How does one respond to a survey report which states that one in four Indians practise untouchability? As an Indian, you could react with a sense of shame, sadness or anger, as many have. Or, if you are a privileged upper caste person who has never encountered caste prejudice in your life, you might show surprise or shock. Or you could respond by trying to protect caste from the bad press that any mention of untouchability tends to generate.

The India Human Development Survey’s (IHDS-2) findings on untouchability have elicited the entire gamut of responses. Conducted jointly by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and the University of Maryland, and based on a sample of 42,000 households, the survey found that 27% of respondents admitted to the practice of untouchability.

The prevalence of untouchability was highest among Brahmins (52%), followed by other backward classes or OBCs (33%), and non-Brahmin forward castes (24%). About 15% of scheduled caste and 22% of scheduled tribe respondents also admitted to practising untouchability. Broken up religion-wise, 30% of Hindus, 23% of Sikhs, 18% of Muslims, and 5% of Christians admitted to the practice.

While the commentary on the survey results has been predictably polarized along caste lines, the responses from upper caste Hindu writers have been characterized by four defensive manoeuvres: one, suggest that the survey may have mistaken kitchen hygiene practices for untouchability; two, quibble over methodology and data points; three, construe the furore around the findings as an attack on Hinduism and/or Brahmins, which then clears the ground for painting Hinduism/Brahmins as the victim; and finally, conclude that the problem is not caste itself but “casteism", which is the savarna name for the bad things attributed to caste, such as untouchability and prejudice. So, once caste has been cleansed of the impurities of casteism, we can all happily claim our caste identities without feeling bad about it.

On the other hand, Dalit-Bahujan commentators have been more overtly critical. They assert that a survey like this in a country where public discourse is dominated by upper castes will achieve little more than ring-fencing untouchability as some sort of a deviant social pathology while exonerating the oppressive institution of caste itself. Unfortunately, savarna interlocutors have shown little inclination to engage with this critique, preferring instead to greet it with either radical incomprehension or outright hostility.

All said and done, the default position of the average Western-educated, English-speaking savarna on the question of caste seems to be that it is an ancient Hindu custom that had its uses in the past, but which today is just “one among many factors that shape identity". Caste, in such a view, is a problem only insofar as it results in biases or prejudice or discrimination or in practices such as untouchability. These pathologies of caste, aka casteism, can be cured through education, awareness, markets, and meritocracy. Once casteism is vanquished, caste serves as just another marker of identity, such as gender, religion, nationality, ethnicity, etc.

But then, as B.R. Ambedkar demonstrated a long time ago in his undelivered speech titled Annihilation of Caste (AoC), there are at least two fundamental distortions in such a benign view of caste.

First of all, what the above description—typically, the English-speaking Brahmin’s notion of caste—ignores is the reality of hierarchy, and the differentials of power and privilege that are encoded in the caste structure and dynamically enforced. It is this enforcement of hierarchy and privilege that enables caste to perform its three-fold function—as a generator of symbolic meaning, as a system of social organization, and as a marker of identity. It is what makes caste different from other modes of identification such as ethnicity or nationality. Being Swedish does not make one inferior or superior to being Australian, but identifying with any given caste automatically places you above or below every other caste.

Secondly, untouchability is not an evil excrudescence that can be excised from caste, leaving the latter intact. Rather, it is the rotten core of caste. Caste system’s encounter with modernity might render untouchability more subtle, as it has rendered caste privilege itself more subtle—to the extent that many upper caste Hindus have no problem denying that their caste location plays any role in their lives. But untouchability can never be abolished without the abolition of caste—this was the reason Gandhi failed miserably in his campaign against untouchability. It was also one of the many reasons why Ambedkar believed that the caste system—his name for it was brahminism—itself needed to go if untouchability had to go.

But good-hearted savarna Hindus, even as they engage in competitive lionizing of Ambedkar, blithely assert that the role of caste today is merely one of nomenclature. If that is all that caste is about, then what’s the problem in getting rid of it?

Ambedkar, of course, saw through all the sophistry wielded in defence of caste. His answer to the question of why Hindus will not give up caste, as laid out in AoC, is quite straightforward. The Hindus observed caste, he said, “not because they are inhuman or wrong-headed. They observe caste because they are deeply religious … caste has a divine basis." His strategy for eliminating the caste system (and untouchability along with it) is also equally straightforward: “You must therefore destroy the sacredness and divinity with which caste has become invested. In the last analysis, this means you must destroy the authority of the shastras and the Vedas." The irony is that India right now seems headed in the opposite direction.

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