Checkpoint Sociology: A Cultural Reading of Policies and Politics [1 ed.] 1032523395, 9781032523392

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Checkpoint Sociology

A Cultural Reading of Policies and Politics

Checkpoint Sociology

A Cultural Reading of Policies and Politics

Dipankar Gupta

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Dipankar Gupta and Aakar Books The right of Dipankar Gupta to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan or Bhutan) British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9781032523392 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032523415 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003406204 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003406204 Typeset in Garamond by Arpit Photographers, Delhi

To

Pradip Bose

Kolkata will never

be the same without you

Contents Preface

9

1. Smell Check Your Numbers: Public Policy and

Sociological Sensitivity 13

2. Numerical Thresholds as Industrial Inhibitors: Raising

Capacity and Formalizing the Economy 38

3. The Changing Villager: What the Numbers Do Not Tell 68

4. Normalising Caste: Same Numbers, Differing Relations 84

5. Beyond Numbers to Citizenship: Overcoming

the Majority-Minority Divide 100

6. Urban Planning for “Citizens”: Emphasising Space

Over Non-Space 112

7. Individuals Possess Rights, Governments Perform Duties:

Citizenship and Social Policy 123

8. Confidence Crisis: Liberalism as a State of Exception 138

9. Source Credibility and Campaign Redundancy:

The Merits of Slow Thinking 146

10. The Public and Private in Policy Making: Lessons for

Media and Covid Control 155

11. Culture War Won: Defying Arithmetic in 2019 Elections 167

12. Why Other People Matter: Empathy and its Policy

Implications 187

13. Checkpoint Sociology: Three Theses on Method 203

Appendix Vignettes: Policy against Prejudice 213

References 235

Index 241

Preface All societies are exceptional in their own way and, in the case of India, it is all the more so. Yet, as sociologists, our task is to make the unfamiliar familiar and in order to do that we use concepts and theories which have a universal appeal. In no way does this attempt stamp out the specifics; it actually makes them come out sharper and yet easily accessible to a cultural outsider. In the following pages, some themes have been chosen for discussion because they have a bearing on Indian social policy as well as figure repeatedly in everyday contemplations. While considerations of the economy dominate policy formulations, often there are hidden assumptions behind them that are never articulated. These have to do with cultural beliefs, even prejudices, and all too often left as pieces in a box of puzzles. It remains then for the sociologist to arrange them in order for they deserve a more generous treatment, one that make their specifics amenable to universal theories. The subjects that concern us in every chapter in this volume are almost as familiar as the boy next door. They might seem all too common place for which reason some may even dub them as frivolous. On reflection it is rather paradoxical that we tend to undermine facts we are overly familiar with because, very often, it is these that play a significant role in our routine existence. However, sociology does not make that mistake for these everyday occurrences actually firm up our social lives. It is their repetitiveness that lays the pylons of some of our most crucial institutions and this is why

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what is profound often masquerades as trivia. Yet it is when we are comfortable with and in control of facts closest to us that we can navigate with ease to those posts that are at a distance. It is also true that planners and administrators seek to order our everyday lives for our greater good. In this volume we will have something to say about those efforts, but from a particular point of view that privileges the sociological optic. Administrators and Planners have rarely paid attention to sociologists and have depended instead, almost exclusively, on economists. Doubtlessly, some of the country’s ablest minds in that field were harnessed by successive governments but, as the following pages, will show, there was much they missed out. What is perhaps more inexcusable is their undermining of all qualitative inputs, many of them sociologically researched, to the category of “anecdotal evidence”, hence easily bypassed. If knowledge cannot be quantified, so goes the dictum, it is not hard evidence, consequently, important facts have gone unrecognised by administrators and their cohorts of experts. The black box of economics has never been rattled. This book attempts to do just that in some measure. This fascination with numbers did not just lead to all kinds of elision but, much too often, to an ironwilled resolve to find numbers where they do not really belong. The first major obstacle numbers face in their attempt to be meaningful is the preponderance of informal labour in India’s economy. There are a number of speculations on this matter and that is quite the nature of the beast. However, even the most optimistic estimate would suggest that roughly 75 per cent of India’s labour work in the informal sector; of course many others peg it at 92 per cent, or thereabouts. One way or the other, it is impossible to get a firm grip on this which is why it is not possible to do anything but take a guess on the extent of informal labour in formal enterprises. This is not just idle speculation for we need some kind of sensitivity towards this aspect for so much of our export earnings are dependent on informal labour and yet we know so little about

Preface

11

it. As we said earlier, such is the nature of this beast! Even so, just imagine how crucial it is to have this information for it would then advise us with greater acuity on how we should train our export policies. Is it advisable to produce goods cheap and score over other countries in terms of low wage, low skill, goods or should we move up the technology chain? One can see this devotion to numbers in abundance in our much publicised, decades long, discussions on poverty. As salaries and bank statements do not reflect real incomes for masses of workers, calorie intake and linked basket of purchases became a proxy measure. How inadequate these attempts were will become plain as we go along, but the absurdity of such exercises was hidden because there was a razzle dazzle play of numbers in the foreground. Recently provident fund (PF) records are put to use to record poverty alleviation, forgetting that such payments affect a small percentage and in no way signal long term employment. Under these circumstances, the best one can do is to show a rise in percentage terms, which is a blip in the overall picture. While mulling over this we must also remember that PF payments indicate nothing other than a certain sum was paid, but has no bearing on overall annual earnings. Legally, if a person has a properly contracted job then, by the rules, that worker is entitled to PF for the period of employ only, no more. When we later discuss labour laws in our country, this aspect will become clearer. Also, flashing numbers has made poverty a debatable subject forgetting that it is so in your face that quibbling over percentages seems a wasteful and diversionary exercise. Obviously, this keeps another world, so dominant in our everyday experiences, but outside the realm of easy quantification, away from serious administrative concern. For example, do we really know if poverty and farmers’ suicides are always strongly correlated? Do we understand the extent kinship ties might pressure a person to end one’s life? Finally, why is it that farmers all over the world are more prone to suicides than any other occupational group? Are

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they all desperately poor? Of course they are not! Could there be other factors too which we are overlooking because they are not quantifiable. Even when it comes to election analyses, here again it is assumed that people vote for reasons economic. Once again, as statistics can show which interest groups have done well, not so well, or faced actual reversals, it is tempting for many analysts to link these findings to election outcomes. Numbers to the rescue. It is, therefore not surprising that ‘rational choice theory’ which was first developed in Economics is lifted to understand voting behaviour with somewhat disastrous results. The assumptions behind rational choice theory and what goes through the minds of an ordinary voter cannot be further apart, but the aura of economics and number seduces so many. Remember that parable. A man is looking for his keys under the lamppost because that is where there is light but not because that is where he dropped his delinquent keys. That is exactly how our fascination for numbers plays out in policy making. Just because a certain aspect of our lives easily yields to numbers, we believe those areas alone are reliable and worthwhile. As a result, economists who are single-minded in their pursuit of numbers get greater prominence than they should in understanding social behaviour. As the pages turn, the readers of this book will sense the deficit that this pursuit of numbers brings about in our understanding of the most pressing issues in Indian society. As money and numbers go well, hand in hand, it is easy to fall victim to the view that “it is (always) the economy, stupid.” Instead, what is advocated here is to be culturally sensitive to factors that lie beyond numbers in order to get a closer understanding of how people actually live and think. I am grateful to the editors of Open Magazine, Indian Journal of Labour Economics, Sociological Bulletin, and Lexis Nexus Publishers for allowing me to reproduce what first appeared there. So, without more ado, let us start.

1

Smell Check Your Numbers:

Public Policy and Sociological Sensitivity

Counting Poverty: A Never Ending Obsession Figures read like a menu card, or a wine list. We all have our favourite numbers when we choose from statistics a la carte. But as all Bengalis know, you can dress up a fish to look good, but if it is rotten it is going to smell. According to one tally, just about 28 per cent of India’s population lives below the poverty line (BPL). The same cooks will tell you that this number was at roughly 45 per cent just about a decade ago but much of that vaporized because of economic reforms. This is clearly India shining; you might even need shades to cut the glare. But then our nose tells us something different. There are still so many poor people, so many hovels, so many mounds of filth, and so many beggars. This is why we need the smell check. The low poverty rates look good only if the cut off is at Rs. 11.80 per day, per person, spending power in villages and Rs. 17.90 in cities. How irrational is this figure? Basically, this would be the price of a local bus ticket, and no snacking on the way. But can a man live on bus rides alone? Should we increase this number ever so slightly, by Rs. 3 for rural areas and Rs. 2 for cities, the statistic begins to gather an odour. Now the proportion of those who are poor goes up to about 38 per cent. Slowly raise the bar by another tiny fraction, say to Rs. 22, and this figure swells to an amazing 70 per cent.

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Now this number may have a high smell but it agrees with what we sense around us. Once we begin to trust our nose we look for figures that would otherwise remain hidden. For example, there is a fair amount of jubilation that the number of women in the workforce has increased. Between 1972 and 2005 the share of women in regular employment rose from 27.9 per cent to 35.6 per cent: a jump of 7.7 per cent. This is certainly worth congratulations and a few rounds on the house, yet it does not smell quite right. And why should it? A closer attention to detail will show that during the same period the proportion of regularly employed men came down from 50.7 per cent to 40.6, a fall of 10 per cent. In balance then, there are fewer regular workers on the muster sheet. Again the nose reveals what numbers conspire to conceal. Sure enough, by 2017-18, the smell turned high again when the labour participation rate fell to a record low of 49.8 per cent from the 63.7 per cent it touched in 2005. The figure for women too sank from 24.8 per cent in 2004-5 to 17. per cent per cent in 2017-18 (https://www.newsclick.in/female-labour-force-in­ India-declining; and https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/ daily-news-editorials/female-labour-force-participation-in-india; accessed on July 9, 2021). When we rejoiced back then, we didn’t care for the smell check and sure enough the stench became strong slightly over a decade later (https://cleartax.in/g/termslabour-force­ participation-rate; accessed July 15, 2021) In the meantime, a mini revolution has clearly been achieved with statistics riding shotgun. In 2019, the official poverty figure is now just 6.7 per cent which comes to about eight million people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_India). Yet, is this what our noses and eyes tell us when we go to Indian slums, villages and cities? Is this what we see when we go to hospitals, especially public hospitals? What about the quality of education and public schools (see Acharya, 2021: 166-177)? While we chew on this question, think of the following as well. According to a World Bank report, India has the second largest

Smell Check Your Numbers 15

percentage of stunted children in South Asia. Along similar lines, Lancet reports that in 2017, 68.2 per cent of all under five years of age deaths were on account of malnutrition (https://www.google. co.in/search?q=stunted.children.in+India&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF­ 8&hl=en-in&client=safari). Sadly, India ranks 94 among 107 countries surveyed; Nepal and Bangladesh are higher up on the list and fare much better (https://swachindia.ndtv.com/ india­ is-home-to-the-worlds-most-wasted-children-as-per-the-global­ hunger-index-2020-52022/). So which data is more credible? True, the number of Community Health Centres rose by as much as 53 per cent between 1999 and 2007. Yet, according to the UN Development Report, India has slipped in world ranking of health from 128 to 134. One set of numbers gives us a thumbs up and the other a thumbs down, hence there is no option but to use the smell test. Playing with numbers just will not do. Infrastructural investment rose appreciably in the past ten years and if we stop there we have a fairy tale ending. Yet we still clench our jaws and fists because, unfortunately investments have not kept up in some crucial public sector undertakings. These include ports, railways, water supply, sanitation, health and education (ASSOCHAM, 2016: 3, 9). Being inattentive in these areas not only assaults our senses, but it is also here that most of us are impacted in our humdrum lives. Once again, let the nose lead the way. Non-farm employment is certainly going up in the countryside. Now almost half the rural economy is officially outside agriculture. This should be good news, but where are these villagers finding jobs? Between 1991 and 2001, the number of marginal workers (that is those without employment for six months or more in a year) increased from 3.4 per cent to 8.7 per cent between 1991 and 2001 (http://censusindia.gov.in/data_products/library/post_ enumeration_link/eci6_page3.html; accessed on July 9, 2021; see also: (https://censusindia.gov.in/census_data_2001/india_at_ glance/workpart.aspx). Further, the proportion of main workers to

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the population fell from 34.1 per cent to 30.6 per cent in the same period (ibid). Between 1980 and 2019 the production of cloth increased from 6 billion square metres to approximately 70 billion square metres (https://www.statista.com/statistics/797609/cloth-production­ india/; accessed on July 7, 2021). The established mills do not deserve credit for this. Here again, the organised sector, or mills, contributed only 3.34 per cent of fabric output and the remaining 96.66 per cent is produced by the unorganized sector (https:// textilevaluechain.in/in-depth-analysis/articles/textile-articles/cloth­ production-in-india-sector-analysis/; Accessed on July 7, 2021). To complete this story, we should also note that the textile industry contributes 4 per cent to GDP and 17 per cent to export earnings. This should give the impression that it employs just a few million people, but no. This industry, singly, employs 35 million people and is the second largest job provider after agriculture; yet, their overall performance is quite dismal. Contrast this with the booming Information Technology (IT) industry. This sector employs 4.36 million people and in 2017 it contributed as much as 7.7 per cent of India’s GDP. Its growth trajectory has been remarkable. In 1998 only 1.2 per cent of India’s GDP came from this sector (https://en.wikipedia.org/information_ technology_in_India; accessed on July 7, 2021). Its export earnings are also very impressive and topped US$ 69 billion in 2017-18. The IT sector is truly flourishing, but employs only three million people. What about the rest of the country? So often we boast that we have a huge middle class, but car sales in certain companies rose in 2018 by 40 per cent, but only 3 per cent of Indian households own cars. India also boasts nearly 300 universities, yet why do major companies, including Infosys, complain about the quality of their recruits? Once again, a disquieting voice from above. According to the reputed Times Higher Educational Supplement our educational institutions are far from being internationally competitive.

Smell Check Your Numbers 17

India’s pride, the IITs, occupy the 50th position in world ranking while the IIMs come 84th. The Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) is a lowly 192, and this is one of our best educational institutions. How does our neighbour compare from across the border? Beijing University is way up for it ranks 15th worldwide. What hurts is that even Fudan University does a lot better than JNU. It occupies the 72nd position, while our best can only make it three pages later. By the way, where is Fudan? It is said that good words cannot butter parsnips. Likewise, can good numbers hide the smell? How good is it also to churn out numbers and not think sociology. In fact, sometimes the devotion to numbers can lead one astray and miss out the real issues. For example, in these Covid pandemic times, how comforting is it to millions of informal workers on the highway that poverty rates are declining? Nor is it enough to look at the labourers returning home, post­ lockdown, as if it were simply because they were poor. That would be a purely economic way of viewing this tragedy. The real reason they were on the road was because the overwhelming bulk of these poor people were employed as informal labourers and did not have their families with them for they were uncertain about their jobs. Poverty is not an unidimensional feature and to see popular responses as outcomes of means-ends rationality where the economy is supreme can lead us to wrong conclusions. Poverty by itself did not prompt mass labour migration homewards post­ lockdown in March 2020. We must go beyond economics and the numbers it proffers to other sociological features to understand the compelling reasons why so many migrant workers started for their rural homes. Migrant Labour and the Ritual Tug of Home Did our urban, means-ends rationality get it wrong again? Was it lockdown-related job loss that poisoned the well and led migrant workers, mostly single men, to head for their villages? Or, was there

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something non-economic, not quite this-worldly either, that turned their stomachs in fear? It is the lack of empathy and the reluctance to see others in oneself that has led us to come to conclusions that are simplistic and “poverty” dependent.The migrant worker, when in crisis, is not seeking material help from his family in the village; they are, anyway, much poorer than he is. What disturbs him profoundly at such times is the fear of dying alone with nobody to perform the rites for him. In nearly every religion, the family plays a central role in the observance of mortuary rituals. Not just that, these have to be performed correctly so that the departed soul can easily negotiate the afterlife. It is considerations of this kind, more than financial hardship, that prompt single migrant workers to leave for their rural homes. The Indian labouring classes are much less rattled by joblessness as unemployment is a frequent, if unwelcome, visitor at their door. This is clearly an outcome of the fact that 93 per cent of our economy is informal. Ironically, the Industrial Disputes Act encourages this trend. It mandates employers to pay severance wages, and other benefits, only if workers are hired, and on the rolls, continuously for over 248 days. This law has had the unintended consequence of making it attractive for management to periodically flip labour around. As a result, only a minuscule minority stays employed for long. Most other workers suffer joblessness for long periods in the bear pit called the city. Yet, it took just two days of the lockdown for a large number of male workers to start the trudge to their respective villages. When faced with an imminent threat to life, the tug of home and family is much stronger for the migrant worker than the industrial glue that comes with an urban occupation. This job could be well paid and the worker may have even held it for some time. There are no laboratory conditions to settle this issue, but a

Smell Check Your Numbers 19

comparative approach might help. In Surat in 1979, when there was a widespread fear that a satellite was going to fall smack in the city centre, causing untold deaths, a large number of migrants there left for their villages. Again, in Surat, in 1994, the plague scare prompted over 6,00,000 to leave their work stations for the railway station. In both these instances, jobs were not threatened, but there was this perceived fear of death. On the other hand, when demonetisation happened in 2016, only a few migrant workers left because this distress was primarily economic, without a threat to life. Later, in 2020, when Covid-19 started killing wantonly, there was a radical shift; now, men without families went home because they did not want to die alone. We missed paying attention to this fact in the latest pandemic exodus because it was accompanied by an economic downturn. It also satisfied our middle class mentality because, from our angle of vision, economic lenses provide the right focal point. For the better off, even a temporary job loss can be traumatic. Besides a bruised self-esteem, there are also equated monthly instalments, or EMIs and mortgages to be paid. It is not uncommon, under these conditions, for a middle class person to turn to the family, as the first port of call. A 2018 CBRE survey shows that 80 per cent of young Indian millennials live with their parents. Further, a YouGov-Mint-CPR Millennial Survey conducted in 2020 tells us that they depend on their parents’ real estate property and savings to give them a start. No wonder, Census figures show that joint families are growing, albeit slowly, in urban India, but declining in the villages. But the short, bullet point is that unemployment does not send migrant workers to their villages because their families there are in no position to help them financially. What brings them home is the dread of dying on alien soil without the necessary prayers. Among Muslims, washing of the body as well as the lowering of the shrouded corpse are important aspects of death rituals

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and ought to be performed by the immediate family. Despite regional variations, certain aspects of Islamic mortuary customs are constant. Death rituals vary among Hindus too. There is no consensus, for instance, on how many days must elapse before major mourning rituals such as chautha and shraddha can commence. Also, most Hindus are cremated, but some are buried too. Only the family would know the minutiae of these details. Further, among Hindus, male blood kin alone can perform the pind daan and the ritual erasure of debts, or (rin), of the dead relative. If these, and other rules, are not followed correctly, the soul of the dead person could suffer perpetual torment in the other world. It will take more than a job somewhere to overcome the fear of dying anonymously, without proper ceremonies being performed. Forced by poverty, workers can take economic hardship on their chin and stomach at the same time. They may have a face for radio and a voice for silent films, but in the theatre of survival, they move adeptly, playing their part. It is in the theatre of death that they need their families to provide the props. If about 90 per cent of slum dwellers in Dharavi stayed put, post-lockdown, it was because most of them lived with their wives and children and did not fear a death without rituals. Newspapers were quick to notice that it was mostly men walking on highways, or leaving from train stations and bus stands. Though the image of vulnerable women and children in the midst of all this is much more wrenching, their numbers were not that many. This is not a trivial observation because women actually form 55 per cent (or, the majority) of rural migrants to urban India. If there were fewer of them on highways it was because arranged marriages have brought most of them to the city, not a flimsy job prospect. This makes their transition more permanent because they now

Smell Check Your Numbers 21

generally have properly anchored urban husbands. These women, in the fullness of time, make a home, birth a family and nobody in that unit need any longer fear dying alone and un-prayed. On the other hand, rural men migrate with tentative employment prospects and it will be a long time before they can, if at all, imagine getting their families over. Of course, a stable job, with entitlements, would let them live that dream. Till then, the thought of death and a frantic bus ticket home will always be paired. Even so, despite economic uncertainties, and underemployment, about 72 per cent of slum dwellings are owned, not rented. This shows the overwhelming preference the poor have for family life, only if they could afford one. That no more than 10 per cent of those in Mumbai’s Dharavi slums left for their village shows the stability that an accompanying family brings to the life of a migrant worker. If anything, the exodus did not show poverty as much as it demonstrated rootlessness, a fact that can be cured if the poor had stable jobs and they could bring their spouses and childrens over from the villages on a permanent basis. In which case, the fear of dying alone would not haunt them. When urban workers rushed to their rural homes, post­ lockdown, it was not poverty alone that drove them. To figure that out one needs empathy and intersubjectivity and try to think of yourself in their shoes. They fear a death where nobody prays for them more than a life where nobody pays them; this is universal. It is not only the economy…. Like poverty which keeps baffling statisticians, so does India’s urbanization. One set of census figures tells us how rapidly India is turning urban, but then again we find that the numbers hide some interesting facts. In other words, if India is getting smart then how come it is still so rural? France was only 55 per cent urban in the 1940s; so were large parts of Europe. Today, France, Italy and Spain, not to mention Germany and Scandinavia, are only 2 per cent-3 per cent rural. This

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is an indication of their prosperity. Latin America has just driven in to the smart set. Its high speed urbanization, like a souped-up limo, touches 85 per cent at various stretches. Village on the Wane Contrary to popular belief, most manufactories and workshops in India are in villages, not in cities. Further, the more backward the state the greater the preponderance of rural workshops. Nor is it that these rude rural outfits employ mostly women looking for a second income or pin money. Though this picture is fetchingly flashed in many NGO brochures, the truth is more complex. The more backward the region, the greater is the proportion of men in village-based manufactories and household industries. In UP, for example, six times more men than women work in such units. In Rajasthan the figure jumps to an unbelievable ten. Sadly, of the 93 per cent of our total workforce that toils in the unorganized sector, 74 per cent of them labour in rural India. So why is rural migration not the answer? Poor people on the margins of a village economy should up and leave at the first opportunity. Yet urban growth due to migration is steadily declining. In fact, the rate of urbanization in general declined in the period 1981-2001. We tend to overlook this as our towns are crowded and filthy. But they are not filthy because they are crowded; they look crowded because they are filthy. Had they been better planned they would smell different too. How urban then is urban India? The mere presence of towns does not always indicate development or prosperity, even, ironically, urbanisation. UP, Bihar and Odisha have a fair number of cities of different descriptions, yet they are all fighting for the last place. Half the towns of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, UP, Bihar and MP are really not urban for agriculture is still the mainstay of their economies. Who would have thought that possible? Weren’t we told that 75 per cent of the economy has to be non-agricultural for a place to be considered urban?

