Accidental Blogger

An article in the New York Times describes the views of an Indian activist and an MIT economist who believe that India’s economic boom could be the realistic vehicle for the dismantling of the millennia old repressive and backward Hindu caste system. Chandra Bhan Prasad, a member of the Dalit community and a social motivator, encourages fellow Dalits to avail of India’s economic liberalization in order to move out of the trap of poverty, social isolation and dead end lives of deprivation. To that end, he advises them to move to cities and ditch village life where their fortunes are tethered to the land and their occupations defined by tradition. Urging Dalits to spurn government welfare programs, Prasad teaches them to have fewer children who are looked upon not as extra field hands, but prospective economic ladders to be nurtured, educated … and taught English.

AZAMGARH DISTRICT, India — When Chandra Bhan Prasad visits his ancestral village in these feudal badlands of northern India, he dispenses the following advice to his fellow untouchables: Get rid of your cattle, because the care of animals demands children’s labor. Invest in your children’s education instead of in jewelry or land. Cities are good for Dalit outcastes like us, and so is India’s new capitalism.

Mr. Prasad was born into the Pasi community, once considered untouchable on the ancient Hindu caste order. Today, a chain-smoking, irrepressible didact, he is the rare outcaste columnist in the English language press and a professional provocateur. His latest crusade is to argue that India’s economic liberalization is about to do the unthinkable: destroy the caste system. The last 17 years of new capitalism have already allowed his people, or Dalits, as they call themselves, to “escape hunger and humiliation,” he says, if not residual prejudice.

At a time of tremendous upheaval in India, Mr. Prasad is a lightning rod for one of the country’s most wrenching debates: Has India’s embrace of economic reforms really uplifted those who were consigned for centuries to the bottom of the social ladder? Mr. Prasad, who guesses himself to be in his late 40s because his birthday was never recorded, is an anomaly, often the lone Dalit in Delhi gatherings of high-born intelligentsia. He has the zeal of an ideological convert: he used to be a Maoist revolutionary who, by his own admission, dressed badly, carried a pistol and recruited his people to kill their upper-caste landlords. He claims to have failed in that mission.

Mr. Prasad is a contrarian. He calls government welfare programs patronizing. He dismisses the countryside as a cesspool. Affirmative action is fine, in his view, but only to advance a small slice into the middle class, who can then act as role models. He calls English “the Dalit goddess,” able to liberate Dalits.

Indian journalist Manoj Joshi agrees with Prasad [and Abhijit Banerjee, the economist quoted later in the article] that economic liberalization and political representation may indeed be the ticket out of centuries old stagnant and unfair social structures.

I think that the truth is a combination of Prasad and Bannerjee’s views. In the past, with the socialist-oriented governments that emphasised distribution rather than production, all that happened was that poverty was distributed. Now, with the economy growing at an average of 8 per cent in the last five years, you have real growth which can be distributed. So, the government’s coffers are brimming– they are able to subsidise vast social welfare programmes such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme which would provide 100 days of work for a member of every family in the year. You have the loan waiver of Rs 60,000 crores to forgive the debt of the poorest farmers and so on.

The problem for the Dalits is that they had no equity in the form of land or education. In addition to their menial jobs as scavengers, Dalits  have mainly been landless labourers. Education creates equity which can be transformed into jobs. Some 16 per cent seats in educational institutions and government jobs are reserved for them.

But Bannerjee is right that this rise has been accompanied by the growth of Dalit political power. With the decline of the Congress which overwhelmingly represented the Dalits, they have realised the value of their votes in the frationated Indian political scene. Ms Mayawati has been able to wield them into a formidable voting machine in her state of Uttar Pradesh. But even then they only account for 18-20 per cent of the electorate and need to ally with other groups to control the state assembly. In fact the Bahujan Samaj Party’s key cadres are people who have come up through the system of  reservations in educational institutions and government.

Remarkably, no Dalit movement, be it in the heydey of the Indian communist movement in the 1940s-1960s, or even now, has ever called for a violent overthrow of the system which as you know has been one of the most repressive in the world. Even though Ms Mayawati’s rhetoric can be very sharp, and even abusive, she is working systematically through the electoral system to establish her hold.

I agree that participation in the newly emerging economic opportunities, offered mostly in urban areas, is one way to erase ancient inequities. But is that as easily done as imagined in a society where access to education, health care, jobs and even mobility is often determined by the accident of birth ? The Indian caste system is an intricate behemoth rooted in deep cultural rut. Education and political empowerment will hopefully erase the oppressive and limiting forces of prejudice some day. But for the disenfranchised changes are painfully slow to come.

Old India’s caste prohibitions have made sure that some can prosper more easily than others. India’s new knowledge-based economy rewards the well-educated and highly skilled, and education for centuries was the preserve of the upper castes.

Today, discrimination continues, with some studies suggesting that those with familiar lower-caste names fare worse in job interviews, even with similar qualifications. The Indian elite, whether corporate heads, filmmakers, even journalists, is still dominated by the upper castes.

From across India still come reports of brutality against untouchables trying to transcend their destiny.

It is a measure of the hardships of rural India that so many Dalits in recent years are migrating to cities for back-breaking, often unregulated jobs, and that those who remain in their villages consider sharecropping a step up from day labor.

On a journey across these villages with Mr. Prasad, it is difficult to square the utter destitution of his people with Dalit empowerment. In one village, the government health center has collapsed into a pile of bricks. Few homes have toilets. Children run barefoot. In Gaddopur, the Dalit neighborhood still sits on the edge of the village — so as not to pollute the others, the thinking goes — and in the monsoon, when the fields are flooded, the only way to reach the Dalits’ homes is to tramp ankle deep in mud. The land that leads to the Dalit enclave is owned by intermediate castes, and they have not allowed for it to be used to build a proper brick lane.

Indu Jaiswal, 21, intends to be the first Dalit woman of Gaddopur to get a salaried job. She has persuaded her family to let her defer her marriage by a few years, an audacious demand here, so she could finish college and get a stable government job. “With education comes change,” Ms. Jaiswal said. “You learn how to talk. You learn how to work. And you get more respect.”

Without education, the migrants from Gaddopur also know, they can go only so far in the big cities that Mr. Prasad so ardently praises. Their fabric-pressing factories in and around Delhi have been losing business lately, as the big textile factories acquire computerized machines far more efficient than their own crude contraptions. One man with knowledge of computers can do the work of 10 of their men, they say. Neither Mr. Kumar, nor the two sons who work with him, can afford to buy these new machines. Even if they could, they know nothing about computers.

The village Dalits do not challenge Mr. Prasad with such contradictions as he travels among them preaching the virtues of economic liberalization. He is a big man, a success story that makes them proud.