Atheism as a Value System

by Ankur Betageri (June 2015)

Affe mit Schädel (Ape with Skull) by Hugo Rheinhold

Dogmatists who twist the spirit of knowledge live in a fortress of dogma, and like all fortress-dwellers they let their power do the talking. While we try to reason and have conversations the dogmatists use the brute force of traditions, rituals and festivals to enforce their dogma, their prejudices and their perverted sense of who deserves to live a good life and who does not deserve it. Atheism in India is not like it is in the West. In India the very existence of God and his cosmic social categories attach stigma to certain people born to certain parents. These caste and racist prejudices have existed for centuries now and it is not so easy to get rid of them. To understand them one has to go to the very source of these prejudices. And that source is the religion of Hinduism. I use the word ‘racist’ informedly: The varna system of Hinduism divides the society into savarnas (literally ‘coloured’) and avarnas (‘colourless’). Unlike in the West, in India the ‘coloured’ people, the savarnas, are the ones who consider themselves superior. They belong to the four-fold varna system, and so they are the gentry. Those outside the varna system, the avarnas, are something like the working class for the dirty jobs. They were not touched before, but now they are treated as though they are mentally retarded, primordially dirty, uncivilized and therefore beyond the pale. I have been appalled to see these racist sentiments expressed routinely by General category candidates (those who are not beneficiaries of Indian government’s affirmative action) towards the Reserved category candidates (beneficiaries of affirmative action) at interviews in Delhi University. How do the ‘colourless’ avarnas live with this kind of virulent racism? On the face of it they appear quite stoic but one only needs to hear them presenting a paper on Ambedkar to see how angry and distressed they are inside. Who has the right to make them so angry? The racist sentiments are often attributed – and thereby rationalized – to the epidemic of unemployment in India and the frustration and insecurity that it engenders among those who do not get any leverage in the appointment process through affirmative action. That there is a need for affirmative action which has been asserted time and again by the different committees set up by the Government (the last such being the Mandal Commission of 1979) as the reserved seats are not filled up by Governmental institutions is beside the point. The point however is that there is no excuse for racism. Because if racism is okay, well, then anything (paedophilia and cannibalism included) is okay.

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Ankur Betageri is poet, fiction writer and visual artist. His books include The Bliss and Madness of Being Human (Poetrywala, 2013) and Bhog and Other Stories (Pilli, 2010). He is a currently a PhD candidate at IIT-Delhi working on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.

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