Hindu Society for the last few decades has been accused of being oppressive. The accusation is that a tiny majority has been the ruling class(Upper Castes) which has enjoyed all the benefits and fruits of being in power and has done systematic oppression on the remaining majority(OBC, SC and ST). They say that this oppression has been going on for 5000 years. All Marxist historians, sociologists, political science experts believe that Hinduism is nothing but a system of continuous oppression and suffocation.

They even go as far as to say that in the past Hinduism came into prominence due to extreme violence towards other religions(read Buddhism) and local tribal customs and traditions.

This line of thought has been very well received by the subaltern groups and has based their entire resistance on this very theory. They have started their struggle to not only overthrow the hegemony of the so-called Upper Castes but also to dismantle caste altogether. But is this oppression theory really based on the principles of Marxism? Let us analyse.

Let us first take a look at the key elements of the process of Revolution, according to Marx and Engels. Of course, there are many more elements but all of them can’t be mentioned in a single article, so let us note down the most relevant ones as per the theme of this blog. As per Marxism, these elements are

1. Class: – ‘The separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class’, ¹
2. History: – ‘History has been the history of an increasing class struggle between the exploiters and the exploited classes, which are believed to represent thesis and antithesis respectively ll”²
3. Hero: – The oppressed class during the process of class struggle produces a Hero. Engels describes him as ‘precisely that man arises at a particular time in a particular country is, of course pure chance. But cut him out and there will be a demand for a substitute and that substitute will be found’³. This Hero leads a successful revolution. Hero or great man is a once in a century or couple of century phenomenon.
4. Revolution: –‘Not criticism but revolution is the driving force in history’, ⁴’the locomotive of history’⁵, Revolution happens when the oppressed class overthrows the ruling class. Oppressed class is always the majority class and the ruling class is only the tiny minority.’The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of immense majority’⁶. If a minority class overthrows the ruling minority class then it is nothing but a transfer of power from one hand to another.
5. Weapon for the Revolution: It can be observed that unlike the earlier writings of Marx and Engels, their later writings were very much in favour of legal methods like Universal Suffrage. ‘Unlike the revolutions of the past, the proletarian revolution is a revolution of the majority for the majority and by the majority, and the majority cannot be mobilised for it is now supplied with a new weapon, and one of sharpest, that is universal suffrage.’⁷Thus Universal Suffrage is the most powerful and sharpest weapon for the revolution. The oppressed class is the majority class and elections are the process of rewarding the majority. Now if we analyse these 5 points in the Indian context and equate class with caste because as per Marx & Engels class can be social or religious as well and therefore, by this logic caste can easily be taken as a class. ‘All historic class struggles, whether they proceed in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domains are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes.’⁸
   
   So yes classes were there; we had 4 distinct castes where a clear division of labour by birth was mentioned. But the definition that class being individuals gathered together to form a group in opposition to a similar group clearly doesn’t fit in. The second point is that the dominant class oppresses the other classes.‘An oppressed class is the vital condition for every society founded on the antagonism of classes’⁹. Do they mean to say that the oppression happened and continued for 5000 years? If it did then point no 3 and point no 4 i.e., emergence of a Hero and a revolution should have taken place. That means a community got oppressed for 5000 years and there was no rebellion, no hero emerged for 5000 years and no revolution took place. Further, there is hardly any pre-British, pre-Mughal atrocity literature available. If a community has been oppressed for 5000 years, either someone from the oppressed section or from the oppressor side must have written about the atrocities in good quantity. Remember the oppressor also loves to write about the oppression committed by him as a self-boast.No historical written proof of oppression, no emergence of a Hero, no previous record of any revolution. Now we come to another point that the revolution happens when the oppressed are in majority and the oppressor is in minority. Was the depressed class a majority class?On page No 18 of the book “The Chamcha Age” written by Late Kanshi Ram, there is a mention of a memorandum given by Bharat Ratna Sh. BR Ambedkar to the 2nd Round Table, in which Mr. Ambedkar wrote that because of the upliftment measures provided to the depressed classes there can be violence against the depressed classes and more than the violence they could meet social boycott by the orthodoxy as the depressed classes constitute a tiny minority. This means Dr B R Ambedkar acknowledged the fact that Depressed Class is actually a minority class. However, as per the Marxist theory mentioned above, there cannot be a revolution where Minority overthrows a minority. So, what next? How to proceed with a revolution when the overthrowing class is a minority class?What next if nothing is available then what to do? The answer is simple: Invent the problem.

