India's Caste System

“Alongside of modern evils, a whole series of inherited evils oppress us, arising from the passive survival of antiquated modes of production, with their inevitable train of social and political anachronisms. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. Le mort saist le vif! We are seized by the dead!” Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I.

Born in Sava, a village in the state of Rajasthan in northwestern India, Devi is from a community that, down the centuries, has worked as ‘manual scavengers’. A caste-based profession, it condemns mostly women, but also men, to clean human excreta out of dry latrines with their hands, and carry it on their heads to disposal dumps. Many also clean sewers, septic tanks and open drains with no protective gear.

They are derogatorily referred to as bhangis, which translates into ‘broken identity’. Most of those employed are Dalits, who occupy the lowest rung in the caste hierarchy and are condemned to tasks that are regarded as beneath the dignity of the upper castes. There are an estimated 1.3 million ‘manual scavengers’ in India, most of them women.

“I started doing this job when I was 12 years old,” Devi recalls. “I would accompany my mother when she went to the homes of the thakurs (upper castes) in our village everyday to clean their toilets. We would go to every home to pick up their faeces. We would gather it with a broom and plate into a cane basket. Later we would take the basket to the outskirts of the village and dispose of it.”

They cleaned 15 toilets each day, which earned them 375 rupees (a little over six dollars) per month, plus a set of old clothes from the homes they worked in, gifted once a year during the Diwali festival. Devi remembers that she was unable to eat during the first week. “I would throw up every time my mother placed food in front of me”. Harder still to bear, were the taunts of her upper caste classmates.

“They would cover their noses and tell me that I smelled. I, along with the other children from my caste, was made to sit away from the rest of the students.” She eventually dropped out of school.

There was no question of refusing to do the work. “From birth I, like the other children from my community, was told that this was our history and our destiny,” says Devi. “This was the custom followed by our forefathers which we had to continue with.”

Caste-based discrimination or untouchability was banned in India in 1955 and several legislative and policy measures have been announced over the decades to end the cruel and inhumane custom of manual scavenging.

As recently as September 2013, the government outlawed employing anyone to clean human faeces. On the ground, however, these measures have proved ineffective, the main reasons being that policies are not properly implemented, people are unaware that they can refuse to work as manual scavengers, and those who do resist face violence and the threat of eviction. Civil rights groups say that often women are victims twice over. Not only are they are looked down upon by the upper castes, they are also forced to do the work by their husbands who find it degrading, but expect the wives to continue with the custom.

Rani Devi Dhela, also started working as a manual scavenger at the age of 12, an occupation she continued with in her marital home, as her husband was unemployed. She enrolled her four children in the village school, hopeful that education would change their future. Reality dawned when her 11- year-old daughter came back home in the middle of the day, sobbing.

“She had worn a new set of clothes to school and the upper caste children and teachers taunted her for showing off,” Dhela tells IPS. 

Her daughter was told to clean up another child’s vomit and the school toilets. “When she refused they told her that this was her future as she was a bhangi’s daughter and that by attending school she should not entertain any illusions about herself.

“A teacher even threatened to pour acid into her mouth. That was the day I realised nothing would change unless I challenged these people. I put the cane basket down for good and decided that I would rather starve to death,” she adds. It was a battle that Dhela found herself all alone in. The upper castes ganged up on her and her community failed to extend support. Worse still was the reaction from her husband and in-laws, who beat her up. “The thakurs burned down our hut and told my husband they would throw us out. But my children supported me,” says Dhela.

Changing attitudes across the country, however, is an uphill battle. The recent India Human Development Survey report highlighted how deeply entrenched notions of caste purity are in contemporary Indian society, with a fourth of Indians practicing untouchability.

In Indian politics, all the ruling class political parties carefully cultivate votes based on caste. Ambedkar warned that the Indian socialist would have to “take account of caste after the revolution, if he does not take account of it before the revolution”.

