A FIRST IN LIFE

For the first time in my life, I went and saw the Hindi film, Phule, made by Anant Mahadevan, in a modern mall theatre in Hyderabad, and that too along with 20 Phuleites — lawyers, doctors, including a Telugu film director. I do not normally see films unless they have historical relevance. I have seen major changemaker’s films, such as Amazing Grace, made on the life of William Wilberforce in England in 2006. It was directed by Michael Apted. I saw Richard Attenborough’s film, Gandhi. I also saw Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, directed by Jabbar Patel in 2000.

The movie, Phule, can be compared more with Amazing Grace than any other. Both of them are about the life and struggle of slave liberators.  

Amazing Grace is a biographical drama film about the abolitionist campaign against slave trade in the British Empire, led by William Wilberforce (1753-1833), who was responsible for steering an anti-slave trade legislation through British Parliament. He fought against slave traders and masters in the British Empire and forced British Parliament to make a law against slave trade.

That was the first ever law against slave trade in human history.  

A COUPLE’S FIGHT TO THE END

The Phules fought against the Shudra/Dalit slavery beginning in 1848. The film is a feast for thinkers, writers and activists, as it combines both fighting in a non-violent way and constructing a theory about how the Shudra farmers, untouchables and women get liberated through education, which was prohibited for them for millennia.

Though Mahatma Phule, even before his marriage, was a spirited boy, after his marriage with Savitribai Patel (after marriage Savitribai Phule) he became a revolutionary, with her readiness to learn and educate herself as a 9-year-old girl. She too was an uncommon girl since her childhood. Her desire to learn and go against her father’s spirit of casteism is well documented. Her spirit lit a real fire in Jyotiba to educate women in India, and she was willing to join the fight from the beginning.   

A SCENE THAT SPEAKS ABOUT A CRITICAL POINT

The film captures the collective consciousness of Phule’s school mate team along with Savitri and Fatima Sheikh and her brother Usman Sheikh, to take a massive step to liberate the entire Shudra/Dalit samaj from the superstitious grip of Brahmanism.

There is an amazing scene that invokes the most significant and game-changing thought process. After the 1957 war, the Poona Brahmins made a drum-beat announcement on the streets where the Shudras lived that to fight the British, they must join Vyayam Shalas (for physical training). That they must learn the methods of fighting and making their bodies fit, while seriously opposing access to education for them.

A Shudra pehelwan (wrestler) keeps training the youth in an open air vyayam shala, teaching them all kinds of exercises —weight-lifting, stick-rolling and fighting. Jyotirao goes there to talk to the master. He asks the master, “Why are you training the youth in this art?” The pehelwan replies that “if we make our youth learn these arts, they can fight the British.” Phule tells him, “Rather, we must teach them reading and writing to fight the British in a better way.” The pehelwan says, “No, it is a sin. We should not do that. If we learn reading and writing we will violate the Dharma”. Phule tells him that there is no such religious rule. The pehelwan throws him on the ground and puts his foot on him and asks him to “get lost”, since he was opposing Dharma.

Phule simply gets up and walks away.

PHULE’S SHUDRA NATIONALISM

The Shudras and Dalits were supposed to fight the British only physically, not intellectually. But the British rule was being sustained through their intellectual might more than military might. Jyotirao understood this. Unless the Shudra/Dalits and women of all castes—including Brahmins—are educated, the fight against the British will not succeed. That is what he tries to impress upon the pehelwan. In response, the latter uses his enslaved brain to physically beat Jyotiba down.

In another scene, a Brahmin team goes to their school and attacks them, beats up Phule and destroys the furniture. Savitri protects the traumatised girls by huddling them in a room. Afterward, she treats Phule’s wounds. Phule tells her that they must be prepared for not just yuddh (battle) but for a Maha Yuddh (mega battle). The Phules’ life was under threat all the time. Yet, they did not abandon the fight.

Two mercenaries were paid Rs 100 and sent by Brahmins to kill Phule. But he won over them. Phule says, “At least, they spent hundred rupees on me.”     

Phule’s philosophy was to educate farmers to produce more food. Educate Dalits to produce better technology of leather and better services by joining the whole society. Phule’s deeper reformist revolution was to prepare India to defeat the British once for all.

The Brahmin pundits, on the other hand, were thinking that they could come to power while keeping humans, production and distribution of goods and commodities backward even after the British left. Savitri tells the Pandits when she confronts them, “You want to rule us exactly like the British are doing”. The Brahmins of that time had a self-interest, not national interest. The Phules were envisioning a bigger national interest.      

After some time, the Phules opened a school for girls in an open field. But no parent was being allowed to send girls to school as an atmosphere of terror was created in entire Poona town.

Suddenly, we see the pehelwan walking with several girls to the school and admitting them. He later follows the Phules all through their struggle.   

The Phules started Shudra/Dalit and women’s education, a revolutionary process in an absolutely non-violent way. Throughout the film, when the Phules and their supporters face violence, they kept the movement completely non-violent. Except in one incident, when the Shudra workers themselves were opposing girls’ education and come to threaten Savitri and Fatima Sheikh, Savitri slaps one. Patralekha, who played Savitri’s role, has shown her talent as an actor.

The Shudra/Dalits were brainwashed for centuries, generation after generation, that education for Shudras is paap— a sin. It became a self-inflicting human torture. Whenever there were attempts to overcome the fear of ‘sin’ and punarjanma (rebirth) as pigs and dogs, a violent attack was launched from multiple corners. The life of the Phule couple is a standing example of that process of Indian history.

The whole project of Phules’, graphically shown in the film in a manner that even a child can understand, was to violate the rules of Shudra/Dalit slavery. From Phule teaching his ‘child wife’, Savitri, opposing the controls of the Brahminic society and self-inflicted father and elder brother, stretching his reform movement farther and farther in the face of resistance, is a new mode of non-violent revolution. No couple in the world has ever played such a revolutionary role in changing their own uncivilised society.

William Wilberforce was fighting his educated and slave trading class with reasoning. It was to make a law to abolish slave trade in the early 19th century in England. But the Phules’ fight was much more difficult. The determined couple, by embracing a philosophy of mass liberation of all Indians, including Brahmins, who were steeped in deep superstition, paved a way for the future. They steered the struggle with grit. They were fighting to counter the practice and theory of embedded slavery and barbarism. No other couple in human history has shown such a spirit filled with revolutionary ambition for change. That too in a stagnant society like that of India.

While watching the film, I was either breaking into tears or trying to clap when they (the Phules) won in some fight.

No other film has made such a deep impact on my life and conscience as the film Phule has.

The writer is a political theorist, social activist and author. His latest book is the Shudra Rebellion. The views are personal.      

Courtesy: Newsclick                        

The post ‘Phule’: A Revolution on Screen appeared first on SabrangIndia.

However, the battle is going to be between the ruling YSRCP and TDP with an alliance with Jana Sena. Jagan since the 2014 election was a lone fighter. Chandrabababu, on the other hand, was desperate for alliances ever since the state was bifurcated. In 2014 he won 102 seats in alliance with the BJP and in 2019 he lost very badly to Jagan by winning just 23 seats. Hence now he is desperate for alliance with both Pavan Kalyan and the BJP. This, of course,  shows Babu’s nervousness.

Since he attacked Prime Minister Modi just before the 2019 elections, after their alliance broke, the PM is not even giving him an appointment. His trips to Delhi are proving to be more embarrassing. This election is very crucial for the state because after Jagan came to power with a massive majority of 151 out of 175 seats, he changed the development paradigm of the state in a manner that no other state Government in the last 75 years tried.