Lenin gave a remarkable speech regarding the new policy implementation at the All Russian Congress of the Soviets. Addressing those who were afraid that the dictatorship of the proletariat would be weakened by the new policy, he said, ‘We want the dictatorship of the proletariat, but where is the Proletariat? The Proletariat was always very small numerically……So if we want to strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat, let us begin by creating the proletariat’¹⁰. This is not a verbatim speech, but the substance and spirit of the speech, mentioned by M N Roy who was present there.

Lenin’s speech clearly indicates that the Soviet Revolution was not a Proletariat Revolution since there was a minuscule Proletariat. Hence it was just a transfer of power, so to introduce a dictatorship of the proletariat, he had to create the proletariat. Lenin thus created a vision of a highly industrialised USSR. Because industrialisation creates classes, both bourgeoisie and the majority proletariat.

Here in India as well since the depressed classes were in a minority, efforts were made to convert them into a majority. In India, the sharpest weapon was always available and that was universal suffrage. Since India was a vibrant democracy that depended on the outcome of elections. Universal Suffrage is always pro Majority and the will of the majority is always honoured.

Now the question was ‘How to turn a minority into a majority’?

The solution for this has already been there in the prophecy given by Marx.

Marx never trusted the middle class and said that this class is a temporary phenomenon and finally ‘have to sink into the Proletariat and finally exit from the scene for good’¹¹, (This prophecy of Marx has gone wrong, today middle class is the largest of all classes).

This line of thought has been picked up very well by the thinkers of the subaltern movement in India. They believe that not only the SC/ST but also the OBC, Muslims, other minority groups are basically the oppressed classes and all have been oppressed by the ruling class i.e. the so-called Upper Castes.

Thus the middle class among the Hindu caste system i.e. OBC and other minority groups outside the Hindu fold were merged together to form a larger class called “Bahujan”.

So an artificial large class was created. Now to convince the newly added classes into the Bahujan fold a history of oppression has to be created, a hero had to be discovered or if not available a hero had to be invented. One of the statements of communist literature given by Marx states ‘Every social epoch needs its great men, and when it does not find them, it invents them as Helvetius says’¹²

Oppression theories of a new sort are getting created day in and day out. New history is being manufactured. Here is an example:

1. A website that supports the Dalit causes and most critical of Hindu religion called www.Velivada.com published an article that Sant Ravidas was born of Buddhist parents; he discarded Hindu Scriptures and eventually was murdered.

https://velivada.com/2017/03/24/why-guru-ravidas-was-murdered/

2. Some of the history which they distort shows the level of imagination and hate.
A) Brahmins killed Sambhaji; Chhatrapati Shivaji
B) Brahmins like Pt Jawaharlal Nehru, Golwalkar, Savita Kabir, and Dange conspired and killed Dr Ambedkar. Savita Kabir was Dr BR Ambedkar’s wife of the Brahmin caste.

Both the above statements are from Dr Vilas Kharat of Bharat Mukti Morcha which is an offshoot of BAMCEF.

A YouTube channel called “I support BAMCEF” has a video clip where its President Waman Meshram echoes similar views on the involvement of Brahmins in the death of Sambhaji.

Links to the videos:

https://youtu.be/y-JFcWIFPAk
https://youtu.be/c56k8tsusxk

The list is endless and can’t be mentioned here in this small piece.

The next step was to discover a hero. Clearly, the subaltern movement rose to its peak in the 1990s. V P Singh who was the prime minister of India in those times gave Bharat Ratna to Late Sri B R Ambedkar. On 7th August he played a trump card and that was the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations which provided 27% reservations in Govt jobs and educational institutes. Thus recognising that OBC were equally mistreated by the Upper Castes.

