Kancha Ilaiah: The ugly truth

Deccan Chronicle - 04th Feb 2013


Dear Ashis Nandy,

On the question of corruption — how to deploy that concept, and which section of the Indian society (not of the state) deserves to be deployed — it seems you displayed a deep diabolism at the Jaipur Literature Festival. With your statement the debate on corruption shifted from individuals to communities/castes. This is in a way good.

The recent countrywi­de debate on corruption was confined to individuals, most of them coming from the higher echelons of the Indian civil society and state. Now you have, however, labelled the OBCs, SCs and STs as communities that are most corrupt without saying anything about the corruption of the upper castes, except a cursory reference to upper-caste nepotism. In any case, none of the upper-caste intellectuals in the realm of social science have accepted, so far, that the upper castes are corrupt as a community. Your presumption on that count is also wrong. In fact, there is no debate on castes and communities vis-a-vis corruption.

Using a concept like co­rruption, which is a hat­ed concept in the public realm, for castes and co­mmunities of India that produced all our wealth for centuries but never got anything back is dan­gerous. The British colonists labe-lled the tribes as “criminal” but the upper castes as “pun­dits, Desh-mukhs, Sir Desais, Deshpandes” and so on. You seem to have followed them in labelling the most op­pressed communities as “most corrupt.” Is it not dangerous to do so while claiming to be their supporter? Does not this harm even the social science discourse?

This is a time when some amount of intellectual intercourse is taking place between the upper-caste subaltern scholars, who denied the existence of caste, and Dalit-Bahujan scholars, who harp upon only caste.

What would happen to a white intellectual who says that “most black Americans are becoming corrupt” without stating that all whites are racist?

What if someone were to say that “most women who are entering the st­a­te administration are co­r­rupt and that women la­bourers are becoming increasingly corrupt,” (ju­st like the tribals who figured in your statement) — would that be acceptable to women activists of India? Would wo­men intellectuals support it?

Take, for example, the very Bengal experiment that you cited. If I use your own analogy, the Bengal OBC/SC/STs are not corrupt because they have not yet come into the state sector.

In other words, the Bengali Bhadralok were/are one of the most corrupt communities of India who pre­tend to have kept th­eir system “clean”. If I pr­esume that you are using the notion of corruption to the Bengali Bh­adralok as a community (made up of three castes: Brahmins, Kaya­s­tas and Vaidyas), wo­uld they tolerate it? How much intellectual energy has gone into exposing the Bengal Bha­dralok manoeuvring? Did they not misuse the law of the land to keep the SC/ST/OBCs out of the educational system?

If we invoke Tarun Tejpal’s epithet that “corruption is an equa­li­ser” then Bengal Communists who ruled that state for 37 years must be treated as the most corrupt group in the world. They subverted the reservation system to ensure that the SC/ST/OBCs do not come anywhere near their Bhadralok Brah­mi­nic state. What did the Bengal intellectuals do to fight that corrupt Bhadralok community? The course has not cha­nged during the Mamata Banerjee regime too. What will you do now?

When the Ambed­ka­ri­tes were almost ready to de­ploy caste in the Indian intellectual discourse, undercutting the class and nation discourse, some of our upper-caste scholars came out with a soft, unidentifiable, Wes­tern concept called “subaltern.”

For those of us who realised that there was a deep notion of casteism operating in the whole nationalist and class movements, we also knew that the deployment of the category “subaltern” subverted our agenda. Some­how, the Mandal mo­vement, with the support of the erstwhile Raja — V.P. Singh — the anti-caste ideology began to acquire a foothold in the academic circles. There is a feeling that only to divert the discourse on corruption of upper cas­tes you labelled the SC/ST/OBCs as corrupt by misusing a platform like the Jaipur Literary Festival.

Otherwise how should one understand your theory of corruption that walked on its head?

As the British had done earlier, criminality is now being attributed to the victims of criminals themselves. This is one of the main attributes of colonial intellectualism and it now is seeping into upper-caste intellectual discourse. The tragedy is that such friendly surrogation of casteism was sought to be played out at a place where the women from Jaipur’s Maharaja family were selling tea, whereas the maharajas were hardly around. This shows that there is a change. But the change is more visible among upper-caste women and not so much among upper-caste men.

Yes, the Dalit-Bahujan movements should keep track of such surrogati­ons without losing sight of who is a friend and who is a foe. It should draw lines carefully. Earlier we faced intellectuals who described Ambedkar as a “False God.” There is that word “God” in it. But what is more important is “False.” You labelled the SC/ST/OBCs as corrupt to equalise them with upper castes who are not merely corrupt but exploit also. We, therefore, not only need to debate caste and corruption but caste and exploitation, too.

The game is not yet being played in a levelled field. The men and women in that vastly unlevelled ground are unequal. The very sight of unequal bodies in the ground, which is unlevelled, the fear of losing the game is deep among the short and lean standing there. While pretending to be a friend of the new entrants, do not hint to the umpire that the new entrants are likely to win by using deceptive means. No… no, that is being a deceptive friend.