Sangh Parivar plays the caste game best, says Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy

 'These days our government is stressing one country, one election, one vote, one language, one religion. To make ‘one’, their method is to make everyone fight against one another, not just Hindus and Muslims'

Arundhati Roy.: File picture

Pheroze L. Vincent, TT, New Delhi, 01.10.23 : The Sangh Parivar understands the labyrinthine caste system the best and uses this knowledge to try and perpetuate it, Booker Prize-winning author and public intellectual Arundhati Roy said at a women’s convention here on Saturday.

“These days our government is stressing one country, one election, one vote, one language, one religion. To make ‘one’, their method is to make everyone fight against one another, not just Hindus and Muslims,” Roy said in Hindi at a conference held by the All India Progressive Women’s Association (AIPWA).

The AIPWA is linked to the CPIML Liberation.

Quoting former Chinese leader Mao Zedong who wrote “A single spark can start a prairie fire”, Roy said: “Our society is not a prairie, it is a maze. The spark gets lost in it. This maze is the caste system and the map of this maze is understood most by the Sangh Parivar and not the parties that practise caste politics. They use this understanding to perpetuate the caste system.”

Roy has been a fervent critic of Hindutva. Her comments come after RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat attacked the caste system in a speech in Nagpur earlier this month.

Bhagwat had, departing from an earlier RSS position that the reservation policy needs to be reviewed, said: “So as long as this discrimination exists, reservation must continue.”

Bhagwat’s remarks came after Tamil Nadu minister Udhayanidhi Stalin called for the eradication of Sanatan Dharma, or traditional forms of Hinduism based on caste.

The BJP has cited this to dub the Opposition INDIA bloc “anti-Hindu”.

Roy said: “Probably 90 per cent of the Muslims of this country are Pasmanda (backward). Why did they adopt Islam? Because they were suppressed under the caste system, they were disrespected.… Today, those poor people who accepted Islam for relief from the caste system are being called children of the Mughals (and threatened that they) will be finished off.

“Whatever conflict we see, the caste system is its base. Our task is to fill these cracks.”

She added: “Now we have one country and one company… Modiji and Gautam Adani. This is the country we have. To maintain this, we have to understand where they want to leave us in this maze.”

She concluded: “Now is the time for everyone… to sink our differences and defeat them. There is no other option. It is not difficult.”

At its two-day conference, the AIPWA is expected to pass resolutions seeking the immediate implementation of reservation for women in legislatures, punishment for BJP parliamentarian Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh who faces charges of sexual harassment, and justice for women in Manipur where they have been sexually assaulted and killed in ethnic clashes.

The AIPWA — whose conference attracted large delegations from Bihar, Jharkhand, Bengal and Tamil Nadu — is expected to plan agitations demanding revocation of the laws that criminalise inter-faith marriages in the garb of preventing forcible or induced religious conversions, legalisation of same-sex marriage, criminalisation of marital rape and revocation of the hijab ban in Karnataka, as well as opposing a uniform civil code.