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equality of rights,
equality of results
equality of opportunity?
how are we to achieve equality of opportunity while permitting inequality of results? Wouldn’t those who are ahead also invest their material and cultural capital in keeping their progeny ahead?
upper-caste, middle-class folks in Delhi are more outraged by a woman’s rape if they see her as ‘one of us’, and less outraged if she is a Dalit in a neighboring Haryana village, an urban maid, or a hijra in a slum.
Kenyan author of Decolonizing the Mind, ‘Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control.’
Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Liberty/Oppression, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation. Liberals and conservatives differ on how they interpret and relate to them. Haidt has shown that whereas liberals fixate on the first three much more than the latter three, conservatives emphasize all six more equally.11
most people who subscribe to a social ideology don’t usually do so out of compulsion or malice. Most often they are simply born into it, come to identify with it, and do not question it enough.
prevent the oppressed from becoming the new oppressors, as the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire cautioned in Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
introspect, step forward, and join forces with the oppressed out of a
Dalits (‘the oppressed’), numbering one out of six Indians. For
Joothan
the binary schema assumes a default alignment between sex, gender, and sexuality.
Homo Hierarchicus.
The Indo-Aryans, whose culture became dominant, introduced into the region their social pyramid with three classes, or varnas (‘color’): the Brahmins (priests and teachers), the Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), and the Vaishyas (traders and merchants). They added a fourth varna after their arrival: the Shudras (laborers and artisans).
‘According to the Mahabharata, the ‘colors’ associated with the four [varnas] were white, red, yellow and black;
The Ramayana contains strong expressions of hierarchy, the Bhagavad Gita extols the sanctity of caste, and The Laws of Manu attempts to codify its operation,
Historians report a few instances of it in pre-Gupta times, some as early as 400 BCE when Panini mentions it. From around the same time, one of the Jataka Tales—which contain stories about the Buddha’s past lives—mentions the Chandala, whose mere sight sully a merchant’s daughters and a priest.
Historian Romila Thapar therefore dates the appearance of untouchability to over 2,000 years
too. In some regions, the feudal landlord was even entitled to spend the first night with the newlywed wives of the ‘untouchable’ men in his employ, as in the infamous system of dola.
while caste is today most visibly associated with India, forms of it have either existed or still exist elsewhere, including in Japan (including an outcaste group, the Burakumin), Korea, Europe, Hawaii, Arabia, and Africa, some with strikingly parallel notions of ‘purity’ and ‘pollution’.
According to Anderson, Hereditary, hierarchical, occupational, striated through and through with phobias and taboos, Hindu social organisation fissured the population into some five thousand jatis, few with any uniform status or definition across the country. No other system of inequality, dividing not simply, as in most cases, noble from commoner, rich from poor, trader from farmer, learned from unlettered, but the clean from the unclean, the seeable from the unseeable, the wretched from the abject, the abject from the subhuman, has ever been so extreme, and so hard-wired with religious force
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Notably, Sanskritization not only didn’t challenge the caste system, it strengthened and legitimized the pursuit of what Ambedkar has called its ‘ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt.’22 In effect, ‘By adopting the most prestigious features of the upper castes’ ethos, the lower castes explicitly acknowledge their social inferiority.’
In juridical terms, ownership of a person, he conceded, made slavery worse than untouchability. But in practice, the slave, being property with value, gave the master an incentive to take ‘care of the health and well being of the slave’. Whereas, ‘No one is responsible for the feeding, housing and clothing of the untouchable.’ Furthermore, ‘slavery was never obligatory’, it only ‘permitted’ one to hold another as slave. ‘But untouchability is obliged,’ he wrote. A Hindu ‘is ‘enjoined’ to hold another as untouchable’, a ‘compulsion [that the Hindu] cannot escape’.
But as Sivakami has written, the ‘relative silence on the part of non-Dalits on issues of caste amounts to an assumption that confronting casteism and untouchability is the sole responsibility of Dalits, just as it was assumed that confronting gender inequalities was the job of feminists.’
