‘Smash Brahmanical Patriarchy’: Twitter Does Not Stand for Social Justices

Smash Brahmanical Patriarchy

Twitter’s policy on abuse, bullying and hate crime may be more opaque than what one would wish for, but the social media website’s stance on caste issues — or the lack of it — is crystal clear. When Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, during his latest visit to India, met a group of women journalists, activists and writers, he found himself in a photograph with the, clutching a poster that bore the legend: “smash Brahmanical patriarchy”.

The image was, of course, met with outrage from the Indian Right and caste apologists who chose to misconstrue a call to annihilate the constructs of caste and patriarchy — and their inevitable intersection — as “hate crime”. Jack Dorsey may or may not have views on the pervasiveness of casteism in Indian society, but the Hindu-Right on Twitter equated the Twitter CEO holding a poster in one photo as a call for attack on Brahmins.

Sanghapali Aruna, the founder of Project Mukti, who gifted Dorsey with the poster told The Print, “Brahmanical patriarchy controls all of us in more ways than one. Brahmin women have been one of the victims of this hegemony. The ‘Smash Brahmanical patriarchy’ poster which I gifted to Jack Dorsey was questioning precisely this hegemony and concentration of power in the hands of one community. This wasn’t an attempt at hate speech against the Brahmins, but was an attempt to challenge the dominance and sense of superiority that finds its origins in the caste system.”

Yet, most outraging against it chose to don blinkers and cry foul.

TV Mohandas Pai, in his Republic editorial wrote: “The poster is an indication of the communal hatred of the people who made it and by holding it, the CEO of Twitter is seen to have endorsed it, which is unfortunate.”

Others, too, took up similar positions.

Of course, positions like these are hardly surprising from those who have much to lose should the caste status quo be challenged. The more problematic effect was the apologies issued by Twitter and Vijaya Gadde, its legal head for India, in the face of outrage. The apologies had a common theme: Twitter does not take sides and chooses to “democratise” all sides.

According to Divya Kandukuri, “Twitter doesn’t really care about Dalit women, or smashing Brahmanical patriarchy. The platform is known to block Dalit voices — like Twitter handle ‘DardEdiscourse’ has been blocked in the past. Intersectionality is a buzzword these days, they don’t really care for it in reality.”

Others too, especially DBA voices, criticised this apology.

Artist @DalitDiva, who designed the poster that was at the centre of the debate, weighed in on the outrage as well.

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