Smell Check Your Numbers 23

But wait, this is India! According to our official definition, even if the economic criterion falters, a place can still qualify as a town. All it needs is high population density and a municipal council or cantonment board. This explains why UP with 704 towns still lacks an industrial base and is cloyingly rural. Only a small number of urban Indians are really urban. For example, just 25 per cent of Bihar’s urban population lives in industrial centres. The remaining 75 per cent is officially urban but, on the ground, their routine is still agricultural. The man heads out to his fields at day break while his wife stokes her wooden stove. Yet, for the record they are town dwellers, no matter what their real lives are like. If they are not officially rural it is because they inhabit overcrowded spaces with a town hall in the middle, like a rhinestone in the muck. If this is the state of our urbanization then where are the hot spots and happening places that once accounted for our 8.5 per cent growth rate? There is, of course, the park facing view. Information Technology is doing phenomenally well, yet this sector employs only three million people. Their scrubbed and healthy looks clean up our sunshine. They live in our neighbourhood and swarm us with their cars. But the stubborn fact still remains: they number only three million. Most of the action is actually taking place in back alleys where small and informal industries function in largely rural and semiurban settings. These small enterprises have grown the fastest of all—by over 110 per cent in the past twenty-five years. They also account for the bulk of our exports. On the other hand, the workforce in the formal sector, that is those with pucca factory jobs, has remained unchanged for decades, at about 24 million. Considering our population, this number barely bobs up over the bottom axis. Though our urban growth rate has declined, urban agglomerates around Delhi and Mumbai have expanded. Investors tend to gravitate around bright lights, afraid of being robbed in the dark.

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Consequently, Class II and III towns have remained stagnant and the proportionate numbers in Class V and VI have actually gone down. And these “towns” are hardly urban in their deportment, looks or facilities. If investments come to big cities, then so should skilled manpower. But, surprisingly, better educated rural migrants tend to avoid metros and head to small and medium-sized towns instead. Even places like Mumbai and Delhi do not attract as many skilled migrants as they should. Here too entrepreneurs depend largely on mule packs of semi-qualified and half-literate workers. True, it is not quite as bad as Jaunpur or Moradabad, but it ought to have been much better. Town or country, informal unskilled workforce is everywhere confounding scholars who depend primarily on numbers. Informal Labour Constrains Macro Economics Macro Economics, in fairness, needs reliable numbers. This would make it a discipline that best suits Western societies where such numbers are reliable. In India that is far from being the case, primarily because of the huge presence of informal labour in our country which, by definition, is impossible to capture and harder still to quantify. As informal labour abounds here, and also because economists are trained Western style, the chances are that only those issues will be raised which can be resolved by statistics. Anything outside this, namely the informal sector, is over-spiced and bad for contemplation. It is this attitude that has kept our understanding of informal labour on a low calorie diet, though it gobbles up 93 per cent of our economy. As information on this is sparse, while the issue is so big, it is convenient to look the other way. This explains the administrative reluctance to bulk up on policies related to this subject. This method actually resembles the way religious discourses are conducted. The Church opposed Galileo and Copernicus because they asked questions for which the sacred texts had no answers. As

Smell Check Your Numbers 25

Joshua had bid, in the Old Testament, the sun to stand still and not the earth, therefore, Martin Luther concluded, Copernicus must be wrong. The Catholic establishment even accused Galileo of planting little figures in his telescope and passing them off as planets. Therefore, if the answer is not in the Bible, or Quran or Gita, ask not that question, admonishes the religious gurus. Likewise, as there is very little that is reliable about informal labour, either in the Census, or in surveys (the equivalent of the Bible/Quran/Gita), it does not count. Information, such as is available, is scattered and sniggered at as “anecdotal” and as informal as the subject matter it is concerned with. Consequently, a sizeable section of our society is deprived of attention. Numbers do not come easy in the informal sector, especially when commandeered from above and afar. However, our ignorance of these very vital issues does not disturb us too much. For example, we rarely give any thought to strategizing cottage industries, international competition, even worker-management relations, for they all include informal labour. When industrial strife is being discussed, figures tell us that there has been a dramatic drop in strikes over the past three decades. This should mean that shop floors everywhere should be buzzing with happy activity. Could it be that the sinister foreman, after a routine body check, swapped his old heart for new? Nor do we know how many unregistered units shut and open shop; or of workers who are routinely fired; or of wages unfairly held back. As a result, we do not have a measure of what India needs to do to become a global power. If there are so many microenterprises, why are we still poor? Also, why don’t graduates from vocational institutes find skilled jobs in the market place? When we laud our export earnings, the informal sector is rarely acknowledged, nor the millions who bent their backs, night and day. We have not even spared a thought for the health of these units; what if they collapse? The ruling view is that if it ain’t broke, and no emergency declared, why break the glass? Instead, we imagine ourselves lounging with the big boys, after elbowing the rat pack out.

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The consumer price index falters at the sight of informal labour. Nevertheless, we continue to extrapolate from those figures, even if it hurts. As long as the tag says the size is right, who cares if the shoe pinches? Was demonetization a success? By all accounts it was an electoral bonanza, yet so many questions remain unasked and unanswered. If livelihoods impact voting behaviour then we should know whether demonetisation affected workers differently. This is particularly so in the case of informal labour simply because of the many varieties they come in. The truth, however, is that we don’t have numbers and it isn’t always the economy. It is said that many lost their jobs, but who were they who were rendered unemployed? Were those who were given work by the week, or month, worse off than daily wagers as high currency notes would be needed to pay them; and these were now demonetized. Did daily wagers fare better, for they could be paid in small change? Or, perhaps it did not matter; they sank or swam randomly. We can only guess the outcome, but where are the facts? These would be hard to come by, quite obviously, for they would require a nonstatistical approach that integrates subjective, cultural experiences which dodge numerical presentations. Consequently, planners prefer to go where the figures and numbers are and their recommendations will nearly always be along some predictable lines. There is too much liquidity, or too little; we cannot afford higher inflation, or a little inflation isn’t a dangerous thing; or oil prices have shot up or fallen; or there are so many bad banks; or there is too much corruption and too little supervision; or too little privatisation and too much socialism; or, if all fails, there is the twin balance sheet problem. These are the items in their economic rattle box and they all come with pedigreed numbers. It doesn’t really matter if these numbers don’t count and hardly address the issues at hand, but as they are the only ones available, they start to function much like the parable of the lamppost mentioned earlier.

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Nor, should one argue that precision does not matter. It is a good idea when disciplinary questions and real world issues prompt the search for exactitude. On the other hand, when it is independently pursued for its own sake, because legitimate numbers are not available, social science becomes a closed box; nothing new is found, nothing new is said. Have wages for informal workers kept pace with inflation? “But we don’t have numbers on that”, says the policy maker. Why not instead start a conversation on inflation and subsidies where reams of numbers are readily available on tap? How often have you seen administrators choose this route? The Low Wage Leverage Inbreeding has its dangers, especially among prominent families. It is also dangerous among prominent disciplines, economics being a case in point. Policy makers like precision, economists like numbers, so if there is a moon in June and the lights are low, the two often hitch up for life. Consequently, economists find it unattractive to enlarge their intellectual gene pool and make contact with others on the same planet. It is this failing that makes many of their recommendations questionable. Take exports, for starters. It is true that our performance in here is miserable, but is the devaluation of our currency the best way out? Check out the consequences if we were to proceed in that direction. Almost instantly, our exporters would have to pay more to get the machines they need to start their businesses. We shall refer to Germany soon, but suffice it is to say right now that it is the second largest exporter in the world after China, but labour is not cheap out there. Therefore, should the only remedy be to cheapen labour further by devaluing our currency? South Korea is not a country that peddles cheap labour any more, but when was the last time it talked about devaluing its currency after 1997 which was when it was hit by a “financial crisis”? But in India, this course of action is rather routine and we don’t

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have to wait for a financial crisis. Whenever our exports falter, and they have been on that course for decades now, experts reach for their gun to rob the rupee of value. Have these economists paused to ask if the devaluations that the Indian currency has already gone through in recent times, say after 2015, have done export earnings any good? Not at all! Consider, in this connection an interesting factoid. About 25 per cent of our imports are petroleum related, but 20 per cent is on account of importing machinery. Further, the import content of exports is about 25 per cent, not including the vast, but incalculable, second hand market for imported machinery in the MSME sector. We talk at length about our oil burden, about our gold fixation, but rarely do we discuss our machinery deficit. In other words, before we can even expect our exports to get tastier, expect our capital goods to be more expensive. These machines are worth the money for they not only make no mistakes, but require minimal training to operate them. This has led to the gradual de-skilling of our working class. Things have come to such a pass that we now depend on China even for electric circuit boxes; not too long ago we produced them in garages. An industrial tailor in India today needs about a month’s apprenticeship as the imported sewing machine in use, with its many knobs and gears, is so versatile. With a flip of a switch it can do almost everything—from sewing pillow cases, to buttons, to curtain pleats. Likewise, textile and car parts manufacturers, whether in Bhiwandi, Gurgaon or Panipat, all import machinery, or buy foreign made stuff, second-hand. Under these conditions, devaluing currency, by RBI fiat, would kill the grass on the other side of the hedge as well. This brings us directly to a correlate misconception. The view that our businesses would have soared had they not been strapped for skilled labour is a convenient eye wash. The 68th round of the National Sample Survey shows that only about 58 per cent of those who go through a formal skill development programme find

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regular jobs. The remaining end up largely as unemployed, or selfemployed, and that was not why they went to vocational institutes in the first place. An Accenture study reports a collateral fact; apparently, a third of graduates turned down jobs because the pay was low or the work profile not suitable. This is hardly evidence of a technology hungry entrepreneurship. India has only 11,000 training institutes while China has 5,00,000. Not surprisingly, only about 2 per cent in the age group 15-59 have some skill training. At a higher level, things are scary too. Some IITs, India’s major grey cell number, have a staff vacancy as high as 40 per cent. A look at the admission cut offs in Delhi University say a lot. Our best out-of-school children tend to opt for commerce and not physics, chemistry or maths. In addition, there is a more recent and worrying trend. The number of literates in the working class is steadily increasing. Today, 27 per cent of the employables are classified as NEET, that is, not in education, employment or training, and this is three times the figure in China. At the same time, 96 per cent of those between 6-14 years of age are enrolled in school, demonstrating a strong desire to get educated. There is then a mismatch between demand and supply of skilled labour. So many want the education to get ahead and leave their poor working class background behind, but can they? This is where we could learn from fast growing Asian economies without, god forbid, imitating them. They too began from a poor industrial and educational base, but have since moved way beyond that. They climbed up leveraging their once cheap labour to move into highly skilled industries. But when our exports grew rapidly between 2003-08, almost at 18 per cent, we did nothing of that kind. They were able to do this because they put in a lot in education, health, and R&D for they believed that it was important to level citizens in terms of their life chances in the market place.

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Once they took this route, tinkering policies around the established given became a thing of the past, levelling citizens became a greater priority. A county can’t get rich by exposing its sores and selling its labour cheap. Once it does that it should be ready for some other country to underbid it and this is what India faces today with competitors all the way from Bangladesh to Laos. The thrall of tuning policies for the poor must give way to thinking of society as a whole. This needs greater work, but that is the only way public policies can be truly “public” and not just for the “poor”. On the other hand, we have many experts who advocate a reintensification of low wage labour approach, because that comes so easy. That this should happen at a time when the West is moving into driverless cars and intelligent automation, is both tragic and anachronistic. This is why our past cling, wraps our present and we just cannot shake it off. Third, the agricultural sector. It is often argued that our public finances would get a pressure boost if only we could tax agricultural income. True, there are some fat cows out there mulching in the fields, but the overwhelming bulk of farmers, almost 95 per cent, have earnings too low to be taxed. Nor are recurrent subsidies, habitual offenders. From USA, to the EU, to Japan farmers would die instantly without these handouts. Also, keep in mind that of all the professions, the highest rate of suicide is among farmers across the world. In France, decisionmakers are seriously concerned about it today. The answer lies in upgrading agriculture to industry by making it safe for small farmers to lease out to big operators. But the fear of the patwari and the tenuousness of land records prevent that from happening. If none of this is convincing. drive down the Delhi-Chandigarh highway where road widening is in full swing. The heavy machines on the job are foreign made, but there are hundreds of poor workers, squatting and chipping stones, Neolithic style. Expect delays, and expect accidents too, because inefficiencies multiply

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when entrepreneurs still find cheap labour profitable to employ. Workers in sweat shops cannot be turbocharged; they can only be flogged. “Citizens” or “Others” Ask the economist administrators for reasons why India finds it difficult to shrug off poverty and there will be little by way of explaining the structured factors behind this social misery. Instead there will be myriad policy suggestions that are eventist in character, seeking escape routes from the hole we are in, here and now. We will be told to discipline our practically corrupt, public sector banks, or to tighten fiscal policy to keep inflation from billowing, or to devalue our currency to help the flailing exports sector. There are a few more of this kind and they keep returning in different avatars and at the hint of a social crisis, we are never sure which rattle will be the first to come out of the box. There is truly no ‘why’ dimension in any of these answers but a laundry list of “hows’ and “whats”. The clothes fit fine they just need a good scrub. The real problem lies elsewhere. Public policy in any democracy must first respect the citizen and the planner must see the world through the eyes of such a person. This does not come easy in poor countries because there is such a vast gulf, in every possible dimension, between those who make the rules and those who have to abide by them. The middle classes in such societies is wafer thin and the poor are many, the very poor, even more. Under such circumstances it would appear that the best policy is one that targets the poor with a range of subsidies and special schemes, and this is the beginning of a long mistake. Such policies run up against several obstacles, but most importantly, they do not centralize the concept of citizenship. T.H. Marshall’s understanding on this subject is probably the clearest. According to him, citizenship confers a status of equality on everyone, a foundation on which structures of inequality may be built (Marshall, 2009).

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This implies that when a democracy is mindful of citizenship, its priority must be to erase the persistent, and stubborn, distance between the poor and the rest. When citizenship is not the governing credo its policy makers are satisfied if those on the other side are a little less sick, a little less starved, a little less wretched; in short, a little less poor. They are not really “citizens” as much as they are the “others” crying for help. That such people will always remain dependent on handouts and subsidies and, hence, can never be truly citizens, does not darken the mood of those who plan for the poor. As these anti-poverty measures are meant specifically for those “others” who are poor and very unlike those who devise these schemes, they are nearly always unsuccessful. Their most enduring feature, across decades in Independent India, has been that of corruption and inefficiency. In fact, they are failures from start to finish, destined to falter and collapse from almost the moment they left the drawing board. Democracy is equalizing, not in terms of wealth, but as Marshall said, in terms of creating equal opportunities. Once that is ensured in the beginning, citizens can go ahead and be unequal, in any way they choose, but at the end. This is obviously not easy. It is certainly way more difficult than “for the poor only” policies which are largely redistributive in nature with a specific category of population in mind. These do not require introspection, or mobilisation, or place us face to face with our own prejudices because they are never about all of us. The most oft resorted to method that starts this process is the wrangling that begins with the questions like who is poor, how many are poor, and how can we help them live without rocking the boat. All of this is quite heady, with a touch of noblesse oblige. As such efforts tend to be self-congratulatory they do not introduce even a pause to our established ways of thinking. What these policies do instead is to provide conditions for corruption. This is because the measures that are advocated by the

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administrator/planner/bureaucrat are not for themselves but for the poor “others” and their consequences are way beneath their actual interests. We need to recognise that as long as policies are targeted towards others and not towards citizens, which includes all of us, they will be riddled with corruption and malpractices. This is because those who matter in society are not those for whom these measures were instituted in the first place. Little wonder then that the “poor” for whom they are designed are soon dissatisfied by the performance of these interventions and take to private deliveries instead (see Gupta, 2017: Chapter. This is most marked in the case of education and health, the two factors count the most in equalizing the life chances of people as “citizens”, but is in plain sight in the public distribution of food as well (Saxena, 2009; Ninan, 2015: 33; see also Mor, 2015) Oscar Wilde had once said that socialism in Britain was not to eradicate poverty but to keep the poor alive. As we have just seen, most redistributive, “for the official poor only” policies, end up doing just that. To think as “citizens” and not in terms of the “poor” would cure us of needless quarrels over how many are poor, when poverty is anyway in open view. What would be a much better alternative is not to keep the poor alive, and many of our statisticians too, but look at people as citizens and plan for the society as a whole (Gupta, 2017: 33-51). At one end, we think public policy should patronize the poor, but not really see the significance of levelling them with “us’ and, on the other hand, there is suspicion too. This suspicion is a function of social distance and it comes up very starkly in our labour laws. Workers end up not trusting entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs, captains of industry, and sundry business people are not supposed to trust the workers. As a result we are caught in an air pocket where mutual suspicion inhibits any forward movement. What is the way out?

