why bant singh can't go to rahul pandita

something led me here, to this very entertaining piece of information:

The meaning of the word 'Saraswat' has more than one origin. One refers to 'offspring of Saraswati'^{[citation needed]} , the Goddess of learning applied usually to learned and scholarly people. It may also denote the residents of Saraswati river basin. The brahmins of this region who are referred to as 'Saraswats' in Mahabharata and Puranas were learned in Vedic lore^{[citation needed]} . They concentrated on studying subjects like astronomy, metaphysics, medicine and allied subjects and disseminating knowledge^{[citation needed]} .

the heading, you'd notice says 'history'. history? do people really believe that's history? gods and goddesses are history? do you notice anything like dates in that whole section?

that piece of history whetted my appetite for more such knowledge. this page tells you about the origins of the nambudiris:

The ancient Sangam literature mentions Brahmins of Chera Kingdom (which became Kerala) who may be Namboothiris as there is mention of Perinchellur(Taliparamba) village, which is one of the most important villages for Namboothiris, as a great Vedic village. There is no concrete evidence to suggest migration of Namboothiri Brahmins to Kerala but would most probably be the heavily civilised Aryans who took the Red sea route to Kerala even before the 100O BC. The recent evidence of Brahmin migration to Kerala is the Embranthiris who were originally Tulu Brahmins.

no concrete evidence, but they're most probably heavily civilised Aryans who took the Red sea route to Kerala even before the 100O BC (100O BC?).

what's funnier (than the content of those histories) is the fact that some people, at least two persons, actually wrote those pages. why? to tell people like me: this is not your history, you can't bask in the glory of the saraswats or the nambudiris, you can only admire them. but would anyone have written those pages if non-nambudiris/non-saraswats like me didn't exist? what's the point of being a brahmin when there aren't any non-brahmins around? so i am there in those narratives: as, say, most probably the heavily uncivilised native who didn't take the red sea route to kerala even before the 100O BC, but was born here. no non-indian can read between the lines and spot me, the non-saraswat or non-nambudiri, who doesn't deserve any history. the nambudiri is the light, i am the shadow that gives the light meaning.

if i ever tell a non-indian that my people studied astronomy, metaphysics and medicine ages ago, i'd be lying. because it was the saraswats who studied astronomy, metaphysics and medicine. so i have to make sure no brahmins, saraswats especially, are around when i tell non-indians that my people studied astronomy, metaphysics and medicine. but a lie is a lie and as long as that page, and less crude but similar pages exist in many forms, i can never really be proud of the fact that 'indians' were smart enough to explore astronomy etc a thousand or more years ago. not as long as some 'indians' claim that they're brahmins.

they say the chinese first started making rockets, or something like rockets. it's quite possible a chinese nobleman first made it. but now, any chinese soldier or hawker or sex worker or scientist or film star could proudly say: we invented rockets. because there is no single endogamous group of people in china who could say: my forefathers invented rockets. so everyone is free to claim that glory.

when someone explicitly tells the world he's a brahmin, like the writers of those two pages, he's claiming a lot of history for himself. a history filled with 'glorious achievements'. you might have problems with the authenticity or incompleteness of that history, but there's very little you can do about it. the problem is, a lot of history attaches itself even to those who don't explicitly tell the world that they're brahmin. a lot of history attaches itself to all brahmins, as long as they're brahmins, in whatever fashion, for the simple reason that indian history doesn't have much space for anyone else.

the reason why indian history sounds so much like a bad zombie movie in which the characters seemingly incapable of any voluntary, conscious action so smartly and purposefully keep cornering the conscious, hyperactive ones, is because it implicitly makes the claim that those mostly unconnected with any production produced all of indian science, astronomy, medicine etc. indian history reads so much like mythology because those claiming its 'glorious achievements' as their own have no idea whatsoever how those achievements were accomplished-- it's obvious that they know only a part of the story, so they add a lot of mumbo jumbo to complete it, to obfuscate the dalitbahujan contributions. indian history is such a colossal crime because by depriving the dalitbahujans of any past, it steals their future too.

