New Delhi: JNU Vice Chancellor Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit termed "Manusmrithi" extraordinarily regressive for what she said categorising all women as "shudras".
Speaking at the B R Ambedkar Lecture Series organised by the Union Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, Dhulipudi Pandit said Hindu Gods do not anthropologically and scientifically come from the upper caste, The Indian Express reported
Dwelling further on the topic "Dr B.R. Ambedkar's Thought on Gender Justice: Decoding the Uniform Civil Code", Pandit said no god including Lakshmi and Shakti is a Brahmin and the highest of them is a Kshatriya.
Lord Shiva, she said, must be of a Scheduled Caste or a Scheduled Tribe because he sits in a cemetery with a snake, wearing very little clothes. According to her, Brahmins cannot sit in the cemetery. Terming Jagannath very much a tribal, she asked why discrimination is still being continued.
According to her Manusmrithi is "extraordinarily regressive", because no woman can claim to be a Brahmin or anything. It is only by marriage a woman gets the husband's or the father's caste.
Invoking Ambedkar's "Annihilation of Caste", she said in order for the Indian society to do well, annihilation of caste is extraordinarily important.
Referring to the death of 9-year-old Dalit boy in Rajasthan after being allegedly assaulted by his upper-caste teacher for touching the drinking water, she said "we are ready to kill somebody to protect this so-called artificially constructed identity".
She said women get doubly marginalised for being a woman in the first place and then for belonging to a "so-called caste"
According to her, Buddhism is one of the greatest religions as it proves that the Indic civilisation accepts dissent, diversity and difference.
Gautama the Buddha, she said, was the first dissenter against Brahminical Hinduism and was also the first rationalist in history.
Pandit, the first woman VC of JNU, was previously Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the Savitri Phule Pune University.