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Will the Real Elite Please Stand Up The poorer classes cannot represent themselves successfully. They are far too impoverished to press their case beyond the here and now. The middle classes usually plot it right, but it is only their wheel that gets the grease. The elite, however, have the potentiality to take history forward. That they are few in number does not count when history is told. All major democratic milestones were achieved over the past 150 years or so, because of elite interventions. These elite did not think of their sectional interest, but were people who had a higher calling inspired by citizenship (Gupta, 2013). Comfortable and assured of their status, the elite can rise beyond their birth and privilege and think big. In most accounts, elites are either considered soft and effete snobs, or dictatorial hardliners drawing inspiration from Nietzsche, and other think alikes. The truth, however, is that if we rejoice in our freedoms, in our modernity and our democracy, it is because the nineteenth century British and European elite made them possible. These have been their gifts to humankind. They thought “public” and not “self-interest.” Which is why when the elite get cracking, the society gets moving. Did the workers complain against how children were pressed into service, even sent to toil in mines? Did they set up barricades to limit the exploitation of women workers? Not really. In fact, workers actually resented some of these measures when they were being contemplated, most glaringly, in the instance of child labour. It was the elite that legislated on most of these subjects. These were men of aristocratic backgrounds or bred on industrial and commercial wealth. Indeed, many of them were also members of conservative parties, and yet as elites they realised that they had a social responsibility that went well beyond their sectional welfare. The 1833 Factory Act in Britain came into force under the Prime Ministership of none other than Earl Grey. For this to happen, there were many rounds of deliberation and wrangling in

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the British Parliament. Michael Thomas Sadler was an industrialist, but he worked tirelessly in favour of this law though it went against his class interests. Along similar lines, Lord Russell, a Whig aristocrat fought to abolish the Corn Law, though it benefited large landowners and members of his family. In fact, Robert Peel, another well born Prime Minister and Russell’s predecessor, had to pack up his cabinet and leave for he fought too hard against the Corn Law. But it was Robert Peel’s conservative government that passed the 1844 Factory Act which limited the use of child labour and spelt out the conditions under which women could be employed. Lord Canning, a rich barrister’s son, repealed an earlier Labour Act that did not allow agitations which combined the demand for higher wages, better working conditions and shorter hours. Samuel Plimsoll was the son of a rich coal miner, but that did not stop him from devising the famous Plimsoll line that ships had to bear so that they would not capsize from being overloaded. When the advantages of this became clear, Plimsoll’s popularity soared; he almost destabilized Disraeli. Even though he was a conservative, Benjamin Disraeli supported the 1867 enfranchisement of every adult male householder. Interestingly, it was with the 1875 Factory Act that Britain became the first modern industrial society. This was again accomplished by the conservative government of Benjamin Disraeli. Far from dragging his feet over it, he saw this bill as his greatest accomplishment. What is equally impressive is that Disraeli could do all this because he was supported by his cabinet, half of whom were lords. Together with the Factory Act of 1875, Disraeli also passed the Artisans Dwelling Act and the Public Health Act. With these laws in place, Disraeli’s government ensured that workers would not be subjected to more than 56 hours a week, and that they would live in decent dwellings, and with the general citizenry, be able to access health services. Richard Cross, the architect of the Public Health bill, was himself a large landowner from Lancashire.

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Need we recall the efforts of Louis Bonaparte who set up public hospitals and amusement parks for the poor, or Baron von Bismarck who is considered the father of social insurance the world over? Perhaps, we should acknowledge in passing, that elites make good revolutionaries too. Lenin’s father, Iliya Nikolayevich Ulyanov, was nobility and held a high position in the Russian court. Fidel Castro was raised as the son of a very rich sugar planter. His father, Angel Castro, even traded with American businesses. Mao Zedong was well to do but he got a lot of help from wealthy Chinese aristocrats likeYe Jiyaning, Lin Biao, Nie Rongzhen, Zhou Enlai, and so on. The Indian elite have not yet got into the act. So far they represent themselves and behave rather like the middle classes. They are self-indulgent and awash with their short-term interests. They are obsessively concerned about their real and imagined downward slide. Unless they think as elites should, India will continue to be slow and lethargic. Impressed by the Big Boom theory our elite are unmoved by the tenacity of poverty statistics, or by the failure of growth reaching down to the millions. If India’s economic successes translate into human development some time soon, it will only be once our elite wake up to their social responsibilities and like their European counterparts, think “public”. The Indian elite have acted as elite on three major occasions since Independence. First, when they introduced reservations for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. At that point, they had nothing to gain from this measure, either politically or economically. Only later did reservations become a self-serving tool for the political class. The second truly elite act was the 1993 Panchayati Raj bill. This legislation did not come up from the grass roots, it was an elite intervention. The bill was fought hard in Parliament and supported by those who could hardly gain any mileage from it. The Right to Information Act should qualify as the third major elite intervention

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in Independent India. In all these cases, the elite had nothing to gain, and, perhaps, quite a bit to lose, and yet they strove to achieve these political milestones. Otherwise, the privileged in India are generally inward looking as their attention is firmly fixed on their own welfare. They find most civic virtues a pain; labour laws and transparency requirements, needlessly bothersome. If they have to submit to certain norms and practices, it is with the deepest resentment. The usual refrain among them is that laws are impediments, and that there is something virtuous in bearing the black money’s burden. The age of the Western elite is also fast disappearing. That is why the Health Bill that President Obama successfully steered through is so welcome. After long decades, a section of the American elite acted independently of powerful lobbies that swung their heft in the other direction. Though the bill has universal coverage, the Gallup poll discovered that only 20 per cent of white Americans thought it might be of some use to them. But the democrats were not looking at mass approval when they rang this bill in. India is today debating comprehensive health insurance, security of employment in the unorganized sector and universal education, not just literacy. Our Parliament is packed with members who have vested interests in not seeing them happen, or, at best, passing these bills in a watered down form. This is the time for the Indian elite to stand up and be counted. We are waiting.

2

Numerical Thresholds as Industrial Inhibitors:

Raising Capacity and Formalizing the

Economy

Nobody can doubt India’s intellectual or entrepreneurial capabilities and yet its industrial sector has not performed according to expectations. Other countries in the neighbourhood have shot past even though India was comprehensively ahead of them when she won her Independence. There are several reasons for this, all the way from our colonial baggage to our economic and social stratification. Here, however, the primary aim is to show how India’s regulations on industrial disputes have slowed down her economic progress. In our view, the laws themselves act as disincentives against developing skill and scale in our enterprises. Thresholds and Labour Laws Industrial relations in India have suffered primarily because the laws around them are premised on an abiding mistrust between labour and management. This prompts a particular strand of opinion that views big enterprises with suspicion and sees minimal advantage in their prosperity or growth. Instead, small units, even cottage-like ones, are preferred where workers are hired on an irregular and casual basis. In pursuit of this ideal, some numerical thresholds are set up which, as will soon be clear, hinder industrial development and hold back enterprise and innovation. The Industrial Disputes Act (IDA), the central pillar of all labour related issues, encourages this trend given the way it

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centralises thresholds. The key ones are in Sections 25K, 25FFF, 25 (2)(a)(ii), 25(2)(b), which collectively relate to size of firm and related obligations. This, in my view, hurts the growth of a dynamic industrial sector and divides the working class. If a unit is above a certain size, only then are workers given security in terms of due process before being fired and compensation when dismissed. The fate of workers in smaller units does not concern the IDA as much. This results in workers getting stratified for there are now the privileged and the less privileged in this class. Workers who are employed in companies who have more than a hundred workers on their rolls are certainly better off than those in smaller companies. The IDA gives them greater economic security and political rights than those in smaller organizations. That is why when the term “labour aristocrats” is employed to designate those who are employed in enterprises with a 100 workers or more, there is a certain ring of truth in it. They are envied by the ones who toil in smaller enterprises and have none of the advantages that those in large organizations enjoy. This creates a gulf between them and inhibits a common front. Most significantly, the IDA protects workers on strike only when they are fortunate enough to be employed in large establishments. No such cover exists for labour in smaller units. Not surprising then that the management should pay close attention to thresholds in order to escape obligations towards the workers. On the other hand, privileged workers have a vested interest in keeping these thresholds firm and unrelenting as they gain from it. This encourages the birthing of small firms, for then the sternest provisions in the IDA can be sidestepped, leaving workers both vulnerable and pliant. Let us take a quick look at these thresholds. The first concerns the size of the unit. If it employs three hundred workers, or more, the government has to be notified before any labour dismissal takes place. Compensation after dismissal becomes an active concern only if the worker has completed 240 days of continuous employment

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If a unit employs less than 20 workers then it gets an additional benefit as it does not have to worry itself about paying out Provident Funds and bonuses. The IDA mandates dispute resolution mechanisms only in companies that employ 100 workers or more. Against this background, it is tempting for entrepreneurs to make sure that, as far as possible, their companies do not transgress these thresholds. This inhibits moves towards expansion because laws are tilted against large enterprises. Get big and you invite a slew of legal requirements which, by staying small and keeping impermanent workers, you can easily circumvent. The most frightening threshold that almost every entrepreneur dreads is letting people be in their employ for over 240 days. This is the structured rationale for the growth of informal labour in our country. As there are great advantages in staying small, particularly in terms of discipline and control, company promoters see this as their first choice. While such a strategy may suit some kind of enterprises, this discourages others that demand size and scale for full efficiency. For example, if a unit is small enough, it is also exempt from environmental norms which can be quite stiff. Their insignificant size also helps them escape audit scrutiny as they are difficult to trace and track down. Moreover, the National Sample Survey also informs us that 79 per cent of workers do not have secure contracts and are ineligible for social security and benefits (Rustagi, 2015: 19). As this primarily afflicts small units, the fate of workers in them is almost entirely shrouded. Anand and Thampi paint an even bleaker picture. According to them only about 8 per cent in India are in regular salaried jobs, but this number goes up to 53.1 per cent in China, 67.7 per cent in Brazil and 84.8 per cent in South Africa (Anand and Thampi, 2019). In this atmosphere of wariness towards large enterprise, two issues are overlooked and these are actually quite vital. The first is that it is not just financial capital, but intellectual capital too multiplies more rapidly in larger units than in smaller ones. Second,

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both management and labour can benefit from the advantages large units provide, but the presence of thresholds obscures this from view. Rationale Behind Thresholds The rationale behind the restrictions and sanctions that the IDA imposes on units that have 100, 200, 300 workers, or more, arises from flawed assumptions. The belief that entrepreneurs who think and act big are more rapacious and self-seeking than the smaller ones is not borne out by evidence. It is indeed a baseless assumption that units with fewer workers are more labour friendly and function under a caring, paternalistic employer. In truth, both these suppositions are incorrect. There is as much greed and avarice among small entrepreneurs as there is among the big. Workers in units that engage less than 100 labourers are equally susceptible to excesses by owners and managers as those in larger ones, perhaps more. These are facts whose relevance is often ignored, or not deeply internalized. What can be size dependent, but overlooked, are matters such as the disposition to invest, upgrading skills and creating workers’ loyalty. Instead, on account of the provisions in the IDA, the drift is in the opposite direction. That being the case, the marked preference for contract labour and the sub-dividing of single enterprises into artificially separated ones is widely prevalent. It is just not about what size would attract the law to give a notice before one goes on strike but there are other thresholds too which have to do with grievance mechanisms, severance pay, and bonus. Every entrepreneur keeps this in mind while operating and they cripple the well-being of industry as a whole. As units want to stay small and qualify below these thresholds, entrepreneurs that wish to expand do so surreptitiously and by subterfuge. What should have been a single unit, with easy cross fertilization between different specialities, is often broken up into several legal bits. This prohibits synergy between units because each is constrained, in

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law, by administrative borders, though these may be perforated in practice. It is not uncommon for entrepreneurs to set up separate units, to feed their major concerns, but claim that these are managed by legally discrete entities. As these contributing units are often small, they need not go though the complex registering mechanisms required for medium and large-scale operations. In truth, however, the ones who are legally owners of such units are in fact dummies of the original parent promoter. They are, nearly always, trusted workers who have served loyally for long years and are now being rewarded for their past dutiful allegiance. As these dummy owners are familiar with the way the parent company runs they have, over time, gained some organizational knowledge and craft skills specific to the job. This makes them heavily dependent on the backup of the true founder/owner so that the required books and records are in order. These feeder units are registered separately as either micro or small, but mostly micro. Once the formalities are completed (and they are not extensive), such outfits can get a host of benefits from the state. These range over a wide terrain and would be attractive to any entrepreneur. They can now benefit from excise exemption, accessing raw material at subsidized rates, special schemes from banks, to list a few. Therefore, the ploy of setting up splinter units serves two functions. First, it helps dodge IDA thresholds; second, it allows big promoters to soak in state largesse from which they would have otherwise been barred. As the cumulative advantage of all this is quite overwhelming, there is a clear attraction in staying small and looking even smaller. The inauthentic character of these sub-divisions can be quite obvious to the naked eye, but it is important that this eye must see. If one meets the pretend owners of such units, their lack of knowledge on the formal aspects of the business comes through immediately. They not only do not have book keeping skills, but also know very little of the markets their units are supposedly

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serving. This also mitigates the dangers of these dummy owners from being too ambitious and refusing to play the servant to the master who set them up. At any point, if this branch becomes unnecessary, or troublesome, it can be easily wound up as it is either “micro” or “small”. Such an arrangement compels units to undermine specialization as well as the acquisition of knowledge that can spur technical advance. As the dummy owners of these contrived units exist on account of loyalty, not entrepreneurial abilities, their skill set is limited. Consequently, those under them are usually not highly skilled either and, at any rate, not as qualified as those employed by the parent company. Such is the case when legal, but token, outfits are set up which do the packing, labelling, transporting or washing. Tellingly, if one were to visit these units it would be easy to spot that they usually serve just one customer. When large companies spawn small subsidiaries, that are legally separate, it is not always for petty side issues like packaging, logistics, etc. Often they are natural extensions that the original business requires in order to grow. For example, textile units may like to add dyeing and fabrication to weaving; furniture companies could diversify from wood to synthetics; or, clutch pedal producing manufactories could start making brake shoes too. In this process, the empire gets bigger in size, not because the original kingdom is growing, but because many more federating units are accreting to it. Yet, such expansions have their downside. They not only raise administrative costs but inhibit skill acquisition as well. This is because workplace expertise is less demanding at the level of the federating unit that values in staying small to beat IDA provisions. Even when skill levels are at a similar level, across the informal empire, social and investment capital stays under the control of the parent promoter. In all such cases, neither market contacts nor capital investments are creations of those who formally present themselves as owners. Further, analysts are often misled by the

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presence of sophisticated machinery in these organizations into believing there is skilled workmanship present. This is, more often than not, a misconception. Machines necessary for production are usually not produced in India, let alone by the unit that uses it. New generation machinery for almost all products are bought from Germany, Japan and, increasingly, China. What one needs to note about these machines is that they are of exceptional quality with superior degrees of technical accomplishment. Simply put, they never make a mistake. These capital goods are difficult to produce, require strenuous research and technical/scientific skills, but are very easy to operate. They do not need skilled workers to run them, or maintain them. The knowledge required to make these machines hum is quite rudimentary; all the workers need to know are the specific things they should never do. Though Indian companies are not in the business of making machinery, they do business with these machines. Sometimes they are even acquired second hand, but in good, durable condition. To work on them requires minimal training and this knowledge can be imparted quite easily to a semi-skilled person who is just about literate. Often, that too may not be required. There was a time when tailoring was a specialist affair. But now a clothing, or fabrication, unit can hire tailors that need about a month’s apprenticeship before they can start working. This is because the new machines are so accomplished. With a turn of a knob they can sew buttons; another turn and they can stitch pockets; another turn and they can make curtain pleats, and so on. The machine is now the star performer, and the tailor is just a facilitator. Not only is this the case with tailoring, but it holds true for car automotive parts as well. What a tailor needs to know is how to keep the material straight and which knobs, or levers, to press. What a car parts worker needs to know is to follow directions and not be careless. When one buys a vehicle from a dealer the

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impression one has is that this product has come out of a single, major producer concern. That is never the case. Practically every automotive car parts manufacturers that we find in Haryana, for example, work on imported machinery. They only require a handyman’s acquaintance with what makes them tick. One must learn rudimentary skills on how to control temperature, replace worn out parts and to generally keep the machine in good, working condition. Nothing more is expected from these workers and nothing more can they give, either. Informal Labour as Skill Inhibitors Almost all of this is an outcome of the constant pressure to remain small and not attract provisions of the IDA. If a company were allowed to expand and not benefit from provisions that smaller units enjoy, they may have promoted higher skills. As things stand, there is just no point in investing in human capital and knowledge. These attributes require scale for best effect, and that is not encouraged by the IDA. As if in lock-step, the IDA also says that if anybody is employed for more than 240 days then a special set of privileges come to that person. Such an employee cannot be fired in a summary fashion but is entitled to full compensation. That being the case, the chances of promoting skills at the worksite get reduced further. There is no accumulation and enlargement of skills for the worker will not last more than 240-days in this incarnation, at least, in this organization. For human capital to grow in an enterprise there must be something called the institutional memory of skill generation. But with the 240 day provision, the management is ever cautious not to slip up on the counting so that the worker is out on the 239th day, latest. Workers too do not have the incentive to learn and develop either for they know that their existence in this organization is a short one. Instead, they keep track of contractors who can switch them around from work site to work site.

