Caste Survives Conversion: Ashraf Clout, Secular Silence and the Pasmanda Challenge

A polemic on caste, clout and the Muslim monolith

Clout Economics — clouteconomics.org

Reading time: about 15 minutes.

In this essay

1. The thesis, with its shoes off
2. The monolith is a clout asset
3. What Ambedkar would ask the mosque committee, the temple trust and the faculty lounge
4. The state’s religious test
5. Theoretical ashraf, empirical pasmanda
6. Two humiliations: one famous, one furniture
7. The courted and the converted
8. Three alibis, three replies
9. A test for anyone who discovers the pasmanda
10. Conclusion: dismantle the ladder in every wing
11. Sources and further reading

I. The thesis, with its shoes off

Caste is not a Hindu hobby. It is the subcontinent’s operating system, and operating systems do not ask for religious identification before they run.

That sentence is meant as an argument against a lazy position held by a surprising number of parties at once: that caste belongs to Hindus, that everyone else is exempt, and that anyone who mentions caste among Muslims is either a bigot or a stooge for bigots. This essay says the opposite. The people who benefit from silence about caste among Muslims are not the Muslims at the bottom. They are the ashraf elite who speak for the community, the secular intellectuals who find a monolith easier to defend than a hierarchy, a state whose own paperwork assigns caste a religion, and a political right that, critics say, has found in the word “pasmanda” a very useful new instrument.

None of this denies that Muslims in India face real hostility, violence and discrimination as Muslims. It is the point. A community under pressure is exactly where an internal hierarchy gets told to wait its turn.

II. The monolith is a clout asset

In the economy of attention, a bloc is worth more than a crowd. A community that can be presented as one voice, one vote and one grievance can be courted, bargained with and spoken for. Its spokespeople accumulate clout in proportion to how convincingly they can claim to hold the bloc together.

This is where caste becomes inconvenient. Hierarchy inside the bloc means that someone is being spoken for rather than speaking, and that the speaker has interests of their own. The pasmanda movement, the umbrella for backward-caste and Dalit Muslims that Ali Anwar named and organised through the Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz from 1998, has argued for decades that the leadership of large Muslim religious organisations has been almost entirely ashraf. That is his claim, and it can be tested against rosters, boards and ticket lists rather than adjectives.

The monolith is not a natural fact. It is a manufactured one, and manufactured assets have owners. Calling hierarchy “divisive” is an excellent way to protect them. It is the rhetorical move of every ruling order: unity, for those on top, means that the lower rungs stop talking.

III. What Ambedkar would ask the mosque committee, the temple trust and the faculty lounge

B. R. Ambedkar’s most useful contribution to this argument is not a slogan but a structure. He described caste as a graded inequality: not simply a division into equals but a ladder, with an ascending scale of honour and a descending scale of contempt. His second point is subtler. The ladder survives because it is naturalised: every rung can look down, so almost nobody has an interest in kicking the whole thing away. He also insisted that caste is not one thing. There are only castes, plural, each embedded in local life.

Apply that to Muslim society in India and the ground shifts. The colonial census of 1901 recorded well over a hundred social groups wholly or partly Muslim, and the Sachar Committee itself later noted that Muslims could be seen as three broad groups, with the ashraf at the top, the ajlaf in the middle and the arzal at the bottom. Ali Anwar has pointed out that all three terms are of Arabic origin, a useful corrective to anyone tempted to treat them as an imported Hindu contamination. Whatever one thinks about what scripture requires, a ladder that exists in the lives of millions of people is a sociological fact, and sociology is not refuted by theology.

Ambedkar’s question travels well. Who sits at the top of this ladder, who is told to be grateful that there is a ladder at all, and who profits when the word “caste” is declared out of bounds? It is a question for the temple trust. It is also a question for the mosque committee, the madrasa board, the Urdu department and the secular dinner party that would rather talk about Hindutva than about its own guest list.

IV. The state’s religious test

The most shameless evidence that caste has a religion in Indian law is paragraph 3 of the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950. It confined Scheduled Caste status to people professing Hinduism, and was later widened to include Sikhs in 1956 and Buddhists in 1990. Dalits who are Muslim or Christian were left outside it.

