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Session 1 - Universalising Caste: Caste in Islam
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Vibha B Madhava
2:13
Hello and welcome to the panel discussion on 'Universalizing Caste: Exploring the interface of caste, religion and region'.
2:15
Session 1 is a discussion on 'Caste in Islam' featuring guest speaker Dr Khalid Anis Ansari, sociologist and professor at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru.
2:17
Prof Vikas Pathak, faculty member at Asian College of Journalism opens the session by welcoming the gathering. He refers to the previously held Caste Colloquium at ACJ.
2:18
"What we call caste primarily means hierarchies at birth because there is no singular, pan-Indian hierarchy," Pathak says.
2:20
He talks about the universal presence of caste and its dynamic nature. Further, he gives a brief overview about both sessions of the day.
2:21
Pathak introduces Dr Khalid Anis Ansari as a leading voice in the scholarship of the Pasmanda question. He calls upon Prof Akash Poyam, faculty member at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.
2:22
Prof Poyam welcomes the guests for the day mentioning that the panel discussion is important for journalists looking to capture the various dynamics of caste in India.
2:23
He introduces Dr Khalid Anis Ansari, the guest speaker for Session 1. With an experience of over 20 years in academic research, he has specific knowledge on the Pasmanda Muslim identity and demands for the extension of Scheduled Caste reservation to Pasmanda Muslims.
2:26
Dr Khalid Anis Ansari begins his address. He delves into his paper on Rethinking the Pasmanda Movement.
2:27
Highlighting the Muslim minority discourse around caste, he talks about the nature of differentiation and inequality.
2:31
“The framing of Islam as tolerant but inequal is a key theme. Religioinsation of caste due to the oriental colonial influence,” he explains.
2:33
Dr Ansari: 'Muslim' and 'minority' have become almost synonymous in political discourses.
2:34
About the contemporary discourse, Ansari says that it has been contested by the lower caste Muslims raising the Pasmanda question.
2:35
He further raises the question: "How does one justify the erasure of caste in popular Muslim imagination?"
2:36
He moves to the next section - Pasmanda contestations.
2:37
Dr Ansari introduces Pasmanda as a Persian term, which means 'those who have been left behind'.
2:38
The speaker mentions how Muslims usually use "zaat" or "biradari" to address castes among the religion.
2:41
2:42
The first wave of Pasmanda politics came with increasing political ghettoization of Muslim, subsequently leading to the rise of identity politics.
2:43
He further adds that the second phase (1991 onwards) marks the onset of the democratization era. With the implementation of Mandal Commission and inclusion of backward Muslim castes into it, the political agenda has shifted from secularism and communalism to social justice; from security to development and equity.
2:44
2:48
Muslims in India are broadly categorised into three social groups - Ashraf ('Honourable ones'), Ajlaf (backward Muslims) and Arzal (Dalit Muslims). Ashrafs are seen as the traditional dominant social group. Dr Ansari uses this context to build on the present-day politics around the Pasmanda community.
2:50
He quotes several scholars and researchers whose work has highlighted the reinforcement of the notion that 'Syeds' (belonging to the dominant group) are the "honourable and noble ones."
2:51
"The mother tongue for Dalit Muslims is region-based. It is a false claim that Urdu or Hindi is their mother tongue," Dr Ansari quotes specific parts of literature propagated to reinforce the idea of Dalit Muslims as the 'other'.
2:52
Dr Ansari raises two more questions of communal violence and equity with regard to the Pasmanda community.
2:53
About the issue of communal violence, he quotes Anwar, an activist: "We oppose both Hindu and Muslim fanaticism."
2:54
He cites another observation that most victims of the anti-Muslim violence are the Pasmanda Muslims.
2:55
Dr Ansari quotes Dr BR Ambedkar: "A caste has no feeling that it is affiliated to other castes, except when there is a Hindu-Muslim riot."
2:56
Talking about equity and affirmative action, he refers to the 2019 data from Aligarh Muslim University. Interestingly, upper-caste Muslims as faculty members are 15 percent and representation in the university is 90 percent. Non-Muslim faculty is more than the lower caste Muslims even in a minority institution, he says.
2:58
Pasmanda Muslims challenges the notion of the overall Muslim quota, Dr Ansari adds.
Reservations for categories of EWS, OBC, ST are religiously neutral. That's the question being raised, according to Dr Ansari. The Pasmanda movement is challenging this idea.
2:59
He says that the anxiety around including Pasmandas into the quotas is also about the "right-wing fantasy of conversion."
3:00
He points out the contention of the Pasmanda Movement that argues that "We are Pasmandas first, Muslims later,” which is the inversion of identity, and a call for solidarity towards collectivization of lower castes. Ansari calls this horizontal movement.
3:02
Dr Ansari says that the idea is to increase stability, identity and security for pan-religion, lower caste groups.
3:05
Dr Khalid Anis Ansari concludes his address by introducing the idea of moving towards a "post-minority condition", instantiated by the Pasmanda movement, which is a movement of subordinated castes within the largest religious minority, the Muslims.
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