as long as the brahmins, as brahmins, are around, and in very large numbers, in academia and other places that produce history-- it'd be very difficult to find anything resembling objective history in that kind of an environment. no, i have no problems with people whose forefathers might have been brahmins filling all available seats in universities with their..behinds.

but as long as people who can trace their ancestry back to the nambudiris or saraswats are around, i might as well give up thinking that i can produce something of value, because indian history tells me i'm totally incapable of producing anything of any value. only the brahmin can.

but mr.dipankar gupta would object to that kind of a caste sneer:

Only recently, a newspaper article, while discussing Narayana Murthy’s inept attempts to wriggle out of his faux pas with the national anthem episode, calmly added without context that one cannot expect much from a Brahmin after all. Now where did that come from? As if to explain further, the journalist went on to remind the readers that Narayana Murthy, the Brahmin, as a Brahmin, also opposed reservation quotas. This is clearly a caste sneer!

yes, that clearly is a caste sneer, because it attributes a negative trait to all brahmins. gupta is trying to say that the journalist accused narayana muthy, the brahmin, of acting as a brahmin. can the word brahmin be sanitized of its history, and of its sociology? can a person just be a brahmin, just as someone can be tall, fat or dark? can someone be a brahmin and not be acting as a brahmin?

isn't the very claim to be a brahmin, a claim on an exclusive right to a long line of 'super-achievements', also an act of consigning almost everyone else to an history of 'non-achievement'? isn't that a caste sneer, in a way?

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i started on this post nearly two years ago-- don't know if all the links work now. but its logic still seems ok to me, and i feel more confident of that theory today, after reading this article by rahul pandita. he says:

As a Brahmin, does it make me less sensitive to the plight of the poor or the marginalised? Why is it such a big deal that I can wear my Janeu, recite my Hanuman Chalisa, and yet go to Bant Singh’s house in Bhurj Jabbar, thirstily gulp down a few glasses of water, and tell his story? Where is the contradiction?

yes, why is it such a big deal that he wears a janeu etc? i don't believe the practice of rituals etc make a brahmin. so giving them up won't make one less of a brahmin, either, in my view.

the big deal is that bant singh can't just get up and go meet rahul pandita in delhi or mumbai or wherever he lives, gulp down a few glasses of water, and tell his story. bant singh was attacked because he wanted to do exactly what rahul pandita does. get up and go do the things he wanted to do.

the big deal is that rahul pandita has the freedom to do so and bant singh doesn't.

if you say bant singh lost his freedom of movement because of the line of work he chose to do-- organizing farm labour-- you'd be wrong because he didn't have much freedom of choice to begin with. history had seen to that. now rahul pandita, despite being forced out of home 'at the age of 14', seems to have done quite well for himself. that's the contradiction.

when rahul pandita says he's a brahmin, he's making a claim on a lot of indian history. when bant singh rebels against his present, he is also rejecting pandita's history, his claim on privilege. if pandita doesn't see that, he shouldn't have undertaken the trip to bant singh's home. 

the history of all hitherto unexciting society...

nice to be around when history is being made:

One is witnessing the process of ‘Telangana’ itself acquiring a history, identity and cultural integrity. Dalits, a strong presence in several forums, are contending that Telangana’s culture is a ‘Sabbanda culture’ that is predominantly non-Sanskritic or un-Hindu.

or made up:

Telangana region was mentioned in the Mahabharata as the Telinga Kingdom which said to be inhabited by the tribe known as Telavana and said to have fought on the Pandava side in the great war of Mahabharata. It is also evident from the fact that there is Pandavula Guhalu in warangal district (wherein Pandavas spent their life in exile (Lakkha Gruham))

And, in Treta yuga, it is believed that Lord Sri Rama along with his consort Sita Devi and brother Lakshmana, spent their life in exile at Parnashala on the banks of Godavari river which is about 25 km from Bhadrachalam in Khammam District of Telangana.

or being designed: discover how un-hindu or non-sanskritic telangana thalli ('mother telangana') is, in the words of her creator, here. if you can't read telugu, don't worry. you can feast your eyes on the telangani diamond 'koh-i-noor' in the goddess' crown.

public good and all that rot

smokescreen asks here:

Surely their vision isn’t blinkered by the bpo sector?!

