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To Be Powerless Is Not To Be Defeated

By Priti Gulati Cox

15 October, 2014
Countercurrents.org

Uttarakhand, the 27th State of the Republic of India is also referred to as Devbhoomi , or “Land of the Gods,” believed by Hindus to be where the sage Vyasa authored the epic Mahabharata . The sacred waters of the Ganges originate in the Himalayas of the state's far north; the sources of the river's four chief tributaries collectively make up one of the holiest pilgrim destinations for Hindus: the Chota Char Dham , or small four abodes of the gods. By 2012, the state was seeing up to 28 million pilgrims and tourists annually, double its own population, and tourism was accounting for a huge 27 per cent of the state's economy.

The Kedarnath Temple is the highest of the Char Dham holy sites. It was there, on June 17, 2013, where one of our many experiments with ourselves unraveled, with nature's fury triggering a very unnatural disaster. It started on the evening of the 16th with an explosive bang. A mile and a half upstream from Kedarnath, a freakishly heavy, too-early monsoon rainfall had melted the already greenhouse-warmed snout of Chorabari Glacier, triggering what science calls an “outburst flood” from a large lake that until then had been dammed up by the glacier. The lake emptied instantaneously. And as if to tease us, the gods in heaven had the wall of water push before it a huge boulder, which stuck in place just above the Kedarnath temple, saving the ancient edifice from being swept away. The deluge skirted the temples' sides, bringing with it flash floods, landslides, silt, rock, more boulders, swallowing everything in its path. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of pilgrims died. There's no accurate count. The torrent roared on for another hundred miles down through the foothills, destroying everything along the riverbanks and triggering massive landslides all the way down.

24 hours later, what lay scattered around the temple was a detritus of wild-eyed pilgrims, bare-backed mules, porters, and helicopters that had been carrying devotees up to the temple, along with rain coats, umbrellas, walking sticks, children's shoes, soda pop bottles, home-made samosas, collapsed guest houses and tea stalls, and Mahatma Gandhi's ashes, which had been immersed in that glacial lake back in 1948. Downstream lay a horror-scape of vanished wheat terraces, crumbled roads and helipads, ruined bridges, and schools buried in silt.

The wise, elderly indigenous women of Uttarakhand had been saying for years before the disaster that they saw it coming. But who listens to them? Stretching far across the hills all around the sites of immediate catastrophe, accompanied by the footsteps and panting of local women as they collect and haul firewood, fodder, and water up the steep slopes day in and day out, cry the state's ravaged, fragile ecosystems, road-scarred and tunneled mountains, broken villages, dammed waters, displaced communities, and desperate household economies.

Seven months after the flood, my husband Stan, his son Paul and I visited the scene. We stood in the middle of a crazy-quilted landscape covered with fresh landslides that had been triggered by the road cuts and helicopter pads that had brought well-heeled pilgrims to the temple. Small remaining pockets of natural habitat remained scattered here and there, resisting the machines of unrestrained religion and capitalism that had come together and let loose all at once. Nandini, a co-founder of the School for Natural Creativity in Guptkashi described the scenery around us as a disruption of the earth's natural balance to which the gods of the Char Dham had reacted with a catastrophic regurgitation.

This recent tragic episode of Indian history is symbolic of what's unfolding throughout the nation's religious, socio-economic, and ecological fabric. You have Hinduism and capitalism on one side and natural ecosystems and the country's poor on the other, and a continuous experiment in all imaginable combinations and permutations playing out between them. Both of these paired systems are dying, but one of them is dying faster than the other.

The roots of what we refer to as the caste system today, Hinduism's chaturvarna , or four varnas, can be traced to Purusha Sukta , “The Hymn of Man.” One cannot help but see the irony in the Shudra's, or laboring castes' , mythical birth from purusha (primeval man's) feet . They, along with the Dalits, Adivasis and other impoverished Indians of various faiths, share one of the world's tiniest per capita carbon foot prints, much smaller than the footprints of those who sprang forth from purusha's fat and muscle - the country's Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas.

Today in India, more so since the recent triumph of economic fundamentalism in this year's national elections, one hears talk of little other than the panacea of growth. Growth, like truth, is a very political word, and in India it can mean different things depending on where one stands on the country's caste ladder. But one thing is clear, that its application today creates a hundred losers for every beneficiary. So far at least, we have seen that for the religious technocrats and economic fundamentalists at the top, growth simply could not have reached the lopsided frenzy it has without simultaneously exploiting the earth's resources and the hearts, hands, minds and livelihoods of the powerless laboring classes.

To the fields, forests, and rivers of India, and to the Dalits, Adivasis, poor Muslims, Christians, and a majority of the Shudra population, India's economic growth is a tumor, a cancer, breaking off of their skins, first slowly like a rash and then spreading, consuming them whole.

Such a campaign can't be carried out without violence. We Hindus were way ahead of the world on this. Eras ago, we concocted for ourselves a uniquely potent blend of the dual-doctrines of 'Shock and Awe' and 'Winning Hearts and Minds,' and sanctioned it in our very own battle bible, the Bhagavad Gita , or "Song of the Blessed One."

Most of us are familiar with super Gita fan Mohandas K Gandhi's famous quotes. Here's one of his more infamous ones, referring to his vision of the ideal society: "The rich man will be left in possession of his wealth, of which he will use what he reasonably requires for his personal needs and will act as a trustee for the remainder to be used for society. In this argument, honesty on the part of the trustee is assumed."

