Dispatch #21: Weekend Linkfest

Here is a curated list of a few good articles from the world of policy, politics and development.

1) The Hindu Hoax- How upper castes invented a Hindu majority?

In the current issue of The Caravan, Divya Dwivedi, Shaj Mohan and J Reghu have written a very important piece which reveals that the Hindutva project in India is an upper caste construct to dominate and hold to the positions of power. The authors have very nicely described how ‘Hinduism’ as a religion is a 20th century idea and the census of 19th century India actually struggled to put a large population of the sub-continent, having diverse set of beliefs and culture, under the category of Hindu. They identified themselves as upper caste and lower caste people.

The best aspect of this piece is to read about how Jotirao Phule wanted the society to be arranged socially vis-a-vis Bal Gangadhar Tilak.

The authors write, “While much attention has been paid to Hindu nationalists’ treatment of those they construct as enemies—the religious minorities of India, especially the Muslims—less has been written about the hoax of Hinduism. The definition of “Hindu” lacks objective reality and runs contrary to recent scholarship in various disciplines. The religion has been used to suppress and control the political aspiration of the oppressed castes, who were slipped into the Hindu religious category in the last century without consultation. By adopting this recently invented religious category as the identity of the majority, the Hindu nationalists led by the Brahminical RSS have been able to claim that they represent the majority. In this way, the upper castes are able to exercise political power in a modern constitutional democracy and distort the history and everyday reality of caste oppression in the subcontinent. The popular understanding of “Hinduism” and the self-perception of the majority of lower-caste people in the subcontinent has also changed to an extent over the last century due to the more or less silent acceptance of this term by some historians, intellectuals and the media.

While it is claimed to be an ancient religion, there is wide academic consensus that Hinduism is a fairly recent invention. For a belief system to be given the designation of a religion, it needs to be understood as one by the state and also by a group of people that share that belief system. In the case of Hinduism, it is only in the early twentieth century that the British government tried to define a criteria for who could be considered a Hindu. Till then, the British officials had used Hinduism as a term of convenience, having inherited it from Christian missionaries who used it as a negative concept—to identify those who were neither Christians, Jews nor Muslims.”

Read the full essay to understand the nuances of the arguments.

2) The Harvest of Casteism- Race, caste and what it will take to make Dalit lives matter:

I have been meaning to read Suraj Yengde’s July Caravan piece for a very long time. Finally got a chance to finish reading it. The article has drawn parallels between the Dalit Panthers and Black Panthers and how caste and race are looked upon by the dominant castes in India and abroad.

Yengde writes, “In India, sweeping talk of “Indian” prejudice shields the real architects of the social order from liability. The forces that give life to caste are clear. The Hindu holy books enshrined the varna system, and they have been preserved and propagated for millennia by the Brahmins, exercising their monopoly over priesthood and vast power over social thought. The other dominant castes have surrendered their minds to brahminical beliefs, and joined the project of translating these into reality. The equations between the dominant castes have seen various configurations over time, and so have their relations with changing political rulers across historical periods, but their collaboration in shaping the present state of affairs is indisputable.

Racist and religious hatred is deeply enmeshed with caste belief. By the rules of caste, all those not born into the varnas are subhuman, and their mere proximity or touch is a source of spiritual pollution. This explains the ostracisation of many of the country’s ethnic minorities—most notably the indigenous Adivasis, ranked alongside Dalits in the Brahminical hierarchy. Huge numbers of Indian Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and Sikhs are from these outcaste groups, having converted to try and shake off the stigma they carry in Hindu eyes. But the dominant castes do not forget that stigma so easily, and brand them with an added taint for the supposed sin of abandoning the Hindu religion. Even in their new faiths, which espouse human equality in the eyes of god, Dalit and Adivasi converts find that a narrow elite, often converts from higher castes, continues to shun them.”