her question is about the national knowledge commission. a few days ago, the chairman of the commission was advocating the need for taking education to the masses through internet.

there are around 50 million to 81 million users in india, according to different estimates (anyone who logs into the net even once a month is a user), but only around 2.6 million internet connections, as of october last year. even if those connections had doubled since last year (quite impossible, because imrb says growth in internet users has been slow since 2001 in this 2008 report ), what makes the chairman, nkc, think the number of connections could grow twenty times in the next five years (to 100 million connections)? and why does he believe that any of those connections would be owned by members of the masses? would they still be masses if they were doing so well as to afford regular internet connections?

that's a wrong response to the chairman's wisdom. why? it means that you are accepting the chairman's idea of public good: different kinds of education for different classes of people. it means you differ with him only on the means to achieve that end.

would pitroda teach his kids or grandkids through the internet? would he want them not go to exclusive private schools where they probably teach french and horse riding and other neat things, among other things, but admit them into a government run school so that they could be taught through the internet, sometimes, because the teachers don't work most times? no. but he still thinks his project is for the public good. and a lot of people, including the ruling government, seem to trust him. why?

came across this interesting study by a group of american psychologists- here's the outline:

One of the most curious aspects of the 2004 presidential election was the strength and resilience of the belief among many Americans that Saddam Hussein was linked to the terrorist attacks of September 11. Scholars have suggested that this belief was the result of a campaign of false information and innuendo from the Bush administration. We call this the information environment explanation. Using a technique of “challenge interviews” on a sample of voters who reported believing in a link between Saddam and 9/11, we propose instead a social psychological explanation for the belief in this link. We identify a number of social psychological mechanisms voters use to maintain false beliefs in the face of disconfirming information, and we show that for a subset of voters the main reason to believe in the link was that it made sense of the administration’s decision to go to war against Iraq. We call this inferred justification: for these voters, the fact of the war led to a search for a justification for it, which led them to infer the existence of ties between Iraq and 9/11.

you need to justify nehru's decision to create iits when there were no proper schools in most indian villages, so you come up with a lot of spin now. so, whatever figures one digs up on the state of the internet in india now wouldn't make the slightest dent in the credibility of the chairman, nkc. and when the project fails to take education to the masses through the internet, five years from now, it still wouldn't make any dent in his credibility, because we need to believe he couldn't have been wrong. he was working for the public good.

it doesn't take too much effort, many times, to bring to light the private, sectarian interest in projects pushed through as essential for the public good. but some projects stay so deeply entrenched in the public mind as public good that it's very difficult to dislodge them. that's one major reason why i've always liked the 'real university' series of posts by abi: many of those posts build a strong argument against the elitist mindset of our planners and policy makers. in one of the first posts in the series, abi points out how the much glorified institutions like the iios (iit/iims etc) are inefficient:

Creation of these new institutions is premised on an over-reliance on Indian Institutes -- a phenomenon which is best abbreviated to IIO. As a strategy for positive change IIO is flawed, inefficient, and expensive. From the point of view of nation building, IIO represents an utter bankruptcy of imagination.

The flaws in IIO stem from its smug assumption that, somehow, small institutions training a few thousand students in niche areas are enough to feed the country's immense appetite for skilled manpower. This smugness also makes it callously indifferent to the hunger for knowledge and skills among our millions of students who languish in our universities and colleges.

From an operational viewpoint, IIO has historically been an inefficient strategy. In any academic institution, certain facilities are common: library, lecture halls, laboratories, sports facilities, amphitheatres, and computing and internet infrastructure. The bigger the institution -- the larger the student and faculty population that uses this common infrastructure -- the lower the effective cost per user. With its emphasis on small institutions, IIO has bred inefficiency. A similar argument applies to the student-to-teacher ratio. Currently, IITs operate at about seven students per teacher (going by the 2003 figures from the Rama Rao Committee report). As M.A. Pai points out, this ratio is three times as high in "most US public universities." Clearly, a poor country like ours has every right to expect -- in fact, demand -- that our institutions perform at the highest levels of efficiency. Engineers and managers from our IITs and IIMs would demand no less in the products and services they design, develop or manage!