JAGAN SHIFTED THE DEVELOPMENT PARADIGM

He shifted the development paradigm from so-called material development of a state to human development by focusing on changing the fundamental structure of school and university education in the state. During the last five years, Jagan took several steps to lay a strong foundation of human development of the state. The first steps that he took were introducing common mediums, English and Telugu, in Government and private schools. This was the most difficult educational reform given the history of the diabolical education system of India. The children of the urban poor and the children of working masses in the agrarian sector were put in an immobile regional language education system by the central and state Governments. The idea of linguistic states created a goose around the neck of state Government schools wherein poor children study. Regional linguistic chauvinism was promoted among the rural masses while the rich put their children in private English medium schools. No Government was allowed to spend good amounts of budget money on school infrastructure, quality teaching, on good food for the poor children whose parents could not afford it. Spending on children for quality education is nothing but spending on human resource development. Discussions in budget sessions of the state assemblies were only on spending money on roads, buildings and occasionally dams. With such investments on material development kickbacks would come to the rulers and middle men. Huge amounts would go into the pockets of contractors.

The Jagan Government changed that model by allocating substantial amounts of budget money for school and university education and also to money transfer schemes to the accounts of the poor children’s parents. This destroyed the middle men role and massive graded cuts by stakeholders in material resource building.

The implication of this shift is that the brokerage system gets weakened. The worry of the opposition parties even if they come to power in 2024 they cannot fully revert to the old pure material resource development model. If Jagan comes back his reforms will deepen where after ten fifteen years a new generation of well educated, confident rural youth will come into the socio-political system. They will not allow an economy that gets used to human resource development changed and also they work for corruption free de-bureaucratized  operations.

The corrupt employees and high end bureaucrats who want to work like ‘civil and police dictators’ at various levels of administration are also unwilling to support this model of development. But certainly the poor rural and urban masses who tasted the money transfer life support the new system. That too getting monitored by village level volunteers on a day to day basis, who are employed by the state for that purpose.

The employment of volunteers to monitor every welfare scheme and help the old and sick get their benefits like old age pensions or rations from Government fare price shops to their doorstep is entirely a novel idea in a democratic administration. Though the middle and high end bureaucrats are unhappy with the volunteer force present in the villages the masses at large are happy. The volunteer in a village is a helping hand to every villager.

Such a model of humanpower development focusing on the schools, colleges has not been tried in any third world country. China, for example, tried with some kind of similar system both in education and health systems. They employed a large number of barefoot doctors. Jagan also created an unparalleled health infrastructure that helped the state in overcoming the Corona crisis with better monitoring systems. The village volunteers did a good job even in the health sector. All these new experiments shocked the contractor class of the nation itself.

The contractor class wants material development but not massive man power development. In my childhood in Telangana the local landlords used to ask the village school teachers not to teach but take salary and be happy at home. Their logic was that if all the village children are educated who will work as child labour around their cattle and who will work as their jeetagandlu (palerlu) after they become adults. At that time landlords saw developing humanpower through education as anti-feudal. Now in AP developing English educated  human power is being seen as an anti-contract capital. Chandrababu is closely linked up to the contract capital and private education sector.

If Jagan wins in this election of 2024 this model will deepen its roots and nobody will be able to change it in AP. That will also influence the national education system.

JAGAN’S NEW GOVERNMENT SCHOOL SYSTEM

For the first time in Indian electoral history, school education has become the central electoral battle. Jagan made the re-positioned Government school education his key agenda to counter his predecessor Chandrababu Naidu’s love for private school education with a clearly divided medium of instruction—English in private and Telugu in Government sector– and also school infrastructure. During his chief ministership both in the united Andhra Pradesh and in the first five years of bifurcated Andhra Pradesh Babu encouraged a massive chain of private box schools up to 12th grade—Narayana and Srichaitanya and others—across the state. These box schools are run in roadside apartments without any open space around the building. They became an educational business mafia by manipulatively drawing thousands of  rural and urban students into high schools and intermediate ( in a system of 10-2) colleges by charging a lakh and above fee per year. The parental struggle for sending children to these box schools became like an educational drug addiction.

They also established residential systems by collecting much more money tucking them in small apartment rooms. They turned boys and girls into mugging machines without allowing them any scope for physical exercise, sports and games and also outside human interaction. They deployed a method of huge propaganda about their achievements of ranks both in print and digital media through massive advertisements.

Chandrababu made the biggest private education mafia leader of that system, Narayana, who came from his own Kamma caste, as cabinet minister in his first cabinet in just bifurcated Andhra Pradesh.  To break this education business Jagan put in his 2019 election manifesto that if he comes to power he will make all Government schools English medium and with improved infrastructure. He won that election with a massive majority of 151 seats out of 175 seats. Chandrababu got just 23 seats.

After the Jagan school education model came into force half of private schools are empty. That is a big worry of  this mafia.

By this election time in 2024 the school education reform of AP has reached to a level where Jagan made his educational achievement as the main campaign issue. He is now mobilizing the parents of school and college-going students as an election force to counter Babu’s alliance and Amaravathi centered campaign.

The idea of development does not just include physical resources for already existing human beings. It includes the human development of just born children and also the people who will be born in future. The physical resources once built will get worn out in a very short time. But the knowledge base that humans acquire continues from generation to generation. It spreads from region to region, nation to nation. In modern times the discoveries by humans in the realm of knowledge benefit every human being on the earth. Jagan repeatedly says that the most valued property that “I give to the poor families is world class English medium education free in Government schools”.

The written word that humans developed preserved the knowledge and skills of people will be used by humans for thousands of years. The modern education system helped the process of preservation of knowledge for a longer time than any other physical structure that humans have built in history.

At a time the temple construction was the agenda of Modi Government Jagan made school construction as his plank of vote mobilization. If he wins the election in coming months English medium education school construction will become a national issue. If he loses this experiment will be defeated Babu and Pavan Kalyan are likely to revert the education system back to private corporate loot model. Let us wait and see.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author of many books.

Courtesy: Counter Current

The post Public Vs Private Education – A New Experiment By Y.S.Jagan Mohan Reddy appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Her speeches, with clarity, have good communication abilities attracting masses and media. Though she was threatened to withdraw and her younger brother, a school going boy, was attacked, she is not deterred. Her commitment to the right to contest and tell the truth to voters is setting a new trend in the state, perhaps in the country itself. She tells a story of an election system giving a handle to harass the poor and vulnerable, as money and muscle power plays a critical role. Yes this needs to be fought by the future generation. This young Dalit girl fighting in a general constituency set aside the caste borders. Her supporters come from all castes, communities and more so women of different walks of life.

Barrelakka is a New hope.           

The most unfulfilled promise of the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (earlier Telangana Rastra Samithi) partly controlled by one whole family is not providing jobs for millions of unemployed. The party that was said to have been formed only for Telangana now jumped that promise to become a BRS within ten years rule and spending a small state’s money for campaigns all over India. However, this young poor girl has put her weakest side on the election agenda. That seems to have turned the entire state’s unemployed youth against the ruling party. Except in that constituency in all other 118 constituencies, the fight may help the Congress because the unemployed youth in all over the state is glued to the anti-Government battle by this young girl.  The BRC leaders, though, are claiming that they put many welfare schemes in place, but their record on keeping the youth unemployed is quite visible in every house. This statehood was achieved by pushing 1500 youth into suicide net by former TRS now BRS leader, particularly the family members of KCR by repeatedly telling them that they would self-immolate if the state was not bifurcated.

