ByKancha
Ilaiah Shepherd
To the
utter shock of American Brahminism an unusual organization called Equality Labs
came into being in New York .
IT was established by second generation,
American born, Dalit women activists to chase it in America in every sphere of life,
including in the digital media. Thenmozhi Soundararajan and few other US born
citizens with amazing talents and were told by their parents that they belong
to Dalits who suffered untouchability, caste brutality and poverty in their
native land. Sharp young educated Dalit women and men were shocked that the
caste discrimination operates in several subtle ways even in America in
every sphere where brahminic people work.
These women
and men are intelligent enough to understand the trauma of their parental history
and identity when they were in their under-graduate and post-graduate courses
in their respective universities. For example, Thenmozhi was a University of California Berkeley student who realized
that their Brahminic teacher’s attitude changed towards her once she revealed
her caste identity. Now she is dead bent on chasing Brahmnism in America along
with others by establishing the Equality Labs.
The
founding fathers of America
declared that “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty ,
and the Pursuit of Happiness….”. But the Indian Brahminic forces carried their
God’s principle of unequal creation of human beings—the Brahmins from his head,
Ksatriyas from shoulders, Vaishyas from thighs and the Shudras from feet. The
untouchables according to their spiritual theory were born without their God’s
sanction hence need to be treated barbarically even in America . The
Indian Dalits/Shudras/Adivasis never knew what is life, liberty and happiness
till today. A few of them came to America in pursuit of them. But
there too the brahminism is haunting them.
The agents
of brahminism in that country hardly acquired any civilizational change with
all their modern English education and American life where there is a strong
Christian ethic. Some of them are liberals but that liberalism does not go
against caste and untouchability in a serious way. Brahhmism is quite safe in
the garb of liberalism, a sad story indeed.
The
brahminic forces are spreading into every structure of the American society.
They do not have any respect to their Christian ethic of compassion, grace and
humanness. They also do not have any historical sense of shame and guilt. If
their ancestors committed sins of practicing human untouchability and graded
inequality like the White Christians who felt shame for slavery and segregation
of blacks and native Americans in earlier decades. The whites tried to fight it
out, the evidence which could be seen in African American museum of Washington D.C
In spite of
number of Brahmin female and male writers emerging from that land no one wrote
like Harriet Beecher Stowe did in her Uncle Tom’s Cabin about the life and
trauma of blacks in the US .
When there are so many Brahmin women academics and writers doing a lot of
writing on India
from American land why they too did not write a single book about caste and
untouchability, is million dollar question? The worst part is the caste and
untouchability menace is spreading in America and it worries
conscientious whites too.
They spread
brahminism of food, bed and everyday life inequality as their cultural
character. Worst, they are spreading anti-Christian idol worship which the ancient
slave Moses fought against and brought them into monotheism of high
civilization. America
is a direct beneficiary of the progressive Protestant ethic. If idol worship
with brahminism of caste purity spreads and persists the capitalist-democratic
structure of America
will come in conflict with the ideals of
its founding fathers’ philosophy who inscribed it on every major
Government building —including on the building of the Supreme Court that –All
Men Are Created Equal. It was this principle that gave enormous scope to blacks
to liberate themselves from slavery and white racism. Many white women and men
were collaborators in the fight against racism, including Abraham Lincoln. It
was in this background that Martin Luther King emerged as young hero of liberation
with whites giving him Nobel Peace Price before he died at the age of 39. That
is grace.
The Indians
spread brahminism into that progressive ethic not only in high end offices,
white house portals, Capitol Hill corridors and also into all channels of
digital media. They appear to be obedient to the whites, while cracking their
civilization of equality from inside and want to see that the Dalits/Shudras do
not enter those structures as their prejudices against them are spiritually
ordained and unreformable. The Shudras do not confront them but the Dalits,
though small in number, are fighting them with the weapon of Ambedkarism.
The
Equality Labs has taken that fight to a higher level of modern operation in all
sectors of life. Thenmozhi and Maari Zwick Maitreyi(a co-founder of the Lab)
match them in all spheres of their operation. The power of their American
education and realization of their ancestral oppression forced them to focus on
casteism in that country and take them on in Twitter, Facebook campaigns , Wikipedia editing and so on.