More important than its inefficiency and narrow vision is the enormous cost of IIO. Just ask yourself this question: if our government is so proud of its IIO strategy, why doesn't it convert all our universities and colleges into Indian Institutes of This and That?

yes, why doesn't the government convert all our universities into Indian Institutes of This and That?

...Let us do some quick math.

The three new IITs, for example, are estimated to cost Rs. 1400 crores per year for the next five years! When fully operational, they will have a student strength of about 14,000 (8000 bachelors, 2000 masters and 4000 doctoral students -- all of which are generous estimates), giving us a price of Rs. 50 lakhs per student. Amortizing this sum over a 20-year period gives us Rs. 2.5 lakhs per student per year. That is just fixed costs alone! Add to it about Rs. 1.5 lakhs per student as annual running expenses, taking the total to over Rs. 4 lakhs per student per year!

To put this number in perspective, if our government were to lavish even a quarter of this amount on every student, it would end up spending Rs. 100,000 crores -- roughly 3 percent of GDP. Put another way, this is eight times India's current expenditure on higher education (0.37 percent of GDP)! Is it any wonder, then, that "IITs for all" is not the favourite slogan for our higher education planners?

there's another question one needs to ask: what kind of minds could've conceived the idea that a miniscule section of the population deserved such irrational largesse? minds steeped in the ideology of caste, in my view. but the answers you might get from the ruling classes would always be couched in modern, democratic rhetoric.

mayawati lacks merit?

It is a joke that even Mayawati and Jayalalithaa want to become PM. It is matter to laugh about. A lot of people in Indian politics want to become PM, but if you look at the trend then Manmohan Singh is well placed to become the PM again.

mani shankar aiyar, who started working for rajiv gandhi's congress even before he left the civil services, thinks mayawati is a joke. what does he take seriously, really? apart from serious sycophancy and slavish devotion to the leaders he chooses to follow? i mean seriously.

aiyar is the second person to call mayawati a joke. cho ramaswamy was the first.

Is this upper caste Hindu bias speaking? Chari refused it was. "I do not deny I am a Hindu and by circumstances, I was born into an upper caste family, but that does not make me biased. A person like P A Sangma could become a Speaker of this country's Parliament though he was from backward classes but that was purely due to merit," Chari said.

the parivar likes merit. and that's what the other major national political formation, the congress, is also trying to say: that mayawati lacks merit. this common belief might be articulated differently, but what one shouldn't forget is that this is a commonly held belief.

louis dumont formulated the theory that the guiding principle of caste is purity. over time, it'd seem, this has transformed into merit. how does one define merit? merit, just as purity, is defined by the meritorious.

if mayawati is accused of lacking intellectual merit, one shouldn't argue that both indira and rajiv gandhi didn't even hold undergraduate degrees while mayawati holds multiple degrees including a b.a., a degree in education and another in law.

what's her agenda beyond caste? the two national parties have consistently brought into legislatures at both the national and regional levels, representatives who've consistently belonged to a select band of castes from each state. castes which don't make up more than 15-20% of india's population. arms of the state- the bureaucracy, the public sector, the judiciary and also the media- are all run by members of this select band of castes. what was nehru's/indira's/ rajiv gandhi's/vajpayee's/sonia's agenda- it wasn't/isn't caste?

she doesn't have a national outlook? isn't mayawati's entire career about expanding the narrow idea of the indian nation?

creamy layer: individuals, not castes

what's the creamy layer? is it a) a set of powerful castes at the top of the broad category of castes listed as backward or is it b) composed of well-to-do individuals from any of the castes in the obc list?

for more clarity, let's check what the national commission for backward classes has to say:

What is Creamy Layer?

The Government of India has evolved the criteria for exclusion of certain socially advanced persons/sections from the benefits of reservation available to OBCs in civil posts and services under the Government of India and this is called the "Creamy Layer criteria"

persons/sections: which i guess should be understood as individuals, primarily, who come from certain sections- the persons and the sections are listed in this page. is there a mention of castes in the sections listed? no. what does that mean? it means that option (a) that i had mentioned in the beginning of this post is ruled out: there is no such creature as a 'creamy layer' of castes. in other words, every caste in this list has passed the test of these criteria. so only individuals would be skimmed off, not castes.

