what the brahmin can't hide, bury or burn anymore

south, karnataka. there are 17.9 lakh landless households in the state. of these, nearly 4.5 lakh are sc households, and 1.7 lakh are st households. who are the other 11.7 lakh landless households? if you ask the hindu, epw, india today, outlook, toi, hindustan times and all the other brahmin rags, they will tell you that they're mostly brahmin households..lingayat and vokkaliga households would also figure, i guess.
‪#obc‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
~
west, maharashtra. there are 47.6 lakh landless households in the state. of these, nearly 9.4 lakh are sc households, and 10.3 lakh are st households. who are the other 27.9 lakh landless households? if you ask the hindu, epw, india today, outlook, toi, hindustan times and all the other brahmin rags, they will tell you that they're mostly brahmin, maratha and kayasth households..
‪#obc‬ ‎‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
~
east. west bengal. there are 75.6 lakh landless households in the state. of these, 25.4 lakh are sc households and 6.1 lakh are st households. who are the other 44.1 lakh landless households? the statesman and the telegraph and the hindu will probably tell you that they're mostly brahmin, baidya and kayasth households.
‪‪#obc‬ ‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
~
west, north. rajasthan. there 26.74 lakh landless households in rajasthan. of these, 7.91 lakh are sc households, and 4.39 lakh are st households. who are the other 14.44 lakh landless households? the hindustan times and the hindu will probably tell you they're all brahmin, rajput and bania households..
‪#obc‬ ‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
~
north, uttar pradesh..there are 79 lakh landless households in the state. of these, 26 lakh are sc households and around 62, 000 are st households. who are the other 52.38 lakh landless households? the hindu, epw, india today, outlook, toi, hindustan times and all the other brahmin rags will tell you that they're mostly brahmin, rajput, bania households..
‪‪#obc‬ ‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
~
east, again. jharkhand. there are 11.57 lakh landless households in the state. of these, 2.27 lakh are sc households and 2.61 lakh are st households. who are the other 6.7 lakh landless households? the hindustan times and toi will probably tell you they're all brahmin and rajput households..
‪#obc‬ ‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
~
northmost, uttarakhand. there are nearly 2.8 lakh landless households in uttarakhand. of these, over 84, 000 are sc households and over 9,200 are st households. who are the other 1.86 lakh landless households? the hindustan times and the hindu will probably tell you they're all brahmins and rajputs..
‪#obc‬ ‬ ‪#‎castecensus
~
centre, north, madhya pradesh. there are over 50 lakh landless households in the state. nearly 10.45 lakhs of those are sc households, and 13.92 lakh are st households. who are the other 26.35 lakh landless households? if you ask the toi or the hindustan times, they'll probably tell you they're mostly brahmin, rajput, bania households..
‪‪#obc‬ ‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
~
east, odisha. there are over 34 lakh landless households in odisha. nearly 8.7 lakh of them are sc households and over 8 lakh of them are st households. who are the other 17.3 lakh landless households? the statesman and the indian express will probably tell you they're all brahmins and karanas.
‪#obc‬ ‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
~
further west or north, haryana. there are 11. 26 lakh landless households in haryana..over 5 lakh of them are sc households and 380 are st households. who are the other nearly 6.2 lakh households? the hindustan times and outlook will probably tell you they're all jat, brahmin and bania households.
‪‪#obc‬  ‪#‎castecensus‬
~
east, bihar. there are nearly 96 lakh landless households in the state. nearly 23 lakh of them are sc households, and 1.6 lakh are st households. who are the other 71.4 lakh households? if you ask epw or india today, they'll tell you most of them are brahmin, bhumihar, rajput etc households..
‪#obc‬ ‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
~
west, gujarat. there are 25.5 lakh landless households in gujarat. around 2.7 lakhs of them are sc households, and 5.2 lakhs are st households. who are the other 17.6 lakh landless households? if you ask the hindu or the toi, they'll tell you they're all brahmin, vaishya or rajput households.
‪‪#obc‬  ‪#‎castecensus‬
~
chhattisgarh. there are 16.88 lakh landless households in the state. of these 4.7 lakh are st households and 3. 3 lakh sc households. who are the other 8.8 lakh landless households? if you ask the hindu or the toi, they'll tell you they're all brahmin or rajput households.
‪#obc‬  ‪#‎castecensus
~
‬ there are over 56 lakh landless households in tamil nadu, and around 19 lakh of them are dalit.. 94, 000 are st households. who are the other nearly 36 lakh landless households? if you ask the hindu it will tell you that all of them are brahmin.
‪#obc‬  ‪#‎castecensus
~‬
north, west, punjab. there are 14.8 lakh landless households in the state. of these, nearly 9.3 lakh are sc households, and 111 are st households. who are the other 5.5 lakh landless households? if you ask the hindu, epw, india today, outlook, toi, hindustan times and all the other brahmin rags, they will tell you that they're mostly brahmin, jat, khatri households.
‪‪#obc‬‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
~
south, andhra pradesh. there are 45 lakh landless households in the state. of these, nearly 10.8 lakh are sc households, and 2.5 lakh are st households. who are the other 31.7 lakh landless households? if you ask the hindu, epw, india today, outlook, toi, hindustan times and all the other brahmin rags, they will tell you that they're mostly brahmin, reddy, kamma, raju, velama households.
‪‪#obc‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
~
south, kerala. there are 25.34 lakh landless households in the state. of these, nearly 4.2 lakh are sc households, and nearly 55000 are st households. who are the other nearly 20.6 lakh landless households? if you ask the hindu, epw, india today, outlook, toi, hindustan times and all the other brahmin rags, they will tell you that they're mostly brahmin and nair households.
‪#obc‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
~
north, himachal pradesh. there are 80, 222 landless households in the state. of these, nearly 28, 800 are sc households, and 3,951 lakh are st households. who are the other nearly 47, 500 landless households? if you ask the hindu, epw, india today, outlook, toi, hindustan times and all the other brahmin rags, they will tell you that they're mostly brahmin and rajput households.
‪#obc‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
~
east, north. assam. there are 18 lakh landless households in the state. of these, nearly 1.7 lakh are sc households, and nearly 1.3 lakh are st households. who are the other nearly 15 lakh landless households? if you ask the hindu, epw, india today, outlook, toi, hindustan times and all the other brahmin rags, they will tell you that they're mostly brahmin and kayasth households.
‪‪#obc‬‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬
~
telangana, temporarily indian. there are 19.7 lakh landless households in the state. of these, nearly 4.7 lakh are sc households, and 1.97 lakh are st households. who are the other nearly 13.3 lakh landless households? if you ask the hindu, epw, india today, outlook, toi, hindustan times and all the other brahmin rags, they will tell you that they're mostly brahmin, reddy, velama, kamma, raju households.
‪#obc‬‬ ‪#‎castecensus‬