She narrates her struggles of spending loaned money on coaching centers, living in un-accommodative Hyderabad city for rural youth. Several days, while preparing for Group I examination, she ate food around some free feeding centers on the roads or temples that dole prasandam. Yet she studied and wrote exams only to be cancelled afterwards on one pretext or the other. She repeatedly tells the masses that she would fight for 40,00,000 unemployed whose age and energies are running out, without getting married and living a secure life.  She explains their sorrows as victims of the negligence of the Government.

I was with her on 25 November 2023, just three days before the campaign ended on 27th. Scores of unemployed youth were in her campaign procession going through the richest Congress candidate, Jupalli Krishna Rao’s, former minister from earlier TRS Government and now shifted to the Congress, village Jupalli. Scores of cars reached there from all parts of two Telugu states, with hundreds of youth shouting slogans “Vote for Barrelakka, Vote for Whistle, Save the lives of Unemployed Youth” made me feel hopeful.

Dharani Took Away Her Small Piece of Land       

She is a graduate, with an innocent labour mother and two younger brothers. Her father became a drunkard and went away from home, after selling away just 10 gunta (1/4 acre) land they had without informing his wife. The Dharani portal allowed any owner to sell land without involving the family’s consent or signatures. She said my father handed over that land without telling my mother or children to somebody. There is no way now to retrieve the land. I went round begging and touching the people’s feet to get our land back. “Our land is swallowed by Dharani and Drunken father” says Barrelakka in a TV interview. This story infuriates people more and more.  The Dharni portal created huge problems for small farmers, who are unable to handle the software mafia.

She hoped for a job in the newly carved-out Telangana state. The KCR party promised jobs for youth once the state is bifurcated. When the state was formed Barrelakka was 15 and participated in the movement for statehood as a school student with a hope that she could help her mother with a Government job in the new state.

She wrote several state service examinations and got qualified from Group I, the top most state service, to other small job vacancies. But every time either selection was postponed or  already written exams were cancelled,  with a pretext of paper leakage and some other issue that state administration itself plotted.

The KCR Government remained indifferent to massively grown unemployment and totally collapsed the state education system. The education system remained dysfunctional during the T-state agitation and thereafter for the last ten years without any serious effort the Government killed the education system. When compared to the other bifurcated Andhra Pradesh, both in education and employment, Telangana remained the most unattended state. Barrelakka is a victim of the new method of administration of the new state administrators.

She Bought Buffalos and became Barrealakka    

She was clueless about her family’s future. She learnt making videos on her phone and started posting them on her Instagram @ barrelakka “Hi friends I am your Barrelakka. However hard we study and whatever degrees we acquire we will not be given jobs in Telangana. That is the reason why I bought four buffaloes with the struggle of my mother. Now I am with my buffalos in the fields”.  That video went viral. The police obviously with the eye-wink of the higher ups booked a case against her under the IPC section 505 (2) that she was defaming the Government. She was made to run around the court and her life became more miserable.

In this struggle came the election of 2023 for the State Assembly. As a last attempt in the struggle for survival, she filed for the nomination for Kollapur constituency. No major politician expected her nomination would survive the scrutiny. They thought that like her answer papers were rendered useless in the job examinations, her nomination would become useless. But it was not rejected. She was given a whistle symbol.

As I am writing this article her campaign began to shake with supporters with small amounts in their hands to donate and willing to stay with her sleeping on the roadside. Youtube channels follow her, songwriters and singers making quite powerful music videos and uploading on Youtube. The atmosphere around her campaign with several cars behind her bannered campaign vehicles showed a newborn moral force in this election. She is certainly a moral political fighter who created a new atmosphere in Telangana elections. Whether she wins or loses is a different issue. But she shows a direction to the youth which is the way forward.

Lawyers approached the Telangana high court asking for protection as the state and election commission were looking the other way about her and her family’s safety. There is fear all around that the rich can do anything against such a vulnerable young poor girl, as she has shown unusual courage and confidence.

The moral nation still surviving in the civil society of India must protect Barrelakka as she is a great hope for future life like her namesake the buffalo milk for this country for millennia.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author. His latest book is The Clash of Cultures—Productive Masses Vs Hindutva—Mullah Conflicting Ethics.

Courtesy: CounterCurrent

The post Barrelakka Is Setting A New Moral Trend In An Immoral Electoral System appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Members of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) or Shudras have opened up a new anti-caste battlefront in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The trigger came from a doha or lyrical verse in Goswami Tulsidas’s famous epic poem, Ramcharitmanas, which says the Shudras, animals, drums and women should not be allowed near anything respectable—and punished if they cross boundaries. In this way, the Ramcharitmanas abuses the productive agrarian Shudras as people of animal status who do not deserve education and reputable employment.

Samajwadi Party leader Swami Prasad Maurya in Uttar Pradesh and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Prof Chandra Shekhar, the education minister of Bihar, flagged off this battle. Now it has spread to Shudra-OBC and Dalit organisations. Chandra Shekhar said the Ramcharitmanas “spreads hatred” and discrimination against the non-elite or lower castes.

The idea is catching on like wildfire. Shudra-OBC leaders have burnt copies of the book, challenging the RSS-BJP’s Dwija or twice-born leaders, saints and sadhus. There is little role for productive work in their lives, which most Sangh Parivar members spend around temples and RSS organisations. Some saints from UP have issued “fatwas” to kill Swami Prasad Maurya for a price. In Bihar, there are demands to dismiss and arrest Chandra Shekhar, but he has refused to apologise.

However, book-burning and banning are no solution—the authentic way out is to rewrite Indian history to include the contributions of the Shudras.

According to the protesters against the abusive language in the Ramcharitmanas, India does not just belong to Dwijas or the Brahmin, Kshatriya, Kayastha, Khatri and Nania, who believe the Shudra, Dalit and Adivasi communities must live as second-grade citizens in Hindu society. The latter do not want their children to learn those ancient or medieval books that abused these identities. They are rejecting syllabi of the kind the RSS-BJP has designed and presented as the “New” Education Policy. They are rebelling against ideas that humiliate them in classrooms and beyond—for example, the books circulated and published by the Gita Press, which promote casteism and Dwija authority in modern India. The New Education Policy wants to systematically promote the regressive ideas in such books.

In Lucknow, several banners appeared with the caption “Garv Se Kaho Hum Shudra Hain—Say with pride, we are Shudras”. They are harking back to the term “Shudra”, which referred to food producers and artisans in ancient and medieval Sanskrit books written by Brahmin saints and priests. These writers imbued the term to mean that the Shudras were unworthy of respect and human dignity, starting with the Rigveda and expanding after that. But the Shudra term is being redeployed by the productive communities as a concept worthy of positive identity. This Shudra movement is like the Black movement in America to rediscover their humiliated past as a weapon to fight for equality.

The Shudras were construed as born of the feet of Brahma, an Aryan war hero given the status of the highest god, while the Shudras were turned into perpetually enslaved people. In the Vedas, Ramayana, Mahabharata, Ramcharitmanas and so on, food producers and artisans were condemned to perform hard labour while kings, priests and saints were asked to shun food production and any other form of labour. But it is the labour-power of the Shudras that built this nation. Wealth cannot be produced by books that do not promote human equality and productive work ethics.

The RSS-BJP calls the Shudra and Chandalas (former untouchables) Hindus but does not go beyond making verbal claims. In practice, it denies them equal spiritual rights in temples or access to their Utopian visions of life after death. The power to control temples has remained in the hands of Brahmin priests, and the RSS never sought equal rights for Hindus of other castes—except the three elite classes—to enjoy this power.

