As Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi continues to push the caste narrative, raising it even during visits abroad, US-based and RSS-linked organisation Indic Dialogue has come out with a documentary suggesting that caste discrimination in India is exaggerated.
The documentary, titled The Caste Rush, is scheduled to be released on Friday in Delhi. It has been funded by Indic Dialogue, and is being promoted in the national capital by the Centre for Social Development (CSD), an organisation of Dalit and tribal academicians run by BJP leader Rajkumar Falwaria. The documentary talks about the conversations around caste discrimination in India, with stirrings of it also abroad, and attempts to debunk it through testimonies of priests from temples across India.
For the past few years, the RSS has been pursuing a social harmony project as a bulwark against the caste narrative of the Opposition. The project not only involves granting access to Dalits to temples and community wells across India, but also creating a sense of Hindu unity in public discourse.
Indic Dialogue, funded by a group of Indians in the US, regularly organises talks, events and funds documentaries close to Hindutva ideology. Around the time of protests over the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), it had released a documentary on the plight of Hindu migrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh. Its talks have seen participation by RSS leader Ram Madhav and lawyer J Sai Deepak, among others.
The CSD was established in 2014 by Falwaria, who claims 90 per cent of its members are Dalit and tribal professors of Delhi University. He claims that the aim of the organisation is to mainstream the deprived classes in a “nationalistic way”.
The documentary has been directed by Neeraj Singh, an IIT alumnus, who studied filmmaking in the US and runs an ad-filmmaking company in Mumbai.
Singh says that moved by “the false narrative” around caste discrimination in the US and controversy around the Swaminarayan Temple in New Jersey in 2021, he decided to work on the documentary a couple of years back. “The way the US media was talking about caste discrimination in India, it sent me into a tailspin. There were a flurry of articles that claimed caste discrimination was still prevalent in India’s ancient temples and that Dalits were underpaid. There was a narrative that Dalits built temples but were not allowed into them. We knew it was not true and so I decided to make a documentary about the truth. Contrary to popular belief, not all priests have to be Brahmins. Our temples are not as casteist as they are made out to be,” Singh said.
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According to Singh, he interviewed priests from temples in Odisha, Hyderabad, Coimbatore and Rajasthan and shot across India for the documentary.
Falwaria, who contested the 2015 Delhi Assembly elections on a BJP ticket from Madipur constituency and is a spokesperson of the party, said: “There was no caste system in India. The narrative around it has been created only to divide the country. In India, there is no system of racism like the West. This caste narrative is only a scheme to fracture society. Now, there is an attempt to establish it globally. We want to expose it.”
The US has seen the issue of caste discrimination being raised in universities and the corporate sphere. In February 2023, Seattle became the first US city to ban caste discrimination. In October same year, California became the first US state to pass a Bill banning caste discrimination. However, it was later vetoed by the Governor of California. Earlier in 2020, two Cisco engineers in California were accused of discriminating against a Dalit employee.
The Swaminarayan temple in New Jersey found itself facing accusations of forced labour, low wages, and poor working conditions during its construction in 2021. This had led to federal law enforcement agents raiding its site, and a lawsuit being filed, with allegations that workers, particularly Dalits, were targeted.
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In September last year, during a visit to the US, Rahul Gandhi had highlighted the caste “gap”, saying: “The elephant in the room is that 90 per cent of India – OBCs, Dalits and Adivasis — don’t play the game… Out of the top 200 businesses in India, there is almost no ownership of 90 per cent of the population of India. In the highest courts of the country, there is almost no participation of 90 per cent of India. In the media too, there is zero participation of lower castes, OBCs, Dalits…”