Think about what that rule says. It says that the state will recognise caste-based disadvantage, but only if the sufferer remains inside an approved list of religions. It treats caste as a property of Hinduism, and it treats religious conversion as an act that dissolves the disadvantage, whatever the lived record shows. The Sachar Committee noted that Muslim arzal groups follow occupations similar to those of Hindu Scheduled Castes and are widely believed to be converts from untouchable communities. The Ranganath Misra Commission, reporting in 2007, also pointed to the case of Dalit Muslims and Christians.

The pasmanda movement’s objections are specific, not rhetorical. Most Dalit and backward-caste Muslims were included in the Central OBC list in 1993, and a few Muslim adivasi groups appear in the ST list. Activists such as Ali Anwar and scholars such as Khalid Anis Ansari have argued that backward Muslims do not receive a fair share within the OBC quota, that arzal groups should be moved to the Scheduled Caste list by removing the religious test, and that certain lower-caste or adivasi Muslim groups remain excluded from any list at all. Bihar’s separate category for the most backward classes, which places the most backward Muslim castes within it, is the model they most often cite. The Sachar Committee’s own estimate that about forty per cent of Muslims are OBC or SC/ST is disputed by pasmanda activists, who put the proportion higher. Without a caste census nobody can settle the number, which is its own comment on who wants to count.

V. Theoretical ashraf, empirical pasmanda

Gopal Guru’s most productive provocation for this debate comes from his critique of Indian social science. In The Cracked Mirror, written with Sundar Sarukkai, he challenges a division of intellectual labour in which “theoretical Brahmins” produce the concepts and “empirical Shudras” supply the experience. The Dalit, in this arrangement, is a source of testimony. The theory itself is done elsewhere, by others, in better-funded rooms.

Move that critique across the religious line and the result is uncomfortable for everybody. Who theorises “the Muslim”? Who is quoted as the representative voice on television, in think-tank panels, in newspaper columns and at conferences on minority rights? Too often it is the ashraf scholar, the cleric, the politician or the secular liberal who relies on a pasmanda informant for a “ground report” and returns to the seminar room to write the theory. The pasmanda is the empirical Shudra of the Muslim question: heard as experience, almost never credited as theory.

Guru’s own answer is that lived experience of subordination is an epistemic resource. Sarukkai, in the same book, argues that those outside a community can also represent it responsibly. We do not need to settle that debate to extract its practical point. Whoever claims to speak for a stratified community must be answerable to its lowest rungs, and the claim should be audited the way any other claim to authority is. That is also a Clout Economics rule: do not ask only who has the microphone. Ask who handed it over, and who was never asked.

VI. Two humiliations: one famous, one furniture

Gopal Guru edited a volume called Humiliation: Claims and Context that treats humiliation as a political and conceptual category, not as a mood. It is a handy tool here, because contemporary politics runs partly on a market in humiliations. Some injuries circulate magnificently. Others are furniture: always present, never featured.

The humiliation of Muslims by communal hostility, public insult and violence is real, and it circulates. It generates solidarity, coverage, fundraising, outrage and electoral calculation. That is a reason to take it seriously, and nothing here makes it less true.

The humiliation of a Dalit or backward-caste Muslim by members of their own community, and by the structures of the state, fits few people’s script. For the community’s established leadership it breaks the story of a single wounded body. For many secular liberals it feels like a gift to the wrong people. For parties that court it, it is useful only so long as it stays a slogan. So it circulates badly. Low engagement. No hashtag. A grievance that must wait because a bigger grievance is on screen.

In the clout economy, attention is allocated by usefulness to somebody’s story. The caste humiliation of pasmanda Muslims has not been useful to enough people. That is a political fact, and it is a failure.

VII. The courted and the converted

Ali Anwar has remarked that “pasmanda” has now become an important word. That is a pleasure and a danger. Once a category becomes politically valuable, everyone wants to be seen to speak it, and the first question to ask is what the courtship converts into.