Since the 2014 parliamentary election, the RSS-BJP forces have divided the Shudras into lower, middle and upper OBCs. It has mobilised them within the Brahmin, Kshatriya, and Bania voting blocs, which favour the BJP in every election. It did this to weaken the regional parties and strengthen its own power at the cost of the disadvantaged Shudra, Dalit and Adivasis. Make no mistake—even national wealth is being transferred to the hands of Dwija industrialists, as the Hindenburg report, published not from India but overseas, has exposed in the Adani Enterprises case.

The RSS-BJP combine wants to organise Hinduism precisely on the lines of conservative Muslim systems in, say, the Middle East, Pakistan or Afghanistan, where kings, dictators or religious figures control the wheels of power. That is why we hear of so-called religious “leaders” in North India issuing fatwas against Shudra leaders.

We must redefine the Shudra category as a dignified, productive force with a role in the political, social, economic and educational fields. Without mass mobilisation around this historical category, the productive status of the masses will get pushed back to Tulsidas’s time. This is why “Say with pride, we are Shudras” is the right slogan for these times.

When Chandra Shekhar put Manu Dharma Shastra, the Ramcharitmanas and the RSS’s ideological guru MS Golwalkar’s Bunch of Thoughts in the same basket, clarity about this situation emerged. Promoting such knowledge will automatically make classical Shudra-Dalit enslavement the norm. Today, OBC-Dalit schoolchildren do not realise that the Shudra category refers to their productive, labouring parents. We need a new cultural battlefront to stop their modern enslavement.

Periyar Ramasamy started this fight in Tamil Nadu, unifying the Shudra-Dalit categories as Dravidians. The RSS-BJP plan is to break Dravidian unity and Shudra-Dalit-Adivasi unity by putting the Muslims up as enemies of Hindus. The Shudras and Dalits have bought into the RSS-BJP’s claims about a Muslim threat to the nation and voted them to power in Delhi and several States. But its undeclared agenda is to relegate the Shudra-Dalit forces to classical Brahmanical hegemony.

For all these reasons, India must start an intellectual battlefront by reading and re-reading Sanskrit texts. BR Ambedkar did this during his time, but the RSS-BJP are trying to co-opt his ideas by selectively quoting him on the minority question. A new discourse around the foundational books of the RSS-BJP—what they call Sanatan Dharma books—must also begin. Many Dalit scholars in North India do not want to enter this debate since they believe the Dalits are Buddhists and need not fight with Hindu religious ideology. But Shudra intellectuals and leaders have to fight this ideological battle.

In Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, Shudra leaders have realised that the New Education Policy reimposes the classical slavery of Shudra-Dalits in the garb of nationalism. Through it, the RSS-BJP regime wants to impose anti-Shudra and anti-Dalit books as sacred texts and lessons in schools, colleges and universities, where children and youth from these backgrounds study.

The slogan, “Garv Se Kaho Hum Shudra Hain”, shows a way out. Reuniting all productive communities, split into reserved (OBC) and unreserved Shudras, is necessary. If regional parties join this battle, it will signal definite hope for transformation. Once a historical category transforms into a category for social change—like the category ‘Black’ discarded ‘African-American’ and ‘Negro’—the Shudra identity will develop the next stage of social movement in India after the Mandal revolution. This new path is filled with hope, and Mahatma Phule, Periyar Ramasamy Naikar and Ambedkar are its guiding lights.

The author is a political theorist, social activist and author of ‘The Shudras: Vision For New Path’ with Karthik Raja Kuruppusamy. His next book will be The Shudras: History From Field Memories. The views are personal.

Courtesy: Newsclick

The post A New Shudra Movement Arrives in North India appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Dr. Gail Omvedt, one of the greatest scholars on caste studies, passed away in her village Kasegaon Maharashtra at the age of 81. She had pioneered caste studies having come as a student from America and settled down in India in the 1970s.

She later married Bharat Patankar, a Marxists scholar, activist; both of them lived in his village all along. She came to study caste and Mahatma Phule’s movement in Maharashtra as Ph.D student from America and was moved with the kind of caste and untouchability system in India and settled down in this country to work for the liberation of the oppressed castes. 

As an American-born Indian scholar, sociologist and human rights activist she was well known all over the world for her writings on Dalits, OBCs and Adivasis.  

She was a prolific writer and has published numerous books. Her Ph.D thesis introduced Mahatma Phule’s Satyashodhak Movement to the world and her major book Dalits and Democratic Revolution became a hand book in every young student’s hands in the colleges and universities across India and also in the South Asian study centres of the world. Scholars study her books to understand the question of caste and untouchability and also change the caste system. She was a great Phule-Ambedkarite who led many movements from the front. The Shudra/OBC/Dalit/Adivasi movements all over India will be indebted to her life time work and inspiration.  

All of us who worked with her in a long journey of Dalit/OBC/Adivasi/women’s liberation movements for the last forty years along with her husband Bharat Patankar and their only daughter Prachi Patanakar will celebrate her life and work as proud Indians.

*The writer is a political theorist and social activist, and also the Former Director, Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy

Other articles by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd:

A team that never was a hope provider for the poor

Disease distancing, not social distancing during Covid-19

Babu and Bhasha: The Game may end with this

Remembering Usaa: The greatest revolutionary barber after Upali

The post India will remember Gail Omvedt forever appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Just a few days ago, I saw an interesting news item on my mobile phone. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) top leader Mohan Bhagawat and his friends: Jaggi Vasudev, and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, will address the nation to create hope in times of Corona dance of death. One does not know what networks they will use to do that? According to the news item, they will create an opinion of ‘positivity’ in an atmosphere of ‘negativity’. Obviously, the negativity refers to opposition to the RSS/BJP central Government all over the world and India. 

The news of these three great saintly men creating hope is being propagated by the RSS cadres. I wish they would have included all the Shankaracharyas of different pittas in the country. Of course, another Yogi–Adithyanath, who also heads a pitta, apart from the Uttar Pradesh Government where mass cremations are happening like a Kumbh, should have been part of the team.

The Prime Minister himself, who now looks like a saint not a ruler, will anyway address the nation from time to time. 

However, the declared team consists of a Saraswat Brahmin from Maharashtra, a Tamil Brahmin who mostly lives abroad and educated in English medium at St. Joseph college of Bengaluru. The third is a Dwija educated at Mysore university-that too in English literature with a chequered life and final guruhood of international institutional base. The Indian diaspora and native upper middle-class swings and waves as they speak but the vast masses of food producers do not know what their guruship is. It is this productive nation that needs hope. For the whole nation should get hope from the central Government not from saints and sanyasis. 

The RSS wants to use Ravi Shankar and Vasudev to add Hindu international networking. But the question is why this team did not find a Hindu Guru born in Shudra farmer family and a Dalit family. Is it because they are less Hindu, as they belong to the fourth varna and also no varna (Dalits are known as avarnas)? In the teaching of these three socio-spiritual leaders is there a single sentence that: ‘All Hindus Are Created Equal by Hindu God’. Is there a caste-free God they visualised for protection of all Hindus, leave alone Muslims, Christians and Sikhs of India?

Even assuming that they do not want to save the atheists and seculars, worldwide who were said to have worked for the advanced medical science, how many rural hospitals these gurus established in our poverty-stricken rural India? Ravi Shankar has a network in Geneva where there is a lot of oxygen to breathe in open air as well as in hospitals. But none in the Dandakaranya tribal belt where malnutrition is making their breathing more difficult than in any other part of the world. Why not that be his international base?  