In those times UP(Uttarakhand included) was headed by Mulayam Singh Yadav, and Bihar(including Jharkhand) was headed by Lalu Prasad Yadav. Both were strong OBC leaders and the collective strength of those two states was 137 MP seats.

BR Ambedkar was always considered a very well-read man who was instrumental in drafting the constitution of India. But 1990 was the year that tremendously elevated the profile and stature of Bharat Ratna Dr BR Ambedkar. This elevated his stature so high that he came into the league of Gandhi, Nehru and Patel. Before 1990, Babu Jagajivan Ram another Dalit icon was at par with Dr Ambedkar. Babu Jagajivan Ram’s role as labour Minister was remarkable as he was the one who introduced the minimum wages act, Industrial Disputes Act, Payment of Bonus Act, ESI and EPF. During his tenure as defence minister, Pakistan was divided and Bangladesh was born.

But Ambedkar became such a personality that all others were dwarfed by his stature. This recognition that Ambedkar received was 34 years after his death. Thus a HERO was invented. Today the stature of Ambedkar has been elevated so high that even constructive criticism of his thoughts, speeches, writings and actions is impossible and is seen as blasphemy. Ambedkar is the new prophet.

These days a new phenomenon has started and even the lineages of great Kings and Rishis are being challenged. Efforts are on by the subaltern groups to prove that Vyasa, Valmiki, Raja Mihir Bhoja, Prithvi Raj Chauhan were from their fold. Thus heroes are not only invented but legacies of the great men of the past are now being stolen.

So by now, we have seen how the oppressed class has been created, a history of oppression has been manufactured and a hero has been invented. The only thing now which has to be achieved is a “Revolution”.

The biggest impediment in the cause of a Revolution is culture, ideologies and religion. Marxist point of view is that these are the ideas of the ruling class and should be done away with. ‘The ruling ideas of each age have been the ideas of the ruling class’¹³, The atheists other than Marx wanted to abolish religion at once. But Marx was against this idea. Marx was of the view that people practice religion due to certain conditions. Thus the conditions responsible for people practising religion should be done away with. Regarding this Marx says ‘The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up the condition which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of woe, the halo of which is religion.’¹⁴ Marx regards the religious world as ‘but the reflex of real worlds’¹⁵, as ‘an illusion of the earthly world’¹⁶ and will vanish when man will be able to normalise his ‘relation to his fellowmen and to Nature’¹⁷. Engels complains that Herr Duhring ‘incites his genderarmes of the future against religion’ and adds that he(Duhring)’ thereby helps it to martyrdom and a prolong lease of life’¹⁸. Thus let the religion die its own death or in other words, let it do suicide.

Now what we are seeing these days is exactly what was thought of by Karl Marx. Of late, the ancient religion of India i.e., Hinduism is being targeted in such a way that it may lose the regard and respect it gets from the people. New narratives are being placed. These are straight out of communist books. How are they communist books, let us examine?

The first state which fell into the lap of the communists was Kerala. In Kerala Narayana Guru’s disciple called Sahodaran Ayyapan retold the tale of the Onam festival. He said that King Bali was a kind-hearted ruler and there was complete equality and prosperity during his rule. The communists took an idea from this and propagated that King Bali was of lower caste and was cunningly deceived by Lord Vishnu who took the avatar of Lord Vamana(an Arya Brahmin). Whereas, if one reads the Srimad Bhagavat the story is totally different and it shows that the Lord Vamana blesses his disciple King Bali and rewards him by making him the Lord of Suta Loka and also awards him the post of Indra in the future. The communist government propagated this new version of Sahodaran Ayyappan and now today majority of the state believes this story. Moreover, now this Hindu festival has been transformed into a harvest festival.