you may try to hide it, bury it, burn it - but the larger truth is out: in brahmin india - from east to west, north to south- there are nearly 6.86 crore landless households. of these, nearly 1.81 crore are sc households, and nearly 70 lakh are st households. who are the other 4.34 crore landless households? they're definitely not brahmin-savarna.

this blog is ten years old today. it was worth the wait. 

maoists' brahmanic nationalism

some notes on the maoists:

a kind of meta theme that runs through the narratives of most varieties of brahmin/indian left, including the maoists, is annoyance with the market, which is understandable. they don't like capital either, which is also understandable. but it is the market which infuriates them more.. because they don't like anything other than caste, which means the janeudharis themselves, mediating social relations.
~
how different is the cpi ml (maoist)'s version of the indian nation from that of the congress, bjp and cpm/cpi? not very different, in fact, it should be seen as a more aggressive supporter of indian nationalism than those other political formations, for many reasons. though it speaks of unequivocal support for 'oppressed nationalities' like kashmir, north east etc., it has never shown any active interest in strengthening those struggles beyond expressing occasional verbal solidarity. and it has never ever looked at exploring the existence of other subjugated nationalities within the indian 'nation'.. it has in fact always nurtured the dream of a strong centre that would ride over 'regional' sovereignties, along the lines of the soviet union.. for instance, the bjp passed a resolution in support of a separate telangana state in 1998, the congress formed a separate telangana legislators forum in 2000 with the blessings of sonia gandhi.. the cpi ml (maoist) toed their line completely and took an active part in the agitation, sharing many fora with congress and sangh members. indian/brahmanic nationalism forms the default ideological framework of the cpi ml (maoist), despite all their talk of resistance and liberation.
~
telangana's population is around 2-2.5 crores less than tamil nadu's, but it produces more foodgrains than the latter.. in 1948 or so, the literacy rate in telangana was around 4-6% (around 1/3rd to 1/4th of national average) at best, now it is touching 70%, nearly, meaning the spread of education in the region has been much faster than in even kerala..aren't these two indicators enough to debunk the theory of underdevelopment? so why did the cpi ml (maoist) so strongly support the so-called telangana movement? because it is driven by the interests of strong dominant caste interest groups, across the country, who believe in the theory of 'smaller states, faster development' (as propagated by the parivar) which actually means 'weaker states, strong centre'?
~
the maoists say indian society has a 'semi-colonial, semi-feudal' character.. look at the first part - 'semi-colonial'. what does it mean? it could mean the indian state doesn't command full political sovereignty and is influenced by an external superior political power.. this could be said about western europe too.. or does 'semi-colonial' mean india is plundered by foreign capital, backed by said 'external superior power', for rampant loot of its natural resources like oil, various minerals etc..? hmm.. there is some export of resources from india, but overall, it's a net importer of minerals from outside, perhaps.. in fact, if the same kind of loose terminology were to be used to describe india's oil trade relationship with the middle east and even russia, you could say india itself acts as a kind of colonial power sucking up precious natural wealth those exporting countries could very well use for their own development. this exploitative colonising nature of the indian state is most evident in its mining operations in the african continent.. so what is the point of using this ambiguous term - 'semi-colonial' to describe indian society's character? dr ambedkar had said the indian masses needed to fight both 'brahmanism and capitalism'.. that makes more sense to the dalitbahujans at large. what does 'semi-colonial' mean, dear ganapathy & co? what are you trying to hide? aren't you trying to erase the brahminical character of india's ruling classes? obfuscate the glaring fact that india itself is a vast empire, a collection of colonies held together and exploited by a brahminized collective of upper castes led by brahmins?
~