Jaggi Vasudev has networks across the United States including the wealthiest California state, but none in the Koraput tribal belt of Orissa. They learnt English in a manner that every English-speaking Asian, American, European, Australian would understand. But they never learnt a single tribal language of India. Their divinity flows in sweet English to promote ‘Hindu, Hindi, Hindustani’ and the RSS loves this nationalism.    

Whom are they teaching their methods of pranayama (Isha foundation specialization)? Ravi Shankar is supposed to be an expert on rhythmic breathing. India is now dying without pranavayu, and no breathing–leave alone rhythmic. What scientific advancement they achieved and handed over to the nation? How many good hospitals that RSS and these foundations established to save the poor from lack of pranavayu in the villages and tribal areas? 

Even before this deadly disease attacked Indian people in villages and urban slums were dying for want of enough oxygen in the atmosphere. What did they do? Why do they go to teach the Americans and Europeans who have everything–enough pranavayu, prana padarthas to eat along with plenty of cars and planes to travel? Why Hindu God is sending these gurus there not to tribal areas or even to African countries where there is nothing to eat and hardly any energy to breathe? They go to the US and Europe to acquire dollars, Euros and Pounds. How is that nationalism loved by the RSS?      

In 1900, Ida Scudder reached the Vellore region to give life to lifeless and started a medical centre, which later became a trend setting hospital. What kind of guruship she initiated and what kind of guruship these Indian Dwijas established? The RSS leaders attack the Christian missionaries on an everyday basis. Did they establish a single hospital in the country that could match the Christian Medical College Hospital in their long life of 95 years? Did they ever look at what that hospital has done to the nation in subsequent years? That was the first hospital that started open heart surgeries in the 1960s itself, when no other hospital in India knew that science. Did any Hindu Pitta, or Foundation or organisation including the RSS did such constructive humanitarian work? Why accuse such Christians as anti-national? 

The RSS and the gurus like Jaggi Vasudev, Ravi Shankar, who work around them as great Hindu nationalists must know the caste culture is causing more harm than corona to the spiritual will of the nation. Why are they so silent about it? In Uttar Pradesh where a Yogi rules, dead bodies are being discriminated against. Which culture is responsible for that? Where is a call from these gurus to not to do that?    

Most organised religions in the world with strong notion monolith of faith are Hinduism and Islam, though they differ in caste cultural practices. In Hinduism these saints are in control and in Islam the Mullahs are in control. Why could vaccine science not develop in countries of those nations where they play a dominant role? Why does the secular world produce more vaccines and life-saving drugs? Why India of these pranavayu giving gurus begging for oxygen from secular nations? Why did the ‘Art of Living Foundation’, which is said to be a great teacher of breathing exercise, establish a vaccine producing industry and also an oxygen production centre? Do these gugus want to tell us those who breathed according to their methods are not attacked by Corona? We assume that Mohan Bhagwat follows them with a discipline of RSS but was attacked by Corona and treated in a modern medical system developed in Europe and America, not in the Art of Living breathing.   

What kind of nationalism in Ravi Shankar and Vasudev the RSS found who established the Art of Living and art of pranayama in America and Europe but not in Indian Tribal Areas? Should Hindu nationalism be taught from California and Geneva to the farmers who are producing food for all Indian to survive and the safai sainiks who are cleaning the roads in the times of this deadly disease? 

The RSS leaders must know that the nation is watching them when they are in the driving seat of the national power. There is enough intellectual base among the productive masses that can see through these English-speaking gurus, what they speak and do in their typical saintly attire here, and what they speak and do in America and Europe? The farmers, workers, shepherds, artisans and so on are already on ‘hope production’ jobs. They do not have to listen to these gurus to protect themselves from Corona. They are on the job of killing coronavirus in the fields by producing protein and raw material for medicines.

*Views expressed are the author’s own.

(Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist and social activist. His latest book is The Shudras–Vision for a New Parth co-edited with Karthik Raja Karuppusamy)

Other articles by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd:

Disease distancing, not social distancing during Covid-19

Babu and Bhasha: The Game may end with this

Remembering Usaa: The greatest revolutionary barber after Upali

The post A team that never was a hope provider for the poor appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Usaa Barber (Uppumavuluri Sambashivarao) (1951-2020)- a well-known social reformer, anti-caste ideologue and anti-brahminism fighter succumbed to Covid-19 on July 25, 2020.  He died because of the Indian medical system that could not reach to a stage where it could meet the challenge posed by the new coronavirus. 

After Savitribai Phule and her son Dr. Yashwantharao died of Bubonic Plague in 1898, Usaa Barber (whom I named so), as committed as Savitribai and Mahatma Phule for abolition of caste and untouchability, died of the brutal Covid-19 pandemic.

Usaa was a legend in many ways.  From his student days, he has been a staunch atheist, and used to compose songs and poems to motivate the masses. For a boy who came from a poor barber family from a village, Brahminkoduru near Tenali, which was known as centre for cunning brahminism in Andhra Pradesh this was surprisingly a bold step by a barber boy. Such a beginning of his was unexpected. A barber has to lead a slave life by going from house to house to shave the heads of those rich unproductive castes, who keep insulting them. They were supposed to behave like skilled slaves and eat the meagre food that they offer and survive.

In the 1960s, a barber going to school in that region was rarest of rare thing. Usaa was put in the school and later in the college by his elder brother. His school teacher seems to have given a date of birth – February 19, 1951.

But unusually this barber boy, instead of shaving the heads of brahmin poojaris who needed to have a clean-shaven head with a scalp like that of Mahatma Gandhi’s at the apex of the head to perform pooja, archana, and offering pure vegetarian food items to brahmanized Hindu Gods, revolted against their God itself. The poojari life and pooja was ultimately to make money to lead the life without doing any productive work either in the family or at community level. A barber had no right to enter the temple along with Dalits. Ages together, Poojaris habituated to live as parasites and justify this sort of life as holy and worthy by their so-called spiritual fascism.   

God for them is free food and a good life provider. This deception was understood by this atheist barber quite early in his life. The barbers of that area in those days were designating themselves as Nayi Brahmins to get some respect but that respect was never to be given by brahmins. They treated them as spiritual and social slaves meant to shave their body on a daily basis for priests and their women who became widows so that they lose their beauty, dignity and human life and live like a brahmin female slave within the four walls of the house.

Brahminism of Andhra was brutal. Brahmin reformers like Gurijada Apparao and Kandukuri Veereshalinam Panthulu initiated some reform for better life of their own brahmin women but a barber’s life remained unreformed and un-upgraded. Leaders, writers and thinkers were not supposed to come from that community even in the freedom movement. They were supposed to shave the leaders’ heads and give them beautiful and clean shape for their elegant public appearance. That was considered to be their contribution to nationalism, without any respect and livelihood.

If any barber aspired for the role of a leader, he would be snubbed and pushed back into his shaving job. The Indian freedom struggle was not anti-caste or struggle for change of the millennial occupational stagnation and indignity of labour. Nobody had a right to change their oppressive caste occupation. The lower caste occupations – in fact all productive occupations – were treated as undignified, unequal to the most unproductive occupation like pooja and purohityam. No brahmin god was pro-production and the Shudra productive god images were pushed into what they cunningly called the ‘little tradition’ by the brahmin intellectuals of the freedom movement. The communist intellectuals having come from the same cultural roots did not think of changing it, rather they reinforced it with loud silence.

Usaa Barber joined the radical left movement once it began. He was in jail during the emergency. Later worked in the Tribal areas to conduct an armed struggle. In plain areas he mobilised farmers and labour for irrigation and drinking water resources. He contested elections and challenged the so-called conservative communists of CPI in Nalgonda district of Telangana. He worked with me to expand the notion of human rights to starving masses, caste atrocities and women’s rights in the 1980s. He was a tireless mass lover and lived with them.  He got expelled from his party for his stand on Ambedkar and anti-casteism. 

