Skip to main content

Vanvasi vs Adivasi

Safe distance


Narendra Modi and his India love Vanvasis, not Adivasis. The reason is that they believe India belongs to the upper caste Hindus, not anybody else, not even the original inhabitants of the land, the Adivasis. The problem with Modi’s Hindutva is precisely this exclusionism. It believes India belongs to a particular group of Hindus. Not all Hindus, let alone the non-Hindus.

Draupadi Murmu’s nomination as the next President of India is only an eyewash. She is going to be a decorative piece of the Dalits, a museum item chosen by Narendra Modi whose love for Vanvasis became too clear in the 2018 Bhima Koregaon case and the subsequent arrests.  

The annual celebration of the Battle of Bhima Koregaon is a celebration of the Dalits. Modi’s India does not like any celebrations by any organisation other than those associated with the right wing, the Sangh. In the new history that is being written by Modi and his ‘scholars’, only upper caste Hindus will be on the pedestals. Draupadi Murmu is only a museum piece in that history meant to keep the low caste Indians where they will always remain. Low.

Modi is basically an RSS man. His heart still belongs to that organisation which has never allowed a low caste member to rise to any position of eminence. The RSS is largely a Brahmin organisation. Every chief of that organisation has been a Brahmin with the singular exception of Rajendra Singh, a Kshatriya.

Forget about the chief, “there is very little participation by Dalits and Adivasis even in the top national level organisational units such as the All India Representatives Assembly (Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha) or the All India Working Committee (Akhil Bharatiya Karyakari Mandal),” as a former RSS member writes [I could not be Hindu, Bhanwar Meghwanshi].

The RSS still maintains untouchability unofficially but meticulously. But it wants to keep the Dalits and ‘Vanvasis’ with it for the sake of retaining political power. Organisations like Bajrang Dal became the answer to the question of how to carry these undesirable elements along.

“The RSS spawned the Bajrang Dal precisely to reach out to these plebeians, who did not mix easily with the upper-caste-dominated ethos of the RSS,” writes Christophe Jaffrelot in Modi’s India. Jaffrelot quotes the irrepressible Sanghi, Subramanian Swamy, who said that Bajrang Dal was formed to avoid “mixing apples and oranges.” In Swamy’s words, “The RSS may be Brahmin-dominated at the leadership level, but its front organizations like the Bajrang Dal are mostly the Hindu proletariats.”

Jaffrelot’s book enlightens readers with the plain truth that most of the Bajrang Dal members are unemployed youngsters who are “involved in semilegal activities, such as gambling and especially lotteries.” Its first leader, Vinay Katiyar, said, “Might is the only law I understand. Nothing else matters to me.” The RSS has used the Bajrang Dal to create riot after riot in the country. The Dal hates all non-Hindus, particularly Muslims and Christians. This organisation played a key role in the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Jaffrelot writes, “It was as if the RSS had outsourced violence to the Bajrang Dal.” The low caste Hindus are meant only to be the foot soldiers of the RSS.

Draupadi Murmu will be the pie in the sky of the Indian Dalits. A real pie. And yet not real. Like Modi’s Vanvasi Kalyan Yojana metamorphosing into Vanbandhu Kalyan Yojana. You belong to the forest either way. You don’t belong to Modi’s India. 

A page from Meghwanshi's book


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...

Joys of Onam and a reflection

Suppose that the whole universe were to be saved and made perfect and happy forever on just one condition: one single soul must suffer, alone, eternally. Would this be acceptable? Philosopher William James asked that in his 1891 book, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life . Please think about it once again and answer the question for yourself. You, as well as others, are going to live a life without a tinge of sorrow. Joyful existence. Life in Paradise. The only condition is that one person will take up all the sorrows of the universe on him-/herself and suffer – alone, eternally. What do you say? James’s answer is a firm no . “Not even a god would be justified in setting up such a scheme,” James asserted, knowing too well how the Bible justified a positive answer to his question. “It is expedient that one man should die for the people, so that the nation can be saved” [John 11:50]. Jesus was that one man in the Biblical vision of redemption. I was reading a Malayalam period...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...