They spoke of the conditions thought to be necessary for the flourishing of democracy: an egalitarian social order, an ethos of individualism, and a culture of secular politics and pluralist tolerance. India had mostly the opposite: a deeply hierarchical social order, subservience of the individual to family and community, and a culture of political quietism, though it did have a kind of tolerance (more on this below).
Another common misbelief is that the Constitution limited all reservations to 10 years, whereas it did so only for political reservations (in state assemblies and the Lok Sabha), not for reservations in jobs and education, where the timeframe was kept open-ended and to be determined by outcomes.
treat unequals as equals is to perpetuate inequality. When we allow weak and strong to compete on an equal footing, we are loading the dice in favour of the strong and holding only a mock competition in which the weaker partner is destined to failure right from the start.10
One wonders why their vehemence against caste-based reservations does not extend to gender-based reservations, when both caste and gender are sources of systemic disadvantage in Indian society. Is it because sisters and daughters in their midst help them overcome their empathy deficit?
India was effectively a democracy of the few, by the few, for the few.
They don’t recognize that while caste-based prejudice or discrimination is bad, a keen awareness of our different caste privileges is both good and necessary for positive
change.
According to a 2012 study, ‘caste still remains a real axis of urban residential segregation in India’s seven largest metro cities, [finding] residential segregation by caste to be sizeably larger than the level of segregation by socio-economic status.
Blocked by Caste, decisively dispels the belief that the private sector is mostly caste-blind and hires based on ‘merit’.13 It shows that equally qualified Dalit and Muslim résumés are much less likely to get selected than upper-caste ones, and exposes other ‘hidden nuances of caste prejudice in the language of globalisation that contemporary India speaks.’14
Narendra Modi, when he was Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2010, got away easily after coldly comparing Dalits to ‘mentally retarded children’ who gain ‘spiritual experience’ from manual scavenging.
None of the eighteen chairs thus far of the Indian Council of Historical Research, which funds historical research in India, has been Dalit.
There is no comparable Indian counterpart of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Which other epic has a hero as introspective and truth-loving as Yudhisthira, or as prone to ethical doubt as Arjuna, or as magnanimous as Karna?
do not see that any good can come from killing our relations in battle.’ (Some have compared this to Ashoka’s turning away from war, which likely preceded the composition of the Gita and may have inspired this framing.)
Gandhi’s case reminds us that what people take away from a scriptural text is inseparable from who they are and what they bring to it.
He suggests ‘that some of the many hypocrisies we observe in Indian life today may have their origins in the way the message of the Gita can be read.’14
How comforting, to have the Lord of the Universe (or Ultimate Reality personified) issue a moral blank cheque to a man disinclined to slaughter his relatives!
Taking an even more pessimistic case of 95 percent under-reporting in Delhi (only 1 in 20 reports) and the optimistic case for US cities (1 in 3 reports), the actual number of rapes in Delhi becomes 20X more than reported, and in US cities 3X more than reported. If we do the math, Delhi still registers a lower incidence of rape than most of the 76 US cities in the DoJ list.
But this media coverage, especially by TV news channels, has also been skewed and misleading.
its incidence to be much higher than it is. As a result, people have ended up with a heightened sense of fear for women being raped when they venture out by themselves—above and beyond their longstanding dread of women being catcalled, ogled,
only 11 percent of legislators in India are women (2014), far below the global average of 22 percent, 23 percent in China and Sub-Saharan Africa, and 42 percent in the Nordic countries.
Preservation of caste has long required strict control over women’s sexuality, giving rise to the custom of child marriage and prohibition on marriage, including of widows, to lower caste men.
‘Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control.
Bilingual folks think differently when they immerse themselves in different languages.4
Ngugi wrote that if the bullet was the means of physical subjugation, language was the means of spiritual subjugation of the African child, resulting ‘in the dissociation of the sensibility of that child from his natural and social environment, what we might call colonial alienation.’