Usaa compared and understood the civilized barbarism with brahmanised radical left and started writing and speaking against their loud-silence on caste culture in Telugu quite eloquently. All communist intellectuals were upset, angry with him.  If only he was to come out of a radical Maoist party he would have been, perhaps, attacked physically as there was a bad culture of accusing every dissenter as a police agent. But he was from moderate Tarimela Nagireddy (a Shudra Reddy) and Devulapally Venkateswar Rao (a Brahmin) group. Democratic centralism destroyed the sense of democratic dissent in the communist structures of India. That was most un-Marxist culture but well developed in those structures. Once brahminism operates as democratic centralism it uses only Vishnuchakra to resolve differences.       

Usaa was the first full-time worker rebellion in Telugu region and oppressive caste leader who, within no time, was identified as leader, writer, thinker, poet and song composer, of course, singer. Singing in the revolution was always left to Dalits/Shudras, as Gaddar and many others did all their life without having a stature of a leader.  Though they were popular among the masses, they were never given a leader’s stature.

This boy started questioning the very existence of their God in the temples. Afterwards this man challenged Brahminism in communism. This was what the first barber Upali did by joining Gauthama Buddha’s system as his close confident during 6th Century BCE. After that, in the known history, only Usaa Barber did that at a very young age. He never turned back.

He was in a haste to fight the exploitation and oppressive system, hence joined the most militant Naxalite (Moist) movement to kill the enemies as soon as possible with a barrel of gun. He mobilized the poor Dalits and Shudra (Other Backward Class) labouring masses to rebel against landlords and oppressors.  Meanwhile in 1975 the emergency came in. He was arrested and kept in Rajahmundry jail for two years.

Then he went into a deep tribal area called Kondamodulu and organised tribals to fight for their lands with bows and arrows. He was a tribal among tribals, eating everything from root to raisin and rat to rabbit. After that, he shifted to Nalgonda to organise farmers to fight for irrigational and drinking water and became a famous peasant leader. He contested from Motkuru constituency in 1984 against a Communist Party of India landlord leader and lost the election. He was not sparing anybody.         

He realised that even in the revolutionary movement brahminism was playing a key role. There was a Brahmin (pure vegetarian) leader called Devulapally Venkateswar Rao (DVR) who was claiming all theoretical authority on Marx, Lenin and Mao as if they were like Vedavyasa, who wrote Mahabharat, Kautilya, who wrote most dangerous Brahmin-State craft book- Arthashastra and Manu who wrote Manudharmashastra that was burnt by Ambedkar. 

Their’s was a culture of read and recite among their families hence they would pick up quotations from Marx, Lenin and Mao’s writings and write funny documents and ask the Shudra/Dalit/Adivasi cadre to apply to them to the concrete conditions of India’s class system, as if there was no caste in India of their mind. What an understanding of concrete conditions of India.     

Usaa sensed DVR’s brahminism in the revolutionary movement. DVR was treating a much better revolutionary leader, Tarimela Nagireddy, who is a Shudra and the author of a famous economic theory book ‘India Mortgaged’ as an unworthy leader. Usaa stood by Nagireddy to finish DVR’s revolutionary Brahminism. But Nagireddy never saw brahminism in communism and died unsuccessful.

Usaa was married to a brahmin woman within the party. The DVR’s camp tried to set his wife (Padma) against him.  But he could take her with him.  She finally became a State Government officer with a Mangali (barber) caste certificate. He was the first man to successfully navigate an extreme inter-caste married life between a barber and a brahman by converting Padma into his caste and she became the bread-winner to support his full-time socio-political work and educated their only daughter Hima Bindu. Both of them lived all along with an unfriendly kitchen at home.  

The caste-blind communist brahminism did not realise a barber whose home preferred food was/is mostly meat and fish across the Telugu society and country and that was/is their pride food culture.  Padma comes from a family that could not even tolerate the smell of meat and fish. Her family, caste, even her ‘out eating’ system was always confined to pure vegetarianism as their God was believed to be a vegetarian at home and also in the brahmin society. All Shudra gods are considered to be meatarians. Usaa’s childhood food was his god’s food who he rejected even that gods too in later life and turned to Buddha.

Her food culture was not a choice based but was a caste trained food culture. Communists should have understood caste is in the blood and class is on the body. Both of them had to struggle a great deal to navigate with two opposite food and work cultures as wife and husband. Like Gandhi, DVR also thought that all Indians should become vegetarian only to die after his communism comes to go to Hindu swarga. But they managed with a great difficulty to be under one roof till their death as Padma died in 2015 in his lap. Thereafter, Usaa became a Buddhist and carried his work.  

In the process of fight against DVR’s so-called Braminic-Marxist theory, Usaa mastered Marxist-Leninst theory quite seriously. Later he developed differences with Nagireddy group leaders on understanding Mahatma Phule and Ambedkar and integrating it into caste-class revolutionary movement, in the context of Karemchedu Dalit massacre in 1985.

Though the main leaders in Telugu states were Shudras (Kammas and Reddys), their intellectual rigor was very weak and could never perceive the role of Brahminism in the communism. That was a green snake in the green grass. A barber who knows how to identify snake of any colour anywhere and kill it, he located this green snake in the green grass.  None of the leaders who hailed from Shudra upper caste background studied the history of Hinduism and Buddhism as rival schools to the Brahminism. And, none of them read what Ambedkar wrote on Indian history.

In the life of the Indian communist movement only Brahmins wrote theory who never had an agrarian or artisanal productive mind. And, they only became intellectual leaders — a tragedy at that. This was a paradox. Dange, Ranadive, Charu Mazumdar, EVS Namboodripad, DVR, Vinod Mishra and so on became leaders and dreamt of becoming like Lenin or Mao. Hence Marxism became Vedamantra but not scientific theory that could adopt to caste cultural conditions. Usaa challenged that communist brahmin heritage. No Kamma, Reddy, Jat, Yadav, Nair, Patel, Maratha could become well-known theoretician from the communist ranks. This barber changed that hallow Shudra house into an intellectual Saloon.

No Shudra leader could acquire an intellectual and philosophical stature even from the communist school exactly on the lines that happened in the Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) school. Usaa even with his limited English could perceive this. The RSS Brahmin intellectuals construct a consent system among the Shudra/Dalit/Adivasi activists about the Hindu spiritual system, which is completely under the grip of Brahmins as priests, philosophers as part of necessary parampara. Productive Shudras have to live as spiritual slaves.

The communist Brahmin intellectuals never allow a serious discourse on Hindu spiritual system quite consciously as that would overthrow their hegemony in the communist structures, under the rubric that they believe in atheism not in religion. They refused to realise that no Shudra could become a priest in a temple like Tirupati or Jagannath, while being treated as Hindu. Usaa has opened this shell of silence in the communist ranks. The bogus theory of base structure and superstructure are separate guarded the Hindu brahminical system in the communist parties. Usaa told them that ‘these two structures are interdependent and you are operating on hypocritical humanism’.   

He was expelled from the Nagireddy group, few others along with me in 1986 on the same question of caste and Ambedkarism. He worked with me in human rights protection and feeding the poor people dying of draught conditions in Mahabubnagar district. In 1987, I wrote a small book ‘Annihilation of Caste – A Marxist Approach’ in Telugu he helped in that project. The communist brahmins mainly tried to make State as the agent of attack leaving the oppression that the Dalits/Tribals/Shudra faced related to caste atrocities as myth. Caste according to them was/is a myth; class was/is material reality. They decided to see only the human body not the soul.

