Caste Sytem - Why is no one talking about abolishing it?
What does abolishing the caste system mean?
What does abolishing the caste system means? To some it means raising the level of backward caste to the same level of other castes so that they are all equal. To me that is not correct. That is a soceity were caste system exists and all castes are treated equal.
Abolishing the caste system means that there will be no caste. No one would be identied by a caste. Every hindu will be just that…Hindu. No Brahmins. No Kshatriyas. No Vaishyas. No Shudras. No Dalits……Only Hindus!!!
Anybody you talk to would agree that the caste system is an evil that has plagued the hindu society for thousands of years. As with every evil, this one should die as well but why is no one talking about abolishing it? Why isn’t there a single voice asking for it?
There could be a multitude of reasons for it.
Now Let us try to examine why different groups are not advocating abolishing the caste system.
Forward Caste:
You won’t see a lot of forward caste people advocating abolishing the caste system. This is because in their heart they have not accepted it that all castes are equal. They still hold the superiority feeling about their caste and would not want to let go of it. I can see a lot of people coming out against this statement but if you look around that there are only a handful few who genuinely believe in equality of all. Others just talk about it for discussions and arguments sake. Some talk about equality because of the fear of the law. Some are frustrated because of the bad side effects of reservations that they are willing to treat the BCs as equals But only few talk about it from the heart. We need a lot more forward caste people to feel from the heart that everybody is made equal.
Backward Caste:
Most of them can’t even dream of it let alone talk about it. They have been opressed for so long that thinking in terms of equality is just beyond most of them. They are more worried about surviving in their day to day life that there is little time left to think about anything else. Most of them have just accepted it that they are destined to be opressed and hence go on living their life without questioning it.
Then there is a group of “Elite BC” who has made some advancement in life and are well aware of the benefits of the government programmes that are run for the benefit of BCs. These elitist BCs do not want to let go of these opportunities. They want to use/misuse it to all their advantage and where would the advantage be if the caste system was abolished? Then why talk about it? In the academic arguments these elitist would be the first one to talk about the evils of caste system but they will never talk about abolishing it. There might be a few thinking about it but I have not heard any voices yet.
Political Parties:
Which political party would risk losing a vote bank? Yes, the political parties will not do it because for every party it is a vote bank. Be it SP, BSP or Congress. The political parties are in fact interested in keeping the caste system alive. The resaons are the same why the britishers wanted it and that is divide and rule. This is the disgusting fact about our political parties. Even those who are the so called “protectors” of the backward caste. The unwillingness of the political parties hurts us the most. Even more than the unwillingness of the “Forward” and the “Backward” caste. It is a shameful fact that we cannot rely on our politician to do any good to the society.
So what can we do about it?
To begin with we can start talking about it. We should use all the possible means of communication to spread the word. There are a lot of wellwishers of the backward caste in the internet community and I hope they will take up this cause. Even though there might differences in the manner in which one would like to go about it but establishing this common goal would be the first step. All should agree first that the caste system should be abolished and then we can start discussing about the modalities.
We should start a discussion about this in the media, both print and electronic, circulate chain emails, start a petition online.
Start raising your voice and soon you will see that they are being heard.
“kaun kehta hai aasman mein surakh nahi ho sakta,
ek pathar to tabiyat se uchhalo yaaron“
(who says the sky cannot be pierced, one just needs to throw a stone towards it with all one’s heart)
July 18, 2006
Posted in: Caste, Caste System, India
5 Responses
The caste system is so old it should be abolished. It was made by people who put themselves at the top. the caste system doesn’t mean anything to me and nothing to my family. That’s how i am bringing them up. If India is to move forward, people should not think about the caste system.
Satnam,
Nice to know that there are people like you who are doing this starting at the family level.
we need to abolish or just ignore caste system in india. everyone is equal before god. The evil designs of a few aryans translated into the caste system in india. result is till now, common people have not understood the beginning. there is no need of any caste system in india. how can indians be so ignorant. everybody has to do away with the caste system. modern day philosophy should be only “Roti, kapada, aur makan”. caste system has more ills than good. i know a number of brahmins who do not even know any slokas or even names of characters in sacred texts or the names of sacred texts. there is no such thing as brahmin. only brahman(almighty and soul) is there. everybody has to realise the truth. let all indians pledge in front of god and swear to their soul that they would ignore castes and treat all indians without reference to castes and religion
Adaptive significance of the Indian caste system: an ecological perspective.
Gadgil M, Malhotra KC.
Indian society is an agglomeration of several thousand endogamous groups or castes each with a restricted geographical range and a hereditarily determined mode of subsistence. These reproductively isolated castes may be compared to biological species, and the society thought of as a biological community with each caste having its specific ecological niche. In this paper we examine the ecological-niche relationships of castes which are directly dependent on natural resources. Evidence is presented to show that castes living together in the same region had so organized their pattern of resource use as to avoid excessive intercaste competition for limiting resources. Furthermore, territorial division of the total range of the caste regulated intra-caste competition. Hence, a particular plant or animal resource in a given locality was used almost exclusively by a given lineage within a caste generation after generation. This favoured the cultural evolution of traditions ensuring sustainable use of natural resources. This must have contributed significantly to the stability of Indian caste society over several thousand years. The collapse of the base of natural resources and increasing monetarization of the economy has, however, destroyed the earlier complementarity between the different castes and led to increasing conflicts between them in recent years.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6638942
Its just sometimes people seem to get themselves tied up in unnecessary knots over something that
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