Casteism of our society

Recently I got a chance to look at a community's monthly magazine. There was an interesting article about dowry system. The writer elaborated the evil of dowry and how families suffer due to such practices. He/she was encouraging the next generation to throw away such injustice social norms and improve the community's harmony. So far so good. The last statement of that article was interesting. The rough translation was like, "Due the evil nature of dowry, boys and girls are not married at the right age; because of this delay, they are pushed to a shameful act of finding a spouse outside our caste".

The above article made me think. It is a good sign that many are raising their voice against dowry and we see a positive response from the younger generation. However, I am not able to conceive inter-caste marriage as something sinful. I could understand that in a community magazine, they may not encourage their community person to marry outside the community - but that is not justified to portrait a broader vision (of inter marriage) as sinful.

Reflecting back the history of the caste system practiced in India, we might find the root in Aryan civilization. May be it made sense at that time to classify people based on their occupation. One might observe that this classification was far humanity based compared to slavery practiced in the rest of the world of that age. Major disgrace is that, when the rest of the world had banned such sinful slavery, we Indians try to cling to it dearly. We are proud of this stupidity.

The recent reservation scheme raises another serious concern. The reservation system was brought in to equalize the otherwise uneven society. However, giving this kind of tool to a selfish politician would use it to cut the society treating that system as a weapon. What a harmful effect of the reservation policy causing a permanent demarcation of the society based on the caste! Unless our community feelings are triggered and a vote bank can be milked, we might have to go through this kind of sub-standard life.

It looks like a chicken-egg problem. Politician finds it easy to reach people based on community and get his needs met. Same way, people find it easy to approach political parties with the background of representing communities and hence getting benefits out of the ruling parties.

The other supporting factor of this caste system is the individual family. The irrational parents do not weigh the importance of their progeny's welfare and happiness. Their standard thinking pattern is: if I get my children married to some other community, what will those "four people" talk? Who are those four people? Nobody knows. They are nameless, jobless stupids. Parents are willing to forego the life of their children for the sake of their dignity and pride. Their cowardice nature of being afraid of facing the society is the reason for the evil of caste system. They think what will their relatives and friends circle speak. This is again an irrational thought, by not realizing that those people will talk for three or four days and beyond that they have their own headache to mind. The spineless activities of the older generation is molding the future generations also into the pit of the evil.

Is there any government policy or social organization working towards eradicating caste from the society? Eager to know.

Upon reflecting what could be done from individual, these are the things came up:

• When a man or a woman is ready for marriage, the person needs to identify the kind of spouse one is looking for, list out the characters and try to find a person outside the same caste. Intercaste marriage will be a strong bolt against the current practice.
• An interesting point at this junction. The thousands of caste system we have in India today is not solely due to the ancient practice. In olden days they had four major sects. The intercaste marriage is the culprit spawning hundreds and hundreds of subsects in due course.
• The next generation should not be exposed to the poison we have. They need to be tagged as non-casterians. We need to voice up for organizations to accept such category. Again, we need to be extra cautious in not forming new sects in mutations or making this non-casterians as a new sects.

Feel free to add your suggestions in the comment section.

I am able to express to this extend because I fortunate to be in a happy inter-caste marriage.