It has been made out that Mayavati won the UP elections because she fielded a number of Brahmin and upper caste candidates. But the BSP had given 86 tickets to Brahmins and only 24 won, a mere 20% rate of success. The Media is also praising Mayawati for having reconciled Brahmins and Dalits. But hers is only an electoral cold calculation: how to get the votes of the Dalits, the Muslims and the Upper castes in one shot. It worked and she is now entering her fourth term. But will it be better than her previous three terms, will she work for the welfare of the people who elected her ? Probably not. Already, she has transferred hundreds of bureaucrats and police officials and she has stopped all projects implemented by Mulayam Singh. Can you imagine the hundreds of crores wasted by these shelved projects and the chaos in the administration which will take months to straighten out? Is this the way to start a new government and be a Chief Minister for all, including those defeated ? Will Mayawati again enrich her party or herself at the cost of good governance ? Then next time Mulayam Singh will be reelected because of the law and order situation in the State and we will be back to square one !
Every political columnist wants to make out of UP as a study case. But is it a good case? Firstly, UP is the worst example how an Indian state can be mismanaged year after year and how the most populous state of India is also the poorest, the most unlawful – bar Bihar maybe. Secondly, UP has shown India and the world how caste and religion can be manipulated to the maximum cynical extent to get elected- as Mrs Mayawati just did.
But then, Mr Mayawati only borrowed from the Congress book of politics and only improved upon it. It is true that the Congress in turn only took over from the British the art of divisive politics, which is to polarize India on castes and religions: “I am a Muslim first and then an Indian”; “I am a Dalit first and then an Indian”; “I am a Christian first and then and Indian”… Now Mayawati wants Brahmins, who have, whatever their faults, shown patriotism thoughout Indian history (hello Mangal Pandey), to say: “I am a Brahmin first and then an Indian”. Today the Congress wants us to believe all these caste reservations and pandering to the Muslims is done to elevate minorities; but in truth it is just a cynical arithmetic computation: with the votes of the Dalits and the Muslims, anybody can be elected. It is true that the Congress got bashed-up in UP, but is equally true that Mayawati upped them with the same calculation, adding a peppering of upper castes for good effect…
There is also a perversion of statistics and facts. Yes, there are still terrible inequalities in India, extremely rich people and the poorest of the poor. Yes, there are Dalits who are oppressed. But no country in the world has done so much for its underprivileged since 1947. Today, many government academic, bureaucratic and even medical posts in India are held by Dalits and OBC. A Harijan made it to the highest post of President. Today India has another Muslim as President, a Sikh as PM and a Christian as Its ‘Eminence Grise’. Did the US ever have a Black President ? Did France ever boast of a Muslim Prime Minister, or a Hindu President ? No way – and it will take a long time to happen.
In fact today, it is the Brahmins who have become the Dalits of India. Brahmins are in minority in most of the UP villages, where Dalits constitute 60 to 65%; most of the intellectual Brahmin Tamil class has emigrated outside Tamil Nadu; the average income of Brahmins is less than that of non-Brahmins; a high percentage of Brahmin students drop out at the intermediate level ; 75% of domestic help and cooks in Andhra Pradesh are Brahmins; and most of Delhi’s public toilets are cleaned by Brahmins. Yet, contrary to the West, where Christian priests and popes constantly meddled in politics and acquired huge health and land, which led to the separation of the Church and the State under the French revolution, the much maligned Brahmins never interfered in affairs of state throughout Indian history, restraining themselves to advising kings and maharajas on spiritual matters.
Dalits should never forget that castes, which once upon a time was just a an arrangement for the distribution of functions in society, just as much as class in Europe, has been the stick that all invaders have used to put down India – and it is today still skillfully employed by missionaries and Marxists (and the millions of parasite NGO’s who make money out of India’s misery, without really uplifting anything but their own bank accounts, one of the greatest scams today). On top of that, nowadays, it is not the Brahmins who oppress the Dalits, but the OBC. See any village in Tamil Nadu: Dalits are parked in one corner and cannot enter the area devoted to Vanniars, who are just one rung above them.
Is the casteisation of politics in India, as embodied in UP, here to stay? We hope not, as it may lead to the balkanization of India. What is the key to stem this rot? Education. Many Indians do not feel nationalistic enough (except for cricket, the lowest and most worthless denomination of nationalism) and put their castes and religions forward, because they are not groomed in school to be proud to be Indians FIRST. As a Frenchman, I am taught about the greatness of my culture, my religion, my roots. Here in India, children know all about Shakespeare and Shelley, or the latest Time bestseller, but have never read Kalidasa, have no idea who Sri Aurobindo is and have no idea that pranayama is the science of breath, unique to India. As a result, later, the IMM’s and IIT’s just produce brilliant clones, without any root in their culture, who export themselves to the West to stay there, the greatest brain drain in the world. It also produces generation after generation of Indian, who scorn on their own culture and look-up to the West and some of the values like materialism and Marxism, which have failed there. But if right after kindergarten, you would teach children about the greatness of their culture, a little bit of the good of each religion, great poets, saints and epics such as the Mahabharata, which is a universal Scripture, one would produce generation after generation of true Indians.
Ultimately, Brahmins are fools if they think that they will reap benefits by allying themselves with the likes of Mayawati. The hate against Brahmins first shown by the Muslim invaders, then by the British and today espoused by Christian missionaries, Indian Marxists and much of the Indian intelligentsia is too strongly imbedded in the collective psyche. They should remember Mayawati and her mentor Kanshi Ram’s early war cry: Tilak, taraju aur talwar, unko maro juthe char (‘Brahmins, traders and the warrior caste should be kicked’). Already BSP leaders feel that the Brahmin over-drive could alienate them from other upper castes, particularly Thakurs. Thus some backpedaling may happen soon. Look also at what happened to the four hundred thousand Brahmins of Kashmir who fled though terror their homeland without raising a little finger in defense. Today no political party gives a damn about them and many of them are still languishing in refugee camps – in their own country – a first in the sad history of Humanity.
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