Biswas recommends Legal Protection for Women, not Caste-ending Democratic Revolution

COMMUNICATION

A.K. Biswas is the only well-known person from elitist West Bengal, who is fighting for the SCs, STs and lowly OBCs. His paper ‘Is India the Most Dangerous Place for Dalit Women?’ in Mainstream, February 9, 2013, furnishes harrowing tales of caste oppressions of SC and ST women and he does not fail to note that the irresistibility of these atrocities lies in the caste and land might of the oppressors.

On October 27, 2012 The New York Times broke the news,

....Dabra, the place of the crime. Jim Yardley reported that “One after another, eight men, may be more, reeking of pesticide and cheap whisky, had dragged the girl into a darkened stone shelter and assaulted her for three hours. She was 16 years old.” After the crime, the beasts “threatened to kill if she told anyone. ...She was....a Dalit, ....untouchable, while most of the attackers were from higher caste that dominated land and power of the village.”

The daily added:

“...her assailants had taken cellphone videos.... and the images began circulating..... until one was shown to the victim’s father,...the father committed suicide on September 18 by drinking pesticide.”

Disclosing the identity of the Dabra criminals, The New York Times informed: “The police have arrested eight men—seven of them Jats—who have confessed to the attack”....

In the terminology of the caste system the Jats are a mirasdar peasant caste who, apart from Haryana, are spread over western UP, Himachal, Rajasthan, and the Sikhs are converts from it. Though Nanak’s religion is anti-caste, the Jat Sikhs have lost nothing of their aggressive casteism. Every Indian State has its mirasdar peasant caste or castes, whose elites, along with the elites of other dominating peasant castes, rule every State and the country in alliance with the elites of the capitalist Bania caste-class and the brahmanical caste-class. How does this semi-feudal caste-class set-up rule India?

On December 13, 2012, the Parliament of the European Union adopted a resolution that observed that though “many Dalits do not report crimes for fear of reprisals by the dominant castes official police statistics averaged over the past five years show that 13 Dalits are murdered every week, five Dalits’ homes or possessions are burnt every week, six Dalits are kidnapped or abducted every week three Dalit women are raped every day, 11 Dalits are beaten every day and a crime is committed against a Dalit every 18 minutes.”

No such account is available of the ST who comprise half (eight per cent) of the SC population. Being helpless and unorganised, atrocities against them are more numerous. The OBCs, who constitute 52 per cent of the population, though not ati-Sudras like the Dalits and Adivasis, do not escape the juggernaught of the caste system and their plight in West Bengal has been vividly described by Biswas and Nazrul Islam.

The Indian Communist Parties, including the Naxalite, characterise the Indian state according to their uni-linear Marxist class methodology as bourgeois-landlord. The new jati feudal society arose in the lifetime of Buddha and during these more than two-and-a-half millennia it has passed through long periods of growth, stagnation and decadence. British capitalist imperialism has transformed it into a semi-feudal caste-class society. With independence the semi-feudal caste-class rulers are perpetuating the semi-feudal caste system, thereby intensifying the rapacity of the elites of the dominant peasant caste-classes and their minions, who are the direct controllers and executioners respectively of the caste system. Biswas believes that law can restrict or reform them.

Reform or Revolution?

Biswas himself admits:

When the Indian Parliament passed a special Act, that is the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 great expectation was kindled in the hearts of the victims of massacres, exploitation, rape, and atrocities for justice. In two decades the promise that the Act held has faded away, thanks to blinding apathy and opposition of the vested interest to implement the Act with commitment. No Dalit today hopes to get justice under this law. The special Act stands practically shelved though it has not lost relevance in any manner. Now there are many advocates for abolition of the Act as the conviction rate under, this law is a deplorable two-to-three per cent....

Being not an activist Biswas does not note that the Dalit intellectuals, especially Ambed-karites, also are partly responsible for the cast-ration of this Act, being corrupted by Reser-vation. As for the term Scheduled Tribes, I am repeatedly stressing that tribe (gana) no longer exists in the world. In India the last sangha-ganas (oligarchies) were extinguished by feudal kings by the fourth century AD. Since then only jamats or Adivasis have come to exist. And gana was not brought into being by the Vedic catur-varnya monarchies, but by the pre-Vedic gynocracies (Vai-raj or stri-rajya) which generated the Tantriki Sruti.

In spite of the experience of this Act Biswas insists that a stringent special Act to prevent gang-rapes in general on women will stop atrocities on women such as the Delhi gang-rape. Though the Delhi gangrape victim hailed from a higher caste, the rapists belong to higher castes. Though the national storm that the Delhi gangrape raised, atrocities on women, their main target being Ati-sudra Dalit and Adivasi women, have increased.

The reason for that is that the perpetrators are not individuals or groups, but ruling castes belonging to the semifeudal caste system. Only revolutionary abolition of the semifeudal caste system will stop these atrocities on women, which were ushered in and sanctified by the chatur-varnya and its Vedic Dharma-sutras ‘ Krshna-varnah hi rama, na dharmaya ramanaya eva ca’. 

Varna slavery being far more complicated than the Greek-Roman Chattel slavery, it requires a Buddha to abolish it by social revolution. Ambedkar said that caste-ending revolution is more difficult than the class-ending one. The Jat leaders of their khap panchayatsare intensifying the general crisis of the caste system by insisting on the age-old sanctity of ‘Honour Killing’. If a young couple marries by contravening the gotra custom, the bride and bridegroom are killed before their own parents. Inter-caste marriage is a more serious offence. Tejpal, a goldsmith youth, and Sushila, an untouchable maiden, married by going outside the Haryana State. They returned, thinking that the tension had subsided. When their home people found that they had not returned from the police thana, their search found their bodies hanging from the roadside tree-branch. The long arm of honour killing reaches its victims as far as Mumbai. The inhuman sway of the honour killer is exercised even on Muslim couples, of course with the consent of its Ashraffs. If, as suggested by Syed Shahabuddin in his paper ‘Caste System—Living Reality in Politics and Administration’, Mainstream, July 16, Ambedkar had declared in the Constitution the delegiti-macy of the caste system, the victims could have resorted to court and mass action.

But when I mentioned in my speech in Siddharth College, Mumbai, on October 24, 2012 that Ambedkar had made no provision of caste abolition in the Constitution, Dalit dailies and Ambedkarites rose in protest against me, assuming as if I was maligning Ambedkar. In Marx’s death centenary year in 1983, I had to refute the contention of CPM’s Social Scientist that only the antagonist contradiction of class society can develop into revolution while the non-antagonistic contradictions of non-class societies cannot develop into revolution. The argument meant that the Indian caste-class society is a non-revolutionary society. The argument being in support of the dialectics of Marx and Lenin, it negated the revolutionary potentiality of the Indian caste-class society. Hence I defended Mao’s On Contradiction (1936). Ambedkar’s Caste Annihilation (1936) belongs to the same year by a strange coincidence. Though it is his most significant work holding immense revolutionary potentiality, with it he separated the caste system from its matrix: Indian feudalism, which led him inevitably to parliamentarism. In order to develop the revolutionary potentiality of ‘Caste Annihilation’, his limitation has to be shown and then only his potentiality can be taken to the caste-ending democratic revolution.

Sharad Patil
Asantosh,
Dhule-424002
(Maharashtra)