Casteism: An endogamous and hereditary social group limited to persons of the same rank, occupation, economic position, etc., and having mores distinguishing it from other such groups.
By the above definition itself, casteism feels evil. Surprisingly we Indians don’t treat it as such. We are enraged about various issues country wide and all of those issues are evils or perceived evils which the Indian society wants to do away with. Somehow and for some reason caste or casteism is seldom mentioned. The only few instances we talk about casteism is when there’s a murder or a rape or an assault because of caste. Which is utterly disgusting.
There was a post in a Facebook group, justifying reservations as lower castes have been abused for centuries before the reservations were implemented. The same post also demanded apology from forward caste people of today for the things their ancestors did. And this was coming from somebody who has good education and now leads a life which most of us will envy. The saddest part about the whole post there was that the person in question believes that its because of his caste, he’s where he is.
I come from a forward caste, a brahmin to be precise. Did I chose to be a brahmin? No.
Does my caste have any bearing on the way I live my life? No
Did I ever discriminate anybody due to their caste or religion? No
Do I agree with the caste system? No
So why the fuck should I or my father or my grandfather apologise for something that was done more than 3 generations ago? We are still apologetic, we don’t like the fact that somebody who might be related to us a few generations ago discriminated lower caste people. There’s nothing we can do about this now. And how different is this post from discriminating the Germans for the atrocities by Nazis or asking the British the apologise for their colonial rule. None of these make sense, people living today had nothing to do with what their ancestors did. Going by this logic, lets obliterate Mongolia for the invasions done by Genghis Khan.
And reservations, the most sincere and insidious government scheme ever. If they were formulated to curb casteism, lets just have a laugh shall we?
I will talk about 2 people I know, who are on two ends of the reservation spectrum. Friend A, intelligent, hard worker, middle class and forward caste. Friend B, filthy rich dude, never studied but belonged to SC/ST. Now, in JEE Friend A got 24k rank, not eligible to get an admission into the IITs. Friend B, he got a rank above 150000, got a seat in IIT Roorkee. Does this seem fair? One may argue that this is an isolated case but let me tell you this is the reality. Please check the admission quotas once and you will know why this is being misused.
This is not even the worst thing that happens. Let me explain, once anybody is empowered because she/he comes from a certain caste then they’re bound to believe in the caste system. As once there’s no label that they come from backward castes, they lose the myriad of advantages they currently get.
Lets acknowledge that humans are selfish, somebody who has benefitted from caste based reservations will want the same for their kids or upcoming generations too. Nobody wants things to get difficult for their children. Every parent wants to make things as smooth as possible. So if its possible to get into the top institutes of the country by putting in no effort, who wouldn’t want that?
The chain doesn’t end here, now comes the issue of relationships and marriage. I know a case about a girl in who was hastily married off and never heard about again because her father got to know that she was dating a guy from a different caste. Her friends haven’t heard about her till today. Or we can also take the example from the soon to pissed upon cult classic aka “Arjun Reddy” where the male lead wants wants to marry the female lead but his father opposes as they come from a different caste. This whole caste based love stories in popular culture are dime a dozen.
I have a friend, who’s studying medicine, her elder brother studied medicine, her mother is a doctor and her father is a civil servant. Now given this background, I’d have expected caste to have no bearing at all. I couldn’t be more wrong, she’s only supposed to marry somebody from her caste. It doesn’t even matter if she likes that person or not. She’s planning on lying that she’s a lesbian to escape that.
The whole reason for this is reservations based on caste. As I said earlier, anybody who has benefitted due to a caste based reservation will never want to move away from the caste.
We cannot have reservations anymore. They’re outdated and they are only going to screw us up beyond proportions.
To conclude, next time you hear about caste based issues. Minimal or major, talk about it. Start a dialogue, until and unless our generation talks about casteism nothing is going to change. Next time, a friend has to break up because he/she can’t marry the one they want to, don’t just be silent and let it happen we are helping this plague transform into something worse by staying silent, go on to social media, talk about it. Let whoever involved know the extent of the despicable act they’re doing.
Thank you for reading :)
Let me know your thoughts on this, a little bit of thinking never hurt anybody except Arsene Wenger.
