The UPA government survived the trust vote, and the farce on display would have put the best script writers to shame. The so-called Left voted along with the so-called Right in a ex-post futile attempt to topple a so-called Centrist government. Everyone was caught up in the drama, with horse-trading allegations, point and counter-points about the nuclear deal, and shifting loyalties. In this whole charade, yet again, glaring pointers to the Great Brahminical Conspiracy were ignored by all and sundry. All? No, not all. Mayawati, in her frustration, unknowingly made a reference to it when she said that the upper caste dominated parties had conspired to keep a Dalit woman from becoming the Prime Minister. Sadly, her remark was dismissed summarily without realizing that it struck at the core of a well-guarded secret. The Great Brahminical Conspiracy has managed to remain the best kept secret in Indian politics for over 80 years now. It is the subject of my doctoral dissertation at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, and as a conscientious student of political science, I think it is incumbent upon me to share this secret with everyone else.
So what is the Great Brahminical Conspiracy? Think about it. Almost all the Prime Ministers, Chief Ministers, Cabinet Ministers, and Presidents of this country have been from the brahmin caste. Is it not suspicious that in a country with a decently functioning democracy the ruling class is almost completely dominated by a community that makes up barely 10 percent of its population? Indeed, the Indian Right has been almost overtly brahminical in their ideology. One of the oft-repeated observations in intellectual circles in India is the fact that the top post of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has exclusively been held by brahmins, in fact almost exclusively Maharashtrian Chitpavan Brahmins.
What escapes attention is the fact that even the leadership of the Indian Left has been a brahminical hegemony. Look at the current Politburo or indeed Politburos over the years, and see if the proportion of brahmins is anywhere close to their proportion in the general population. Of course, this fact is never mentioned because the Left has successfully created the illusion that caste is irrelevant in their sphere of dominance. That caste is a non-issue in West Bengal and Kerala. It is all about class. And in that lies the germ of the driving philosophy of the great brahminical conspiracy. By creating an illusion of the irrelevance of caste, brahmins are free to dominate the Left, without really attracting the same charges of caste-ism as the Right does. H K Surjeet was the exception, but then he was not Hindu. Take him away and then examine the who’s who of the Indian Left and an ominous pattern starts to emerge.
Then there’s the Congress. Everyone talks about how it has been a one-dynasty party. That the Nehru-Gandhis are the royalty of the party, with a birthright to lead it. Fair enough. But is it just a coincidence that the dynasty (which should rightfully be called just the Nehru dynasty, for apart from the sperm donated by Feroze Gandhi, there is nothing non-Nehru about it) is also a brahmin dynasty? In the pre-British days, the only Hindus considered to have a birthright over governance were from the warrior Kshatriya caste (the one glaring exception being of course the Peshwas who, incidentally were from the same sub-caste as the RSS leadership). Now things have changed to such an extent that a brahmin family is considered the royal dynasty of India.
Brahmins thus dominate the leadership of all three major national-level political entities in India, despite the fact that ideologically speaking, they should dominate just one. Is it not peculiar that although Mahatma Gandhi, a member of the trader vaishya caste, almost singularly dominated the landscape of Indian politics through entirely non-violent means, and ushered in principles of equality, every major ideology in Indian politics is now dominated by brahmins? Of course, we have some supposed lower-caste politicians gaining prominence, like Mayawati, Lalu Yadav and Mulayam Singh. But they always play support roles and never call the shots. This is not just an accident, nor can it be fully explained by the “head start principle” (i.e. brahmins got a head start in education so they dominate all streams of ideology from the right to the left) over 6 decades after independence.
This brahminical dominance is the result of a well crafted strategy aimed at perpetuating the hegemony of a numerically insignificant community over a country of a billion “others”. When I elaborate on this strategy completely in subsequent parts, some of you might be tempted to dismiss it as a crackpot conspiracy theory. Some might even draw parallels to the idea of Knights Templar/Freemasons secretly ruling the world. But the evidence for the Great Brahminical Conspiracy is overwhelming. And this evidence is archival, historic as well as circumstantial in nature.
Before I conclude this post, let me leave you with some questions. When was the Communist Party of India formed? When was the RSS formed? When was V D Savarkar released from prison by the British? When did Jawaharlal Nehru start gaining prominence in the Congress Party? And finally, when did B R Ambedkar start his movement and gain prominence of threatening and competitive proportions? Remember or look up these dates, and you will be more prepared for my subsequent posts.
Pyotr Periyar Pandey is a PhD Candidate in the Political Science Department at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. He is working on his dissertation titled “The Great Brahminical Conspiracy: An Investigation into the Antecedents of the Hegemony of a Numerically Insignificant Community over the Polity of the Diverse Indian Nation”. He can be contacted at pyotr.periyar@pandey.ru