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The movement of workers from unit to unit happens with fair rapidity; 240 days being the outer limit. This not just inhibits them from truly specializing and up-skilling themselves, in any craft, but employee loyalty too is seriously undermined. In many ways, such an outcome mirror images the lack of loyalty the management has towards workers. That is why when the cry goes up that workers frequently absent themselves, or return late from their leave, it should be discounted. These are all outcomes of workers not feeling really wanted in the company in which they are employed. They too are biding time and notching the days. Workers have often expressed the view that if the management recognised them properly, their outlook towards the company would change. What is not taken into consideration is how much a labourer wants respect from the owners and managers. That so many of them lack proper documentation of their status, even for those 239 days, makes their sense of self-worth fall even lower. No, they do not always dispute the fact that they prolong their leave without notice, but then they argue, why not? What has the management given them? If they overstay their leave, they have little to lose. It is for reasons such as these that companies remain low-skilled and small. All kinds of ruses are put in play, but if one were to take a longer view then both entrepreneurs and workers are losers when the day comes to a close. This is what the IDA does, and it does it rather blatantly. It keeps alive hostilities between workers and entrepreneurs by insisting on thresholds that can only help industry function below par. In turn, it encourages the existence of contractors, indeed, they are the backbone of Indian enterprise. Both workers and entrepreneurs are contractor dependent in a way that can only harm the long-term health of the economy. The informal economy does not operate in isolation, but often in tandem with the organised sector. In fact, the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector, found that the percentage of informal labour had risen dramatically from 37.8

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per cent in 1999-2000 to 46.6 per cent in 2004-05 in the heart of the organized sector enterprises (Report on Conditions of Work and Promotion…: 4). This was the first study of its kind (there have been a few later) and it sent anxiety ripples of anxiety among those who were willing to heed the dangers inherent in allowing the informal sector to grow unchecked. Subsequently, Maity and Mitra returned to this issue and found that by 2009 the figure was no longer 46.6 per cent but 84.54 per cent (Maity and Mitra, 2010: 8-9). Without fretting over numbers, what appears as undeniable is that the presence of informal labour in the organised sector is steadily rising. Contractors Everywhere There is this myth about contractors that must be put to rest at the start. In years leading up to the mid-twentieth century, the contractor was a person who had intimate links with the family of the worker. That is not true anymore, and there are reasons for this. Urbanisation and the breakdown of old rural relations are primarily responsible for a new generation of contractors and of workers. The ties between these two classes are not primordial, as it once was. Now they are established, more often than not, outside the village, at, or around, the workplace. Alongside, we need to correct, very quickly, another misconception. The hated contractor image is a cut out image of a past era without any real substance in contemporary times. Take away the contractor and workers would have a hard time orienting themselves as they transit from job to job (in keeping with the IDA thresholds). To be able to connect oneself with a resourceful contractor is, under these circumstances, a very fortuitous outcome. If contractors are in abundance everywhere it is also on account of a misreading of the law. It is not true that once a contractor is hired the promoter is no longer responsible for the conditions of work or welfare of the workers. Legally, the promoters/ management of a unit remain as principal employers and the contractor a copula

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of convenience, not a substitute. In other words, the management/ promoter must continue to supervise the contractor’s work to make sure that all relevant laws are being obeyed. There is no transfer of responsibilities, but just that of supervision. How the contractor functions has to be overseen and controlled by the management to ensure that no law is being violated. Very often, I have found, the owners, as well as those in managerial positions, are ignorant about this. They believe that, by law, if a contractor is in place, then they are off the hook. Sadly, as many law enforcement officers also subscribe to this view, the correctness of the situation is never quite comprehended or implemented. This also leads to the proliferation of contractors in practically every industry. The provisions in the IDA directly contribute to this outcome. Once the big, overarching rationale is in place, many sub-specialities tend to grow around it. Ways are found by which different enterprises work out the most convenient contractorworker relationship for themselves. There is then no one template that contractors, big and small, abide by, universally. Even so, the main intention, almost everywhere, is to find ways to steer around under IDA thresholds, primarily those related to size and job duration. This is not to undermine the attention that many small entrepreneurs also pay to bonus and provident fund thresholds. The first kind of contractor is a poor cousin of the dummy owner we had encountered earlier. They too are tried and tested, long-term employees and somebody the parent promoter can trust. They are contractors in name but actually paid by the parent owner to keep up appearances. In this case, it is not labourers who are flipped, but the contractors are. It is often the same labourers who stay on to work in the same establishment, but the contractors keep changing. Like dummy owners, discussed earlier, these contractors too can be called “dummy” contractors. Through their medium, the formal acknowledgement of longterm employees is compromised. They are now presented, in books

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with stiff new spines, as newly recruited contract labour though they have worked for long. It is artfully concealed that only the contractor is changing while other personnel remain the same. Undoubtedly, under this dispensation workers get a better deal than those who are moved from site to site on the 240th day, if not earlier. Even so they know they are not on top of the hierarchy from the owner’s, or management’s, point of view. The most coveted position will always be that which is occupied by those who are registered employees and deemed permanent. There is yet another variation that is very deceptive and can easily miss detection. I have come across this kind in quite a few places, though their numbers are still small. Initially I was quite confused because while the company did not smell quite right, all its workers had formal employment papers and were entered in the company’s books as full-time workers. The truth was quite different, but that took some time to figure out. The pieces began to fall in place only after an examination of the employment registers, not of recent days and weeks, but over a longer duration. While all the names were entered, some workers, on the face of it, were absent for months, not days. As one dug deeper, and went further back, one realised that these workers had been away from work for extended periods of time. Not one of them was fired, they just stopped reporting to their jobs. The employers’ reaction to this was quite unique. They said that their generosity and compassion made it difficult for them to fire these workers. After all, it is well known that members of the labouring class irrationally absent themselves against their better interests. So the management keeps these jobs open should the absentees one day choose to return. The truth was very different. The “absent” workers had actually been fired but their names were not taken off the rolls. I was made aware of this by a worker in the unit who told me how all this functioned but till then I was really quite foxed!

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The long and short of it is that contract labourers and contractors (both under different guises) are found across the industrial sector in India. Whether it is spinning, weaving, buffing, metal work, ceramics, powder-coating, furnishings, formal, permanent employees are few and far between. The unfortunate part of this story is the way the IDA has boosted a practice that has given the bulk of workers neither expertise nor respect. As most of them spend their entire lives working for contractors and are hired and fired at periodic intervals, they have no commitment to their employer, or to their craft. As a result, the belief of the irrational working class that is reluctant to return after taking leave, or is a laggard at work gets an empirical basis. In my experience I have found that workers, in general, feel a great sense of pride if they are given a permanent, formal position in the enterprise. Many of them have told me how they long for this status as it not only gives them security of tenure but also gives them a feeling of self-worth. If such good fortune ever came their way, they would be incentivised to stay with the job, grow with the job and return to the job promptly after leave. No doubt it suits the employers when workers play truant or when they end up with the same skills with which they started. This ideologically justifies their domination over their employees and also makes it easier to control them. Further, under the cover of the contractor the management and owners are able to fudge and lose records without being held accountable. All of this contributes to the great deception that almost every entrepreneur in India resorts to especially regarding to size and employment duration. The IDA provides them with the provocation to take these measures without a sense of guilt. What the IDA thresholds ultimately conspire to bring about is low skill and low wage employment, which suits most of our entrepreneurs just right. When workers have a tenuous position in the organization it also takes care of the possibility of unrest, grievance manifestation and strikes. There has been a long-term decline in the number of

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strikes and lockouts and this is primarily because contract work has made labourers vulnerable. FICCI documents the falling graph of strikes between 1980 and 2010 when the number fell annually from about 3,000 disputes to under 50 over a thirty-year period (see All India Association of Employees: 2). A more recent documentation shows that between 2003 and 2014 the number of strikes fell by 75 per cent and person days lost reduced by almost 90 per cent (Nanda, 2015; see also Ray, 2018). Given the propensity towards informal, low skill contract labour that the IDA unfortunately privileges, can child labour be far behind? If carpet weaving attracts child labour in Uttar Pradesh’s Sant Ravidas Nagar and Jaunpur districts it is because this work does not require special skills. What little is needed can easily be imparted to children who are also easy to control and easily dispensable. The view that carpet weaving requires a child’s nimble fingers to accomplish is a myth and has never been true. However, when international buyers entered the picture, a higher order of surveillance was introduced. This reduced the incidence of child labour in carpet weaving. Now it only needed a photograph on the net of a child weaving to blacklist the exporting enterprise in the international market. Again, control by owners through contractors has also led to the preference of migrant workers over local ones. It is true that migration in India has increased tremendously, not just from rural to urban but also from rural to rural. This is because a large number of informal enterprises have also been set up in villages and many in the countryside go there in search of work. The long-distance migrant may not be any more skilled but because home is far away such an employee is less prone to absenteeism. While a local worker might take off to be with their families to fulfil a trivial obligation, a migrant is more likely to leave only when the occasion is more significant. There are, of course, instances, when certain craftspeople travel across the country because they are in demand, but their

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numbers are limited. Finally, what helps to seal the preference for migrant workers over local ones is that they are more amenable to management control. This is true not just of small scale and micro units, but also of larger ones. But through it all, what keeps this logic robust are the thresholds of IDA. The MSME Lock In While India spends about 29 per cent of its import bill on petroleum, what is not adequately emphasized is that it also spends about 20 per cent on machinery. If these machines were not to be purchased, we would find it difficult to produce most of the goods we export. In this connection we must also remember that informal labour accounts for at least 40 per cent of our exports. The MSME sector plays a major role in this and has in some cases displaced factory production. The collapse of textile mills and the sudden burgeoning of power looms is a ready example of this phenomenon. Over 95 per cent of what is considered to be in the MSME category is actually units that qualify as “micro”, not even “small”. This satisfies the Gandhian ideal of cottage industries but hardly contributes to innovation or to formalizing the labour force. Yet, units in the MSME sector are steadily growing. Between 2014-15 and 2015-16, the number of such enterprises has increased by 18.7 per cent. The number of people working in them has also jumped from 81 million to 117 million between 2006 and 2016. This trend is impressive till we realise that the number of unregistered micro units is 13 times the number of the registered ones. What is disheartening too is that these micro units do not want to step out of their baby clothes (see Reserve Bank of India, 2018: 101). Officially, MSME contributes about 40 per cent of the gross value of our economy, but so much of it is low skill and low technology. This holds back both economic growth and innovation in the Indian industrial sector. It is quite telling that even MSME’s contribution to the country’s manufacture has fallen from 42 per

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cent in 2006 to 37.3 per cent in 2013. This trend has deepened in recent years, probably because demonetisation in 2016 hurt the informal, small-scale sector the most. We can get a sense of this from our export figures, to which MSME make a major contribution. According to the Reserve Bank of India (2018), our 2017-18 export earnings have not yet touched what we had achieved in 2013-14 (ibid: 244). Alongside, and quite significantly, MSMEs addition to the total GDP also dropped from 7.7 per cent to 7.0 per cent in the same period. Inefficiencies have a way of coming out in the open and showing their true colours. Nor has the government encouraged micro units to become small ones and eventually graduate into medium-sized enterprises. Indeed, the government has set up several institutions tasked to upgrade MSMEs, but their record has been far from impressive. Besides the MSME Development Institute, that is widely recognised, we also have the NSIC, BCSB, SIDBI, NIMSMI, MGIRI, and so on. They all sound rather grand and these acronyms are mystifying, but MSMEs stay where they were. The RBI, at one point, attempted to nudge matters along and raise the bar for this sector. It advised banks to extend financial support for an additional three years to those MSMEs that want to grow up, but this initiative has also wilted. MSMEs receive an additional boost as they also help larger entrepreneurs to fulfil their orders without fearing IDA thresholds. The Report on the Conditions of Work and Promotions of Livelihood in the Unorganized Sector 2007 shows how the contribution of the informal sector to the formal sector had shot up from 37.8 per cent to 46.6 per cent between 1999 and 2004. This study was completed in 2005 and since then this feature has become stronger. According to Srija and Shirke the proportion has climbed in later years and is closer to 55 per cent (Srija and Shirke, 2012). Maity and Maitra contend that the number rose to 84.5 per cent by 2010 (Maity and Mitra, 2010: 8-9). Using another scale of measurement Sood, Nath and Ghosh demonstrate that the share of contract

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workers in organized employment has more than doubled between 2003-4 to 2009-10 (see Sood, et al., 2014: 60; see also Fallon and Lucas, 1991; see also Hazra, 2001). Numbers and more numbers, but what comes through is that informal labour is growing and this is visible even to the naked eye. For once, numbers agree with overt evidence, often decried as “anecdotal”. The other danger of MSMEs is the ease with which they can violate laws and regulations. As they are too small to audit (Basu and Dixit, 2014), practices that should never be tolerated go unchecked such as with reference to child labour, overtime and wages. Kattamuri and Lovo show in a recent article how small-scale enterprises seek out states in India where environmental control is low (2018: 35). Interestingly, it is not ease of doing business in the right sense of the term that attracts enterprise in this case, but the ease of breaking laws. Low in Scale and Skill When MSMEs mushroom because large-scale industries face regulatory headwind, a number of other factors emerge as a consequence. The most important among them is the low emphasis on skilled labour. This also fragments the working class which is really detrimental to the long-term success of established trade unions too. The complete rout of the once powerful trade union movement is an ample demonstration of this case. According to Maity and Marjit (2009: 17), where there is weak governance, informal labour and extra-legal contract labour transactions will be greater. This will result in large wage differentials between formal and informal labour, as well as low R&D investments. Under these circumstances why should informal labour not grow? In India, it now seeps through every pore of our economy. On account of this, casual workers look up to their labour contractor more than to the owner of the enterprise where they actually work. This is because, in keeping with IDA thresholds, most often a labourer’s contract with a company is through a contractor and ends

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before 240 days are over, if not earlier. If it lasts a day longer, then the employee can legitimately demand severance wages from the employer should the contract be terminated. Sadly, casual, informal workers can also be used as a bargaining chip to undermine the conditions and pay of regular workers too. A very credible survey reports that over 70 per cent of those in regular jobs do not earn the amount they are legally entitled to (see Anand and Thampi, 2019). This is the primary reason why our enterprises are smaller than those in South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines. While in India, large firms are about 10.5 per cent of the total, the figure for South Korea, Philippines, Malaysia and China are 29.6 per cent, 22.8 per cent, 52.8 per cent and 51.8 per cent respectively (Hasan and Jandoc, 2010: 7). Though productivity is low in smaller units (see Ramaswamy, 2016), and it is here we take a beating, but when it comes to large enterprises, productivity per worker in India compares well with other countries (ibid: 8-9). In the apparel industry, 90 per cent of units in India have less than five workers, whereas in China about 70 per cent have above 51 workers (ibid: 17). It is hardly surprising then that value added per worker in India is the lowest among all the major Asian countries (Hasan and Jandoc, 2010: 7-23). This is a good enough reason not to spend too much energy in encouraging small firms , unless, like Germany, they show an interest in R&D and moving out of their precarious existence. The accent should not be on small firms, as some recommend (see Das and Ghani, 2021) but providing the needed support so that firms increase their productivity, regardless of size. Eventually, size will count, but the crucial factor here is productivity. In Germany, just as a comparative point of departure, about 35 per cent of gross value added to the economy comes from small and medium sectors. Micro industries in Germany are not nearly as prolific on the job front as they are in India. While 79.3 per cent of Germany’s MSME are micro they only account for 18.8 per cent of

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the workforce. On the other hand, employment wise, while small and medium units are only 13.5 per cent of total enterprises in the country, they employ 47 per cent of the total workforce. This is because the MSME sector in Germany is not committed to staying small, or remaining informal. Many of them are getting large on their own steam, and should business prosper, the enterprises in this bracket are happy to grow up and exit it one day. Germany has other reasons to recommend itself as a model for India. Germany is the second largest exporter in the world, after China, and this is surprising because it has high labour costs. This demonstrates that cheap labour is not always an attractive selling point, as many of our economists argue. They, of course, do not say it in so many words all the time, but they signal this when advocating the lowering exchange rate so that India could then out compete other low skill products from other countries. German small and medium enterprises have a very positive outlook as their predicted value added growth in 2018 is about 10.2 per cent (see: https://ec.europa.eu/docsroom/documents/38662/attachments/12/ translations/en/renditions/native; Accessed on July 5, 2021). The popular belief that Germany has only large industries is false for 99.5 per cent of all private enterprises in the country are small and medium in size and yet they have high productivity, innovation and R&D too (see: https://universalhires.com/ magazine/guide-mittelstand-germany/; Accessed July 5, 2021). German small and medium enterprises spend a lot in training their employees for which reason their youth do not run up huge loans to get university degrees as they do in USA (see: https://www. managementstudyguide.com/germany-small-medium-enterprises. htm; Accessed on July 5, 2021). To get a measure of how far India’s lag in developing industrial skills, a quick comparison with South Korea would help, all the more because we have just familiarised ourselves with the German example. Almost the entire labour force of South Korea, that is, about 95 per cent, is skilled while the figure in India is a paltry

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5 per cent, if that. The MSMEs contribute nothing to R&D, nor do they require special skill development either.1 If they need skills at all, it is of the tedious cottage industry variety. Much is made of expertise of this kind and a certain romance is also attached to it. However, jobs which draw upon such skills do not evolve, but involute. What more can one expect of workers functioning out of dug out looms, or embroidering painfully in failing light? The informal sector has little need for formally skilled labour and that is quite obvious. Interestingly, even the IT industry, the jewel of India’s entrepreneurial world, spends far little on R&D than its counterparts do, even in middle income countries. The 2018 Economic Survey points out that India spends just 0.7 per cent of its GDP on R&D. The enormity of this minuteness can be gauged from the fact that China spends 2.1 per cent and South Korea 4.2 per cent of its GDP on R&D. In the top 10 R&D sectors in the world, such as pharmaceuticals, auto industry and IT, India has no presence at all, while China has in each of them (see Economic Times 2018; see also Gupta, 2002). It is not just that our labour force is unskilled and suited primarily for the informal sector, but there is no drive to change things either. Sharma has reported that only 5 per cent of those who have gone through Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (the government’s primary skill development programme) have found jobs after graduation (Sharma, 2016). The National Skill Development Centre was set up in 2008 and the NDA government in 2014 further pumped it with funds and additional ballasts, but with little success. This could well be because Indian entrepreneurs do not seek out skilled workers. As we found in the earlier sections, industry in this country is hobbled by the IDA and government policy preferences and opt to stay small and unmuscular. Rangan quotes an anonymous source in the Skill Development Ministry who said that Indian industries are not really interested in developing a skilled workforce for it gains nothing out of it (Rangan, 2015). An

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official of Centrum Learning (a unit of Bharti Airtel) confessed that the incentive to be trained is low because those who undergo it do not get higher wages (ibid). In fact, the various training agencies that the government has funded do not have data on placements, though this was a specific mandate given to them (ibid). Subodh Verma argues that about 65 per cent of those who have received formal, vocational training in engineering or computers eventually end up as farmers. Further, about 60 per cent of those trained in textiles are in jobs that are unrelated to the skills they have supposedly acquired (Verma, 2013). The low recognition that is given in India to skill development can also be gauged from the fact that we do not have enough vocational schools. At best, only 3 per cent of the 14 million that pass out every year can be accommodated annually in these institutes (Majumdar, n.d). This is the story of MSMEs in most poor countries. Exceptional ones, like South Korea have made a breakthrough by investing in human capital as well as in formal, heavy industry. On the other hand, as La Porta and Schleifer discovered, this is not the case in those other poor countries that did not upskill its citizens and, instead, dug deep into their impoverished labour force. The hard truth about MSMEs is that informal entrepreneurs are typically uneducated and unproductive, and they run small businesses producing low-quality products for low-income customers using minimal capital and adding marginal value. As La Porta and Shleifer found, in their cross country study, informal units “start out and live out their lives informal, they avoid taxes and regulations, and they do not trade with the formal sector. It is difficult to lure them into becoming formal, even with subsidies. Far from being reservoirs of entrepreneurial energy, they are swamps of backwardness. They allow their owners and employees to survive, but not much more. (La Porta and Schleifer, 2014: 118). What is equally telling is that when the labour force growth is not highly skilled, the transition to formal economy is even slower and that this fact is compounded with larger entrants into the labour force (ibid: 122). This is certainly true in the Indian case, as we noticed a little earlier.

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Do MSMEs Have a Future? La Porta and Schleifer argue that small, informal enterprises lack what it takes to become formal primarily because an overwhelming proportion of their owners do not have a college degree. They are happy to operate as small units, avoid taxes and are fearful of formal operations (La Porta and Shleifer, 2014: 114-117). In India, over 95 per cent MSMEs have less than five employees and in most cases they are not born of entrepreneurial acumen but on account of distress entrepreneurship for want of a job.2 Recall La Porta and Shleifer’s study which shows that just a handful of MSMEs in poor countries are run by people who have a college degree. This need not be the case, if we look at what is happening on this front in other parts of the world. In recent times there have been some stirrings in the government that MSMEs need to be invigorated and not just allowed to survive. Remember, this is not the first time such ideas emerged among administrators, as we noticed earlier, but nothing really grew out of those initiatives. The new policy on the block is called Productivity Linked Investment Scheme (PLIS). The big difference this policy hopes to make is to encourage those firms that invest big to employ formal, skilled labour and increase their productivity. Sadly, so far, investors have not shown an exceptional appetite in this direction. Time will tell and let us hope that PLIS does not end up the way other schemes have. The big hope now is that international firms will take advantage of this policy and come to India and open up more units in line with the ‘make in India’ thrust. However, it is still not clear if the existing MSMEs can gear up to make the most of PLIS. Combating Thresholds The fear that size would hamper control by management is a genuine one and cannot be sidelined. It is inconceivable that an entrepreneur should knowingly and wilfully give away authority by letting their enterprises grow. This would be both foolhardy and suicidal.

