“Gandhiji, I have no homeland...” - B.R. Ambedkar “How can I call this land my own homeland and this religion my own, wherein we are treated worse than cats and dogs, wherein we cannot get water to drink? No self-respecting Untouchable worth the name will be proud of this land.”
The ideology of Hindutva, fuses Hinduism with Indian nationalism, is associated most closely with the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) and the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) and the Shiv Sena. However, the Indian National Congress, has increasingly compromised its original commitment to secularism and tried to use religion in its own interests as have the the supposed Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist).
Hinduism is the most difficult religion to define as it does not have a common creed. Each village and region had its own gods in an India that was a society before it was a nation. Consequently, both its supporters and critics can take up any one of its various aspects and present a conception of it that is nowhere near the reality.
Hinduism being an umbrella of various religious tendencies required to be defined for providing a base to Hindu religious nationalism. This is exactly what is being done by the protagonists of Hindutva. Hindutva forces are committed to preserving the hegemony of the ‘upper’ caste Hindus, this being the core of their agenda. Hence, their claim of representing all ‘Hindus’, including the oppressed castes (who form the majority of the ‘Hindu’ population) is, to put it simply, bogus. The supposedly divine commandments of the Manusmriti, which prescribes slavery for the ‘low’ castes and sanctions ‘upper’ caste, particularly Brahmin, supremacy as supposedly the will of God, have been consistently eulogised by Hindutva idealogues. The temples of India aspire to the kind of institutionalization that the churches in the West came up with. Just as the church appropriated tradition, the upper castes of India “brahminized” tradition – which means appropriated it as being the product of the priestly class.
Hindutva adherents are ardent advocates of neo-liberalism which fit the interests of the Indian ruling castes/classes and is evidenced by their support for privatization and the encroachments of the Indian economy by multi-national corporations.The Hindutva state, would be minimalist in regulatory interventions in social and economic matters and maximalist in the maintenance of law and order. This can be taken to mean that the state will not seek to interfere with the working of the market mechanism, which is heavily skewed in favour of the dominant castes/classes. If the state were to intervene in the working of the market in order to protect or benefit the poor, including in the form of affirmative action for the oppressed castes, it would be exceeding its limits, the intervention being anti-Hindu. The main task of the state would simply be to prevent any challenge to the iniquitous status quo and to ruling caste/class hegemony—in the name of maintaining law and order. The ideology and politics of Hindutva are geared to protecting and promoting the hegemony of 'high' caste Hindu elites.
To this day, many Indians still believe, that Dalits are being punished by God for sins in a previous life. Under the religious codes of Hinduism, a Dalits only hope is to be a good servant of the high castes and upon death and rebirth they will be reincarnated a high caste. This is called varna in Sanskrit, the language of the original Aryans. Millions of lower-caste Hindus have sought escape over the centuries by converting to Islam, Sikhism, Buddhism or Christianity. But the caste biases followed them.
Gandhi might have said that he would like to be born in the untouchable family yet he actually never condemned the caste system. “ I do not advice untouchables to give up their trades and professions. One born a scavenger must earn his livelihood by being a scavenger and then do whatever else he likes. For a scavenger is as worthy of his hire as a lawyer or your president. That according to me is Hinduism.”
This compliance with tradition led to a reply from the hero of the Dalits, Babasaheb Ambedkar, p “For in India a man is not scavenger because of his work. He is a scavenger because of his birth, irrespective of the question whether he does scavenging or not. If Gandhism preached that scavenging is a noble profession, with the objective of inducing those who refuse to engage in it, one could understand it. But why appeal to the scavenger’s pride and vanity in order to induce him and him only to keep on to scavenging by telling him that scavenging is a noble profession and that he need not to be ashamed of it. To preach that poverty is good for shudra and for none else, to preach that scavenging is good for the untouchables and for none else and to make them accept these onerous impositions as voluntary purposes of life, by appeal to their failings is an outrage and a cruel joke on the helpless classes which none but Mr Gandhi can perpetuate with equanimity and impunity.”
