Electoral Results Unlearnt

[The following article had reached us quite sometime back but could not be used earlier due to unavoidable reasons. —Editor]

The present plight of the communist and Dalit movements brings to mind a Mahabharatan myth. Brhadratha, the king of the rajaka Magadha state, was sonless. He got a fertility fruit from a sage, which he gave to both of his queens. They delivered the halves of an infant. Furiously they were thrown on a dung heap. The mother-goddess Jara saw it and joined them. And Jara-samgha came to life.

With British rule Indian society became a caste-class (jati-varga) society instead of the former caste society. In its Marxist unilinearism the communist movement still adheres to its maxim ‘caste struggle divides class unity’, while the Ambedkarean Dalit movement sticks to its anti-brahmanical caste movement. Both the halves have lost their revolutionary goals. The Naxalites are implementing their New Demo-cratic Revolution among the forested adivasis. Ramdas Athavle’s Republican Party has united with the casteist Shiv Sena and BJP. And Mayawati has changed her Bahujan Party to the brahmanical Sarva Jana Party.

The Pune session of All India Brahmana Conference again passed a resolution demanding abrogation of the Tenancy Act. The Jat gentry persist in ‘honour killing’ of the couples who marry in contravention of their customary gotra law. Manu’s statue in the Jaipur High Court waits for the final triumph of the brahmanical counter-revolution.

Marxism Panacea

Communist Parties the world over persist in treating the Marxist philosophy as a panacea even after the collapse of European socialism. All articles dealing with the LF’s and LDF’s defeat in West Bengal and Kerala respectively refuse to take into account that the present Indian society is caste-class since the advent of British rule and hence their unilinear, class understanding of the Indian society offers no solution.

Mao first studied the class structure of his home province and on its basis formed the concept of the New Democratic Revolution. No Indian Communist leader has studied the caste- class structure of the Indian society in order to form the concept of the Indian Bourgeois Democratic Revolution. Only E.M.S. Namboo-diripad studied his home State, but that too from the class point of view. The same is the case with R.P. Dutt and Soviet scholars. The ‘Quit India’ national uprising threw up the ‘Patti Sarkar’ (parallel government) in the undivided Satara district led by Nana Patil, who was a product of the non-brahman movement which had merged with the National Congress in the forties. After independence Patil became a Communist, relinquishing his anti-caste heritage. Te-bhaga (three shares to the tenant and one of the feudal landlord) in the undivided Bengal and Telangana in the feudal Hyderabad state broke out on the threshold of independence. A participant in the former reminisces in Social Scientist that in contrast to the bhadralok the SC and ST tenants were most self-sacrificing. P. Sundarayya’s classic on Telangana declares that the great (class) struggle abolished untouchability. He self-criticised by saying that had the CPI not committed the blunder of opposing ‘Quit India’ by ‘People’s War’, the national and class anti-feudal struggles would have merged into a revolutionary conflagration.

The India-China conflict split the CPI into the CPI and CPI-M, the former declaring its form of revolution to be a National Democratic one and the latter a People’s Democratic one. Lack of historical study of the caste-class society of India compelled both the parties to borrow their forms from Europe. The same unilinear mistake was continued by the Naxalites, who broke from the CP-M in the concluding part of the sixties and borrowed from the CPC its New Democratic Revolution.

Nepal’s Maoist Party has stopped after abolishing monarchy and it is looking perplexed at the caste-class Hindu state. Indian Maoists are implementing their New Democratic Revolution among the forested Adivasis. Though the Adivasis are Ati-sudras, according to the Dharmasastra, they were not considered to be the Social Proletariat by Ambedkar. ‘Iron Lady’ Sharmila Chanu’s brother told me two years back in Pune: “We, adivasis are not concerned with the caste system!” That confirmed my lifelong experience of movement among the Adivasis.

Though the non-brahman movement’s legacy and implementation of the OBCs’ reservation has saved the LDF from the LF’s devastation in West Bengal, the caste system, which has brought Christianity and Islam on their knees, stays put. Ambedkar had warned that untouchability cannot be ended by legal means. Only abolition of the caste system can bring it to an end. After a top Dalit bureaucrat retired on the eve of the Assembly elections in Kerala, his cabin, car and residence were purified by his staff with cow urine! About 80,000 acres of above-ceiling surplus land still remain to be redistributed in Kerala; it may be more.

Gangsterism and Revolutionary Crisis

Murder Incorporated, written by the Chief Judicial Officer of the USA, tells us that gangsterism was imported from Italy by corporate capital to counteract trade unionism. The Mafiosi functioned in a feudal way. Buddha represented the revolutionary outcome of the varna slave system of the oligarchic samgha-ganas, while the dacoit (likhitaka) Angulimala was its negative outcome. Angulimala turned a bhikkhu which means that the varna slave system was in a revolutionary crisis.