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The problem lies in our partiality towards labour aristocrats, who work in big factories with 100 workers, (300 in Rajasthan). They are unduly protected against a host of circumstances, including indiscipline. This frightens management enough and they ensure that their enterprises do not become big for then they must suffer labour aristocrats. On the other hand, labourers in smaller units are almost entirely unprotected. In fact, should the enterprise have less than 20 workers even bonus and Provident Fund are exempt. And, as we notice earlier, what every Indian business person keeps a close track of in their waking hours is to ensure that nobody, except a very few, stay on beyond 239 days. In the interest of growth and development of Indian industry this provision in the IDA must go. Unless enterprises can grow organically the scope for skilled labour and R&D is virtually absent. Fracturing the labour force into those who are protected by a sheet of armour, as it were, and those who are utterly vulnerable is unfair. This is also contrary to the basic tenets of citizenship (see Marshall, 1950/1990: 34). What is equally relevant is that this marked preference for staying small also inhibits efficiency Thresholds, however, are not as formidable as they may seem and can be demolished rather swiftly, if one has the will to do it. First, the distinction between units employing different sizes of labour force must go. Second, all units must follow the same norms. Labour aristocrats of today have to submit to the fact of hiring and firing, just as those in the informal labour market face every day. But there is one major difference, and this is the great leveller. All workers, regardless of size, must receive severance wages when they are fired. This may vary depending upon whether or not the termination of service is because the enterprise is switching to other specializations, or whether it is closing down on account of bankruptcy, or whether disciplinary action is being taken. The severance package should be designed such that it is a deterrent against idiosyncratic management behaviour. If, for instance, it

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were pegged at 45 days of wages for every year of work, it would no longer be cost free to wilfully put somebody out of a job. On retirement, dismissal or resignation, workers should be entitled to gratuity and Provident Fund for the period they have worked. All of this should be size neutral. This also takes into account the need for entrepreneurs to fully factor in the risks that accompany entrepreneurship. In India, this aspect of risk is feared and this fear has received government protection. The IDA, in a way, also barricades risks at the entrepreneurial level too, driving them to small-scale units, or towards contract labour. This was noticed even by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He is otherwise a friend of business, but he too admonished entrepreneurs at a conference in September 2015, to stop acting like paid employees and start taking risks. He said, “Risk taking is in your DNA, that is why you are a businessman and not a consultant” (see Gupta, 2015). Once we get rid of the major thresholds marked out by the IDA, other matters can be trained accordingly. The most important of them relates to dispute resolutions. Here again, size neutrality should prevail and there should be dispute resolution mechanisms in all firms, small or big. True, those units that hire less than 20 workers might need a special tweak and in this case a mechanism such as a Local Level Committee may be set up. Such a body can be established under the authority of the District Magistrate and can function along the lines of the Sexual Harassment Act of 2013. There could be other suggestions too, but the moot point is that dispute mechanisms must exist at all levels of employment. What are the advantages to the entrepreneurs should provisions such as these be put in place? Business in India has internalized the culture of hostility towards labour and vice versa. As we have argued earlier, the IDA has played into this and also exaggerated the distance between these two classes of actors. However, many entrepreneurs also recognise the importance of keeping competent workers on their rolls, of enhancing in-house specialization, and so

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on. They will immediately see the benefits of such moves for it is not in their interests to simply control workers if they also want their companies to grow. It is also wrongly assumed that most workers are laggards, or owe no loyalty/commitment to the firms they work for. This, as we have pointed out, is largely because companies, themselves, show no loyalty to workers. They follow the IDA norms and escape obligations by firing labour before they complete 240 days of continuous service. Workers, like white collar managers, in fact, like everybody else in this world, seek respect which the IDA forecloses. Instead, of cushioning the labour aristocrats, should the IDA become size insensitive, workers, in general, would receive greater coherence as a class. In other words, by removing the IDA thresholds, one can help business, as well as labour in one stroke. The question that arises is: why the Indian capitalist class is reluctant to think along these lines? A follow up question that comes to mind is: why did the working class organizations not oppose the labour aristocracy either? A possible answer to the first is that the Indian business person is risk averse. As they lack the hunger for R&D and, instead, are happy to capitalise on received and inherited technology, the current IDA regulations suit them fine. They, therefore, function more as merchant capitalists rather than entrepreneurial capitalists. At the same time, the Indian state too weighed in favour of small business and assisted cottage industries to claim the moral high ground. These two tendencies acted in tandem and promoters who could have thought big see that it is in their immediate interest to think small. Working class activism in India is most effective when sponsored by established trade unions, most of whom have political party affiliations. Trade union leaders too do not want to risk losing their captive constituency and they too want to play safe. They might have to reinvent themselves if lifting the thresholds would mean that today’s labour aristocrats could also be fired. The advantage of enlarging their mass base outside this charmed circle does not

Numerical Thresholds as Industrial Inhibitors 63

attract them immediately. Yet, if they accept the provision that severance pay is given to all fired workers, regardless of unit size, trade unions actually stand to gain. It would bring about greater solidarity between workers in different sized firms. At the same time, this would give those who are in smaller establishments the benefit of belonging to supra-local trade unions. Finally, after we jettison thresholds from the IDA, it will no longer be attractive for entrepreneurs to keep actual labour figures under wraps. This, as we have pointed out, is a major factor behind the cause of informal economy. In fact, contract labour can be formalized quite easily once the fear of keeping units small and labour impermanent is overcome. There will be a much lower premium on dodging laws, nor need firms employ clever people to help work around the thresholds that IDA has set up. This will not only attract a different set of skills in managing industry, but many consultants and lawyers too will probably lose their jobs. Are we prepared for this? A quick look around the world will immediately inform us that we lack those features that have helped other countries prosper. To catch up we too must invest in R&D, be less dependent on farm incomes, encourage skill development and move away from informal labour. If we want to join that set, the IDA, as it stands, must go. There is not much point in fiddling with threshold and a new rationale must replace the old. Conclusion In India, we have not really looked the IDA in the eye and challenged it, nor have wer done a contact tracing of how it has infected other parts of our economy. The lockdown has been a rude jolt, even so, our initial reaction, so far, has been to do more of the same but with much greater emphasis. Instead of breaking free from the thralldom of small-sized, poorly intellectualized, heavily informalized, industrial units, we continue to think in terms set by the earlier status quo ante. The old mindset continues to rule, albeit in a slightly modified form.

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Like other countries, east and west, the lockdown has extracted a severe price from India. Tragic though this outcome has been, it now gives us an opportunity to realise how unsound our basic premises have been since independence. We should realise, up front, that the paradigm set by the IDA and all the baggage that comes with it must go. Now we can also see that MSMEs have to recast themselves if they are to be our long-term allies and fall in step with R&D powered industries. This is not a utopian dream for such a transformation of MSMEs has happened in many parts of the globe. It has taken place in wide swathes of Europe from the Basque country in Spain to Germany, and, nearer home, in South Korea and Japan. Even when it comes to export, we must learn from international experience. South Korea, for example, has done well and emerged as a major exporting nation because it created alongside a strong domestic market and kept enriching its production methods. At long last, the lockdown has let us see with our naked eyes that the Indian economy has fault lines cutting across it. For all the damage the Covid-19 pandemic has caused us, it has also clearly brought out problems that most of us were not willing to acknowledge in the past. Now, we should, at long last, realise the advantages of thinking “Big”. Given the frailty of our industries at this point, enterprises in the private sector will require active state support. In a quest such as this, laissez faire lacks both the grit and the muscle. Nor should narrow, partisan, ideologies, tempting as they are, stand in the way. The belief that large units are more exploitative than smaller ones can only be sustained if we are blind to the numbers that were on the highways after the lockdown was declared. If we try and revive our “pre-coronial” economy in “post-coronial” times, our economy will have lain etherized on the table for no reason at all. We must call in the specialists because if there was ever a time, this is the time to think “big”. In conclusion, this presentation argues that the central feature

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which needs immediate attention is the dismantling of the current IDA. For several decades now, the provisions in the IDA have been the leading factor behind the irrationality and smallness of enterprises in India. They have also encouraged the informalization of the economy which has, in turn, spun off a multitude of small, precariously perched units in a a long supply chain. What then are the issues we should emphasise in the post­ “coronial” era for India’s economic development? Obviously, right on top of the agenda is that there should be some re-thinking on labour laws, yet again and as a general rule, thresholds should be suspect. In particular, those thresholds that exclude workers from benefits, social security and safety from hazardous processes and occupations must be lifted. So far, the primary concern has been to give the management the freedom to hire and fire and this has dominated policy planning. Removing thresholds regarding benefits and work processes does not mean that the management cannot hire and fire. What it does entail is that in every case, severance wages must be paid to all workers, regardless of the size of the enterprise. This by itself will act as a deterrent against wilful disciplinary action against workers and unwarranted excesses by the management. Also, works committees should not be mandatory only in large units, but in every establishment. When these measures are in place, the management will also see the benefits of upskilling their workforce and investing in R&D. Workers too, over time, will forge bonds with the establishments they work for. It is an inescapable fact that R&D and knowledge generation will now become essential across the industrial scape if India wants to grow socially and economically too. There are many examples from different parts of the world that can provide a guide as to how the state can incentivize R&D. This ranges all the way from lowering interest rates, to providing market opportunities, to harmonizing state-level scientific findings with industry-specific R&D. Once R&D energises the skill sets of Indian workers,

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industry will begin to feel the need for technically qualified labour. As a result, vocational institutions will become more vibrant. That the poor have shown their eagerness in getting educated needs reciprocity from the side of the employers. There is no reason to be lax regarding the observance of labour norms when it comes to MSMEs. It should not be the case, either, that “new” units are spared from vigilance. If all establishments abide by a uniform law, the chances of rewarding the good ones for enterprise become more realistic. Large companies should be encouraged to audit their supply chains for this would enhance the quality of production down to the last worker. The law, as it stands, must re-consider the need to provide housing for workers. This aspect does not find mention in the new 2020 labour law. It, however, does provide migrant workers with extra allowance for travel, back and forth, but this is neither enough nor can it be monitored. Further, given the size of most Indian states, even an intra-state migrant may be travelling vast distances in search of work. Therefore, housing for workers is a very urgent need and should be given adequate attention when legislating for the labouring people. Housing projects could also become part of an enterprise’s CSR. CSR is best when it begins at home, literally and metaphorically. Once migrants get a sense of permanence they will move in with the family. In fact, our censuses report the steady increase in household migration over the years. We also know that “studies” (or, education for children) is the second most important reason for male migration. If housing is provided, this aspect will be further strengthened and would help future generations of workers to step out of poverty and undignified labour. Once these measures are in place, there is a greater likelihood that a skilled, large-scale, formal industrial structure will begin to take root in our country. The lockdown etherized our economy on the table for long. It would be a pity if we just awaken it without performing a major operation on it.

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NOTES

1. R&D expenditure is typically the domain of those who are big and want to stay that way. This is why companies like Intel, Microsoft, Novartis, Roche and Merck, all spend between 13 per cent-20 per cent of the revenue in R&D (see, http://fortune.com/2014/11/17/ top-10-research-development/; accessed on November 19, 2018). In terms of total spending, however, Volkswagen, Samsung, Intel and Microsoft (in that order) lead the pack (see ibid). In this connection, I must commend the article written by Ramaswamy (2016). It uses large scale data to clearly demonstrate the point that I am making here. 2. A glance at figures from other Asian countries should give us some perspective in this regard and demonstrate how backward the current MSME sector is in India. In India, Micros employ 84 per cent of the workforce, Medium 5.5 per cent and large 10.5 per cent. The comparable numbers in the Philippines are for micro and small 69.6 per cent, 7.5 per cent for medium and 22.8 per cent for large; South Korea, 46.5 per cent 23.9 per cent and 29.6 per cent; Malaysia 27.5 per cent for Micro and Small units, Medium is 19.7 per cent and Large is 52.8 per cent For China, Micro and Small is 24.8 per cent, Medium is 23.3 per cent and Large 51.8 per cent (Hasan and Jandoc, 2010: 7)

3

The Changing Villager:

What the Numbers Do Not Tell

The Village Today India is truly an amazing place: it is both a graveyard of concepts that flourish happily elsewhere, and a breeding ground for those that survive only in our conditions. Terms such as class, status, nation-state, and community have already undergone significant modifications in the Indian setting. These changes have undoubtedly helped broaden the appeal of universal concepts and made them more versatile, but still, India is a difficult place for theorists to live in. Now the hammer falls on the hitherto unquestioned under­ standing of a village. What is a village? And with that, who is a villager? The most important criterion for an area to be declared officially rural is that at least 75 per cent of its economy should be agricultural. In which case, India’s claim to be a rural society falls flat. If we calculate what these so-called villagers produce nation­ wide then we find that as much as 45.5 per cent of their Net Domestic Product is actually non-agricultural. In which case we need to re-think what is a village, and who is a villager. The village economy is split almost down the middle: one half agricultural and the other half anything but. In which case, what happens to the popular notion that India is a land of villages, or that 70 per cent of our population live in rural India? Are these numbers useful? Do they tell the real story?

The Changing Villager: What the Numbers Do Not Tell 69 There are some other add-ons to the official understanding of what makes for a village, such as population density and so on, but they are not worth the candle if the economic criterion is not satisfied. Given this objective reality regarding rural India we can no longer talk of the Indian villager in the old fashioned way. Instead, we need to understand and underline the country-town nexus in which the villager operates. The relationship between the rural and urban is so dense and reiterative that it makes no sense to discuss one without calling out to its other. Even if we were to play along, for the time being, with the accepted, though misplaced, distinction between rural and urban, we cannot help notice the huge push forces that are working on our villagers. The latest figures on migration show that the search for jobs has outstripped even the search for marriage partners as the principal reason for leaving one’s home. Till quite recently, women who left to join their husbands after marriage was the most frequent cause of migration, but not any longer. This shift is clearly visible now, but it has been building up for a long time. Interestingly, there are many who live in these villages, but do not work there. They wake up in the morning and head for a town, or sometimes a manufactory in the vicinity, but by nightfall they are back in their rural homes. If one were to go to a village in the day there would be far fewer people than at night, or early in the morning. Around the time most of us are wiping the sleep from our eyes villagers are either heading to their fields or to the nearest busstop, or collection point, in order to earn their living. The villager mingles town with country even before the day has properly begun. Not everybody comes back home with anything to show for a day badly spent. Rural Indians are fated to face the luck of the draw no matter what they do. If they are engaged in agriculture, they are hostage to monsoonal vagaries; and if they congregate at market squares they are not always noticed by contractors foraging for cheap labour. Even when they make eye contact, the village hand loses out; his skills don’t have a standard price. Consequently,

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they are always left holding the shorter end of a stick in any wage negotiations. The Multitasking Villager Though such people lack high levels of specialization, they are usually half competent at a host of things. They can work today as a labourer, tomorrow as a brick layer, the next day as a part time carpenter, or an earth mover, and so on. Now comes the sadder part. No matter how many years these workers may have spent in these scratchy jobs their skill levels never go up. They remained boxed in all their lives in non-remunerative occupations, or in looking for them. Consequently, their entire biographies hover around poverty levels. But how different is that from those who work in the fields? Another all India statistic might help. At a conservative estimate about 80 per cent of landowning cultivators have holdings that are less than five acres. If one were to dig slightly deeper we find that in fact as many as 66 per cent have three acres or less. My own experience in different parts of India suggests that the picture may be grimmer. Apart from some areas in Northwest India, in large parts of the country it is hard to find anybody who actually owns five acres of land and has only a wife and small children to support. A farmer who is blessed in this respect is accorded the status of a substantial farmer by other villagers. This is why when we get the impression that there are a fair number of substantial farmers in a village, we need to check the generational depth. When it comes down to the measuring tape, 15 acres divided between a father and his three married sons actually gives each nuclear family less than four acres apiece. Clearly, the village is not what it used to be. When one reads accounts of rural India of the 1950s and 60s it almost appears as if we are describing another country. Where are all those landlords? Those agrestic serfs? Those bonded labourers? They are difficult to find even in Bihar or east UP. But this should not appear very

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startling. If 80 per cent of landholdings are below five acres where is the scope to hire workers on the farm? In fact, there is an excess of family labour in most agrarian households. This is why villagers hope to send as many of their boys as they can to the cities, leaving behind just the idiot son. So, if hired labourers are missing it is because of the structure of landholding, and not so much because villagers are getting better off. Migrating out of the village has always been a major attraction in rural India, but now it has become a compelling factor. In the first few decades after independence rural out migration could be seen somewhat episodically as an unusual, but interesting, feature. But now the drive to give up agriculture is so pronounced that it can no longer be viewed as a side show, or as a phenomenon that peripherally relates to rural life. It is a significant aspect of village life itself. A large number of rural migrants do not come alone. They have a network that brings them to urban jobs and it is this network that supports them in between jobs. A network of this kind is nearly always community or region-specific which is why there are multiple networks crisscrossing one another in an urban site. Villagers long to belong to such networks but I have also seen villages that are bereft of these long distance ties. Why, I don’t know: but that is the way it is. These network circuits are very idiosyncratically connected for so much depends on chance and a breakthrough. What all of this adds up to is that between the village and the city there is a two-way traffic. The village impacts the city and the city the village, and the two are nearly one. We cannot talk of rural India without immediately calling out to the urban world. In the past village field studies usually saw the town and country relationship as a one-dimensional phenomenon. For example, even in the works of T. Scarlett Epstein (1973) it is the city that influences the village, but not a word of the movement the other way. There are detailed descriptions in accounts of this sort that

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document how many motorcycles, TV sets, and coffee shops are in the village. But what they fail to point out is that villagers are not sleeping at the switch. They too are active agents who are keen to exchange their mud huts for urban shanties. Villagers know that the rural economy cannot afford the luxury of planning a lifetime devoted to agriculture. Landholdings are getting smaller; the pressure on farms more intense; even the green revolution is now a has-been. This is why on an all India level, there has been a 25 per cent decline in the total land operated between 1960-61 and 2002-03 (National Sample Survey, 2006: Table 3.2). So no matter which map one reads, there isn’t a scenic route to the village chaupal any more. If agriculture were to grow at even two per cent per annum that would bring joy to villagers and to wizened planners in Delhi. As a matter of fact, in 2003 agriculture actually suffered a negative growth rate. This is really quite incredible against the overall growth rate in our country. Even the total investment in agriculture as a percentage of GDP has fallen between 1990-91 and 2005-06 (India Key Data 2007-08, 2007, 35). There is no reason, therefore, for villagers to be even remotely romantic about their way of life. All rural classes and communities, from diverse points of departure, are busy planning strategies to up and leave for urban India. Urban manufactories are growing rapidly because there is cheap labour from the village to work in them. Undoubtedly there is the pull from the cities, but without the shove from the village it would have been impossible for these manufactories (actually sweat shops) to multiply at the rate they have. For example, units employing less than 10 workers have grown at over a 100 per cent in the last 25 years (Five Year Plan 2002-07, Vol. 1, Annexure 5.3). These are also the enterprises that service the export sector, both directly and indirectly. So our shabby manufacturing urban outposts with poor “rural” employees are actually integral parts of a global economy. Things have gone that far!

The Changing Villager: What the Numbers Do Not Tell 73 In the early decades after independence a number of community development schemes were envisaged, and most were given up very soon. What came in the way in those days was the great divide between rich and poor villagers which robbed the idea of the “community” of any significant meaning. For the same reason the Bhoodan movement too went under as it depended heavily on men of means to display some generosity to the very poor. These illusory promises are now things of the past and so are the rural rich. Years and years ago, right down to the early 1980s, perhaps there was some purchase in the belief that land reforms would do the trick and take the poor villager out of poverty. Today, however, given the extent of sub-division of holdings, there is just no land to be reformed. What politics and the administrative machinery failed to do, sheer demography has managed. If approximately 80 per cent of landholdings are below five acres then land reforms obviously have no scope. It is population increase, more than anything else, which has seen to the demise of the category once called “landlords”. Till very recently these landlords stalked the village, killing, raping and looting at will. Their descendants have no such luck. Under these conditions it would have been hard to believe that rural India could afford disparities any longer. Villages should have been one thick swathe of unhappy egalitarians, but that is still not the case. Given the massive levels of poverty there are still many in the village who would consider a five acre land owner to be a rich farmer, particularly if he has access to irrigational works. In real terms, this five-acre magnate is a poor man. When he has to employ labour during the peak harvesting seasons he does not do this from a situation of advantage. His pockets are pretty shallow which is why landowner-landless labour confrontations in contemporary India are quite different from what they used to be. Today both sides confront each other from different levels of poverty.

