Thread by @saaf_oxforduni

Our second speaker Sagar has begun discussing 'From Colonial to the Everyday: Hindutva’s Caste Ambiguity'
#CountingCaste
#CasteCensus

I will speak from my experiences of reporting on Hindutva, before coming to the caste census. Hindutva is not just about mobs wearing shawls, red marks on their forehead. It is more about people who want Hinduism as the normal politics of the country.

First coined by Savarkar, he says Hindutva is about common religion, common heroes, common history, common festivals, common flow of blood, everyone born this side of Sindhu. He says Christian and Muslim communities are not Hindu because they do not have this common history.

Golvalkar said ‘caste system saved us from succumbing to foreign powers’. Deen Dayal also said ‘caste is what Hindu religion is, that is dharma. They will replace caste with dharma, morality, with social things, and keep repeating this.

Without caste there cannot be a Hindu, it is the nucleus of Hindu religion, that caste is important for unity of Hindus.

I met militia groups while reporting who have arms, and cadres. Their composition is mostly Jat, Gujjar, Kashyaps, somewhere between OBC and Kshatriya. They identify with the 36 biradris, these were originally farming castes, they are agreed to vote for farming related leaders.

But now it has become a Hindu identity and they say they will protect their women, and their enemies are those who will attack their women. They think it is their duty to defend themselves against Muslims and you can see how this is a caste identity.

We see many of our leaders like Mayawati, Akhilesh talking about Ram mandir etc., but they are not talking about land grab, reservation not being implemented. Our leaders are not talking about our rights being taken away.

Dalit panthers started with the simple idea of taking data about atrocities to the masses and make people aware. Today we report 30-60,000 instances of atrocities with a fraction of convictions in these cases.

We need 1000s of Bhim Army, to show that we can take this legally, socially, that we will not be threatened.