[Reader-list] Stir against Ashish Nandy exposes laziness of elite anti-casteism

[Asit Das]

  Stir against Ashish Nandy exposes laziness of elite anti-casteism

*Garga Chatterjee <http://www.dnaindia.com/authors/garga-chatterjee> *|
Agency: DNA | Monday, January 28, 2013





This is not a good time to be Ashis Nandy. In this age of ether when words
travel faster than sound leaving comprehension behind, it is not surprising
that some ‘casteist’ words of Ashis Nandy, spoken by him at a literary
festival, have traveled fast and far. Token anti-casteism like token
anti-communalism is one of the easiest paths to salvation for the elite
chatterati. But even in the month of Magh, the Kumbh mela is too plebian
for such folk. No wonder, so many have chosen to sanctimoniously pounce on
his statement, as a Plan B.

Ashis Nandy did not say that people from the OBC, SC and ST communities are
the most corrupt. He said: “Most of the people who are doing corruption are
people from OBC, SC and ST communities and as long as it remains Indian
republic will survive.” The difference between most of the corrupt and
corrupt-most is crucial. An audience whose interaction with the OBC, SC and
ST communities is limited mostly to house-maids and drivers made sure that
his comment did not go unchallenged.

At the most banal level, there is no way for the statement to be
statistically untrue because most people who live in India are from OBC, SC
and ST communities. They form a stupendous majority of the population. That
they also form a majority of the corrupt is only natural. The problem with
looking at corruption in this way is that it does not unpack this thing
‘corruption’ into the myriad forms it takes – and that matters. By form I
do not only mean the quantum of corruption but also the method of
execution. Given that corruption is something that all communities indulge
in, asking who does what how is important.

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But there is also the public life of corruption, its most talked about form
being corruption in public life. In that elite congregation in Jaipur and
their kith and kin beyond it, if one were to ask for the names of two most
corrupt politicians, Madhu Koda, A Raja, Mayawati, Laloo Prasad Yadav will
jostle for space in their lists. That people from OBC/SC/ST communities are
over-represented in the imaginary of this ‘public’ along with its
pronouncements of wanting to see beyond caste needs some reflection. The
charge of corruption is looked upon as a non-casteist charge and by
bringing it up, prejudices and animosities, which may otherwise have
casteist origins, can be sanctified and presented in public discourse. The
devil, then, is not in the commissions but in the omissions. This brings us
to the question of ‘visible’ corruption.

‘Visible’ corruption, the eye-ball grabbing variety, is visible mostly due
to a crude job in covering up tracks. The visibility is due to getting
caught. A clandestine political group escapes persecution by building a
networked system of subterranean safe-houses. Caste groups with
pre-existing socio-political hegemony have a long experience in building
safe-houses so as to channelize their corruption into ‘internal channels’
rather than public-private ones. So much so that some such forms of
corruption are not considered as such and do not need to be clandestine any
more. Systems of aggrandizement are built into the system so that
corruption happens even on auto-pilot. Just like old money begets new
money. Older and much-maligned extractive capital becomes today’s
fashionable finance capital. All this requires time. OBC/SC/ST communities,
by and large, have not had the time to develop the art of reducing
corruption to making the papers correctly. They do not have an
well-entrenched system of trustworthy accomplices who are well grounded in
this management science. Upper castes elites have. They are its fathers.

In the subcontinent, few opportunities exist for someone to undo the lack
of caste or economic privilege at birth. Aspirations and accomplishments
are pre-determined by a legal framework that does not acknowledge realities
of the past or the present. The few viable ways to negotiate this
disadvantage happen to be extra-legal. We love to call this corruption.
Indeed, in the absence of this conduit, things would be even more skewed
than they are.

If Ashis Nandy had said that most corrupt come from the forward castes,
there would not be any furore. That is because, in India, the potency of
implicating hegemonic groups has been defanged by the enthusiastic
appropriation of the mantle of fashionable anti-casteism by the very same
groups. Which is why the persecution of the Kabir Kala Manch does not
attract the ‘freedom of speech’-wallahs who also double up as
‘anti-casteism’ wallahs, as and when required. The reaction to Ashis
Nandy’s statement exposes the laziness of elite anti-casteism.

*Garga Chatterjee is a post-doctoral researcher at the Massachuetts
Institute of Technology**
On Twitter: @gargac*