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Contemporary Rural Classes The small to marginal farmer, as one can guess by now, rarely packs a lunch pail for a full day in the fields. Even the much written about migrant worker from Bihar and east UP to Punjab spends most of his working months outside the village, pulling rickshaws and doing odd jobs. Come harvesting season they go singly or in families to the villages where they ask for proper wages. The land owner employs them because he has no option to do otherwise. But once the harvesting is done and it is pay day there is no cash in the employer’s till. This is when problems and tensions arise. It is not as if there is this proud, pompous overbearing landlord squeezing the peasant, but a poor owner-cultivator facing off with an even poorer agricultural labourer. This is the irony of rural India. As agricultural labourers only surface at certain calendrical moments the bulk of the work is carried out by members of the family. From preparing the field, to sowing and weeding, it is the family that mostly toils on the family farm. This is why the nature of agrarian politics too has undergone significant changes. There was a time when rural India was beset by violent confrontations between big landlords or capitalist farmers and poor agricultural labourers, many of whom were dependent on their patrons. Those were the heyday of left-wing agrarian politics. But today agricultural labourers are more or less absent for the better part of the year making that kind of mobilisation obsolete. It is difficult to build a movement with a cast of cameo performers who appear largely at harvesting time. The famous struggles that left and socialist parties led even after the Green Revolution are now history. The Naxalite movement that fought for the sharecroppers would not get off the block were it to be inaugurated today. The most vibrant rural-based politics in our time now is not around marginal and poor farmers, but focused on the interests of owner-cultivators. Whether we take Nanjudaswamy in Karnataka or Mahendra Singh Tikait in West UP (his son is

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leading the current farmer protest outside Delhi’s borders), their support base is not the poor landless peasant or sharecropper, but the owner-cultivator. Here too it is not the rich capitalist farmer, but the operator of what can be loosely called a family farm. In fact, Tikait was very firm about not letting landless peasants enter the fold, at least in Uttar Pradesh, of the Bharatiya Kisan Union. He consistently maintained that only a landowner can claim the status of a kisan. The issues that the contemporary farmers’ movement press for have nothing to do with agricultural wages or permanency of tenure, but with support prices, inputs and subsidies. Unlike the peasant movements of the past where the enemy was right there in the village sipping tea with the local thanedar, the enemy here is the supra-local state. This is why Tikait and his band marshal their forces outside the office of the Meerut District Magistrate, or in front of the Legislature in Lucknow, or on Delhi’s Boat Club lawns. Except attending to their inner factional squabbles, farmers’ movements have no enemies in the village. As their target lies outside the village, town and country once again come in close contact. This development in rural politics is also to be expected. If family farms dominate the countryside then where is the scope for employing hired labour or putting sharecroppers to work? If anything, one sees a surge in the number of reverse tenancies. In such cases, richer farmers rent land of smaller ones to increase their area of operation and employ economies of scale. This feature can be readily found in Punjab and Haryana. The issues that arise in the village economy today have nothing to do with agricultural labour or sharecroppers. Naturally, rural politics too is only about owner-cultivators. The old world has vanished and with it the old villager. But are our intellectual commissars ready to accept such impressive transformations? We still hear calls for thoroughgoing land reforms when the need for them is practically non-existent. Where is that surplus land to be distributed? One still comes across

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characterizations of India as an agrarian country while there is very little on the ground to suggest this. It is not uncommon to sit through a treatise that claims that the heart of India pounds in the fields and rests behind mud walls. Not only do gross statistics disprove such a notion, but an informal chat with villagers would quickly reveal how fed up they are with their world and how dearly they would want to move into an urban slum. In the village, tomorrow holds no excitement, but in an urban slum one can still dream. Even so, there are power wielders and decision-makers at the highest level who insist on deluding themselves that the village is still the mainstay of our society, economy and culture. What helps them prop up these utterly anachronistic views is the way the administration conducts surveys and census operations. As I discovered, census enumerators frequently put down all those who are landless in a village as agricultural labourers, without enquiring if they actually worked on land. The National Sample Survey goes the distance. This organization defines a farmer very loosely as anyone who has worked on land during the past 365 days. Note the emphasis is on during the past year and not for the past year. So if a person works for even a few days on land then the term “farmer” becomes readily applicable. For the remaining 364 days this “farmer” could be a carpenter, a welder, or a brick layer, but because there was a lapse once for a few days, hours even, in the past year, this person is officially a farmer: or so the NSS wants us to believe. And what about a farmer’s household? The NSS again quite simple-mindedly states that if a household has one “farmer” then that becomes a farmer’s household. The others in the household may be lawyers, doctors or industrial workers, but just because of one errant relative the “farmer” tag will hang on their door. This is how the figures on farmers are inflated, and this is why our policies are always off the mark. Even in the 1950s and 60s there was a body of opinion that argued that we should try and get the villager out of the village

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as India is an industrializing country, or ought to be one (Desai, 1958). This call has been ignored for all these years, but now it is difficult to dodge it. Simple villagers will readily testify that there is no future in farming, and if only they and their children found alternate occupations life would be so much better. It is important then to work at the state level to address these felt aspirations of our villagers. Initiatives like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme are only measures that keep the rural poor alive, but they do not to take them out of poverty. If we cannot think differently of the Indian village, let us at least be mindful of the Indian villager. The village is still out there and one sees the more concretised varieties of it clinging to highways, but less prosperous versions are hiding behind those long stretches of crop land. Yet, while it is there in space, and it is still designated as rural, it has a transformed social presence in India today. Sadly, it is in these villages that there is a rising sense of hopelessness among the young, an alienation from all that is rural in their lives. In their imagination, urban slums may be squalid, messy, and crime-ridden, but they still present a constant hope that the next day may bring a new life. Rarely would a villager today want to be a farmer if given an opportunity elsewhere. That nearly 68 per cent live in villages should not mislead us. Indeed, there are few rural institutions that have not been mauled severely from within. The joint family is disappearing, the rural caste hierarchy is losing its tenacity, and the much romanticised harmony of village life is now exposed for the sham it perhaps always was. If anything, it is perhaps B.R. Ambedkar’s analysis of the Indian village that strikes the truest of all. It was Ambedkar who said that the village was a cesspool of degradation, corruption and worse. That village India was able to carry on in spite of all this in the past was because there was no option for most people, rich or poor outside the confines of the rural space. If rural India has lost its centrality in the minds of most villagers in contemporary India today it is not, as we mentioned earlier, only

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because an urban world has opened up their horizons. We need to recognise in tandem that the village economy itself has lost its sustaining power. Consequently, the countryside has witnessed a kind of cultural implosion that has shaken many of the verities of the past. With the abolition of landlordism and the introduction of adult franchise (the two must necessarily go hand in hand), old social relations that dominated the countryside are today in a highly emaciated form, when not actually dead. Roughly 85 per cent of landholdings are below five acres and about 63 per cent are below even three acres. What land reforms and land redistribution could not do, demography and subdivision of holdings have done to land ownership. Where are the big landlords? There are some, but they are few and far between. But does this make the village an egalitarian utopia? Far from it! This is where the sociological dimensions need to brought in to give meaning to economic morphology. Without this exercise developmental planning will be a pure formal exercise with no ground level resonance. Medium-sized owner-cultivators contend against landless labourers, both economically and socially. While the rigidities of the caste systems no longer operate in their pristine form, caste prejudices and identities die hard. The stigma of tradition sits incubus like on social relations even if the prescriptions of tradition cannot be followed with equal facility these days. Other than the lack of economic opportunities, it is the nature of social relations in rural India that drive many impoverished castes and classes out of the village. Clearly, the poorer one is, the greater the temptation to up and leave the village before the sun finally sets on one. Unfortunately, because of their resource limitations, the indigent ones are left behind and it is usually the better off who succeed in exiting their rural confines (see also the last chapter, section on “Crime and the City”). Where landholdings are so fragmented there is no scope for agricultural regeneration. Planners would be happy if agricultural

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production could be sustained year after year, and elated if there is a modest increase of even 1 per cent. Last year, there was in fact a negative growth rate. In small plots there is always a preponderance of family labour and the Chayanovian logic of balancing drudgery and needs usually operates in such cases. The Rurbanite It is for reasons such as these that another categorical distinction is facing rough weather, namely, that between urban and rural. Interestingly, we get to the official definition of rural by exclusion. There are numbers that satisfy what is urban and any area that does not match these numbers is rural. In an urban area then there must be at least 400 people per square kilometre and 75 per cent of the male population should have as its main occupation something that is not agricultural. All areas that do not satisfy these numerical criteria are rural. This is an easy to understand definition, but these numbers hardly give us a sense of what really rural India is like today. If we take just agriculture, there is so much of the outside world that comes in, not just as external markets, but as external inputs. This is the biggest difference from the past. Further, many of our villages would barely qualify as rural if we were to take occupation alone. All too often people continue to live and work in villages but are almost urban in terms of their work profile. So the earlier line that separated the farmer from the worker is slowly getting erased as well. This is why a labourer would seek work outside agriculture for when they return home after a day’s toil, say as a rickshaw puller, there will be money jingling in his pockets. Small change, one might say, but big money from the worker’s point of view. This is what prompts the poor villager to leave every morning for the bus stop or the village square in the hope that he will catch a contractor’s eye and his day will be made. Now, would such a person be classified as rural or urban? In what kind of numerical criterion would this individual be embraced?

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We have to leave aside the numerical classification of rural and urban if we want to understand and appreciate the tremendous increase in Rural Non-Farm Employment (RNFE) in India. What was once a secondary occupation for most villagers is often the primary one today. The National Sample Survey (2009-10) shows that the percentage of non-agricultural households has increased from a pre-existing high of 31.9 per cent in 1993-94 to 42.5 per cent in 2009-10 (National Sample Survey 2009-10; see also http:// www.indiastat.com/india/showdata.asp?secid=324; accessed August 7, 2007). What is equally noteworthy is that the rural non-farm sector contributes as much as 62 per cent of rural net domestic product (http://www.indiastat.com: 58; see also Chaddha, 2003: 55 for an earlier estimate). Nor is this a story of the developed regions of India. In fact, the more backward the districts, the higher the proportion of men in household industries. In Uttar Pradesh (UP), for example, six times more men than women work in these manufactories and in Rajasthan the figure jumps to an unbelievable ten (Census of India 2001, Part (II) B 9i) Primary Census Abstract: General Population). When we examine the Census we find that factories and workshops have quite a strong presence in rural areas. In fact they dominate rural regions in states as disparate as Kerala, Punjab, Odisha or Gujarat (Census of India, Table H-1). The recent census of MSME industries confirms the lively presence of enterprise in villages. When it is about registered units then rural India houses 45.2 per cent of them, but in the unregistered ones, there are as many as 60.2 per cent in the countryside (MSME Annual Report, 2012-13: Statement 2.1; p. 21). This probably explains why rural to rural migration is quite active as well. This is an area we do not pay sufficient attention to because the move to cities is much more dramatic in its outcome and numbers. After all, figures show that 29 per cent of rural migrant households migrate from rural India and that 55 per cent of them had done so for economic reasons, with self-employment playing

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a major role in this (pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=62559; accessed May 10, 2014). The rural rate of migration too is a respectable 26 per cent (ibid) with nearly 91 per cent of the movement coming in from other villages (NSS 2007-08 estimates it at 70 per cent). We might as well also underline the fact that these migrants primarily fill the ranks of units which are categorized as “self-employed” and in which, on an average between two to five people work (MSME Annual Report, 2013: statement 2.1, p. 21). So, rural India is not just agricultural anymore and indeed caters to the international as well as national urban market in terms of manufacturing. A large number of products—from bric a brac, to clothing, to gems and jewellery, and now even to machine parts—which have a rural provenance, are now available in urban households and markets. Thus, while on the one hand we have family farms that are proliferate in the villages, one also finds the rapid multiplication of self-employed enterprises. These outfits are the closest one can come to family farms in a non-agricultural setting. Therefore, there is an urban aspect in the village, much as there are rural aspects in cities, brought about primarily by migration from villages. We would be better off with the term “rural-urban nexus”, rather than “rural-urban continuum, for one penetrates the other in such a fashion that a slide rule like concept seems inadequate. Further, the very fact that there is a rural-urban nexus, forces us to see the effect of the city on the village in ways other than that of acquisition, viz. telephones, scooters, motor cars, coffee shops, etc., but in terms of the economy as well. Nor can we really think of energizing small farmers without radically addressing their felt needs and where they earn their real incomes from. This is because their economic and aspirational horizon no longer curves within the village perimeter. As a result there has been a diminution in the status of agriculture as an occupation. Family farms have, consequently, lost some of their esteem as a precious gift to be harvested in perpetuity. As needs

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have escalated, as scales of operations have increased, as inputs are getting costlier, the family farm is no longer what it was earlier cut out to be. In the fitness of things, should we then not call the villager of today a “rurbanite”? Such a person has left much of tradition behind, though a fair amount is palpably present in a number of interactions. This makes the rurbanite a complex, multi-faceted, ambitious and yet a somewhat handicapped individual. There are a number of features that express this variegated term “rurbanite” but none better than the desire to get educated (Desai, et al., 2010): 80-81 and leave agriculture, and if possible, the village altogether. This is another reason why a greater number of literates tend to migrate from country to town (NSS 2008: H-ii). There has also been a steady rise in the migration of male workers from rural to urban India. In less than 10 years, from 1999-2000 to 2007-08 the number has gone up from 36.5 per cent in 1999-2000 to 41.6 per cent in 2007-08 (see Kundu and Saraswati, 2012: 221). In just one year, between 1999 and 2000, the proportion of people migrating for jobs has jumped by as much as 15 per cent (Manpower Profile of India, 2005: 303, table 6.12). All of this goes to show that we need to check if the socalled objective diacritics and criteria that once served so well in separating town from country are relevant any longer. It should not be surprising then that over five billion railway tickets are sold every year in India. As anyone who knows this country will vouch that even this figure is an understatement for most people travel ticketless on Indian Railways. To understand the nature of rural dynamics one must perforce look at the village as a part of the larger society. In traditional sociology, for instance, there was a great degree of attention to villages and village studies, but they suffered, in the main, from one serious flaw. For most of the scholars who worked on this subject it was their village that mattered most and India was a distant reality. There were, of course, many exceptions to the rule, but

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that was the rule. Even when some village experts looked at change the overall orientation was one where the urban was impinging on certain aspects of rural life and changing it in cosmetic ways. There were tea shops, more motor cycles, more radios, and so on; but the village itself seemed more or less undisturbed. Fortunately, scholars today see no purchase in studying an isolated village; they would rather examine villages around themes that engage India. When examining this issue, it is impossible to ignore three major aspects that tumble out the moment such an analysis begins. The first is the emergence of small towns and with it the enormous growth of the informal sector, particularly in terms of its contribution to the formal sector and to manufacturing. Secondly, we need to look at the growth of education which is a necessary corollary to the first. Finally, an issue that cannot be overlooked. Interesting changes have taken place in inter-caste relations that upsets most of our traditional views on the Hindu hierarchical system. Put all these together, stir it, and what you get is the Rurbanite in more than one dimension. Is it surprising then that nearly 20 per cent of India’s billionaires live outside metros?

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Differing Relations

Caste Puzzles Why does caste excite so much excitement? What is so unique about it? A corollary, it leads us to ask how does India function at all, divided as we are by such fine numerical slices? Numbers present a problem again. Jats and Yadavas are not majority populations in either west UP or Bihar, and yet, for over thirty years they were politically paramount in these regions. In a way, this is explicable on grounds that those castes that are more powerful can command castes below them to do their bidding. This is a feasible explanation as, it is said, caste is the only form of social hierarchy where those, supposedly, at the bottom agree to be there; or, at worst, are humbly reconciled to their lot. In fact, if one were to go by traditional renditions, there is no contestation at any point over social placement anywhere up and down the line. This is because caste is premised on the presumption of different bodily substances that range from the most pure to the most impure. If that be the case, how can we then entertain the contrary fact that in recent years the sway of the Jat and the Yadav is not anywhere as persuasive as it used to be? What changed? Castes are still there, numerical proportions have not altered, but social relations have. Traditional renditions tell us that Brahmans and Untouchables are at either ends of this continuum, while other castes find their

Normalising Caste: Same Numbers, Differing Relations 85 place somewhere in between. Through all of this, let us not forget that the special fact about caste, is the supposed acceptance of the hierarchy by everybody, including by the most oppressed. The view that poorer, subaltern castes participated in their own subjugation is what makes the caste as a system unique. Fetching and attractive though this presentation of caste is, contemporary India puts it under considerable pressure. If castes ordain ranking and if this is accepted by all, then how can caste competition be explained? This is particularly relevant when observing the passion with which politics is conducted in India. This is a major contradiction which a traditional rendition of caste just cannot reconcile. Caste competition, regardless of how it is seen, cannot allow for acquiescence of how bodily substances are placed hierarchically. Therefore, in a nutshell, caste politics, including caste alliances, violate the essence of the pure hierarchy, as it is known. When castes compete against one another, how can a single hierarchy be assumed? How can discrete and disparate castes acquiesce that their body substances are inferior to those others against whom they are in competition? Chatur Baniya Wants to be a Warrior Well before films glamourised movie stars as giant killers, almost every caste, in old fashioned India, claimed some kind of martial status. The link between Kshatriyas, muscle tone and weaponry is well known, but it is not as if other castes don’t claim a similar profile. For instance, the Baniyas are frequently presented as crafty, chatur, peace-seeking merchants, but many of their origin tales spin a different story. In these legends (or, jati puranas) Baniyas come through as heat-seeking warriors; brave and fearless, never dodgy peddlers. This is actually to be expected, and had it been otherwise that would have been quite unusual. For some reason, humans everywhere want to be remembered as fighters. Like our Ranjits

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and Vishwajeets, some of the commonest European names, such as Vladimir, Ludwig, Louis and Richard mean conqueror, brave, vanquisher, and so forth. Once we factor that in, it becomes easier to accept the Baniya version of the self as ruler and warrior, prone, on occasions, to recklessness too. As almost everybody aspires to be a warrior, king and conqueror, it is hardly surprising that there is no consensus in India’s four caste model (or chaturvarna) on who is a true Kshatriya. From earthy Jats and Marathas, to princelings and their hangers on, such as the Rajputs and Thakurs, a wide range of castes call themselves “Kshatriyas”, but without a shred of mutual admiration. The chaturvarna model has cushion enough to absorb all this, but it begins to wobble once Baniyas reject the Kshatriya tag and yet claim battle readiness. The Khandelwals and Maheshwaris, two major Rajasthani Baniya castes, notwithstanding their claimed Rajput ancestry, found the Kshatriya practice of animal sacrifice a real turn off. Their sensitivities were so repulsed that many of them went the distance and dumped Hinduism to become Jains. Yet, through all this they held on to their identity as rulers with high-order kingly qualities. In retrospect, they were probably the first to imagine non­ violent leadership. Many origin tales of North Indian Baniyas also assert that they were once kings, and that too of civilisational hubs like Ayodhya, Kaushambi and Mathura. The Agarwals have a similar origin myth. They trace their descent from King Agrasen, hence Agrawal. This view received a contemporary fillip when the famous nineteenth century poet, Bharatedu Harishchandra endorsed it and by the fact that in the early 1800s, Jaisalmer actually had a Baniya king. The Subornobaniks of Bengal consider themselves to be more Aryans than the usual Brahmans or Kshatriyas, because they once walked over the fire with Goddess Anayaka. Burnished thus, their skin colour became way lighter than the darker people in the

Normalising Caste: Same Numbers, Differing Relations 87 neighbourhood, inspiring their enmity and ill will. In the west, Khandoba, the principal God of the Marathas, is always represented on horseback with both his wives. Of the two, the one in front is more valorous, and she is a Baniya. It is roughly the same in South India too. The Kaikkoolars (also known as Segunthar Mudaliyar), who are otherwise identified as merchants and weavers, see themselves as creations of Shiva, with Murugan as their specific God. Legend has it that from the anklet of Parvati (Shiva’s consort) nine jewels broke free out of which came the original nine Kaikkoolar warriors. They were blessed with such powers that even Shiva depended on them to tune out his arch rival Suurubatman. Incidentally, Murugan, the Kaikoollar chief diety, was a reputed hunter, lived dangerously in the hills and possessed the “rajasik”, or Kshatriya, trait, of keeping a large retinue of women. From all of this it is very obvious that Baniyas find the chaturvarna classification unacceptable as it places them after the Kshatriyas and Brahmans. But subscribe to the Vedic hierarchy and the association of merchants with “cunning” is as commonplace as lentils and rice. On the other hand, if we were to seriously consider how Baniyas view themselves, then a completely different set of qualities will have to be served up. Why, in the South Gujarat district of Sabarkantha, the term “shahukar” does not signify a mean moneylender (another caricature), but a large-hearted, honest person. Nor is it always a big deal to be a Brahman either. From Punjab to Travancore, many communities consider this caste to be inauspicious. For example, Kuricchans, of west Kerala, had an established protocol to ward off evil should a Brahman ever enter their homes. In Punjab, even minor misfortunes, like a tractor engine seizure, spontaneously leads one to a memory check. Was there a Brahman somewhere along the way to the farm? The Anavils of Gujarat believe that their ancestor was Chanakya, the instructor­ in-chief of Kshatriyas, and this places them well above the garden variety priests, who often pretend to be superior.