Ambedkar wrote "Inequality is the soul of Hinduism" . He characterised the oppressive caste system as the tyranny of Hinduism. Ambedkar asserted: "I was born a Hindu, but never will die a Hindu. What is required is to get rid of the doctrine of 'Chatuvarna'. That is the root cause of all inequality and is also the parent of the case system and untouchability, which are merely other forms of inequality". Ambedkar made a scathing attack on Hinduism: "The religion that does not recognise you as a human being, or give you water to drink, or allow you to enter temples is not worthy to be called a religion. The religion that forbids you to receive education and comes in the way of your material advancement is not worthy of the appellation 'religion'.” He also said "It is your claim to equality which hurts them [the upper castes] . They want to maintain the status quo. If you continue to accept your lowly status ungrudgingly, continue to remain dirty, filthy, backward, ignorant, poor and disunited, they will allow you to live in peace. The moment you start to raise your level, the conflict starts. Untouchability is not a transitory or temporary feature; it is eternal, it is lasting. Frankly it can be said that the struggle between the Hindus and the Untouchables is a never-ending conflict. It is eternal because the religion which assigns you the lowest status in society is itself divine and eternal according to the belief of the so-called high caste Hindus. No change warranted by change of time and circumstances is possible."
Ambedkar may not have been a Marxist but he was never fully satisfied with the bourgeois democracy which came to be established in India and he had a hand in drafting the constitution! "Democracy is incompatible and inconsistent with isolation and exclusiveness resulting in the distinction between the privileged and the unprivileged... Democracy is not a form of government, but a form of social organisation... What we must do is not to content ourselves with mere political democracy. We must make our political democracy a social democracy as well. Political democracy cannot last unless there is at the base of it, a social democracy."
It can be argued that India is a hybrid society. It has acquired the “modern” of a capitalist system is wage-slavery where money is the sole means to freedom yet retained the ancient of “tradition" a feudal system where hierarchies maintain social inequalities through caste-slavery.
Temple wealth
The god industry in India is a big business with enormous political clout. Priests and gurus receive generous material support from the supposedly secular government, such as land and infrastructure for new temples, and ashrams and schools for training priests. In some provinces, priests are now paid directly by the government. Religious institutions get financial support from leading Indian companies, prompting Nanda Meera Nanda author of Prophets Looking Backward and The God Market to speak of a “state-temple-corporate complex.”
Lord Vishnu is not on any of India’s rich lists even though the value of just some of his recently disclosed wealth is estimated at well over £12 billion. You might imagine, considering the absolute poverty in India, that this would cause a certain amount of resentment but it doesn’t seem to have done. Lord Vishnu is in fact very popular. What’s more, his method of accumulating wealth is entirely legal, tax free and doesn’t involve any risky re-investments of his capital. People just give him their money. So what’s his secret? Well, Vishnu is no ordinary lord. Lord Vishnu, you see, doesn’t actually exist. He’s a Hindu god.
The Padmanabha Swamy temple at Trivandrum in Kerala contains the offerings made by devotees over the last 500 years which was found to be a vast hoard estimated to be worth at least £12.6 billion.
“All of Kerala is celebrating this extraordinary find,” said a temple official. And why not? Surely this could finance a few hospitals or schools at the very least?
However, as is always the case, the needs of the gods come before human needs. “It belongs to the Padmanabha Swarmy temple and will be preserved there,” said Oommen Chandy, Kerala’s chief minister, firmly rejecting the idea that it should be used for public benefit. Lord Vishnu gets to keep it. In general, Hindu believers treat the disadvantaged as sinners reaping the fruits of a past life. Thus, a leper is to be shunned; the exploitation of dalits is justified. Why do major Hindu religious establishments involve themselves only in collecting donations and not in performing such community services as building hospitals and schools?
An Indian court has ruled that Hindu gods cannot deal in stocks and shares after an application for trading accounts to be set up in their names. Two judges at the Bombay High Court on Friday rejected a petition from a private religious trust to open accounts in the names of five deities, including the revered elephant-headed god, Ganesha. “Trading in shares on the stock market requires certain skills and expertise and to expect this from deities would not be proper,” judges P.B. Majumdar and Rajendra Sawant said, according to the Indian newspapers in 2010.
Socialism in Hindi
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