By Vijay Prashad

My Indian passport came back to me from New York City via federal express. I’m always nervous about sending it anyway, mainly because it bears so much weight for those of us who hold things like Green Cards, and therefore have stamps in the passports that are meaningful. Inside the passport, alongside its latest visa, was a note that said “with the compliments of South African Consulate General.” I am still ecstatic.

About a decade ago this would have been impossible. My passport then bore a stamp that said on page four that said “Countries for which this passport is valid: all countries except Republic of South Africa and Israel.” The Indian state, born in an anti-colonial struggle, was resolute in its determination not to allow its citizenry to participate in contemporary apartheid, whether in the Herrenvolk state of South Africa or the Zionist state of Israel.

As Mandela led the people of South Africa out of formal apartheid, the Indian state welcomed interchanges with that beloved country, long a place of hope and aspiration for us in India. And then, as the forces of anti-colonialism in India lost ground to the forces of a cruel nationalism that was eager to make nice with imperialist globalization, the strictures against Israel also fell away from my passport. South Africans won their formal freedoms, but Israel continued its policy of apartheid against the Palestinians (despite the creation of a threadbare “authority”). So why did the Indian state allow us to visit Israel? Because the newly installed Hindu Right regime was eager to curry favor with the United States, to buy arms from Israel and to create some kind of alliance against its vision of an Islamic bloc.

All these issues come to a head as I prepare to go to South Africa for the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR). The United States and the European Union states want to protect their accumulated values from the legal challenges of the formerly colonized world: that England’s Industrial Revolution was financed and fueled by Caribbean slavery and Bengali famine (1770) is something we are enjoined to forget. So reparations may be off the table. The United States and Israel want us to treat the west Asian state as a little piece of Europe and not to recognize Zionism as fundamentally a racist nationalism. And finally, the Indian government, ruled by the Hindu Right, wants to pretend that its own form of Hindutva cruelty should be mobilized to protect its social base of Brahmanism, whose sociological appearance comes in a form of modern feudalism we know as caste.

When national level discussions for the WCAR began in India last year, the problem of caste immediately stirred controversy. The Hindi-Right dominated government was chary to raise the issue of caste on the world stage, particularly at this juncture when it revels in the US-sponsored praises for being the world’s largest democracy (and to secure India a much-coveted seat as a permanent member of the UN Security Council). The government seeks to avoid anything that makes India “look bad” on the world stage.

Apart from these international political reasons, the Hindu-Right government has a commitment to the perpetuation of caste discrimination. Not only are its ranks filled with representatives of the dominant castes, but its public policy platforms frequently privilege the rights of those dominant castes who hold wealth over the rest of society (of oppressed castes and religious minorities). Furthermore, allied organizations of the Hindu-Right have even convened religious conclaves given to the topic of a formal “revival” of strict Brahmanical social organizations, such as varnashramadharma or the four-fold division of varnas (the four social orders, Brahman, Kshatryias, Vaishyas, and Shudras). On 7 February 2001, the External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh noted that “we must ensure that the Conference does not lose sight of its focus on racism.” In other words, the Hindu-Right would then be able to preserve itself not only as an anti-racist nationalist force, but that it could occlude the several discriminations and prejudices that structure the Indian polity.

Dalit rights activists have, naturally, been eager to raise the question of caste discrimination on the international stage, particularly since this government (in power since 1998) has been the first to block discussion of caste in international forums. Martin Macwan, national head of the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights, reminds us that “in earlier international forums, notably the Committee on Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, the Government of India had successfully taken up the issue of caste-based discrimination. Why is it insisting that caste is an ‘internal’ matter?” The idea that caste is an “internal” matter is specious, mainly because “caste” as we know it today is decidedly fostered by a combination of Indian social relations, European-driven colonialism, and global capitalism. These three factors produce what we know as caste today, since the practice cannot claim to be an ahistorical reflection of what one reads in Sanskrit texts. Caste, then, is not “internal,” but a form of social discrimination that is in conversation with similar forms elsewhere. It is in this spirit that most Dalit rights activists want to hold the international discussion.

Let us leave aside those who want to use reduce caste to a form of race as biology: they have little political strength and don’t merit too much discussion (besides I’ve written about this elsewhere, in Zmagazine for instance).

The issue of caste, nevertheless, will be taken up in Durban both at the NGO section of the meetings, and at the UN meeting. Martin Macwan and others will be active at the former meetings, talking about caste violence and of the aspirations of oppressed castes in India. Meanwhile, the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development will hold a parallel conference on “Racism and Public Policy” and at that conference I will present a paper on the problem of caste. This is what I shall argue:

Caste, as constructed in colonial times and lived in the contemporary moment, is not identical to race, even though both emerge simultaneously as methods to exert imperial control and to justify white supremacy. Where caste and race share much is in the way in which these forces of social oppression are related to the economic domain: both are about the denial of the means of production to certain peoples. Caste, unlike race, was never constructed based on phenotype. Indeed, the British, notably H. H. Risley, spent decades trying to map caste by head size and by nose height, as well as skin color, but they could not come up with the kinds of simple distinctions that they nevertheless fabricated for what they called the different ‘races.’ Caste, then, even in its modern history, did not have to contend with the classifications of modern biology. Castes are not knowable in a phenotypical sense, but this does not mean that castes cannot be identified. There is not one dominant caste across India, but each local region, over time (and some over millennia) has either one or a set of dominant castes who came to power most often by the sword or chicanery. Under the heel of these castes are others whose genealogy can be traced to events that often have nothing to do with the conquest: caste stories are traced to marriage ties (endogamy, exogamy), to claims of a common divine ancestor, to arrangements to tether cattle together (gotra) or else to keep common kitchens. These cultural formations (that could just as well be called tribes) form the heritage of most castes. One can, therefore, identify caste, sometimes (bear in mind the number of caveats) by various cultural features, but these differ from one locality to another. Caste domination, then, is fiercely local, this unlike the formation of racism. Here is one example of the distinction between the operation of caste oppression and racism.

Given this, and other distinctions, to collapse the social contexts of India and Europe/US is not helpful. Civil rights (or human rights) as a platform has been a useful rhetorical handle, but as I’ve argued before, the horizon of our struggle has already gone beyond the rights framework: we already have formal equality, and we need to fight for much more than that. In India, given that caste oppression is most acutely felt in the rural areas, the issues for liberation are higher agricultural wages and land to the tiller. Each region, each locality fashions its own fights in a way that strike at the local capillaries of caste power. Without a careful analysis of the importance of locality, the anti-caste struggle can lead to alliances with upper castes against middle castes, as has happened (and will shortly happen again) in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.

The main platform for the liberation of oppressed castes in India is land reform, a remedy that would make no sense in the western European context. While we seek to be internationalists in our vision and to fight against the occlusion of oppression by cruel nationalism (often in the service of imperialist globalization), we should be very keen to the political platforms that our analysis produces. Politics is, after all, not just about our gut instincts, but principally about the platforms we produce to engender struggles.

On to Durban.

Vijay Prashad is an Associate Professor and the Director of the International Studies Program at Trinity College in Hartford, CT.

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