The
brahminic false nationalism of standing against the development of any other
person of Indian ethnicity except the Brahmins is brought out in graphic
details in a recent report that the Equality Lab brought out called Caste in
the United State .
Equality
Labs along with Ambedkar Association of North America, The Ambedkar
International Mission, Ambedkar-King
Study Circle, Boston Study Circle ,
Ambedkar-Periyar Association have started an impressive work of countering the
spread of brahminism in America .
The Shudras are still to wake up, as they are back in India . But they
too will realize soon that their ancient productive and universally validated
spiritual and food culture— meat, chicken, fish and so on—is being humiliated
there too. Look at what a Shudra woman said:
“We are a
Shudra Caste family. At Diwali and other festival potluck parties, I am really
nervous about what I cook. The “upper” Caste folks may ostracize me for
bringing nonvegetarian dishes on their “auspicious” day. One time, I cooked a
chicken curry and they set my dish aside, all the way on the other side of the
table, in a corner and labeled it “NONVEGETARIAN” in large letters. No one ate
my curry and avoided me the whole night. I go to the parties for my kids so
they won’t be isolated from their friends but I’d really rather not go
altogether and I am considering that option more and more.
It is this
pure vegetarian brahminism that is destroying India
ever since the BJP/RSS came to power at Delhi
in 1999 and 2014. Dalits and Muslims are being lynched for eating beef or for
possessing cows as their property. The BJP/RSS use the Shudra muscle power for
such inhuman acts without even granting them spiritual equality in the religion
that they run as its custodians—Hinduism. No Shudra can become priest in Hindu
temple even now. Once the Shudra self rebels against this ‘ vegetarian eating
great’ culture as all Shudras are historically meat and fruit eaters
foregrounding their multi- cuisine culture and civilization from the days of
Harappan city civilization brahminism will be buried once for all. However,
they still follow brahminism as God’s dictum.
But the
Dalits world over are fighting brahminism in all its manifestations. The
Equality Labs report recorded the statements of many Dalits living in America . It
tells the world what strategies they adopt to discriminate them and practice
new forms of untouchability in foreign lands too.
See the
kind of school and college level caste humiliation that brahminic caste youth
practice with their college or school mates. One college going boy told: “Friends
who came over to our house did not eat when they saw books on Dr. Ambedkar at
my home and guessed my Caste”
Another
person narrated: “Most Indians in my school were upper Caste Hindus and Brahmin
families, so I never felt connected to them through “Indian culture”. They
would make fun of the fact that I ate meat and was Christian. In that way, my
religion and family history sort of alienated me from them. I did not know it
at the time but they were Brahmin… and my parents hid from me that I was Dalit.
But if I had known I could have called out their Caste bullying for what it
was.”
Bullying a
school child in America
is a big crime. It is strange that the American brahminic mothers teach their
children to bully the meat and chicken eating children. All American children,
apart from the Dalit/Shudra American children, whether white or black are also
meat, chicken and beef eaters. The Chinese and all Middle Eastern settlers are
meat eaters. If all these children begin to bully the Brahmin/Bania children of
Indian origin they will face a miserable life there. But they are gracious as
that principle is taught to them as part of their Christian/liberal upbringing.
The
Brhamin/ Banias of India once used to think that crossing the sea is a sinful
act. Even learning English was thought to be sinful. But they overcame these
hurdles but not casteism and pure vegetarianism which are not at all common
human characteristic. Pure vegetarianism or pure meatarianism is an animal
characteristic. For example, cow, buffalo, sheep, goat and so on eat only
grass/leaves. But lion, tiger, jackal and so on eat only meat. But all humans
eat both. Pure vegetarians should have understood this globally practiced food
culture, at least while living in Euro-American soils. Constructing anything
pure in food culture leads to cultural conflicts . If a counter bullying, based
on universal food culture starts against them their life becomes miserable both
in India
and abroad.
The
Equality Labs report tells several stories of Dalit discrimination of women and
men in America .
Such discriminatory practices are not uncommon in Canada ,
UK
and other places. The question therefore is how to overcome this inhuman
behavior of casteists and pure vegetarians who do not live a normal life.
