India's caste cauldron

I am not into sports. I neither play nor watch any sport. What effect this will have on my health is a debate for another day. But here, I want to discuss the man whose name has been on every Indian lip since August 7, 2021.

When I first read that Neeraj Chopra had made it to the final of the javelin throw category at Tokyo, I was enthralled. I was proud that a fellow Indian had made it this far in an international sporting event where India has had a very bad record for decades.

But there was another reason. 'Chopra'. Ah! he must be a Punjabi Khatri ... like me ...I may be a journalist with experience of 15 years. I may be a reasonably well-educated person. But in that split second, I had not been able to resist the call of something very primordial in our region: Caste.

The first question that we as humans usually ask strangers is their name. It gives us a fair idea of where they may be from. All of us, after all, have an abiding interest in others' origins. In short, we try to seek familiarity.

When somebody who has made a name for himself or herself happens to belong to our clan, caste, ethnicity, religion or race, we feel even more glad. We feel a part of that person's success as if s/he is a member of our own family or kin group.

Things take a sinister turn, however, when we use the celebrity who belongs to our clan, caste, ethnicity, race or religion to score brownie points over others. The idea is to prove ourselves to be superior, something as primordial as social division. This is particularly dangerous in a country like India, where caste, class, race and religion have fragmented society into thousands of categories.

Neeraj Chopra's gold medal proved this once again. I soon found that I was not the only one trying to claim him as one of my own. There were the Rajputs.

There were the Rors, a small 'upper' caste that claims Kshatriya descent and is concentrated in the Kurukshetra, Karnal and Panipat districts of Haryana, along the Grand Trunk Road.

Even the Marathas in faraway Maharashtra claimed him, on the basis of a historical event in Medieval India, the Third Battle of Panipat where the Durrani Afghan Empire under Ahmed Shah Abdali, defeated the Maratha Confederacy on January 14, 1761.

So what does all this show us? Well, the naked truth. More than 70 years after the Republic of India banished untouchability, the institution of caste is thriving in the country, even among those who have had access to higher education such as yours truly.

Indeed, caste-based conflicts have only increased in ferocity in all these years. In March 2016, Down To Earth (DTE) had reported as to how traditional landed castes in various parts of India, such as the Jats in the north, the Patidars in Gujarat, the Marathas in Maharashtra and the Kapus in Andhra Pradesh were violently protesting for backward caste status to get government jobs.

DTE has often highlighted the plight of extremely marginalised communities like manual scavengers, who continue to be forced to do their millennia-old occupation. And of course, there is the issue of people dying because they are forced to clean manholes.

This fracas over Neeraj Chopra's caste comes days after a nine-year-old Dalit girl was found to have been gang-raped and her body burnt secretly in Nangal, Delhi. And there was of course the horrific Hathras case last year.

Then there was the case of Vandana Katariya from the Indian women's hockey team being abused with casteist slurs after the team lost at the Olympics.

Whom should we blame? Our polity? Our society? Our laws? Our education system? Or just our minds and our thinking? I guess all of these. What should we do to remove this cancer from our country and perhaps our region too? (We often forget that the caste system exists in varying intensities across South Asia).

One suggestion is that we could drop our last names. Indeed, many 'upper' caste people in Bihar did this after being exhorted by Jayaprakash Narayan. Many in India still bear one name or take up the last name that is non-caste in nature, in accordance with their beliefs. But will this be acceptable to everyone? I doubt it.

This is not to discount that several people are working tirelessly to eradicate the cancer of caste from India. However, the nature of this institution is such that it keeps on taking up new avatars, like this one regarding Chopra. There is no caste atrocity. However, various castes come out to claim an individual because he has been successful. And claim to be superior to the others.

Will divisions like caste, religion and race ever die in India and the world? The answer lies with us and us alone. DTE

Views expressed are personal