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India’s polity suffers from a strong caste bias, writes Rajdeep Sardesai

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prasad1

prasad1

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[FONT=&quot]Caste narratives expose inner fault lines in our hierarchical society and can easily spark off controversy. Last week, when Jai Ram Thakur was selected as the BJP’s Himachal Pradesh chief ministerial candidate, I tweeted about how nine of the 11 BJP chief ministers (excluding the north-east) now belong to upper castes. Predictably, the tweet raised an avalanche of protest. Since 280 characters on Twitter aren’t enough to make a nuanced argument on the divisive issue of caste, I deleted the tweet. Thakur, a five-time MLA and the son of a mason and a farmer may be a deserving choice, but is also a beneficiary of Himachal’s ‘Thakur-waad’ dominance with nearly half the ruling party MLAs belonging to the community. Indeed, my central argument is unshaken: Seventy years after independence, despite the push for a more ‘inclusive’ politics, we remain an upper caste- led polity.[/FONT]
 
When Narendra Modi became the country’s prime minister, it was seen as a watershed moment, one that would genuinely effect a change in the power pyramid. Until then, the highest executive post in the country was controlled by upper castes (the one exception was Deve Gowda, a Vokkaliga from Karnataka, whose brief tenure must be seen as an aberration).

Three years later, that elite is still very much in power. Just take a look at the senior ministers in the Union cabinet: the all-powerful Cabinet Committee on Security, for example, is monopolised by Brahmins and Thakurs. The senior bureaucracy is also dominated by the upper castes. The Opposition is led by a Janeu-Dhari Hindu, as we were firmly reminded by the Congress during the Gujarat campaign. Yes, the President of India is a Dalit, but his tenure in Rashtrapati Bhavan is unlikely to lead to greater Dalit empowerment, just as a Pratibha Patil’s nomination hardly promoted women’s emancipation.


Post-script: To those turned off by caste arithmetic in politics, how about a review of the matrimonial columns in newspapers that so glaringly mirror social prejudice? As for us journalists, we too maybe need to look within and ask the inconvenient question: how many Dalit, OBC, Adivasi editors do we have in Indian newsrooms?


Post#1 and post#2 go together.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/india-s-polity-suffers-from-a-strong-caste-bias/story-diVCpStp4f41TvChaXTq7L.html


This is the opinion of Rajdeep Sardesai a senior journalist and author.
 
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