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Three Varnas of Bharat

Source: https://www.facebook.com/share/1BeeVHKsKf/

By Devdutt Pattanaik

Once there were four varnas. Now there are three. The Baniya who owns the temple, the Brahmin who guards it wearing a collar he mistakes for a crown, and the Shudra - the servant, the slave, the cockroach, the anti-national. 

Look at sport. Every Commonwealth medal, every Olympic medal India has ever won, comes from Punjab, Haryana, from the wrestling akharas and the hockey fields of the north. Yet the games go to Gujarat. The stadiums rise in Gujarat. The budget, three times what Punjab and Haryana get combined, flows to a state that has never produced a medallist. Nobody asks why. The bureaucrat who could ask is a Brahmin. He does not ask. He signs.

Look at the newsroom. Who reports the news. Brahmins, mostly. Who owns the channel. A vegetarian businessman. The canteen serves no meat, no onion, no garlic, and the reporter feels pure, feels pious, feels chosen. He does not notice his salary is a fraction of the profit walking out the door in a Mercedes.

Look at the factory floor. Who builds it, who owns it. The UP Brahmin migrates to Gujarat to teach, to clerk, to supervise, proud of his vegetarian tiffin, proud of his sacred thread, unaware he has become staff in someone else's kingdom. The owner's children are in London. They eat whatever they like there. They come home twice a year, donate a percentage to the temple, and the Brahmin garlands them at the door.

This is the miracle of ahimsa, properly interpreted. You may steal from a cow, so long as you do not slaughter her. That is not violence, that is milk. You may raid a beehive and take the honey, so long as no blood is spilled. That is not violence, that is Ayurveda. By this logic you may hollow out a nation's treasury, so long as nobody's throat is cut. That is not violence either. That is business.

The Rishi once advised the Raja. That arrangement is dead. Wars are no longer won with armies, they are won with money, and money buys technology, and technology decides who appears on your voter list and who quietly disappears from it. Democracy promised that voters choose kings. Capital has quietly amended the clause.

Remember who India's first prime minister was. A Pandit. A Brahmin. And who destroyed him, slowly, patiently, across decades. Also Brahmins, cheering from the sidelines while someone else counted the profits of his fall.

The irony is old, older than the Republic. The merchant class was Jain once, Buddhist once, thrown out of the fold by Brahminical orthodoxy centuries ago. They did not forget. They waited. They rebuilt themselves as Baniya, and they have spent generations turning the very priesthood that expelled them into paid staff, garlanding their factories, blessing their gold, barking on their behalf on social media for free.

The Kshatriya, meanwhile, has no sword to raise and no war to fight, so he has nothing left to sell. Only the Brahmin still has his voice, and he has rented it out cheap, in exchange for a vegetarian canteen and the right to feel holy while someone else counts the money.

Bark on, gentlemen. The Nagpur bowl is being refilled in Ahmedabad.

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