For all the brave face the government is putting up, its perfidy has been exposed. The issue was not whether affirmative action is permissible. What was grossly objectionable was that the government indiscriminately included groups that manifestly ought not to be beneficiaries. They had converted a social policy into a pure power play.

so, what are the groups that pratap bhanu mehta is talking about? is he talking about the same 'groups' (or 'members of certain castes') as dipankar gupta was talking about a few months ago?

It is ‘demonstrably perverse’ to consider members of certain castes incapable of doing well and getting ahead even if they have the means and the powers to do so. This is as much a cultorological loaded argument as are the caste slurs against the Scheduled Castes. By reminding the government to take a second look at not just the number of OBCs but also the principal of identification, the Supreme Court was doing democracy a great favour.

what groups are these two tv stars talking about? dipankar gupta has never minced words on what he thought of obcs, like in this article for instance:

Mayawati thought differently. She knew from experience that it was OBCs, and not Brahmins or Baniyas, who routinely brutalised rural Dalits. She abandoned her early catchwords and reached out to the 'forwards'. She could sense they were politically rudderless and racked by post-Mandal job anxieties. Therefore, by bringing the two together and taking advantage of rampant lawlessness in UP, which again is largely an OBC phenomenon, she rode to power in style. It was this deadly scissors movement, which combined 'forwards' and SCs that cut OBC supporters down to size. This lot had been fattened post-Mandal, pampered as they were by the Left and Right. But Mayawati contributed little to this OBC-led bonhomie. She was preoccupied elsewhere with the thought of bringing Dalit politics back to basics.

pretty sweeping? neither mr.mehta nor mr.gupta ever talked about only individuals, their target was always whole groups or castes or the broad category of backward classes itself. now, when they call the supreme court's judgment 'a landmark' or 'it was not supposed to be caste' (check both articles- see how similar both their arguments sound given the fact they're both trying to reinterpret some of their earlier assertions in the face of obvious rejection of their original arguments by the sc) don't delude yourself into thinking that they were talking about excluding privileged, well-to-do individuals from obc families from reservations- this is not the creamy layer they were talking about. in mr.gupta's view, at least, the whole of the obcs were a creamy layer.

in mr.mehta's defense, one could say that he wasn't as strongly opposed to 'affirmative action' for the obcs, as he calls it, as mr. gupta. he advocates better targeting. but the company of other committed intellectuals opposing obc reservations did show through in some of his articles in which he pointed out at some length that the obcs didn't deserve reservations.

mr.mehta, mr.gupta and also yogendra yadav have all talked about other, more rational/objective methods of measuring backwardness. 'deprivation indices' that focussed on the school an aspirant went to, location (village/town/city etc.,), gender, income and caste etc., all, except for caste, very objective criteria, right? if someone like yogendra yadav thinks that such requirements as income certificates can't be custom-designed, especially by individuals from those sections of indian society who occupy nearly 70% of india's sarkari/quasi sarkari positions, what can one say? and what is more real than the fact that caste determines economic realities in india? these folks live in a different reality.

the problem is not that they live in a different reality, it is that they create a different reality for a large majority of upper caste indians, ever willing to subscribe to any explanation that turns accusing fingers away from them: a reality in which rich obcs travel in chauffeur-driven mercedes cars, own most of the land in rural india, go around in rampaging mobs killing dalits in the countryside, vote in single-minded hordes for parties that promise them undeserved goodies, and send large numbers of disgustingly unruly, illiterate lumpen elements to houses of legislature. don't stop to think of an army of bloodthirsty nayees or kumhars or bunkars and ponder on how absurd a picture that makes, don't stop to think of all the obc famers killing themselves in the countryside, don't stop to think, for instance, of how in madhya pradesh, as ndtv pointed out yesterday (albeit, to press home an altogether different point), obc legislators make up only 15% of the members of the legislative assembly (while the obc population in the state is 51% of the total) and how their representation in most states is much more pathetic. don't stop.