Marx’s conclusion that the British capitalist imperialism made the first and only revolution in Indian history is wrong. The British regime tried to perpetuate the age-old caste system. It was Buddha who made the greatest revolution in Indian history by abolishing the varna slave system.

Not only that. In pursuance of the Master’s commandment that the new jati system would be abolished by a new philosophy, galaxies of philosophies were generated by the Mahayana, the greatest of which was the Dignagean School. Its philosophy of Sautrantika Vijnanavada produced the anti-caste logic which verged on the dialectical logic and a-brahmani aesthetics with which Dignaga defeated Kalidasa in a public debate. His epistemology was made up of the dualism of consciousness (sa-vikalpaka) and subconscious (nir-vikalpaka) and he defined that every phenomenon is unique (sva-lakshana). He developed Buddha’s dialectics of general imper-manence, ‘Sabbam aniccam’, to unconditional momentariness: ‘Yasmin eva lshane utpad-yate, tasmin eva kshane vinasyati’, and thus laid the philoso-phical foundation of modern software.

The Dignagean School has thus laid the Enlightenmental foundation of the Caste-ending Bourgeois Democratic Revolution. In spite of his profound humanism, Buddha was patriarchal. The Mahayana acharyas were pilgrims of the Stri-rajya (gynocracy) of Shri-shaila. The Maha-vihara of Nalanda began its studies each day after worshipping the statue of Hariti Devi installed in its great gate. As earth mother she was the deification of a queen of some gynocracy in the tradition of Rashtri-devi Nirrti of the Indus civilisation, on the etymology of whose name the public duel between grammarians Gargya and Sakatayana was fought. Utopian Socialism was sung by the Sunyavadin bhikshu, Santideva (+700), of Saurashtra.

This enlightenment has been neglected by the Ambedkarist Dalit movement and literature as well as the communist movement, as a result of which the former has surrendered to the brah-manical political parties and literature while the latter has deteriorated to gangsterism. The CPM’s Kerala State Secretary, Pinarayi Vijayan, could not have isolated the CM, Achyuthanandan, to the extent that he could persuade the PB not to field VS in the Assembly elections without resorting to gangsterism. The Indian Express reported that a parallel economy rules the roost in Kerala due to which ‘supariwalla gangs’ can be hired for any criminal job. No less a person than D. Bandyopadhyay, the former Revenue Commissioner of West Bengal, in his lurid accounts in Mainstream reported the carnage carried out by the CPM gangs during the long- drawn-out rule of the LF. A leading Naxalite bearing the sir name of Bhattacharjee gave an interview to the Indian Express in which he proudly said that only Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee could give away his 1000 acres to its cultivating tenants. West Bengal is the only State in India which is still ruled by Brahmanas and Kayasthas. In the rest of India gangsterism is employed by the elites of mirasdar or dominating peasant castes, who themselves gang up under brahmanical Central rule.

Indian capital is still compradore, not only because it is ‘dalal’, but because it itself is overwhelmingly Bania and hence it has ganged up with the brahmanical intelligentsia and the elites of the dominant peasant castes in the post-independence period. It is against demolishing the semi-feudal caste-class social structure and prefers to go with the G-20 led by the neo-imperialist G-8. Though the present gangsterism is generated by the caste-class establishment, the Dalit surrender to it and the Left gangsterism is the result of the Left’s inability to find its bearing in the new revolutionary crisis.

Revolutionary Theory and Revolutionary Philosophy

Lenin’s directive that ‘there can be no revolution without a revolutionary theory’ has helped China, Vietnam, Cuba and North Korea to make their bourgeois democratic revolutions verily because their societies were class ones. Their revolutions were successful because they were made in their ‘svakshana’ way and not like the Russian way. But India’s society is basically caste and hence its bourgeois democratic revolution can be made only by a new philosophy. Buddha had to make his varna-slavery abolishing revolution by the new philosophy of Pratitya-samutpada (Dialectical Realism) and he warned his Samgha that the new jati-feudalism would be abolished by a new Dhamma (philosophy). The Mahayana philosophers, beginning with Asvaghosha (+200), started the search for the appropriate caste-ending philosophy and the search ended with Dignaga’s Sautrantika Vijnanavada. I have dealt with the School’s contributions.

I have synthesised Dignaga’s philosophy with Marxism and through sublation arrived at Sautrantika Marxism. Dignaga’s ‘sva-lakshna’ overcomes Marxism’s unilinearism and homo-geneous mind’s epistemology by the dual mind’s epistemology of consciousness and subconscious. Vijnanavada is deleted and the dialectics of momentariness accepted. Unilinear historical materialism is changed into multilinear historical materialism. Primitive Communism is dropped and its place taken by matriarchy-gynocracy. Socialist Realism had already outlived itself and its place has to be taken by Socialist Sautran-tikism. Socialism could not be built without Dialectical Logic. My Vol. IV has formulated it.