Taking a cue from this success story the other parts of India too has started developing stories that project the revered Hindu Gods and Goddesses as the Gods and Goddesses of the Upper Castes. Vulgar literature regarding Goddess Durga is being flooded in social media. This story is said to have been spread by a left-leaning university around 15 years back. Ravana is being projected as a lower caste and then killed by an Aryan upper caste, God Rama. Whereas the scriptures prove that Ravana himself was a Brahmin by caste. Thus they are not abolishing the religion directly but destroying the cause and the reason for which people worship Gods and follow a religion.

Thus the subalterns are trying to fulfil all the pre-requisite conditions needed to create a revolution.

The problem they are facing is that both the lower castes and the upper castes are intimately connected by a strong fabric of faith, which is difficult to break.

A hint of what a revolution, if it happens, would look like was witnessed when the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party formed an alliance and contested the UP elections in 1993. They won the elections and Samajwadi Party was the bigger partner, hence Mulayam Singh Yadav became the Chief Minister. Kanshi Ram, the BSP supremo, pressurised Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav to remove the Chief Secretary Mr TSR Subramanian, one of the most respected IAS officers in India. The reason Kanshi Ram gave was straightforward, one without giving any diplomatic twist, and the reason was that Mr TSR Subramanian is a Brahmin.

India is a huge country with 1/6th of the world’s population and that too is a diverse one. The occurrence of a revolution is not an easy thing till the country remains intact and the religion remains strong and Gods are revered.

The second and more practical reason is that originally the subaltern movement was a minority movement. To add up their numbers they have added other groups which come more or less in the middle of the hierarchy. Marx has clearly stated that the middle class is not a dependable class, they may oppose the bourgeoisie due to their personal misery but when things become normal they can leave the revolution and join the bourgeoisie. Engels writes about them in the communist manifesto ‘The “dangerous class, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue’¹⁹. Also in his book “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” Marx wrote that the ‘The bourgeois republic won. On its side stood the aristocracy of finance, the industrial bourgeoisie; the middle class; the small traders’ class; the army; the slums, organized as Guarde Mobile; the intellectual celebrities, the parsons’ class, and the rural population. On the side of the Parisian proletariat stood none but itself ‘ ²⁰.

Another cause of worry is that though Marx was against capitalism, he did not hate the individual capitalists because he saw capitalism as a stage where the communist revolution will happen. Thus it was a progressive stage. Here the hate is getting to an individual and personal level and is becoming a fight to the finish. This reminds us of Stalin’s statement that ‘To finish the enemy, one has to hate him by his heart and soul’.

Despite deep connexions with Marxism and full preparation for the revolution, the preconditions, in India, for the revolution are not natural, they are artificial. Hence not suitable for a full-fledged revolution. What is more likely to happen is hate-filled attacks on the bourgeoisie. As Lasalle says that ‘Apart from the working class, all other classes are a reactionary piece of mass’²¹, however, Engels disagrees with this statement let us see where this hate will lead us.

Looking at the above statements and events, we can arrive at one thing 1) Either a great Marxist mind is behind all the subaltern movements or 2) These are the events that every society goes through and Marx has predicted this accurately.

Foot Notes: –
1. German Ideologue Page 39
2. The Holy Family page 51
3. Engels’ letter to Starkenburg, Jan 25, 1894, Selected Works Vol ll, pg 458
4. German Ideologue pg 50
5. The class struggle in France, pg 177
6. Communist Manifesto p 42
7. The Class Struggle in France, Engels’ introduction (1895) p.125
8. Cp. Republic 338 ff, The discovery of Marx, Harsh Narain pg 57
9. The Poverty of Philosophy p.196
10. Marxism is Dead, by Brij Narain, Lahore 1939, p. 75
11. Communist Manifesto p.39-40
12. The class struggle in France p.177
13. Communist Manifesto p.17
14. CCHPR (OR), p. 42
15. Capital, l, p.79
16. German Ideologue, p 259
17. Capital,l, p.79
18. Anti Duhring,p.440
19. Communist Manifesto p.10
20. Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Collected works of Marx &Engels, Kindle Edition p. 451
21. Engels’ letter to Babel, March 18-28, 1875, Selected correspondences,p.353.