Brahminism seems to be an unreformable cultural construct. To understand why
brahminism is behaving the way it does worldwide we need to examine how it
reshaped itself up in nationalist English education period in India .
North
America is a dream land of English educated Indian Brahmins ever since Lord
Macaulay, whom they hate in home land, structurally instituted English medium
education in India
in the nineteenth century. Ever since the first English medium school was
started in 1817 in Calcutta
they only admitted their children in that school. They left their Sanskrit to
their gods/goddesses and priests. This was sheer hypocrisy! Their children,
youth, men and women should get easy wealth without soiling their hands in
agrarian sector, which involves hard physical work. Avoiding labour as life and
living leisure as life was/is their spiritual design. That forced them to play
all kinds of tricks possible. But that process of life endangers any productive
culture and civilization. That is what they are experimenting in America whose
philosophy is labour is life. They do not believe in a God who tells people to
live by the ‘sweat of their brow’.
The first
unofficial initiation of teaching English to Indians was made by William Carey,
an English cobbler turned Christian missionary, only to be hated by the English
educated Bengali Brahmin pundits later. However, they adopted Rajarammohan Roy
as the father figure of brahminic renaissance
who co-operated with Carey and learnt English in the process in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries .
As I said Roy learnt English with
the help of William Carey. This led to many Brahmins going to England and learning English not to give up
Brahminism but to control the Dalit/Shudra/Adivasis masses of India at home
and earn Pounds/Dollars from the West. But a parallel educational revolution
was initiated by Dr.B.R.Ambedkar by studying in America
and rose to write the Indian constitution and also many books to liberate the
oppressed castes of India .
The Equality lab is working with his banner in America .
By the time
the Bharatiya Janatha Party came to power with full support of national and
global money of Bania/Brahmin forces in 2014 they spread the poison of caste in
the West—USA, UK, Canada—to create a crisis in the transformed culture of human
equality. The Western intellectuals so far have not seen that danger to their
civilization. The Dalits, however, are letting the world know what kind of
poison of inequality can be spread in the Western civilization that taught the
notion of equality and grace to the world that it would face.
Brahminism
in the post-colonial India
adopted a double edged strategy to see that the oppressed castes do not get
English education and compete with them in the national and global markets. It
kept English medium in private sector and saw to it that all the Government
schools teach only regional languages to the working caste/class children.
The RSS/BJP
recruited most Shudra youth into the muscle power squads, not to learn English
in schools, but to persecute minorities in India . Citizenship Amendment Act
(CAA) and National Register of Citizenship (NRC) are best examples of that
process.
In the urban
areas the very Brahmin/Bania children studied in the best Christian schools and
best institutes of India and
went abroad settled in America
and UK .
They themselves were/ are in touch with Western liberal/left educationalists.
The West hardly had any knowledge of the other side of India .
According
the report of the Equality Labs the first man who took American citizenship in
late nineteenth century was A.K.Mozumdar, who obviously was an Indian Brahmin
by claiming that he was an Indian Aryan born in a high caste blood pool, which
according to him was very close to the European Caucasian blood. The then
racist Americans agreed to give him citizenship on that ground. Since then they
began to move there with their temples and priests and caste system with them.
The white
racism has now changed so much that many whites fought for liberation of the
blacks from slavery and segregation. But hardly any major Brahmin/Bania
intellectual worked for abolition of caste. They have not shown that grace.
William Wilberforce, a British white parliamentarian turned against the
barbaric slave trade by using the same Bible and became the harbinger of
‘Amazing Grace’ in the Christian civilization. Why not a single Brahmin used
their own spiritual texts against human untouchability and caste based slavery
in India ?
Why for three millennia the Brahminic men and women never showed such grace?
In America there
are extreme right wing brahminic intellectual forces like Rajiv Malhotra and
other members of extreme right wing supremacists working from American Hindu
Foundation , Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh and other spiritual institutional
structures. They are spreading the poison of caste, untouchability pure
castesist vegetarianism into the Western world with a clear long term design. The
Equality Lab and other Dalit organizations are chasing them but the
brahminism’s future in the West depends on how and when the Westerners realize
the real danger to their civilization itself with the spread of caste,
untouchability and pure vegetarianism.