the maoists identify india as a 'semi-feudal' society (apart from being 'semi-colonial'). this is another vague term that conveys no comprehensible picture of indian society.. the indian state recognizes no landed nobility now, formally, nor does it endorse any form of unpaid extraction of labour, formally. but there are still many instances of bonded labour in several pockets of the country, but these practices do not form the dominant mode of agricultural production in rural india. what characterizes indian agriculture overwhelmingly, across all regions, is stagnation. stagnation in productivity over a long period of nearly half a century. one major marker of this is: in the forty five years since 1970, while total foodgrain production in india grew by 2.3 times, or doubled, the number of people involved in agriculture (cultivators plus labourers) grew by 2.1 times, or also doubled.. india must be the only country in the world where the number of people involved in agriculture actually doubled.. it's doubtful this happened anywhere else in the world, on such a scale, at any point of time, in the last two hundred years, or in the entire modern era.. this almost zero increase in productivity per capita naturally means not zero but negative growth in real incomes of the producers..so why are they still engaged in agriculture, and not just engaged but also dragging in every new generation into it, as if ordered by manu ? this is a new kind of social enslavement that can't be conveyed through such woefully inadequate terms as 'feudalism' or 'semi-feudalism'.. this serfdom of nearly 200 million peasants (and their families) has no parallel whatsoever in world history. have the maoists really, truly studied this?
~
the cpi ml (maoist) says in its statements, more than once, that the struggles of the 'oppressed nationalities' such as the kashmiris and the various north eastern peoples should be 'supported unequivocally'.. when was the last time you saw them organize a 'national bandh' in support of kashmir or the northeast? what do their overground support organizations do to spread the idea of freedom for these 'oppressed nationalities' in the so-called mainland? very little - or nothing, among students, peasants or other working classes.. all that they do is to prop up a handful of high profile brahmin-savarna activists as the 'saviours' of these peoples. this actually goes on to reinforce the role of the brahmanic, imperial ruling class these activists come from as the only possible 'saviours', among the masses across india.
~
the cpi ml (maoist) calls india a 'prison-house of nationalities'. no, it doesn't define 'nationalities'. nor does it explain why it considers india a 'nation' when it thinks it's a 'prison-house of nationalities'.. it shirks away from looking at the ethnic, linguistic or caste-religious roots of these nationalities which are imprisoned within india.. it looks at them only through the prism of 'development' - some are more developed, some are underdeveloped, according to it. no, it doesn't define 'development' either. there is less malnutrition in kerala, and more literacy, than in haryana, which has much higher per capita incomes. so which state is developed, and which underdeveloped? how does the cpi ml (maoist) understand these differences? or has it outsourced its brains to the various brahmanic institutions such as the planning commission or the nac or jnu or csds or csss or various other brahmanic ideological apparatuses just as the congress/bjp/cpm/cpi do? does it consider these differences as mere 'regional differences' just as those 'national' parties do? do they have anything more to add to that bare explanation? does it look at the strength of brahmanic hegemony in both states, and try to understand the history of anti-caste struggles, or lack of struggles, in those states to understand their role in their differing trajectories of evolution? how does it justify the grouping together of these two peoples in one 'nation'? the other brahmanic parties do it without any reflection, the maoists don't seem any different.
~
the maoists never named the reddies, kammas, brahmins, rajus, velamas as the communities which hold excess land in the telugu speaking regions because all of their leadership also came/comes from those communities...this resulted in sustenance of disunity among the majority, the oppressed communities, who did not understand clearly who the 'class enemy' was..not just was/is the maoists' marxism very woolly-headed, even the terms they used/use to define classes in india (borrowed from 19th century europe) were/are meaningless.. they're just another face of brahmin imperialism..
~
now, will the maoists in maharashtra, name the marathas, brahmins, kayasths etc as those who control maharashtra's land and political economy, reigning over nearly 400 other dalit, backward and tribal communities, if they're half as serious as they claim to be..? and also show filthy rich people like kobad ghandy the way out if they want to even appear serious..and also distance themselves from various casteist brahmin patwardhans etc who make all their efforts seem very, very farcical.
~
one clear sign that the maoists do not want any land redistribution is that they never ever made any strong case for a caste census in india, which could have led to the development of a real, meaningful socio-economic profile of india.. in fact, most of their overground activism has been against any such caste-based analysis and policy. how can you trust their sincerity towards land reforms, when they have never bothered to find out who exactly owns excess land in all states? and whose excess land are they going to redistribute if they want the owners' social profile to remain hidden?

