Of baniyas... good, bad and clever!

There are baniyas and baniyas. Baniyas are Communist and Socialist too. They are, in fact, found in every party though, in India, they seem currently partial to the BJP.

Baniyas patronise the fine arts and can be gross. There are corrupt and clean baniyas. Arvind Kejriwal is seen by a majority of Delhi voters as a clean baniya. His main adversaries happen to be baniyas too. Some baniyas are so powerful that they claim to have political parties in their pockets. They own TV channels and newspapers.

There are good and bad journalists among baniyas. The man who exposed the key players in the Gujarat carnage of 2002 with shocking sting operations is a baniya, a key lieutenant of Kejriwal. That’s one more reason why the Delhi chief minister is in such bad odour with the BJP.

BJP president Amit Shah is a baniya from Gujarat. He has called Gandhiji a chatur baniya recently. “Chatur” could mean clever or shrewd in a positive way or it could mean sly. Given the context, I think Shah meant to say Gandhi was a clever man. In Shah’s view Gandhi could see that the Congress would degenerate into a ruling wand for the privileged after Independence. He had therefore wanted the Congress to be wound up after 1947.

Had Gandhi succeeded, there would have been a power vacuum. In all likelihood, the Hindu right would have stepped in. Another possibility, which the wealthy baniyas feared most, was a Communist takeover. Nehru took charge to keep both sides on a tight leash. He dismantled India’s first Communist government in Kerala and was partial to state-owned enterprises.

I am intrigued by the fuss about the BJP president calling Gandhi a shrewd baniya. If Nehru could flaunt his brahmin caste and be called a pandit, why is there so much caginess about the word baniya for Gandhi? Elections in India are conducted along caste arithmetic. AJGAR in Gujarat or Rajasthan stands for an alliance of Ahir, Jat, Gujar, adivasi and Rajput. Add Muslims to the equation and it becomes MAJGAR. Lalu Yadav has a Muslim-Yadav winning combination MY.

Castes compete with other castes and their leaders vie for influence within each caste. Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath is a thakur, a caste also known as rajput. Home minister Rajnath Singh was considered the most powerful thakur leader in UP before Prime Minister Modi promoted Adityanath. Caste plays a major role in stratifying Muslims too. And, Muslims too have baniyas.

Shah’s calling Gandhiji a chatur baniya drew strong criticism from Opposition parties and intellectuals. But Shah is aware that criticism of Gandhi goes down well with the dalits he is wooing. B.R. Ambedkar had major run-ins with Gandhi. Ambedkar called Hinduism a “chamber of horrors”. Gandhi saw Hinduism as an anchor of India’s spiritual future.

If I am right, Shah is the first baniya president of the BJP. And he is a vegetarian. In fact, of all three Hindu upper castes — brahmins, thakurs and baniyas — the baniyas are the most rigid in their vegetarianism. But they own abattoirs. Shah says Gandhi foresaw the degeneration of the Congress. But Gandhi even more presciently saw the danger rightwing Hindus posed.

Excerpts below from Gandhi’s prayer meeting could be a message from an old baniya to the younger ascendant baniyas.

“Rajendra Babu (who became India’s first President) tells me that he has received some 50,000 postcards, between 25,000 and 30,000 letters and many thousands of telegrams demanding a ban on cow slaughter. I spoke to you about this before. Why this flood of telegrams and letters? They have had no effect.”

“I have another telegram which says that a friend has started a fast for this cause. In India, no law can be made to ban cow slaughter. I do not doubt that Hindus forbidden to slaughter cows. I have been long pledged to serve the cow but how can my religion also be the religion of the rest of the Indians? It will mean coercion against those Indians who are not Hindus.”

“We have been shouting that there will be no coercion in religion. We have been reciting verses from the Quran at prayer. But if anyone were to force me to recite these verses I would not like it. How can I force anyone not to slaughter cows? It is not as if there were only Hindus in the Indian Union. There are Muslims, Parsis, Christians here.”

For that and less Gandhiji, the good baniya, was killed by Godse, the bad brahmin. By arrangement with Dawn