The present Indian revolution can be charac-terised as Anti-neoimperialist Caste-ending Bourgeois Democratic Revolution. Its economic aspect is redistribution of the above-ceiling surplus land amounting to 21 million hectares among the SCs, STs and landpoor OBCs. As the land is owned mainly by the elites of the dominant peasant castes, legislation of punishable Caste Annihilatory Act is assential; by this the following six characteristics of the caste system will be abolished—1) Cast is hereditary; 2) Caste occupation is hereditary; 3) Marriage within caste and subcaste; 4) Caste localities, main division between sa-varna and savarna; 5) Food within caste; and 6) Except capital crime all other cases decided by caste Panchayat. Marriage within caste has reproduced the caste system upto the present period. In spite of modifications by semi-capitalist development, the system stays put. In the pre-British period the Brahmana and the Mirasdar peasant castes were the ruling castes and during the Turkish period the Muslim Amirumraos became the main ruling community. In the post-independence period, the Brahmanical caste-class, the Bania capitalist caste-class and the elites of dominant peasant castes have become the ruling establishment. This dual caste-class aspect has so far been neglected by all Communist and Dalit parties and hence they have been unable to formulate the revolutionary pro-gramme of the annihilation of this caste-class society.

The above-ceiling surplus land of 21 million hectares of agricultural land is waiting for its redistribution among the landless and land-poor of the SCs, STs and OBCs since the Ceiling Act of 1960. But being owned by the elites of the upper castes and dominant peasant castes, no ruling party or parties dare undertake this agrarian revolution. The economic agrarian revolution and the social revolution of caste annihilation both being inseparable, this unique dual revolution can be accomplished only by the philosophy of Sautrantika Marxism.

Unique Revolutionary Enlightenment

After Dharmakirti (+700) the hardening of the caste system started, as a result of which Buddhism was driven out of India. The dark period pertaining to philosophy thenceforth extended to the emergence of the caste-class society and its revolutionary crisis. Hence the pressing need of hammering out the new philosophy, its applied philosophy and aesthetics and now the Dialectical Logic without which the new revolutionary Enlightenment cannot take shape.

Though the Dignaga School knew from their master, Vasubandhu, that the mind is dual and Dharmakirti developed formal logic to its ultimate extent, he researched the mind internally to find out the dialectical logic. The mind separates itself into the social world into their ‘Tantriki Sruti’ and ‘Vaidiki Sruti’ and with their social struggle starts its own developmental struggle of consciousness and subconscious. To trace this struggle upto the modern period and on its basis visualise the future desired development is the job of the Dialectical Logic, which I have named ‘Janiva-Nediva-anveshi Tarksastra’. Though Dialectical and Historical Materialism is monist, natural and social phenomena have to become dual in order to develop. This becomes clear in the first chapter ‘Commodity’ of Marx’s Capital. It is the greatest masterpiece of Dialectical Logic, though its actual realisation had to come long afterwards. I discovered it after completion of my Vol.IV: ‘Primitive Communism, Matriarchy-Gynocracy and Modern Socialism’. I was desperate and then it dawned. Had I not traced the struggle between Tantriki Sruti’s subconscious and Vaidiki Sruti’s consciousness upto date in my three volumes, I would not have discovered it.

The present-day Indian society is caste-class. Communists approached it from the economic class side and Ambedkar from the social jati side. Half-realisation does not lead to the revolutionary solution of the Whole, Enlighten-ment apart. Both Communists and Ambedkarites have totally ignored that 21 million hectares of above-ceiling surplus land remain to be redistributed since 1960 and both have turned their back on the Indian bourgeois democratic revolution. This land is being owned by the elites of the upper castes and dominant peasant castes who control the rural caste system and hence it cannot be acquired for redistribution without abolishing the caste system, non-realisation of which has led the Ambedkarites to abandon their social revolution. As a results the Dalit movement has surrendered to brahma-nism politically and culturally and the communist movement has deteriorated to gangsterism. Cadres of both movements will have to salvage their movements for the Anti-neoimperialist Caste-ending Bourgeois Democratic Revolution.

The social proletariat is the leader of this revolution. Ambedkar was not far from correct when he warned that this revolution is more difficult than the class-ending revolution. For the allies of the social proletariat—the economic proletariat, the OBCs, the mass of dominating peasant castes, the adivasis and the middle caste-class—are still not supporters of this revolution. They have to be made its supporters by allround Enlightenment.

Due to the peculiarities of the varna-slavery-ending Buddhist revolution, full potentialities of the a-brahmani cultural revolution could not be unleashed. To it has now been added the suppressed potentialities of the caste-ending cultural revolution. The total pent-up cultural revolution can be guided by the aesthetics of Socialist Sautrantikism. Writers and artists of this unprecedented Cultural Revolution will turn the vacillating allies of the social proletariat into firm supporters of the caste-ending revolution.