My question is, why take something from somebody that they themselves have produced only to give it back to them? Wouldn't it be more efficient not to take it from them in the first place?

Traditionally Dalit livelihoods have been limited to tasks such as scavenging of excrement by hand, and to deposit it in places considered to be out-of-bounds wastelands where nothing must be produced, where Dalits themselves live — on the fringes of towns and villages, in closer proximity to their harvest of excrement. In India as almost everywhere in the world, there is what Marx called a “metabolic rift” that occurs when nutrients are harvested from fields of grain, eaten and excreted by humanity, and not returned to the soil where new grain will be produced. To Gandhi's credit, he believed the nutrients in excrement should be returned to the soil; however, his views on that, like those on nonviolence, never prevailed. His views on retention of the Bhangi (scavenger) system did prevail; thus a precapitalist form of discrimination continues today , fulfilling another Marx adage: that profit results from “simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker.”

Dalit and human rights organizations have made a concerted effort in trying to expose day-to-day abuses and atrocities suffered by Dalits across the country. A 2010 Robert F. Kennedy and Navsarjan Trust study on caste-based discrimination conducted in more than fifteen hundred villages in Gujarat among other things found—in 98 % of villages—a refusal to serve tea to Dalits in non-Dalit households, or to supply it in a segregated cup called a "Rampatar"; in 71 % of the villages there is no water tap at all in the Dalit area; and in 29 % of the villages, Dalits are denied access to common wells or taps.

"I do want to attain moksha ," Gandhi said. "I do not want to be reborn. But if I have to be reborn, I should be born an untouchable. A Bhangi." (That is, a scavenger). The question to ask here is not what Gandhi would do if in fact he was reborn a Bhangi, but what COULD he do as a Bhangi to change this cruel system.

Here's what DID happen to Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a Dalit, who eventually came to be known as Babasaheb (respected father). His focus was on the emancipation of his Dalit brothers and sisters. Ambedkar, as Arundhati Roy points out "was Gandhi's most formidable adversary. He challenged him not just politically or intellectually, but also morally."

Annihilation of Caste is a speech that Ambedkar composed, but never delivered. It was meant as a lecture to a 'moderate' Hindu reformist group, the Forum for Break-up of Caste of Lahore (in modern Pakistan). The group had invited him in May 1936 to speak his mind. But they wanted a sneak preview of the contents of his speech first, and when they saw, well, they changed their minds. They found it too "unbearable."

The text survives. Here's part of what Ambedkar had to convey in that undelivered speech: "What Hindus call religion is really law, or at best legalized class-ethics. They are iniquitous in that they are not the same for one class as for another. I have, therefore, no hesitation in saying that such a religion must be destroyed. Give a new doctrinal basis to your religion," he said. "A basis that will be in consonance with liberty, equality and fraternity; in short, with democracy."

So while Gandhi was front and center in liberating Indians from British rule, Ambedkar was trying to liberate Dalits from the shackles of "Gandhism." In response to Gandhi's desire to be reborn a Bhangi, Ambedkar said, "This is the technique of Gandhism, to make wrongs done appear to the very victim as though they were his privileges. If there is an ‘ism' which has made full use of religion as an opium to lull the people into false beliefs and false security, it is Gandhism.

Both Gandhi, the mahatma, and Mukesh Ambani, today India's richest man, belong to the Vaishya (business/trading) caste. One was driven by religious fundamentalism, and the other by economic fundamentalism. And they both used their position of power to further their own visions for India at the expense of the working classes' sweat, humanity, dignity and tears.

Mukesh Ambani is #28 on the Forbes' 2014 list with a net worth of $ 23.5 billion. He lives in the world's largest “democracy,” alongside approximately 960 million Indians who live on less than 50 cents a day. So, for every $100 or so that Ambani owns, four Indians have no democracy.

Gandhi's net worth is that he is the last mahatma standing between two experimental mantras: "the market will take care of it all," or "social cooperation will take care of it all," both of which always tugged at the mahatma's dhoti (hem) for approval.

All too often our response to conspicuous consumption triggered by market fundamentalism has been a conscious, personal demonstration of conspicuous abstinence. Again, as Roy points to Gandhi's pursuit of the simple life in her introductory essay to the 'Annihilation of Caste,' by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, entitled 'The Doctor and the Saint,' “The question is, can poverty be simulated? Poverty is about having no power. It took a lot of farmland and organic fruit trees to keep Gandhi in poverty." Can everybody in the world afford to live poor Gandhi-style? In other words, are we all islands by ourselves, able simply to wave the magic wand of localism and good-examplism to stop ecological breakdown and solve the global imbalance of property and poverty? Can we not see the layered complexity of root forces beyond our control compounded by elitism that cuts off all rational communication? This is not to take a defeatist attitude, but to acknowledge that there is something that lies beyond the power of abstinence to contain. To do so is to know powerlessness. But to be powerless is not to be defeated.

Maybe somewhere there, contained, between the assassination of a universally adored and powerful Vaishya mahatma, the assassination of a radical speech by the Dalit Babasaheb Ambedkar, and the assassination of the last defenders of India's forests, India's Adivasis, still on their tribal lands, lies powerlessness, and the spark of revolution. Waiting for the right moment.

 

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