kerala: how caste surpassed class

by the time the land reform movement in kerala was finally translated into state policy, it had actually become a moment of 'caste surpassing class' and not vice versa. it was a movement when the most politically active jati group among the bahujans, especially sections of the ezhavas, forged a tentative alliance with the erstwhile landholding upper castes.. kerala history after that moment should perhaps be seen as a chronicle of the fortunes of this alliance as more space was negotiated, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, from the upper castes by this emerging dominant group, through time.. so what the policy achieved was actually only a formalization of of transfer of titles to peasants from this group who were already tilling the particular holdings as tenants.. land reforms across india have followed a similar pattern..they have always been transfer of full rights to a few jatis who were engaged as tenants earlier, not to the whole category of shudras or obcs or dalits, at large. these successful jatis form a minority within the shudra/obc category. this was the case in up, were the yadavs, kurmis, jats etc benefited to some extent, not all of the 70 odd obc jatis at large.. it's again, yadavs and kurmis etc in bihar, not the 130 other jatis..the dismantling of zamindaries and jagirdaries in coastal andhra and telangana benefited the reddy, kamma, kapu sub-castes.. and so on. the same was the case with kerala.. where the ezhavas and a couple of other jatis benefited more than the 70 other jatis..

so the class struggles, which had been waged earlier, finally transformed into a triumphal caste alliance when they became policy in the late 50s. all the progressive 'reform policies' in kerala should be seen as a culmination of a century old class struggles, wrongly referred to as mere caste -particularly in its reductive form, jati - assertion movements or religious reform struggles.. whether it was ayyankali's first agricultural strike or right to education movements, or the movements led by narayana guru and others - all of these can only only be understood as movements against caste or class rule. as dr. ambedkar had indicated in aoc, caste rule should be seen as constitutive of power derived derive from 'religion, status and property'. so the 1950s land reforms ensured some property for the ezhavas and a few others, while ensuring the maintenance of the religious authority, social status, property and power of the brahmins, nairs etc.. a strengthening of the caste order or caste rule through the the infusion of some new partner jatis into its fatigued body.