don't stop to think of how round after round of the nsso surveys reveal an ever increasing share of the obcs in the total population and in the population of the poor in the country. don't stop to think of figures that indicate widespread illiteracy, unemployment. of lives wasting away in occupations that define india's heritage...

don't stop, because the creamy layer will melt away. you know you it exists, because you're convinced it exists. it's powerful ('a few prosperous castes eat away all the benefits'), and it's prosperous ('they own most of the land') and it's large ('they're the votebanks'), among a whole lot of evil, immoral things.

that's what the manufactured reality, built on mostly anecdotal evidence and garnished with sparse factual support, has achieved until now: convinced a large number of upper caste indians into believing that the creamy layer is the whole reality of the obcs.

i'd like to ask, picking a line from this blogger: where's the data? where's the data to prove that the creamy layer exists and it is all the things it is garishly portrayed to be? and even if it exists, why should it be excluded? show me the data to prove that it should be excluded.

the chemistry between the right hand and the left

laxman seth, a cpm mp, tells the government how to mobilize more resources, a couple of years ago (and i'm sure someone from the cpm had given the government the same advice a couple of years before that, and a couple of years... before..):

Saying that there is a huge resource crunch, with high revenue and fiscal deficits in the union budget, Seth stressed the need for resource mobilisation. And for this, the vast parallel economy of black money must be tapped. Seth pointed out that there are huge tax arrears amounting to nearly Rs 70,000 crore. The non-performing assets of banks (NPAs) account for another Rs 75,000 crore. He criticised the government for not making any attempt to unearth the black money. He also wanted plugging of large-scale evasion of taxes by corporate and business houses and the broadening of the tax net. He gave an example of how bad things were by citing the case of returns filed by the corporate houses. Only two per cent of those returns are checked on the plea that the government does not have sufficient machinery. Seth questioned why there is no sufficient machinery and if this was the case how the government can mobilise resources.

what do you learn from that advice? one, that there is large scale tax evasion in the country and two, the government should invest more in machinery so that tax evasion can be curtailed and arrears can be collected.

one agrees totally with the first conclusion. tax evasion is bad for the country. one also agrees with the second conclusion, almost totally. almost totally, you might ask? why not totally? the second conclusion, or element of advice, asks the government to invest more in machinery, and this is what i object to. machines do not collect taxes, people do. babus in the central and state governments. the mp obviously thinks the government should recruit more taxmen. he means upper caste taxmen, of course. you very rarely find any other kind in the country. this would entail a certain cost every year- a few crores, or a few hundred crores if you're thinking of the whole country, in pay and perks for these new taxmen. and they won't come with any guarantee that any tax arrears will be collected. writing such a condition into the terms of employment would of course have the cpm on the streets, conducting bandhs, and also galvanize them into action in parliament, conducting roadshows. and what'd you be ultimately left with? more taxes to pay for the extra taxmen.

that's how upper caste revolutionaries save upper caste businessmen while pulling up the government, and not the upper caste taxmen, for not recruiting more upper caste taxmen to improve tax revenues. that's called: saving all shades of upper caste indians with one stone.

here's another instance of good marksmanship:

In any case, the issue is between:

Rs. 58,416 + 38,107 + 58,655 +87,992 crores vs. Rs. 60,000 crores

Needless to say, the marginal and small farmer has neither such tax-saving options - and for that matter, a taxable income!!!

that is how you save upper caste small and marginal farmers (yes, i know it'd be easier to find the loch ness monster than small and marginal upper caste farmers who need relief): by pointing out how upper caste businessmen owe more notional tax arrears than them! you can't tax the loch ness monster for inhabiting the loch ness, can you? but notional tax arrears make as powerful tools as mythical monsters in keeping the lower castes hungry and happy.

the life of an upper caste revolutionary is tough: he has to carry the burden of so many lower caste ingrates while at the same time protecting, as i said earlier, all shades of upper caste indians.

the day upper caste taxmen collect the 70,000 crores in tax arrears plus the 75,000 crores in npas (mentioned in the first part of this post) and also the Rs. 58,416 + 38,107 + 58,655 +87,992 crores in tax evasion (mentioned in the second part, or instance) i'll offer them an equivalent amount plus one rupee as a token of eternal gratitude from the aforementioned ingrates.