Regarding Caste, the RSS is in an Awkward Quandary
Reading the above Op-Ed piece , I got the overwhelming feeling that Rahul Gandhi is probably right about the Caste Census. It’s an idea whose time has finally arrived in this country … and as Victor Hugo told us long ago, No power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come!
This caste census in our country when completed will, in my considered and intuitive view, bring on profound (at times quite cataclysmic) social churning in our country.
What will eventually emerge as outcome from such a potentially violent churning is anybody’s guess …
There can be a hundred and more unintended consequences of both the benign and malignant kind to be expected in this near-cosmic process of social-change we can imagine this churning is surely going to be .
Let’s remember that both Amrutham (ambrosia) and Visham (toxin) came out of the mythical churning event described in our Purana as “Saagara Manthana”…. When the Milky Ocean was churned by divine titans called Devas and Asuras who both vied for power and dominance over the other. Yes, of course then, the whole of God’s Universe teetered on the edge of self-destruction, between life and death.
Changing metaphors …
This Caste Census is in my expectation going to signal India’s own version of what in the erstwhile Soviet Union towards the end of the Cold War era played out as “perestroika” and “glasnost”… Both were historic buzzwords — just 2 words that summed up the predicament of a nation that was on the brink of breaking up.
The first word meant deep and sweeping “reforms and restructuring” right across the innards of society.
The second word meant the spirit of “complete openness” infusing every nook and cranny of a ragged body politic that was on the verge of being consumed by the gaping jaws of History.
We all know what happened to the Soviet Union after “perestroika” and “glasnost”….
A nation that was the size of half the entire Asian continental land-mass on the planet broke up, got dismantled overnight and it plunged headlong into a precipice and a morass of economic and political dysfunction for more than two ensuing decades.
It took 25 long and arduous years thereafter for Russia to climb out of the deep, dark and treacherous ditch of despair it had fallen into.
Thanks to the indomitable leadership of Vladimir Putin , the country weathered twenty years of strife and war and economic stagnation … but still, in the end, managed to survive near collapse, anarchy and bankruptcy of both the material and moral kind.
Yes, Russia did survive and, perhaps for a brief while in the first two decades in the new century, managed to even salvage — or at least gave the impression of having salvaged — a bit of its old power and glory.
But then today look at Russia…! In spite of its heroic struggle to survive and remain united as a nation, sadly, it still is a badly bruised and precarious nation riddled with so many insecurities and so much angst of both the economic, political and moral kind.
Post-Caste Census, in the two decades ahead, it is my own fearful prediction that the story of an Indian “perestroika” and “glasnost” will play out in my own country in pretty much the same way it all played out and ended in the Soviet Union.
Sudarshan Madabushi