society. Thus, total crime faced by senior citizens, children, women and SC/STs is recorded and reported annually by the NCRB. The established practice today is to take the total figure of crime against SC/STs and report it as ‘atrocities’. To reiterate, since figures under the PoA and PCR are considered low and therefore unreliable, in order to reflect a ‘truer’ picture, the total number of crimes against SC/STs are quoted as atrocities. You don’t have just yellow journalism to blame for this. Even the official website of the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment follows exactly this strategy in its annual reports.

There are multiple problems with such an approach that make it not just unreliable, but outrageously deceptive. To list just a few of the problems – these cases would include those where both victims and perpetrators belong to SC groups; they would include crimes that have no relation to caste and do not establish that the perpetrator even had any knowledge of the victim’s caste – a pre-requisite to making a case of ‘atrocity’; they would include categories of crime that could not logically be envisaged as ‘atrocities’. The need for special legislation covering caste atrocities was felt because it was seen as an especially obnoxious kind of crime. While it was never clear what exactly atrocities referred to, it was clear that the violence was disturbing not because of the volume of the crimes against SCs, but because of the special nature of the crimes.[1]

Yet, today, this rationale behind the PoA finds itself absolutely overturned, and all crime against SC/STs, regardless of who has committed the crime, is being categorized as atrocity. Remember that this route is taken because the statistics under PoA and PCR are considered low and, therefore, unreliable. Yet, if we take this route and deem any crime against an SC to be a measure of atrocities, we are faced with an even greater hurdle to understanding the basic claims about caste atrocities.

One of the basic claims about caste atrocities is that caste violence is extremely widespread and that lower castes face greater violence than any other groups in society. These statistics, inflated as they are, should be in a position to give some credence to this claim. Yet, if we study these statistics, we are forced to reject the claim as absolutely baseless!

How so? Some simple mathematics will tell us. The total number of incidents of crime against SCs in 2016 was 40,801. Of these, 5926 crimes were reported under the PoA act. The figure for total incidents of crime in India in 2016 is 48,31,515. The SC population comprises about 17% of the population. If 17% of the population faces 0.84% of the total incidence of crime, then 83% faces the remaining 98.16% of the crime in India. That means each percent of the SC population faces about 0.049% of total crime, while every percent of the non-SC population faces 1.18% of the total incidence of crime. Thus, non-SCs face about 23 times more crime than SCs.

Would we really want to support the claim that these statistics tell us anything significant about caste atrocities? Yet, scholars, journalists, activists, and government agencies, all use these statistics with impunity and with very little evidence of basic mathematical reasoning!

In all this bandying about of numbers, what is lost sight of is precisely the problems that the PoA legislation was framed to address in the first place. These statistics certainly do not help us understand what the problem of caste violence was or is, or explain anything that could help form solutions. Yet, our scholars and journalists, who ought to be engaged in helping us understand the problem, instead appear unable to show the mathematical skills of a 10 year old.

International attention

A Pew research study on ‘global restrictions on religion’ 2015 placed India fourth on its world-wide scale of ‘social hostilities’. India came in after Syria, Nigeria and Iraq, doing only negligibly better than these countries on its scale of social hostilities. Why so? Where is the kind of wide-scale violence that Syria, Nigeria and Iraq have witnessed in order to justify giving India this rating? Who in India has been subject to such systematic violence as the Christians in Nigeria, for instance? No need to go far for the answer. The report says, “Hindus were harassed in just 18 countries, fewer than some other groups. But the vast majority of the world’s Hindus (95%) live in India, where harassment of Hindus by both government and social groups was reported in 2015. Members of the lowest Hindu castes, also known as Dalits, often faced obstacles to [access] basic government institutions and services such as education and health care. The United Nations also reported systematic abuse of Dalits by individuals, and many of the perpetrators of these crimes were not prosecuted by the government.”

Since when does the be-heading of 100s of individuals belonging to a particular religious group put one country almost at par with another country where a section of the population faced trouble accessing government services? Besides, which section in India, except the moneyed classes, do not face difficulties accessing government services? Yet, this does not alarm either our political classes or our activists. India has systematically built up an international reputation for the abuse of its SC population, which for the most part is built on inflated numbers and reports like the one cited above – in other words, on thin air.

Yet, the UN annual report on religious intolerance 2017 relies on Pew as its source for India in order to press for international recognition of violence against “Hindus”, which basically refers to “caste violence”. Coming at the heels of the special attention paid to caste discrimination by the UN Special Rapporteur on minority rights in 2016, we can be sure India is going to hear more about this internationally.

So, here’s the deal. We in India have no reliable data to talk about caste violence. Yet, we loosely talk about it in puffed up figures that would not stand up to a child’s scrutiny. The world is listening in and such loose talk will cost India dearly.

Social unrest and anti-SC sentiment

While NGOs and intellectuals build their careers by shedding crocodile tears for SCs, and the political classes scamper for their votes, of greatest concern in the contemporary scenario is not India’s international image. Of greatest concern is that the kinds of policies that government after government is upholding vis-à-vis the SCs in the name of their interests is systematically building a dangerous anti-SC sentiment in the country. Legislation like the PoA Act was not built on the basis of popular SC campaigns or movements. In fact, even today, most of the so-called SC groups are really Marxist groups, not mobilisations based on any kind of SC movement.

But, for the first time in history, there is a popular movement against the PoA that was also directed against the SCs – the Maratha movement. No matter what kind of violence India has witnessed in the name of ‘caste violence’ so far, it has never been targeted at SCs as a whole. It was always particular jatis or clusters of jatis in particular regions that came into conflict with each other. Even though the PoA Act was never a plank to bring SCs together, it has become the plank that builds resentment against them as a whole.

Ironically, even government reports have warned against the effects of the PoA in society and how it was actually acting against the interests of SCs. A Karnataka government report in 2008 baldly stated how the PoA was affecting inter-community relations, especially in rural Karnataka: “Instead of developing a good relationship based on mutual dignity, a fear psychosis is making many people of the other sections to refrain from any transactions with the [SC] people, adversely affecting the livelihood opportunities for the poor village living persons dependent on farm labour.”[2]

While the Supreme Court verdict is seen as going against SC interests, it is perhaps the only time over the past four decades that anyone has dared to do anything that is really in the long-term interests of the SCs. The truth is that SCs are ordinary citizens of this country. There is absolutely no reason why upholding their interests should bring us in conflict with the interests of the Indian citizens at large. What will the ordinary citizens of this country choose to do when their long-term interests are being systematically trampled upon in the name of short-term gains by every power-wielding class in this country? The answer to this question will shape the future of India.

 

[1] Special Correspondent. ‘Rising Crimes against Scheduled Castes’. Economic and Political Weekly, XV:32, 1980, p.1336.

[2] Bhat, H.K. An Evaluation Study on the Atrocities and Compensation given to victims of Atrocities on Scheduled Castes in Karnataka– Report submitted to the Director, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Research Institute, (Government of Karnataka), Bangalore, October 2008, p. 345.