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We should take serious offence when caste stereotypes degrade Dalits, but that ought to alert us to many other forms of community slurs that are routinely in circulation. This is why any reference to the chaturvarna system is bound to put off somebody. Imagine coming out of the barber’s chair with short hair standing up everywhere and there is nothing you can do about it—caste jokes hurt much more. At the end of the day, consider this: was Gandhi, a Baniya, a crafty merchant or a noble ruler? Does the answer lie in some sacred text or should a person’s life be an open book? Caste stereotypes are what they are, stereotypes. It is dangerous to fall into that trap. Caste System and Identity Yet, it is not as if, for all these reasons, castes have disappeared. What has changed is that castes no longer form a ‘system’, but are active as ‘identities’. The phenomenon has morphed quite significantly and one we need to be sensitive to it in order to understand how castes manifest themselves today. When castes interacted as a ‘system’, people behaved in accordance with ascribed rank, or what was ordained by birth. This hierarchy was manned and patrolled by the ruling caste of the region and even defined by them. This is why caste rankings differed from region to region, but, more importantly, the ‘system’ held. This worked well for centuries with different Kshatriya castes heading the system, but came unstuck once the closed village economy collapsed. Almost all powerful castes, such as the Jats, Rajputs, Bhumihars, Thevars and Okkaligas do not want to be Brahmans but covet Kshatriya status. In India, there has been a gradual undermining of the rural way of life from the late nineteenth century onwards. What had remained unchanged in essence for centuries was beginning to shake in the latter decades of colonial rule. By the time independence came and zamindari was abolished, the system began to seriously wobble. The rural economy was no

Normalising Caste: Same Numbers, Differing Relations 89 longer closed, and as time went by, it was not overwhelmingly agrarian either. Today, over 60 per cent of India’s Rural Net Domestic Product is non-farm in character, and only 13 per cent of its GDP is agricultural. There are very few big landowners, and the old landlords have all but disappeared. This has wrecked caste as a ‘system’ for there is no oligarch, or ruling patron, who could keep the various castes in place. In time, the systemic aspect collapsed, but caste as ‘identity’ remained, and it is this that fuels competition and politics in India today. In fact, the collapse of caste as a ‘system’ encouraged the emergence of caste as an ‘identity’. Now that caste functions as identities, there are open declarations of contesting origin myths which are as fantastic as the Rg Vedic Purusha Shukta. The only difference is that many of these are borne by oral traditions and are not part of the great Hindu textual heritage. Here too, changes are occurring for many of these alternate origin myths are being written at the pace with which its subscribers are getting literate. The question then is whether the caste identities that are now sprouting everywhere brand new, or were they there earlier, but remained suppressed? The more credible argument, which would fall in line with what has been said so far is that fear of punishment kept subaltern castes from extroverting what they truly believed about themselves. Now, that times have changed and the old oligarch is no longer the source of power and patronage, it is much easier to come out in the open and shut the closet door behind. It is hard to make the claim that in the past most adhered to the ruling caste versions of the hierarchy and, therefore, remained obedient and servile. The present has taught us to suspect the traditional treatises on caste. Pressured by contemporary circumstances we begin to appreciate caste as discrete identities that have a separate existence outside deemed hierarchies. Once we do that, there is a switch, and uniqueness disappears. This is because human beings across the world fashion origin tales for themselves and are often willing to die for them. This

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is how discrete identities are consolidated where there is a great degree of pride on “who we are”. At the level of castes too, it has often been observed that no matter which caste is talked about, there is a great deal of ‘patriotism’ that clings to it. Identity is the fundamental, internal factor and hierarchy is the impact of external power. Us versus Them Brahmans may consider certain castes to be ‘low’, but that is not how these castes view themselves. In fact, there are several occasions when a Brahman is seen as inauspicious and borderline ‘impure’. In Malabar, if a Brahman enters the home of a Kuricchan a ritual cleaning of the premises is called for. In Punjab, ill luck is often associated with sighting a Brahman in the morning. Further, even in the old days, from the ruling Kshatriya point of view, the Brahman is a service caste, though with a favoured position at the top. Having said all that, it can also be admitted that India is not the only country where birth defines cultural identity. This is a human failing everywhere, an anthropological truth, as it were. The world is separated on the basis of language, religion and colour, and none of these markers are achievement-based, but birth-determined. Likewise, one is born into a caste and dies in it. Another universal truth, which is but a follow-up of the first is that people are not just divided into ‘us’ versus ‘them’ as if they were natural distinctions, but each identity carries with it a certain pride of belonging. No matter which category people fall into, everybody believes that their character and heritage are the best of all. This is true of those who lived in the stone age as well as those who occupy the Middle Kingdom, as well as Hindus and Europeans, just about everybody. Therefore, castes share many of these characteristics that are present in other forms of social stratification elsewhere in the world. In addition, contrary to the traditional view, generated by Purusha Shukta partisans, those castes that were considered to be

Normalising Caste: Same Numbers, Differing Relations 91 low, actually never believed in their positioning. This completely robs castes of their unique attribute. Like people everywhere in the world, those who are considered to be low or impure by some standards have a different opinion about themselves. There is no caste that does not see itself as superior to all others. How ordinary and common place is this? There are hierarchies everywhere, in Britain, in France, in the United States and in the African continent too. Yet, nowhere can it be said that those who are politically and economically dominated actually acquiesce in their humiliation. Racism, in whatever form, whether in Europe, America or South Africa, did not result in Blacks saying that they deserve to be punished by White people. The colonised also always found reasons to explain away their defeats at the hands of outsiders to factors that did not question their heritage. The French, true to form, believed that the Prussians gave them a sound hiding in the late nineteenth century simply because their children went to better schools. Nationalism, in many cases arose out of defeats in the battlefield. The vanquished often attribute their defeats, not to their physical or intellectual shortcomings, but to traitors, named and unnamed. Sometimes, even gods can be blamed for being mercurial and petty, taking offence over something as trivial as an improperly concluded ritual. Once again, all these features come alive in the making of caste identities as well. So what is so unusual about it? For instance, even those who were once called Untouchables, refuse to bow down to orthodox pressures. They too have their own origin stories to relate, and they are all grand. These castes, like blacks in apartheiddriven South Africa may concede that others may be richer, more educated, and so on. Yet, when it comes to the crunch, they will never accept the fact that their lower social status is on account of the inherent substances that make them. If “black is beautiful” gave voice to this view in America, the ‘Dalit’ heritage has done it for those who were once considered

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impure in Hindu India. If Black counter-culture, from the margins of New Orleans, Harlem and Chicago can be carriers of pride, so can Dalit poetry and worship be for the once considered ‘Untouchables’. In which case, the established view that is put forward in sociological texts of lower castes participating in their own subjugation is false and untenable. There goes another pillar of caste as exotica. Interestingly, in none of the studies which assert that lower castes participate in their own subjugation, are the views of the subordinated people taken into account. What is overlooked is that India too has its own version of the “Harlem culture”, and this is best expressed in the way those once deemed as low castes have carved proud niches for themselves. Origin Tales For example, in most origin tales of leather workers, the view that they were once Brahmans, but lost their status because of deceit is quite common. One of their legends relates an episode that purportedly happened long ago when three Brahman brothers went out to bathe in the Ganges. On the way to the river they saw a cow trapped in quicksand and struggling for life. As the other two were weak and scared, it was the youngest brother who ventured to rescue the cow but failed to pull it out alive. When he returned his older brothers turned on him and said that as he had touched a carcass he would henceforth be called a “leather worker”. Then there are ex-untouchable legends which claim that they were once rulers and much loved by their subjects. In this happy world descended some evil forces, often with divine help, and cheated them of their land and power. Jyotiba Phule propounded a similar view, but went on to add that it is the culture of this community that is actually the origin, the adi, of Hindu civilisation. In other words, true Hinduism rests with the culture of the adis, who were tricked by usurpers to the horror and anguish of their erstwhile subjects. Communities like the Meradh, Kammara and

Normalising Caste: Same Numbers, Differing Relations 93 Jajjagara, who are blacksmiths by occupation, also believe they are among the adis. Other lower caste origin myths need not even be about Brahmans, rulers and kings, but go directly to the gods. The washermen of Bengal believe that they are born of Shiva’s divine intervention. Many, many years ago a washerwoman sent her son to collect Shiva’s soiled clothes. The boy waited patiently, but as Shiva was so completely immersed in meditation, Parvati asked him to play around and return. When Shiva came to, Parvati scolded him and said that there was this little boy waiting outside to take his garments for a wash. When Lord Shiva stepped out, there was no boy in sight. This horrified him for he feared that some devil or ogre must have gobbled the boy up, now how would he face the little one’s mother. So Shiva, by pure meditative skills, that only he was capable of, created another boy, a doppelganger of the one he thought had been picked up. However, he later came to know that the first boy got tired of waiting and went home. Now there was one boy too many and out of Shiva’s creation then arose the caste of Chasadhoba of Bengal. The Mochis of Maharashtra claim that their ancestor saved Shiva from a tiger and turned the beast outside in and made socks (or Mojas) out of his skin. This was then presented to Shiva and that is how they came to be known as Mochis. The Valmikis trace their descent from the famous sage while one of its sub-castes claim that its ancestors were born of the Balahi creation myth. The Nhavi, or barbers of Maharashtra contend that they are superior to Brahmans as they emanated from the serpent, Shesha that encircled Shiva’s neck. Those who were once pejoratively known as Chandals believed that their ancestor was a Brahman who was cheated into eating something impure by his enemies and thus got degraded. However, a time would come, and soon, when this treachery would be avenged. Let us now move on to the Vaisya category. The Purusha Shukta legend places them at the third spot, just above the lowest ranking

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Shudra. As observed earlier with the so-called Untouchable assertion of dignity, the Vaisyas have their own origin tales resplendent with honour and glory. They not only dispute the high ranking of Brahmans and Kshatriyas, but find their ways offensive. This is primarily on account of blood sacrifices that Kshatriyas patronise and Brahmans perform. In this, the Agarwals and Khandelwals are most assertive. All of this should explain two enduring truths. One is that nobody wants to be trampled upon, least of all accept the ideology of domination thrust on them by the superior community or communities. Second, caste positions are seriously contested across the spectrum. If that was not visible earlier it was because the ‘system’ was strong and held in place by the closed village economy that was ruled over by the rural oligarch. As that is no longer the case, the hidden aspects of ‘identity’ that remained submerged for fear among the non-privileged castes have since sprung to life. This also suggests that whenever there was a social flux, caste hierarchies too underwent transformations. Once we are aware of this possibility, their occurrence in history can be spotted clearly. The Marathas, Rajputs and Jats, who are now considered to be quintessential Kshatriyas had very humble pasts. Some like the Jats were actually pastoralists, no better. The founder of the great Mauryan Empire might well have been a non-Vedic person from the Morya tribe. There is a difference, however, between then and now. In the past, caste positions changed on account of bloody wars and that happened after decades, if not centuries, of tranquillity. Today, these disputes happen every day and signify a transition from the medieval times. Ephemeral Numbers Caste identities also express themselves in politics, but once again, just caste numbers by themselves can be misleading. There are many known caste alliances such as between Kshatriyas, Harijans, Adivasis and Muslims whose acronym, ‘Kham’ gained near conceptual status

Normalising Caste: Same Numbers, Differing Relations 95 in the 1980s. Then there was the other grand caste alliance of the Ahirs, Jats, Gujars and Rajputs, known by the acronym ‘Ajgar’. Both of them came and went because this unity was not a merger of likes but a vehicle of convenience. They saw a certain advantage in banding together for a particular election, but once that was over, individual caste identities began to press for a breakaway. The numbers then are ephemeral and not binding. The Backward Class Movement that gained in strength postMandal Commission recommendations has faced a similar fate. From the outside it appears as if all peasant castes, such as the Jats, Gujars, Kurmis and Koeris are made from the same earthy material. This overlooks the very real rivalries and distrust that exist between them. Yet, because they have identical interests, in that most of them are petty peasants seeking a break into the urban world, it makes political sense for them to unite. A discussion of caste alliances tends to impute a natural affinity between different communities which is actually non-existent. What exists are transient interests which bring different identities to temporarily merge before parting ways. The tie that binds identities together in a political alliance is notoriously fickle; the moment the context changes so do friendships. In the 2017 elections in Uttar Pradesh, for example, the Jats, Yadavs and other peasant castes, who were once together, went their separate ways. This process can also be found among the Scheduled Castes. The Bahujan Samaj Party which was successful in Uttar Pradesh for several elections, has lost its charm over its once loyal followers. If one were to examine its performances in 2002 and 2007 and contrast with its more recent showing in 2017, the same process can be observed. Constituencies that went with the Bahujan Samaj Party in one election, ditched it in the next, and so forth. In fact this is true of all elections. In politics, caste alliances are temporary, what holds over a longer term is the internal sense of identity and belonging.

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Castes then are not as unique as they are often made out to be in mainstream literature. They contest over positions of superiority, just as other status groups do. They have identity tales that elevate their background and breeding, just as other status groups do. The only feature that separates them from all others is the quantitative proliferation of different status groups in the caste order. However, this by itself is hardly an exotic attribute. Finally, caste Hindus are even more like other individuals in the rest of the planet. When it serves their interests they abandon caste identities altogether and opt for more secular ones. There is a clear empirical reason why this should happen. Hindus may belong to different castes, may be attached to them too, but are not professional Jats, Gujars or Khandelwals, or Jatavs or Kurmis. For instance, Jats did not vote for Jats in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh elections and neither did Paswans vote for Paswans in Bihar in 2015. It is also fairly certain that a large number of Jatavs, traditionally Bahujan Samaj supporters, voted for the Bharatiya Janata Party in Uttar Pradesh in 2017. Such examples abound. Finally, no one caste numerically dominates any constituency. The Yadavs are only 9 per cent of Uttar Pradesh’s population. West Uttar Pradesh has no more than 8 per cent of the population who are Jats, but is mistakenly considered to be a Jat bastion. In such a situation, where in most constituencies about five castes of equal numbers are present what must a voter do? As nobody wants to waste a vote and as there are usually only two major contenders, most people will be forced to vote outside their castes. It is disappointing for exotic hunters to know that Indians are actually ordinary, normal people, but with a difference—as with every other community. It is, however, nowhere as exotic as it is often made out to be. The great advantage of discarding the exotic veil around castes is that it promotes analytical thinking in social science. Once that happens, universal theory comes alive and understanding across cultures grows.

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Racism and Colourism As an addendum to our presentation above it would be appropriate to consider the tendency to explain, our partiality for light complexion in terms of caste. That does not really hold, but it has an immediate attraction for then we can line up our prejudices like the West does in terms of Black and White. Even a bout of quick reflection will tell us that caste hierarchies or even identities fail if we put them to the Indian “fair” versus “dark” complexion test. They work better as disaggregated prejudice rather than structured racism “Fair and Lovely”, arguably India’s most popular skin lightening cream, has just emerged from the makeup room. It now calls itself “Glow and Lovely. To campaign bluntly and in your face, literally, for “fair” skin is clearly bad manners, given the worldwide momentum of the “Black Lives Matter” Movement. Obviously, the intention here is to re-name and un-shame. By adroit label management, manufacturers of “Fair and Lovely” have found a good place to land. They offloaded “cancel culture” conscience keepers, kept their customers safely strapped, and stayed on course. Street protests and internet ballistic missiles work when they have clear implications for state policy. For example, Barclays Bank was once in trouble for its apartheid connections and J.K. Rowling is roasted today because her remark “biological sex is real,” offends transgender rights. “Glow (or, Fair) and Lovely”, however, need not fear. It is below the radar for hostilities towards it, unlike the examples above, have no policy implications. Colour preference in India is an aesthetic choice, largely a domestic affair. It has no obvious impact on public spaces like racism does in USA. The Indian variant of “colourism”, if one may call it that, is an unfortunate consequence of colonialism but that does not allow it to gate crash into the “Black Lives Matter” movement. The anti-racist struggle in USA, even Europe, is way beyond surface aesthetics and has a profound bearing on public policy and

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administration. Police reform in America stresses anti-racism and colour blindness while police reform in India seeks independence from political masters. Reservations in India are based on caste, while Affirmative Action in America is largely colour coded. The markers of status in India are far more subtle and varied with skin colour playing only a peripheral role, at best. For example, no Indian cop will have his knee on a person’s neck because of skin colour. In the high-end job market being ‘wheatish’, or fair, is easily trumped by brains and skills. A Bangaluru-based IT executive put it graphically: “We need Nerds, not Birds.” There are times when light skin works in India but, ironically, in the reverse direction, such as when hiring people for low end jobs, like that of shop assistants and hospitality staff. This is because a pleasant face at the counter, or reception desk, helps customers reach for their wallets without a muscle pull. The store owner or the Hotel General Manager could be much darker than the junior, front line employees, many of whom are from India’s Northeast, where people are generally “fairer.” Yet, it is these light-skinned migrants from the Northeast who face actual, public racism in Bengaluru, Delhi, and elsewhere. If ever a movement emerges in India saying “Dark Complexions Matter”, the first casualty will be the family. Siblings would club siblings and cousins would fire bomb one another’s homes. Given the idiosyncratic ways genes combine, it is quite likely that children from the same parents may have different skin pigmentation. The darker ones may resent nature’s callousness but they wouldn’t be categorised as half-breed, Mestizos, or Creole, or Quadroon, or Octoroon, or illegitimate, whatever. Their parentage is never in doubt, nor concealed. This is in contrast to the phenomenon known as “passing” that was prevalent till recently in USA, when light-skinned Blacks tried to hide their lineage in the hope of passing off as Whites. Till the 1950s, the “one drop rule” was used quite frequently in America to

Normalising Caste: Same Numbers, Differing Relations 99 separate the races, though it never really became law. If somebody had 1/64th Black blood, that was it. No matter what the actual skin pigmentation, the person could even be a sunshine blonde (like civil rights leader Walter Francis White), but would still be categorised as Black. The ranking principle in the caste order is different and colour is of no relevance here. The warrior-like Dogra is generally fairer than a Namboodri or a Bengali Brahman. Likewise, a merchant Baniya may well be shades darker than peasant Jats or Gujars, who stand lower in the traditional hierarchy. Subornobaniks of Bengal have a reputation for being light-skinned, but they are not on top of the caste heap. Castes invoke a powerful sense of identity which draws on origin myths, legendary heroes, and believed in, but invisible, caste specific bodily substances, but not skin colour. Some so-called lower castes may claim parity, even superiority, with so-called upper castes, but still would not want to “pass”, or marry out; so proud are they of their identities. In India, no one is “fair” by European, or Caucasian, standards, which is why there is an obsession with minor skin colour differences. This is not uniquely Indian and is fairly common in other non-White populations too, such as in Brazil and the French West Indies. Brazil betters India in this department for over there eight different non-White complexions are recognised, while in India we have terms for about five. In this connection, one must commend the American Civil Rights Movement. It marked a big break from the past and gave Blacks a new sense of confidence. Consequently, the many terms they also used to differentiate skin colour among themselves, like ink spot, red bone, yaller, tar baby, and so on, are in disuse today. All said and done, it does not really matter in India if you are Black or White, so long as you have a Green Card.

