Comment

The caste system is under pressure. Urbanisation and market forces have blunted its sting, but it is also adapting and mutating to survive. Last Sunday’s rally by Mayawati in Mumbai is one pointer.

Far from seeking the end of caste, she seemed to suggest that castes need to come together under one political umbrella. After winning Uttar Pradesh, Mayawati is obviously attempting to spread her wings in Maharashtra through the same route, by building a coalition of castes under Dalit leadership.

To be sure, this is little more than the old Congress formula of upper caste, Dalits and Muslims coming together for electoral advantage.

The Congress didn’t succeed in dislodging caste through this approach; so there is little reason to think Mayawati can do it merely by having Dalits in the leadership role. Banding together for power is a very old idea in India.

Moreover, any caste-based accommodation has automatic limits to growth. If Mayawati can consolidate different groups in one way, why can’t the others?

It’s not unthinkable for a Mulayam Singh or even a BJP to try and re-engineer a winning combo by mixing castes and communities in different proportions.

A couple of defeats at the hands of Mayawati will be enough to get her rivals thinking along the same lines. One suspects that Mayawati’s project can go only so far, but, thanks to her political compulsions, caste has found a life of its own. The moot point is: can it survive forever?

My own understanding is that it will mutate to survive in various environments. Just as capitalism has survived and even prospered by adopting the welfare state model, caste could end up doing the same.

And the reason is simple: caste is not just a system of oppression dreamt up by the upper castes. It endures because it provides a terrific support system for the individuals within each caste.

Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet, essayist and Nobel prize winner who spent several years in India in the 1950s and 1960s, notes that caste is not just about a group’s place in the social hierarchy.

According to him, caste has survived for over 2,000 years because it is a “fabric of religious, economic, political, territorial, linguistic, and familial relations…”.

It takes an outsider to tell us what we should have known by instinct. You can’t eliminate caste by pretending it is only about evil. It is much more.

It is a self-supporting system built to resist change and provide members with stability. To eliminate it, you need new structures that will help individuals and groups to emerge from caste’s cosy womb.

An example from the world of business should illustrate the point. Till the early 1990s, the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) was the country’s premier exchange, and it was run like a club — its members were almost all from the same community. They would trade together, conspire together, and — if someone got into trouble — bail him out together.

The problem: they were losing the trust of investors, who tended to see stockbrokers as crooks. That’s when the National Stock Exchangecame up.

It said: we don’t care for such clubs which don’t serve investors. We will provide a system that is transparent and pro-investor. In just a few years, it overtook the BSE. And the BSE is today following the NSE model of governance. A club has become an institution.

It would be naïve to believe that nation-building can be as easy as developing a transparent stock exchange. But the building blocks are similar. Strong institutions, the rule of law, and a vigilant people and press. Unfortunately, our politicians have been busy destroying institutions.

Parliament is already debased. The lower judiciary is often compromised. The police force in many states is half-criminal. The press is often mercenary.

This leaves people with no alternative but to fall back on the old reliable support system: caste. The moral: create alternative institutions, and caste will wither away.

Email: r_jagannathan@dnaindia.net