Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition

by B.R. Ambedkar

Ambedkar’s point is that to believe in the Hindu shastras and to simultaneously think of oneself as liberal or moderate is a contradiction in terms.

Like Thomas Jefferson, he believed that unless every generation had the right to create a new constitution for itself, the earth would belong to “the dead and not the living”.

By Brahminism, they didn’t mean Brahmins as a caste or a community. They meant the domino effect, what Ambedkar called the “infection of imitation”, that the caste that first “enclosed” itself—the Brahmins—set off. “Some closed the door,” he wrote, “others found it closed against them.”

In 1899, Swami Vivekananda of the Ramakrishna Math—the man who became famous in 1893 when he addressed the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in his sadhu’s robes—said, “Every man going out of the Hindu pale is not only a man less, but an enemy the more.”

By 1925, Dr K.B. Hedgewar had founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu nationalist organisation. B.S. Moonje, one of the early ideologues of the RSS, travelled to Italy in 1931 and met Mussolini. Inspired by European fascism, the RSS began to create its own squads of storm troopers. (Today they number in the millions. RSS members include former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, former Home Minister L.K. Advani, and four-time Chief Minister of Gujarat Narendra Modi.)

By the time the Second World War broke out, Hitler and Mussolini were the RSS’s spiritual and political leaders (and so they still remain).

If you are powerful, you can live simply, but you cannot be poor.

Let not the people of Vykom or any other place fear that Mahatmaji wants caste abolished. Mahatmaji does not want the caste system abolished but holds that untouchability should be abolished … Mahatmaji does not want you to dine with Thiyas or Pulayas. What he wants is that we must be prepared to touch or go near other human beings as you go near a cow or a horse … Mahatmaji wants you to look upon so-called untouchables as you do at the cow and the dog and other harmless creatures.

The Communist Party of India and its offshoot, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), have more or less become bourgeois parties enmeshed in parliamentary politics.

On the Adivasi question, Ambedkar too stumbles. So quick to react to slights against his own people, Ambedkar, in a passage in Annihilation of Caste, echoes the thinking of colonial missionaries and liberal ideologues, and adds his own touch of Brahminism:

Ambedkar is being assimilated in another way too—as Gandhi’s junior partner in their joint fight against untouchability.

In 2002, in the Godhra railway station in Gujarat, a train compartment was mysteriously burned down, and fifty-eight Hindu pilgrims were charred to death. With not much evidence to prove their guilt, some Muslims were arrested as the perpetrators. The Muslim community as a whole was collectively blamed for the crime. Over the next few days, the VHP and the Bajrang Dal led a pogrom in which more than two thousand Muslims were murdered, women were mob-raped and burnt alive in broad daylight and a hundred and fifty thousand people were driven from their homes.265 After the pogrom, 287 people were arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA). Of them, 286 were Muslim and one was a Sikh.266 Most of them are still in prison.

In his essay “Blood Under Saffron: The Myth of Dalit–Muslim Confrontation”, Raju Solanki, a Gujarati Dalit writer who studied the pattern of arrests, says that of the 1,577 ‘Hindus’ who were arrested (not under POTA of course), 747 were Dalits and 797 belonged to ‘Other Backward Classes’. Nineteen were Patels, two were Banias and two were Brahmins. The massacres of Muslims occurred in several cities and villages in Gujarat. However, Solanki points out that not a single massacre took place in bastis where Dalits and Muslims lived together.

“The purpose of Religion is to explain the origin of the world,” Ambedkar said, sounding very much like Karl Marx, “the purpose of Dhamma is to reconstruct the world.”

Can caste be annihilated? Not unless we show the courage to rearrange the stars in our firmament. Not unless those who call themselves revolutionary develop a radical critique of Brahminism. Not unless those who understand Brahminism sharpen their critique of capitalism.

He that will not reason is a bigot. He that cannot reason is a fool. He that dare not reason is a slave