stagnation is a marker of agriculture in kerala more than in any other part of the country - it had arrived a decade or two earlier, in the 60s itself, while in many parts of the country it started in the eighties or nineties.. for instance, kerala now produces less rice than it did in the sixties, perhaps.. a large quantum of essential foodgrains come in from other states while large tracts of agricultural lands lie fallow.. this might all seem very strange, considering one would expect land reforms to increase productivity and output. in kerala, both have gone down over time.. if we analyse closely, we'll notice two subterranean facts: one, that land reforms actually arrived when a large number of the largest group of landholders - the nairs and brahmins - had already decided to consolidate their urban assets (and move away from agriculture?)..the nairs, for instance, had the highest literacy rates, perhaps, among all shudra groups in south india - right from telangana to tamil nadu - next only to the brahmins, even as early as 1911. two, the new group of tenants who had become title-holding farmers, the ezhavas and others, did not have a) the same resources as the erstwhile upper caste landholders to invest in increasing productivity, and b) a large number of these new farmers were themselves becoming more interested in urban jobs..

this caste alliance, which calls itself a communist party aiming for a 'people's democratic order' and working for the interests of the people against the 'landlord-bourgeois' dominated society represents the strongest class interest - or a combination of interests - in kerala.. it is characterized by what could be called babu collectivist interests - bureaucratic capitalists, as they would call in their terminology - plus a wide range of state-dependent commercial interests - from those involved in plantations to tourism to other such services. all of these interests share some common caste identities, and have a common vision.. we can perceive the peculiar contours of their vision by looking at the political economy they have together tried to forge in kerala over the last 6 decades - stagnation in agriculture, increase in consumption (among the middle classes, all fueled not by increased capital formation but by remittances generated from a workforce aiding economies elsewhere) without a concomitant increase in production, stagnation in industrial expansion, lots of disguised unemployment and underemployment. this represents the starkest case of what i call caste mode of production - selective adoption of modernity to fossilize social relations around caste through the agency of state power.

breaking up india 6

[notes from a forthcoming book: part 6 of a series of exercises involving breaking up india into parts to understand it better. i'm not posting all the notes, only random ones]
i'd said:

india was always considered an empire all through history - how did it become a nation?

perry anderson asks this question too - how did india become a nation? or why did india become a nation in the minds of all major leaders of the freedom movement - from gandhi to nehru - and still remains such a strong idea among even the 'most distinguished Indian intellectuals' - like amartya sen to ramachandra guha to sunil khilnani to meghnad desai - when historically it never was a nation? anderson notes:

Nehru’s claim of an ‘impress of oneness’, going back six thousand years, persisted from pre-war writings like The Unity of India to his final dispute with China, in which the Mahabharata could be invoked by his foreign office as proof that the North-East Frontier Agency had been part of Mother India from time immemorial, rather as if the Niebelunglied were to clinch German diplomatic claims to Morocco. Such notions have not gone away. The facts gainsay them. The sub-continent as we know it today never formed a single political or cultural unit in pre-modern times. For much the longest stretches of its history, its lands were divided between a varying assortment of middle-sized kingdoms, of different stripes. Of the three larger empires it witnessed, none covered the territory of Nehru’s Discovery of India. Maurya and Mughal control extended to contemporary Afghanistan, ceased below the Deccan, and never came near Manipur. The area of Gupta control was considerably less. Separated by intervals of five hundred and a thousand years, there was no remembered political or cultural connexion between these orders, or even common religious affiliation: at its height, the first of these Buddhist, the second Hindu, the third Muslim. Beneath a changing mosaic of mostly regional rulers, there was more continuity of social patterns, caste – the best claimant to a cultural demarcation – attested very early, but no uniformity. The ‘idea of India’ was essentially a European, not a local invention, as the name itself makes clear. No such term, or equivalent, as India existed in any indigenous language. A Greek coinage, taken from the Indus river, it was so exogenous to the subcontinent that as late as the 16th century, Europeans could define Indians simply as ‘all natives of an unknown country’, and so call the inhabitants of the Americas.