This theory came from Bengali and Marathi brahmin intellectuals into the communist revolution exactly on the line as it came into the RSS from Maharashtra Brahmins. This barber realised that this deceptive ideological framework certainly does not allow even social reform, leave alone revolution.

The Shudra/Dalits who worked in leftist structures believed as Marxism was given divine truth, as such brahmin nationalism is God given truth in RSS. In both mainstream communist parties also Shudra/Dalits could not become intellectual leaders as they could not in RSS till today. In the CPM’s Politburo there is no single Dalit/Adivasi member even now. This is where caste disease destroyed human creativity.  

To sustain such brahmin intellectual hegemony many wings — literary, cultural, student and so on were started in communist parties. The Brahmin youth were trained to read and write. Others were made to do the mass work, as if it was like tilling land again in the revolution, which no brahmin does. And they became poojaris of Marxism. 

Usaa became an all-rounder in this struggle.  He became a poojari of his own gods –Phule and Ambedkar, and started shavings the head of brahminism, rather clean. 

They abused him as renegade, reactionary and lackey of imperialism. Usaa said ‘my foot — get lost’.  His tongue and pen became sharper and shaper. He travelled into the nook and corner of two Telugu states prepared youth for a leaderless #Black Lives Matter# like leaderless #Shudra/Dalit Lives Matters movement any time in future.       

Usaa Barber a college drop-out leaving after his II year B.Sc perceived this quite well. So far, no communist leader in Bengal or Kerala or Maharashtra did that. We do not even know even a single Shudra/Dalit intellectual leader from these two states even though the communists ruled them for decades.  

In literary and cultural field in Telugu states P.Varavara Rao led that strategy of Brahmin control. In organizations, a Brahmin is given the hold to control the written word.  Even if others–Shudras/Dalits/Adivasis come into that field marginalizing their written word or making it invisible has been a historical strategy.  Varavara Rao with his friends did that quite consistently. 

Since the communist movement gives more weightage to written word–the theory–they made Marx as a Brahmin in India and others could never counter it with strong autonomous strategy of written word.  Usaa hence started his own journal, a small Youtube studio in his house at the time of his sudden death. Corona took him away from his busy work. However, he made it difficult for the communists to continue their long-time caste-blind approach and continue the brahminism in future–a life that never rested till he breathed his last.  

(Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, a long-time associate of Usaa Barber, Political Theorist and Author)  

Other pieces by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd:

Disease distancing, not social distancing during Covid-19
Babu and Bhasha: The Game may end with this
Opinion: Why Hindutva philosophy never discusses poverty

The post Remembering Usaa: The greatest revolutionary barber after Upali appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Ever since the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, announced national lock down on March 24, 2020 to fight Covid–19 and declared that “Social Distancing” is the only solution to save India from the Corona Pandemic, all Chief Ministers are also using the same coinage in  India. We must use ‘Disease Distancing’ not Social Distancing because India is a country of social Untouchability and caste distancing for millennia. If this goes in to the national psyche it will make Untouchability and casteism worst in future. India is not like Europe, America and China. This is a country of millennial practice of social distancing.  

Unfortunately  Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Bharatiya Janatha Party claimed biggest organised network in the world. But their cadre are not seen anywhere among the poor, semi-starving labour, beggers across the country when they themselves were ruling. Mohan Bhagwat and Amit Shah are not seen giving calls to nation how to save the poor, unemployed, beggars, nomads and semi-nomads by organizations. No Hindutva organization is seen distributing food, water to beggars, destitute and to the old poor in urban slums. This is a bad nationalism to say the least. Nationalism means saving the poor’s life and a crisis like this.

I request all organizations to not to use the phrase “Social Distancing”  but use Disease Distancing or Corona Distancing. With great struggles from the days of Savitribai Phule and her son Dr.Yashvantharao Phule who died in serving the dying poor in Poona in the Bubonic Plague of 1897, we struggled a lot to fight caste social distancing. We should strengthening it again. The poor must be saved from not only disease but also from hunger and drinking water. Let serve poorest of the poor like Karalites are doing to save the country.

* The writer is a social activist and writer. He is the former Director, Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad

The post Disease distancing, not social distancing during Covid-19 appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The Y.S.Jaganmohan Reddy Government recently issued orders for the implementation of English medium in Government schools from the academic year 2020-21. It said that from the next academic year, from classes I to VI, all Government schools will teach in the English medium with one subject compulsory in Telugu. The orders have been issued almost seven months in advance before the academic year starts. This is not a hurried step, but it is not known to the people of the state. This was one of the key Navaratnas (nine diamonds) of his election manifesto. Had he not implemented it, everyone would find fault with Y.S.Jagan’s Government. The people have voted him to power to make English as the main language of instruction in Government schools. 

Why is Chandrababu Naidu, the Opposition leader, opposing the educational reform and why is he deploying his pro-private English medium educational squads on to the roads in the name of Matrubhasha Pariraskshana (Protection of mother tongue)? What is the mother tongue of his grandson, whose mother and father studied in private English medium schools that do not even teach one subject in Telugu compulsorily? Devanshu’s mother and father studied in America adopting an American accent as well. Why did Chandrababu not send them to the world class Telugu teaching centre in Telugu Desham?

Is one’s mother’s language a fixed entity or is it likely to change as the mother of child learns new languages and speaks to children in different languages? Is language an instrument of sentiment or it is an instrument of development of a person, family, region and nation? If English is anti-national or anti-Indian or anti-Telugu, why did the founding fathers retain that language and why did it survive only among the elite who rule the nation and the states? Why are the young generation rulers of India people who are educated in the English medium? Should not the village poor and lower castes join that English educated brand new Indian club of rulers?   

If one goes by the editorial of Eanadu on November, 9, 2019 there is a move to instigate an anti-English medium agitations in A.P. If the rural lower caste children of the poor study in English medium in their villages the Telugu language dies, why it did not die in all the houses and colonies of the rich whose children studied and are studying only in English medium private schools? How could they become the rulers of the states and the nation by studying only in English medium? From Jagan Mohan Reddy to Akhilesh Yadav to Rahul Gandhi to Nirmala Sitaraman to Nara  Lokesh to K.T. Rama Rao to Sachin Pilot to Jyotiraditya Scindia to Aaditya Thackeray, all are English medium educated leaders. Should not the rural poor and lower caste youth aspire to emerge like them? If not in Government schools, where could they study English medium? Y.S.Jagan wants the poor children learn English like him. What is wrong with his policy?

The argument that by introducing English medium in Government schools of Andhra Pradesh by the Y.S.Jagan Government is destroying the first linguistic state, namely Andhra Pradesh, is quite ironical. According to Eanadu that even the beneficiaries of English medium education in Government schools, who live in remote villages and Tribal areas should oppose, this decision. This is a very emotive and sentimentalist and provocative argument. 

Ramojirao’s younger son, Suman, who unfortunately passed away very early in his life, was my student in Nizam college and studied his B.A. He was from an English medium school education background. His Telugu was not so good but he was good speaker in English. I used to appreciate his sincere and serious learning approach. He used to come to discuss international relations subject with me personally as I used to teach that subject to his class. A moot question is: why Ramojirao, who was running such a big Telugu media industry has put his son in English medium school? Why did he not put him in a school that taught him in his mother tongue? What is wrong if the rural poor mothers’ children study in English medium in Government schools in their own villages? How does Telugu disappear from poor’s houses when it did not disappear in Banjara Hills, Jubilee Hills and Film cities?

