6 Oct, 2015
India witnessing a return to medieval Brahminical values – The Hindu
Ever since Mandal and Mandir in the early 1990s, conflicts arising from caste politics and from religious politics have been treated as separate types of problems, with distinct causes, logics and effects. This separation of “casteism” and “communalism” can be seen both in the specialist discourses of social science and in popular perception. So we might regard the massive Patidar agitation for reservations under Hardik Patel’s leadership in Gujarat as unrelated to Mohammad Akhlaq’s lynching in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, by a Hindu mob, on the suspicion that there was beef in the refrigerator of his Muslim household. Both events unfold simultaneously in different parts of India, but thanks to our analytical bad habit of separating matters of caste violence from matters of communal violence, we fail to see the direct connection between them.
The connection, which it is high time we brought out of the shadows, is Hindutva. Hindu right-wing ideology is precisely what undermines or worse, aggressively attacks the very foundations of equality and egalitarianism in India, be it between castes, between religious communities, between majority and minority groups, or between men and women.
Read the rest: The reactionary present – The Hindu
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