you'd think anderson had delivered a resounding slap to the collective face of the brahminized classes through his book. but they're not easily daunted, and ignoring totally the unpalatable parts, such as the excerpt quoted above, they quote him selectively with a lot of enthusiasm these days. because it's a trendy thing to do in academia, perhaps.

so why do all of india's modern day leaders and intellectuals lie, why don't they admit that there never was any india? anderson's essay is just one recent example, there have always been others who had questioned this 'idea of india'. anderson's scaled down, but very effective presentation of some plain facts makes it seems such a commonsensical question. why don't people ask it more often?

breaking up india 5

[notes from a forthcoming book: part 5 of a series of exercises involving breaking up india into parts to understand it better. i'm not posting all the notes, only random ones]

talking against indian nationalism while writing within its framework is naturally very counter-productive. india was always considered an empire all through history - how did it become a nation?

the empire became a nation in the same way as the brahmins became just another jati. both ideas are now articulated as common sense. the indian nation has become so much common sense that even those who have critiqued indian nationalism, from an anti-caste perspective, have not questioned this fundamental premise.

historically, aloysius says: 'The cultural unity of the subcontinent, then, is mostly derived from the ascriptive and hierarchical elements of power as dominance.'

in other words, the existence of the caste system across the subcontinent is viewed as indicative of 'cultural unity'. how acceptable is this theory of 'cultural unity', and how did it merge so totally with the idea of one nation and one nation-state, when historically there had always been several states in the subcontinent?

if a shared system of oppression were to be taken as an indicator of cultural unity, all the former colonized lands of the world should also be seen as one nation. all the former roman colonies should also be one nation. one could think of several such examples. the subcontinent itself wouldn't have evolved into the 5 or 6 nations that it is now if the theory of cultural unity were tenable.

cultural commonalities can't be interpreted as signs of cultural unity. there might be much in common, culturally, between maharashtra and gujarat or andhra and tamil nadu or bengal and odisha and all of these regions and foreign countries such as malaysia, sri lanka and pakistan and so on.

even if we assume, for argument's sake,  there is cultural unity across the subcontinent, history has provided more than enough evidence that political unity, based around this cultural unity, was always short-lived. because, obviously, the kind of 'cultural unity' that many see in the subcontinent is a very narrowly defined unity. and this unity is defined from the perspective of the dominant brahminized classes, across regions.  

cultural unity of india was the dominant classes' excuse for forging one political geography out of the largest part of the subcontinent. it needs to be understood that more than any cultural unity, the indian state is the result of the political unity of the dominant classes of india.

but, as dr. ambedkar would have said, it might be in the interests of the dominant classes to define india as one nation, but how can it be in the interests of the oppressed classes to accept that definition?

breaking up india

[notes from a forthcoming book: part 1 of a series of exercises involving breaking up india into parts to understand it better]

 if a lower caste labourer from, say, rural telangana/andhra, unable to cope with dominant caste reddies or kammas or rajus or velamas migrates to rural maharashtra, he'll face the same, more or less, kind of oppression at the hands of the marathas there. if he moves further north to haryana, he'll have to face the jats..if he goes east to bihar, he'll meet the bhumihars, rajputs, brahmins etc..

you would think all of these dominant castes were born from the same womb. they might behave in a similar fashion, but we know they all speak different languages, have different cultures, eat different food and enjoy different kinds of entertainment. and they also look different, even if they all seem to be of different shades of brown. and if you check even more closely, you'll find that they don't even pray to the same gods, if you ignore the common brahmanic gods (like avatars of vishnu, shiva, durga, ganpati etc) that most of them have taken up over the last one century. their faiths are distinctively local, and different from each other even if they're all labeled together as brahminism/hinduism.

none of them would inter-marry, and would probably go to violent lengths to stop any such alliances from happening if any couples overcome the limits of geographic, linguistic/cultural boundaries and come together. and inter-caste marriages even within the same linguistic geographies are rare.

you'd also notice that they might have dislike and contempt for each other, might plot against each other for political positions, economic interests at local, regional or central level. but they all behave in a similar fashion, more or less, towards people lower down the caste hierarchy.

how and why did all these dominant castes, which are so different from each other, come together and become one 'nation'? and paradoxically, why did the oppressed castes, the dalit bahujans, acquiesce to this formulation that they are also a part of the same 'nation', along with the oppressor castes?