3) The faces behind the farmer revolt:

Sayantan Bera has written a beautiful piece profiling the farmer leaders who are leading the ongoing protests. These leaders belong to disparate farmers’ unions. The piece is on how they have set aside their differences and joined hands to take on the government.

Bera writes, “Many of the farmer leaders who are out on the streets have not seen eye-to-eye for years, if not decades. Yet, decisions are being taken jointly, brushing aside years of acrimony and differences. While the outcome of the agitation may become clear only with time, the pushback by the farmers is already a case study in the art of protest—in a social atmosphere where protest is increasingly viewed with suspicion.”

4) Why does poor West Bengal have healthier children than rich Gujarat?

Using the latest NFHS data, Shoaib Danyal explains the paradox between the health indicators of West Bengal and Gujarat.

He writes, “Prabir Chatterji, a doctor working in rural Bengal, points out that the state’s healthy gender indicators, nutrition and political structure plays a role. “The availability of PDS [Public Distribution System]is very good in Bengal as is primary and high school education for women,” he explains. “Local government in the form of the panchayat system is also very strong.”

PDS is a government-run programme that distributes food grains to the poor in India. While Bengal was once a laggard, a 2016 study found that it has made significant strides in making its reach universal in rural areas of the state which means it is “catching up with the leading PDS reformers”.

As Scroll.in has reported earlier, West Bengal has one of the most robust systems of local government in the Indian Union. Panchayats are politically influential locally and handle significant amounts of money. Attempts to tamper with them – as most recently seen by in 2016, when the state government attempted to fix elections results – have seen strong resistance. As a result, panchayats are able to play a significant and beneficial role in rural development.”

5) Love Taboos- Controlling Hindu-Muslim Romances:

Charu Gupta has a brilliant piece on Love Jihad for The India Forum. The article is like a one-stop shop for anyone who wants to understand the history of love jihad in India.

The author writes, “The ‘love jihad’ campaign of Hindutva, along with the circulation of such images, constructs every interfaith love, romance, or marriage as a deception. In such a climate, a Tanishq advertisement, a scene from the web seriesA Suitable Boy, an Assamese television serialBegum Jaan — anything that even remotely depicts the arc of Hindu female desire for men outside the community — is regulated as transgression, which produces moral disciplining and everyday violence along the alliance model of sexuality, where through arrangements of marriages, boundaries of religion and caste are policed. It is precisely the malleability of Hindutva discourse that portrays interfaith relationships as ‘love jihad’, and its wider application in the form of laws, which has made it even more insidious.

Various regulatory mechanisms have thus evolved to control freedom of choice and shrink the mobility and space for young urban Hindu women, and reorganise the urban public sphere according to a gendered Hindu private and civic order (Tyagi and Sen 2020). Couched in the language of ‘protection’ is a grim coercive power and disciplinary regime, that views women who desire and who chose their own partners as an enemy within and as a menace to Hindutva. A nation coded as Hindu is deciding the rules of love, intimacy and desire.”

6) Health and economic impact of air pollution in the states of India- the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019:

“1·67 million deaths were attributable to air pollution in India in 2019, accounting for 17·8% of the total deaths in the country. The majority of these deaths were from ambient particulate matter pollution (0·98 million) and household air pollution (0·61 million). The death rate due to household air pollution decreased by 64·2% from 1990 to 2019, while that due to ambient particulate matter pollution increased by 115·3% and that due to ambient ozone pollution increased by 139·2% . Lost output from premature deaths and morbidity attributable to air pollution accounted for economic losses of US$28·8 billion and $8·0 billion, respectively, in India in 2019. This total loss of $36·8 billion was 1·36% of India's gross domestic product (GDP). The economic loss as a proportion of the state GDP varied 3·2 times between the states, ranging from 0·67% to 2·15% , and was highest in the low per-capita GDP states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh. Delhi had the highest per-capita economic loss due to air pollution, followed by Haryana in 2019, with 5·4 times variation across all states.”