The caste system originated in ancient, pre-capitalist society. It is a rigid, hereditary hierarchy of social rank. A caste is a social group defined by its traditional hereditary occupation or productive role. In South Asia people are born quite explicitly as potters, barbers, basket-makers, agricultural laborers, scavengers of dead animals, and so on—the name of a caste typically being simply the word for the occupation traditionally followed by its members. There are priest castes, merchant castes, and land-owning castes. Individuals who manage to find other work, and even whole communities that abandoned their traditional occupation generations ago, retain their caste identity and its associated rank. Caste is not class. There are brahmins as poor as any dalit. The single most reactionary role of the caste system in South Asia today is to divide workers, be they high-caste or low, from their class brothers and sisters. Nowhere are castes defined by ethnicity or appearance. A caste does not have its own culture, language, or territory. Nor does it have its own political economy, but is integrated into that of the larger society. Caste oppression is enforced through the panchayat system of village councils that dictate what is acceptable in all aspects of social relations. These councils have the authority to punish anything from cross-caste marriages to violations of dress codes for women.

A Trotskyist website had this to say:

"Yes, the solution we offer—socialist revolution—does not simply address caste. We don't think caste is an isolated problem that can be fixed on its own. We think that caste oppression and women's oppression and communalism and all the other basic problems in society have their roots in the class rule of a minority of exploiters who control the wealth that is created by others. That does not mean we don't recognize that caste is a special problem that requires special demands and special forms of struggle. But we do not think the special oppression of lowercaste and outcaste people can be abolished without smashing its material basis through proletarian revolution."

This other article attempts to provide explanations

"...Following Marx’s repeated observations, if we examine classes in  India, all the lower castes are part of working class. Further, these are sections that are subjected to exploitation of labour to a large extent. They have to liberate themselves from exploitation. They have to change the division of labour that exploitative societies created. For that, they have to go along the path of class struggle only. If they do not recognize that path and go in that direction, there will not be a way out for them from this problem. The same situation will continue in future also just as they have been languishing in the caste system for the past hundreds and thousands of years. It is not possible to escape from it in any other way....Imagine that there formed a government in  India where in the representatives of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Backward Castes constitute the majority! What can that government do in respect of elimination of caste? What will be their programmes in that respect? How will it abolish exploitative property relations? With what programmes will it change the economic conditions of lower castes that are living by performing all kinds of unclean labour? At the most, it may make some laws with haphazard sayings like - ‘Don’t observe caste distinctions!’ Whom can it order with such laws? Can it arrange a marriage between a Brahmin girl and a Chamar boy by means of commands of law? Can it bring together any two persons any time by means of laws? How can it pave the way to intercaste marriages without changing economic conditions? Can it change even a single aspect of social relations by means of its administration? Then what will a government of lower castes accomplish by taking the reigns of state power? What it will achieve is this: It will accomplish the sharing of its spoil in the process of exploitation of labour. It attains a place that enables it to stand as lower caste bourgeoisie beside the upper caste bourgeoisie. We are seeing governments of lower castes also. Their entire aim is to create Dalit Bahujan Bourgeoisie. Do you know what it means? Nothing but the exploitation of the ordinary masses of lower castes by the bourgeoisie of the lower castes! Governments of lower castes will achieve this wonderfully."

This reflects much of our own thinking in the World Socialist Movement  and it is recalled that Uttar Pradesh has the Dalit, Mayawati Kumar, known for her statue building and Punjab has Vijay Sampla in the Modi government.

Again to quote an insightful commentator

"Caste has reinvented itself and is very much part of the consciousness of all the Indian classes. It will not be an exaggeration to say that no conversation or discussion in everyday life of an average Indian goes beyond the second sentence without the phrase ‘which caste is she/he from?’ In a sense, perpetuation of the caste system is promoted by the upper echelons of the Indian society to bring order and to directly or indirectly control it.  The abolition of the caste system has to be a fundamental goal of the Indian democratic revolution. Any mass movement to abolish classes, which does not engage in a direct fight against the caste system, will not achieve its objective. The reverse is also true. Just identity-based caste struggle without challenging the exploitative relations of production cannot create a social system without exploitation." 

India does have a significant proletariat — in car factories, mines, steel plants, railways, textiles and engineering manufacturing, but a working class that is divided by caste, religion and ethnicity is further fractured into competing unions affiliated to political parties. Nevertheless, the Indian capitalists are well aware of the potential power of the workers. They still fear the possibility of revolution and will continue to set one section of the people set up against the other, having learned the maxim attributed to Jay Gould, one-time American railroad baron – “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”