Ramojirao is also running an English medium public school in his wife’s name called Rama Devi public school at Abdullapurmet, Hyderabad for several years. How did or does this school serve the first Telugu linguistic united Andhra Pradesh? Can Ramojirao allow a survey to be conducted into the school education background of the main anchors who run his entertainment channels? It is easily perceivable when they slip into English speaking that most of them come from English medium school education background. Let there be a survey in the film industry that Ramojirao is fully associated with. All the young heroes and heroines are English medium educated yet they make Telugu films.

All this shows that there is a conspiracy against the poor Dalit/OBC/Adivasi children learning equal range of English with all these forces that Ramojirao and Chandrababu’s family networks associated with. The language deception as against the lower caste/poor is not just contemporary.  This skillful deception is historical.

In ancient and medieval times before the Persian language became a ruling language Sanskrit was the ruling language of India. The teaching of Sanskrit was in the hands of private Gurukulas. The Shudras and Dalits had no right to study Sanskrit in those Gurukulas or outside. After the Persian became the ruling language in urban areas the Muslim elite and rich upper castes could learn Persian but not the village poor. From mid-nineteenth century English became the ruling language. English as a teaching language started in Calcutta (Kolkata) in 1817 with the initiative of William Carey a British cobbler, who came as a missionary to India.

The first English educated Shudra was Mahatma Jyotirao Phule apart from Gopala Krishna Gokhale and Balagangadhara Tilak, in Bombay Province. That is where the lower caste liberation started with English education.

After 1947 in spite of Dr. B.R.Ambedkar’s insistence to recognize English as national language and must be taught in Government schools the Nehru Government relegated English teaching to private school education and the regional languages were adopted as teaching languages in the Government schools. This policy denied equal rights in the education system and language played a key role in that denial of ruling class language to the poor and lower castes.

The A.P. Government has initiated a process to bring school education in Government and private sectors to a level playing field. If the opposition leaders and the media network around him oppose this, the rural lower caste and poor masses will see through this game. Naidu and his anti-English education supporters to the poor must be aware that if their game ends with this issue of the poor’s most decisive empowerment project, they will never be in the play ground again.            

The post Babu and Bhasha: The Game may end with this appeared first on SabrangIndia.

 
Does Hindutva’s ideology allow any anti-poverty agenda in any mode of its functioning?
 
Do any of its core ideological texts, written by any of its ideologues, at any phase of their operation, problematise the poverty of the Indian masses?
 
Do they suggest ways and means to alleviate, leave alone eradicate, poverty?
 
Be it the writings of Savarkar, Hedgewar or Golwalker, I have not found even a single line in these texts about the Hindu masses, of any caste, suffering miserably from poverty — or of the means to remove it.
 

Caption: Not so ideologically rich? Savarkar’s writings lack a discourse on poverty and how to alleviate it. (Source: PTI)
 
Hindutva’s political pundits — Deendayal Upadhyaya, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Lal Krishna Advani, etc. — none of them talked in-depth about improving the lives of the poor and reducing inequalities. All evidence, until Narendra Modi became the Prime Ministerial candidate in 2014, shows that they rarely discussed issues of poverty.
 
Opposing poverty was never their ideological agenda.
 
Modi chose a very neutral slogan in 2014 for his campaign — “Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas”. To my mind, his slogan stands for the privatisation of the economy and providing jobs to the poor in the government sector. It also stands for improving rural employment by pushing in corporate companies.
 

Caption: Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas: But how far does Narendra Modi’s rallying cry really go? (Source: PTI)
 
The question though is, how can Modi help industrialists get more wealth — and, at the same time, provide the poor with two square meals a day, a reasonably good house, good government schools for educating their children and good hospitals in villages for basic health treatment? In practice, this proposition seems impossible and, as I see it, Modi knows this and his party also knows this well.
 
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) ideologues were for the growth of Hindutva and its distribution across the country. The Hindutva cultural heritage they praised and wanted to strengthen was basically that the economically rich should feed the gods — but not the poor.
 
There is no idea of equality or philanthropy in their economic lexicography.  
 
No text of theirs suggests that the rich who subscribe to Hindutva must be content with their wealth. No rich man is told by the gurus that if he makes more money, without helping the poor, Hindutva swarga will not allow him to enter. On the contrary, the spiritual beliefs these inculcate, to my mind, is that the richer one becomes, the more could be one’s chances to attain moksha. These ideologues never believed in an autonomous economic paradigm called the secular theory. Economic development normally entails a question on equitable distribution — but they do not believe in such distributive theory.     
 

Caption: Bring back the established norm: Hindutva does not believe in a secular theory of redistribution. Or change. (Source: PTI)
 
In the diction of Hindutva, there is no opposition to the notion of ‘exploitation’ — both the exploiters and the exploited are given their positions by God. Hence, prominent Hindu economists, like Arvind Panagariya and Arvind Subramanian, apparently do not believe in the core ideology of reducing inequality. Of course, they were deadly opposed to the notion of socialist equality, which has its own strengths and weaknesses — but what about the democratic principle of less inequality?
 
Does such a principle exist in Hindutva’s textuality?
 
Even by positive divine theory, taking societies and nations towards lesser inequalities is an acceptable norm. But that needs some planning at a human level in this world, which does not seem acceptable in Hindutva economics. Positivism is thus an enemy of Hindutva’s philosophy. 
 
Hinduism does not agree with the human planning of taking a country towards equality — it argues that the whole planning is in the hands of God. Hence, in all likelihood, they so strongly recommended the abolition of the Planning Commission. They know that smashing the idea of a ‘mixed economy’ is smashing Jawaharlal Nehru and communist ideology. Since Hindutva’s gods created the poor as per their karma, Hinduism does not consider even malnutrition as a serious issue.
 
Production, according to this thought, can be increased — without increasing the distributive wages of the producers. The producers are meant to serve the consumers. The producers have to be selfless.
 

Caption: In Hindutva’s view, workers are meant to be selfless, which makes them great. (Photo: Twitter)
 
If the managers have better salaries and owners of the industry have increased profits, even without much labour participation in market-purchasing or farmers not getting remunerative prices, the GDP still grows, by God’s grace.
 
Since secularism has no place in such economic thought, God’s grace plays a key role. But the universal notion of ‘The Kingdom of God on Earth’ is a kingdom where there is no exploitation. In this kingdom, one who has more has the will to share with those who do not have much. Since the concept of political economy is seen as Marxist, Hindutva’s spiritual economics does not have any place for it. Hence, Hinduism should have some love for the poor. But Hindu economists, political pundits and spiritual gurus do not have that frame of thinking.
 
These five years (2014 –2019) of unmixed economic ideology and Hindutva’s governance have shown us what this could deliver. The powers that be have dismantled the influence of Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze on the Indian economy during this period and weakened the discourse of anti-poverty.
 
Now, poverty is sacred.
 

Caption: India needs to have a serious discussion on poverty, inequality, malnutrition. But the discourse is anything except that. (Source: Reuters)
 
According to these thinkers, by 2019 elections, India should have been the strongest nation in the world. But now, though the poverty level, as data shows, has increased, India has become more robust apparently because the economy of Modi’s India has the best ‘growth rate’ in the world. Vedic mathematics shows all correct trends — Prime Minister Narendra Modi sees the real picture in his palm. They are all perfect when it comes to palm reading.
 
This growth is, of course, because the rich have increased their wealth. Since 2014, the poor have become poorer — but there is no conversation around them since the poor are not a part of Hindutva’s ideology.
 
Hinduism does not agree with human planning taking the country towards equality.  According to them, the whole idea of equality is Western — and hence, perhaps it is anti-national too.
 

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