Political parties of every orientation have discovered that backward-caste and Dalit Muslims are a constituency worth addressing, and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s outreach to “pasmanda” Muslims in recent years has been a prominent example. The response within the movement is contested. Some pasmanda activists welcome any attention that might produce results. Others, including reviewers of Ali Anwar’s recent writing, read the outreach as an attempt to build a parallel leadership inside a movement that was organised from below, and note the difference between recruiting people to a party and delivering what the movement asked for. We can accept both worries without choosing a side, and apply the same test to every suitor.

The test is the oldest one in this site’s toolkit: attention versus conversion. A party can issue declarations, hold conferences and talk about “pasmanda Muslims” until the feed goes quiet. Has it moved on the 1950 Order? Has it supported a caste census? Has it changed who sits on the boards it controls? Recognition without redistribution is only another subscription.

VIII. Three alibis, three replies

“Islam is egalitarian, so caste among Muslims is a myth.” A claim about what a religion teaches is not a claim about what a society does. Whatever the texts say, the sociological question is who marries whom, who leads what, who is counted, and who is left out of the lists. Those are questions about institutions, and they can be answered with evidence.

“Talking about caste divides the community and helps its enemies.” This is the logic of every ruling order that has asked its lowest rung to wait. Unity achieved by silencing the people at the bottom is the ladder with a flag on it. The risk of instrumentalisation is real, and the answer to it is to push for material results faster, not to stop speaking.

“Caste is a Hindu matter, and converts left it behind.” Ali Anwar has written that his constituency converted for equality, which is another way of saying that the promise was equality and the delivery is the evidence. If the ladder followed people into their new community, that is a debt owed by the new community. And the state’s decision to treat the 1950 Order as if conversion erased caste adds a second, separate debt, owed by the Republic.

IX. A test for anyone who discovers the pasmanda

Any party, movement, newspaper or think-tank that invokes pasmanda Muslims can be asked five questions.

1. Does it publicly support removing the religious test from the Scheduled Caste list, or does it avoid the subject?
2. Does it support enumeration, such as a caste census, so that the numbers can be argued about in public?
3. Do pasmanda people hold power in its own leadership, or only appear in its photographs?
4. Does it treat pasmanda organisations as political partners with their own agenda, or as audiences?
5. Does it apply the same standard to the caste hierarchies in its own base?

These questions apply to the Muslim leadership, to the secular parties and to the Hindu right in equal measure. That is the point of asking them.

X. Conclusion: dismantle the ladder in every wing

Ambedkar’s demand was for the annihilation of caste, not for a more tasteful arrangement of the rungs. The same logic follows into every building the ladder has entered: the temple, the university, the newsroom, the party office, the mosque committee and the seminar room.

Clout Economics has no special immunity from this critique. This essay is itself a bid for attention, published from a position of some comfort, which is not nothing. It cannot decide what pasmanda politics should demand. It can only insist that the people at the bottom of the ladder are the ones who get to decide, and that everyone else is accountable to what they say.

If a community’s unity depends on the silence of its lowest rung, it was never unity. It was clout.

Sources and further reading

These are the works this essay draws on or leans against. Claims about the pasmanda movement and the legal history are attributed in the text to the people who make them. Readers are encouraged to check them against the originals.

• Ambedkar, B. R. Annihilation of Caste. Written 1936 as an undelivered presidential address. Annotated critical edition with an introduction by Arundhati Roy, London: Verso, 2014.
• Guru, Gopal, and Sundar Sarukkai. The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012.
• Guru, Gopal, ed. Humiliation: Claims and Context. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Anwar, Ali. Masawat Ki Jung (Hindi). 2001.
• Anwar, Ali. Sampoorn Dalit Andolan: Pasmanda Tasawwur (Hindi). Rajkamal Prakashan, 2023.
• Ansari, Khalid Anis. Writings on the pasmanda movement, including essays published in Round Table India.
• Prime Minister’s High Level Committee. Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India (the Sachar Committee Report). 2006.
• National Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities. Report (the Ranganath Misra Commission). 2007.
• The Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950, paragraph 3, as amended in 1956 and 1990.