Whisper of the heart

Without yourself, you are alone...

Wednesday, July 21, 2004

Indian Caste System

  
 
I was talking to my father the last Friday after work and the topic on the caste system in the Indian society cropped up suddenly.
 
There was a news recently about this indian rebel who torched the family of a pastor. The reason? Because the pastor was converting many Hindus to Christians in India. When the ex Prime Minister Vajpayee’s party was ruling India, there was a proposal to ban Hindus from converting their religion. Instinctively, the world retaliated. The archbishop of Italy was totally against it, calling for protest. What intrigues me is the fact that when the Malaysian government passed the ruling that no Muslim can convert into other religion, no one made even a single noise, why?
 
Perhaps we as Indians should start thinking why are all these happening? Why is it that the rate of conversion in India is rising so much so that the Prime Minister himself had to intervene and pass a ruling as such? Why are all Hindus converting at an alarming rate until it is predicted that at some point, there will not be anymore Hindus in India?
 
Let us analyze the root cause for all these. Torching the pastor or passing a new ruling in the parliament is not a solution to this problem. Let us open our eyes widely and look into our Indian society.
 
Why is a society based on the beautiful Hindu religion littered with caste system? In which part of our Hindu scriptures have they mentioned about dividing our society according to caste? What is the difference between us? Malayalees, Ceylonese, Telugus, Kannada, Punjabis..Gounder, Chetty,  the list goes on, as endless as can be. What is the use? What good does it make to us? Why is that we differentiate between our very own people? Does this kind of division occur in other religions? Who are Malayalees? People from Kerala..who are Ceylonese? Indians from india who migrated to Sri Lanka. Who are Punjabis? People from Punjab..So? what’s so great about that?
 
There is this place in India called ‘cheri’. it’s a slum and the people there are basically from low caste. They are not allowed into the temple, not allowed to mingle with the higher caste people and basically, if u are born there, u will live as a beggar and die as a beggar. What is so great about being higher caste? They breathe the same air, don’t they, or is God releasing special gas for them to breathe? When they die, they rot, don’t they, or does the body remain as fragrant as ever?
 
There is a street in India, I am not really sure of the name (maybe Anna Nagar), the lower class people there were ignored by the higher caste until all of them converted into Islam, where caste does not exist and decided to change the name of the street into a Muslim name. When this happened, all the so-called higher caste Indians could not accept it and protested but to no avail.
 
A man from high caste but with bad records is still accepted into the society but a man with a golden heart but from a lower caste is shunned from the doorstep. Where is the logic? Where have our brains gone? Lets start judging a person from his character, not from his origin.
 
The discrimination against caste is so vast that when the lower caste people in India are approached by Christians and Muslims and asked to convert, they do it willingly without much hesitation because their very own race is shunning them and herding them towards poverty. Rather than being an outcast for the rest of their lives, might as well they embrace a different religion whose society embrace and accept them with open arms.
 
Let me make something clear here.I am not against any religion, any preachers, or any particular caste. I am not against conversion of religion either though I believe if you are born in one religion, you should die in that religion. What I am trying to say is remove this caste perspective from our Indian society. There is no use complaining that people are converting Hindus to other religion, there is no use passing harsh rules to prevent people from changing their religion. Before taking all those steps, let us abolish the caste system in our society and live together as Indian Hindus..not differentiate according to castes and discriminate each other forever.
 
In the eyes of god, we are all the same. If caste division doesn’t stop now, soon Hindus will be wiped out from the face of this earth. 
  
  
  

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