5

Beyond Numbers to Citizenship: Overcoming the Majority-Minority Divide From Feudal Minority to Nationalist Majority There was no ‘majority’ population anywhere till nationalism created one from a collection of discrete and separable cultural units. So, when people celebrate Independence Day, the world over, they are actually felicitating the creation of a novel historical object, namely, the ‘majority’. Look at all the history books you have on your shelves and nowhere will you find a monarch planning a move to win over a majority of subjects. Colonial rule too, believed in divide and conquer, and not create a majority rule. The idea of a majority is the contribution of nationalism. This majority came alive because nationalists fused this collective with history and memories of wars won and lost, about victories to be cherished and defeats to be avenged. There was also the sacralization of soil, the motherland and, for the first time, a community got linked to geography. On the other hand, when democratic countries celebrate the Republic (as we do on January 26) they are now felicitating the individual with ‘rights’, where culture and tradition are secondary. No longer is the ‘majority’ upfront, but the culturally unencumbered ‘rights’ bearing individual. Therefore, on Independence Day we remember the past, but on Republic Day we vision the future. It is ironical that Independence Day is celebrated in India in relative calmness while on Republic

Beyond Numbers to Citizenship 101 Day, where the citizen is revered, battle gear and tanks are in full display. When nationalism created the category called majority’ it was by accreting and accommodating several disaggregated population clusters. The avant garde, the thinkers, of nationalism were those in business and commerce as they were best equipped to overturn the feudal economy. Unlike feudalism, nationalism requires that the ways of life and language of the avant garde be open to all. Those who adopted them, prospered, but those who could not, either because of inherent handicaps, or prejudices, suffered. When the euphoria was over, these people felt left out. This is why the Welsh, otherwise proud of their language, agreed to be subservient to the English. This is also the reason the languages of Breton or Occitan were trumped by French. It took time, and a certain contingent advantage, even ‘luck’, for a language and lifestyle to come up on top. This process required a modicum of consensus between once fractious and dissenting groups to weld together into a “majority”. It might seem so natural today, but it really never was so. When the clock started ticking, at nationalism’s start, there was no consensual majority culture in place. Unlike, feudalism, or colonialism, where privilege to the leadership was restricted, the spirit of nationalism strove to be culturally inclusive as it only had numbers on its side to beat the monarchs and colonialists. So, everybody was invited; it’s another matter that some felt awkward at the party. The Ruling Minority of Feudalism There were many reasons why majority and minority consciousness grew alongside nationalism. The most important being that the ruling class which had to be displaced by nationalist partisans was almost always made up of minorities, if not by religion, then by language and etiquette.

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Typically, the pre-democratic phase was either characterized by direct monarchy, say the Bourbons in France, or mediated monarchy, as in Belgian Congo, or colonialism, where India is probably the best-known example. Medieval India too had its share of ambitious, warring kings. When nationalism came to these countries, it was against this minority that proudly represented itself, first and foremost. The populace outside this hallowed circle was differentiated according to inherited customs and traditions which, left to themselves, naturally tended to further subdivide. Thus, there are so many branches of Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and even Sikhism. The idea of ‘majority’ was yet to be born but what was in full flow was the battle over privileges. Naturally, being close to the minority elite and assuming their cultural lifestyle was the way to go. These minorities in pre-democratic times were like layers of a pyramid where each layer comprised discrete, discontinuous blocks rather than a single, continuous plank. When these blocks struggled between themselves to get closest to the singular block on top, the pyramid had to be readjusted. The challenge to this minority rule did not come from democracy, but from nationalism. Nationalism created a majority out of myriad minorities and this was possible as the singular minority on top was despised by most minorities below. For the first time, numbers began to count. In nationalism, the majority, cobbled by the combination of many minorities, brings about the destruction of the ruling minority. Now minority allegiances, in their fractionated form, mattered little. The need of the hour was to forge a united majority and oust the hated minority at the top. Nationalist ideology, however, shared some commonalities with earlier minority identity passions. There was, once again, the emphasis on traditional qualities of inherent superiority and the prejudicial marking of the outsider, except these were now carried out on a supra-local scale.

Beyond Numbers to Citizenship 103 In sum, we need to remember that while nationalism creates a majority, all too often, it also creates minorities as a by-product. This could be because past prejudices hold on, or because the social status of some communities stays poorer than the rest, or a combination of the two. Nationalist leaders brought together a majority from a collection of communities and interest groups that hitherto led, separate discrete lives. Yet, it did not abandon the idea of the minority, even needed it periodically to fire patriotic sentiments. But democracy marches to a different drum. From Minorities to Citizens Nationalism converts ‘subjects’ of the monarchical/colonial period to ‘people’ whom democracy later turns into ‘citizens’. ‘Subjects’ of the past belonged to culturally bound, introverted, communities. Nationalism brought them together as a ‘people’ for they now had a common enemy. Democracy unsettled this notion of the ‘people’ replacing it with the ‘citizen’, heralding a dramatic turn in politics. The ‘citizen’ is also more novel because it is determinedly future looking. It daringly blanks out past traditions and cultures from the consideration of an individual’s worth. Now, for the first time, the individual is not part of a collective called people, burdened by the summons of history and culture, but an unencumbered person with ‘rights’ and rights alone. This upsets old political calculations and if they do not, red flags should be out. Once the citizen is in, to play minority politics is betrayal to a cause. However, in many electoral polities today, power seekers find it easier to win over leaders of purported minorities rather than deliver on the ground and rid the source of minority fears altogether. But this is an arduous process. Citizenship driven democracy, is fundamentally opposed to the idea of a minority. The effort now is to create a majority of

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unencumbered individuals for whom tradition is fragmented for pleasure and not for political gain. This new majority knows no minority, because it is made up of equal citizens. Therefore, on August 15, we in India, celebrate the birth of the ‘people’, the collective, but on January 26 we felicitate ourselves as individual ‘citizens’. Is there a majority now? Yes, but a majority of individual citizens with rights and not of ‘people’ who find meaning within a community, bounden by memories. When democracy comes in, after nationalism, there is still the real or imagined, lingering threat of evil foreign powers. Even so, democracy strives to make minorities an irrelevant category by positioning ‘citizens’ above ‘people’, and creating an undifferentiated, culturally blind majority. Culture, in its pure form, is thus put in its place and, alongside, the attention is now on universal law: a law that makes sure all are treated equally, especially at the starting point. If nationalism created patriotism to restrain suspicious minorities, democracy creates citizens with equal, ‘rights’. This makes ‘minority’ an irrelevant category and it is the aim of democracy to end the consciousness and politics that comes with it. As democracy advances minority consciousness should retreat, leaving behind an ever-growing majority, a single majority, of individual citizens. Minority Protection and Citizenship Minority protection is actually alien to democracy. It is, at best, a special provision if, for some anachronistic, undemocratic, reason, a community is discriminated against, denied citizenship rights and access to the mainstream. This demands immediate correction, not protracted protection. These are temporary blips which democracy must correct, and these aberrations are not to fester and create special interest groups. When there are only citizens there can be no minority, only individuals. Logically, there can be no majority either, unless it’s a majority of citizens.

Beyond Numbers to Citizenship 105 Democracy’s task then is to dissolve the majority that nationalism created and put in its place citizens who stand equal and separate, bound only by universal law. Hardly surprising then that democracy leaves no culture stay unmolested; they must all change and conform to universal law. It is, therefore, incorrect to believe that what appears to be the cultural “majority” in democracies was always the original condition. This would then leave only currently designated “minority” cultures to alter themselves, adapt to new demands, while others do little to become full citizens. Here we shall argue differently. The lessons of successful democracies show that the first round of cultural adjustment began with those who, today, are retrospectively grouped as the “majority” community. This is true of nearly all democracies, especially of the more successful ones. None of this was easy, there were resistances between and within these participating cultures, as should be expected, and we shall delve into them soon. Unfortunately, we tend to ignore this process in our enthusiasm to usher in a multicultural democracy, which is a contradiction in terms. The demands of citizenship do not course down a one-way street where only the minorities mind the rules while the “majority” can cross where it pleases. When democracy takes over from nationalism, it brings about a majority by crafting legal and cultural compromises between citizens. Citizenship against Tradition In most cases, that community sets the original standard which is already economically ascendant. Even so, it must adjust its ways and mind its manners to attract others to arrive at a first, rude summation of a majority. Then more compromises happen, the majority gets bigger, till all are in. It is worth reiterating that no tradition, left to itself, and untrained, can be a friend of democracy. If this sounds strange it is

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because habit has made us believe that all democracies are governed by dispositions set by the extant dominant tradition and culture, forgetting how new they really are. This ignores the many vital steps that had already taken place and only attends to the end product. It is this belief that often leads to unseemly obduracy between majorities and minorities. The truth is that the universal law of citizenship forces all traditions to adjust, not just the ‘minority’ ones. If we stay true to the logic of democracy then it is clear that there are more adjustments in store for a single, big majority of individual citizens. The truth is that citizenship leaves no culture untouched. What is now a majority is on account of compromises and more are waiting. Likewise, the minorities of today should also be ready to be part of this ever-growing majority. The resistances to this can be lessened across the board once all parties realize that citizenship leaves nobody, and no culture, untouched. There is nothing stellar in being culturally obstinate. If one were to take a retrospective look, with this perspective in mind, it will become clear how deliberately democracies toiled at undermining traditions to create a majority of citizens. Once citizenship triumphs, nothing pristine remains; even the long labourious process behind it is erased. With citizenship comes true democracy and inclusiveness keeps growing with time. This is how Christian majority, later the White majority, in Europe, came about. This is also how the Hindu majority emerged in India from a potpourri of diverse cults, inheritance and marriage systems. As will soon be clear, it was cultural pruning initiated by our Constitution and not cultural swagger ordained by tradition that allowed for a Hindu majority to emerge. A similar process brought about a majority in Europe as well. The so-called ‘original condition’ is, factually, a myth.

Beyond Numbers to Citizenship 107

The Making of the Hindu Majority India began its democratic career soon after Independence when its Constitution came into effect in 1950, which is, by all accounts, a remarkable document. The transition from people’ to ‘citizen’ happens in the ‘Preamble’ itself, and this should suggest right away, our Constitution’s intentions. In this we beat even the the self-conscious French Constitution. In the American Constitution the term ‘citizen’ appears well after the first paragraph; the Italian Constitution in Article 3; the Spanish in Section 9; the Swedish in Chapter 2, and, in the German, way down in Article 16. That a traditional, economically backward, ex-colonised country could arrive at a Constitution as advanced as this is because of the sagacity of its founding figures. They took full advantage of being late comers by absorbing lessons from the experiences of earlier, established democracies. The Chartists and the Suffragettes had to fight for universal franchise for decades, actually for nearly a century, but the Indian Constitution decreed that from the start. In addition, what it also did, by a supreme stroke of the pen, was to abolish caste based practices from public life. India did not stop there, but later laws spelt out in great detail the punishments reserved for casteist behaviour. Soon after it became a Republic, it also took on Hindu practices that related to marriage and succession and created a single law that replaced many sectional, sectarian and tribal practices. It was in the years 1955-1956, that the Hindu Succession Act, the Hindu Marriage Act, Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act were made into law. It was not easy, frustrating even the likes of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar but finally the Hindu majority was born and it has held good for over 75 years. Nobody today will support polygamy, as some eminent people did in the mid 1950s, arguing that among Hindus marriage was a sacrament, not a contract. Some of those worthies also said that

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amending the Constitution in this fashion would also undermine the foundations of a family. Very recently, two judgments further diminished patriarchy in Hindu practice. In 2015, the Delhi High Court pronounced that a single woman need not disclose the name of her child’s father and yet be eligible to be its guardian. This ruling amended the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act. In 2016, the Delhi High Court also decreed that a woman can be ‘karta’, or head, of HUF property. This is in addition to the 2005 judgement that allowed women to inherit family property, including agricultural land. Studies show this has begun to happen, but needs to pick up pace. On this count, it must be acknowledged that traditional Christian and Muslim laws were much more even handed in their dispensation, though far from being dismissive of patriarchy. Unfortunately, the implementation of a Uniform Civil Code is still blocked in political corridors. It is through these legal changes and the adoption of cultural norms that were in accord with citizenship that the Hindu majority was established, and consolidated. Legally now, the term ‘Hindus’ includes Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists as uniformities were created between them. That this made a real difference is because it pertained to matters of succession, inheritance, maintenance and property. Prior to this, even among Hindus, there were different inheritance laws, most notably the Dayabhaga in eastern India, and the Mitakshara elsewhere in the country. Over and above these two, there was the Mayukha system too in western India, including Konkan and Gujarat. Then there was the specific form of inheritance among the matrilineal Nayars of Kerala. Besides, large tracts of Tribal India had their own, quite distinct inheritance customs. While we are at it, let us not overlook how the law flattened the cultural differences between the Dravidian cross-cousin marriage,

Beyond Numbers to Citizenship 109 and the “kanyadaan” practice of the north. The divergences between the two once had a range of sociological implications but now these are legally irrelevant. What some legislators should realise is that the Uniform Civil Code does not deny minorities their culture but blunts only those aspects of tradition that hurt citizenship. It by taking incremental steps of this kind that we go a long way in creating the everexpanding citizen majority in democracies. The Portuguese Civil Procedure, though advanced in certain areas, allows women to inherit 50% of the property but that only applies if they get married the Catholic way in Church. If this were to be modified along the lines of the Uniform Civil Code that would further bump up the majority. Despite such advances, the imposition of Hindu dietary taboos on the rest inhibits majority formation and keeps minority fears alive. On the other hand, minorities should accept that while beef eating is not disallowed by Islam, neither is it a necessary aspect of their religious observance. Making a Majority in Europe Textbook versions suggest that majorities were already in place in Europe and it is this that made nationalism easy to march in. This is a post hoc rationalization and unfaithful to the facts of history. Europe did not just have multiple, discrete communities but they were also frequently at war. There were Germans ruling over English speaking soil and Spaniards in German kingdoms. Nowhere then, in the original condition of modern nation-states, was there was just one single culture or language. The credo of one language, one religion, one nation has always been a myth. Strife was everywhere when the Austro-Hungarian Empire fell and Italy, it may be recalled, experienced all of this in a near pure form. Battles raged in the years 1861-90 as Sardinians clashed

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against Bourbons who fought the Sicilians and all of this over the idea of Italy. Democracy dismantled cultural impediments and its effects became instantly tangible. Imagine USA’s intellectual poverty if Harvard still disallowed Jews as it did up until 1926. Or, if Britain’s 1673 Test Act (in effect till 1850) kept Methodists and Presbyterians from Oxford and Cambridge. Most recently, that is in 2013, the Succession to Crown Act underwent a major amendment and now it allows Britain’s Constitutional monarch to marry a Catholic. It was not just nonProtestants Christians who were minoritised and persecuted, but even the dissenting Protestant ones. In France, the Third Republic, after 1870, came down heavily on the hitherto unchallenged Catholic Church. In 1905, matters came to a head when France inaugurated its version of secularism, or laicite, which finally ended all attempts at supremacy by the Catholic hierarchy. From 1905 on, no symbols of Christianity, the Holy Cross in particular, could be worn by any French official, including government school teachers. Ernest Renan advised the French to forget the St. Barthomelew’s Day massacre and the persecution of Huguenots to make citizens in France. As these barriers fell, the Christian majority gradually emerged in Europe and even Jews in North America have now begun to wonder how suddenly they have become ‘White Folks’. The bells and whistles of culture could stay but aspects that offended citizenship had to go. Conclusion: Making a Majority Democracy initiated these attacks on iniquitous tradition because citizenship demanded them. It was not the cultural majority but the micro-minority that was now the focus of attention. As T.H. Marshall presciently argued, citizenship confers an equality of status on all as the starting point.

Beyond Numbers to Citizenship 111 In this process, as we have noticed, traditional customs and practices that supported a cultural majority had no place in their original form. Instead, it was time now to create a majority comprising only citizens. This is a paradox, because the citizen, in essence, is a micro-minority. Citizens, if they so wished, could stay culturally encumbered. They could hold on to their cultural bells and whistles as long as they did not harm the premises of democracy and the promises of citizenship. Cultural practices would now be non-contradictory in practice and yet remain redolent. Today, for many, our prior culturally antagonistic pasts are difficult to recall, which is to the advantage of citizenship. All communities, majority and minority, carried ideological baggage that weighed them down, but citizenship set them free and lightened the load. That is, in a significant way, a positive outcome because it denotes a satisfying culmination of a difficult process. Every culture had to behave to get here. Multiculturalism today wants us to return to a fractionated past and their appeal must be thwarted if citizenship is to advance. The direction of democracy, needless to say, should pull us inexorably towards dissolving majority and minority consciousnesses and proclaiming a single citizenship instead. This is the grand majority that still awaits us; a majority of individual citizens confident of their place in society.

6

Urban Planning for “Citizens”:

Emphasising Space Over Non-Space

The Vision of Citizenship Urban Planning, properly done, should add up to reveal a vision of what the city stands for, how its residents connect, and, of course, public aesthetics. Naturally, this demands coherence and structure at the state level and cannot be left to disparate local initiatives, led by diverse concerns and moral ties. Most of all it demands considerations of public space where the citizen is upper most and not categories like poor and rich. Indeed, in all such efforts, consultations with stakeholders are vital. This is not because their views are inviolable but because the considerations they place need to be factored in, lest nothing significant is left out. At the same time, neighbourhoods do not add up to a good city, in fact, it is the other way around. If the city is planned with the right vision, neighbourhoods will connect, or else they will stand apart as enclaves-gated, or relegated. A city is not just an agglomeration of people whose numbers make it urban by census classification. It is first and foremost, where citizens live and where the reach of citizenship expands. A city has the potential to advance culture, the arts and sciences and create a democratic temperament among its residents. Rich and poor, a city is where human horizons grow and human creativity is at its best. It is essential, therefore, that citizenship concerns drive urban planning. This demands the crafting of an overall perspective of

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what we want the city to accomplish for its residents. It cannot be achieved piecemeal, lurching, from project to project; a housing colony here, an industrial site there, offices somewhere else, and so on. For citizenship to be placed uppermost in urban planning, two issues need to be kept in mind. Significance of Public Space and Non-Space The first is to underscore the importance of ‘public space’, and the second is to note the distinction between space and non-space. A public space is not simply a place in the open that people pass through, but one that generates a sense of belonging to all. This happens when there is a general awareness of its aesthetics and public utility and which, together, create a sense of belonging and membership. Public spaces, therefore, are made up of two concerns, viz. public and space. The first tells us that it is open to all, but the second alerts us to the fact that this is a ‘space’ that everybody can identify with and have a sense of belonging to. This latter aspect can be clarified by referring to Marc Auge’s all important distinction between place and non-place (Auge, 1995: 34). A non-place, of which there are plenty in most unreflective urban projects, is where people come and go, frequently too, but they form no attachment to it. It does not tug at the heart and if they were to move to another non-place that performs the same function, they would not notice the difference very much. An airport, for example, is a non-place. It can be super functional and can amp up your travel time efficiencies, but it will remain an airport—a place you come into and exit from. Nobody will ever say that they love their city because of its airport. If they do, it is a danger sign and a negative comment. Obviously, the place where they live is starved of public spaces allowing non-places like airports to become a rallying point. Just as airports are non-places, so are supermarkets, office complexes, and some apartment buildings as well. They are recommended for their

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efficiencies and not for the feeling of membership or generating a spirit of ownership. A space is then where people can call their own and if they were to be away from their city, it is areas such as these they would recall the most. A public space then is where the public, in general, have this feeling of belonging and where they congregate in happy numbers in a routine fashion. This is why some of the more sensitive urban planners do their best to convert non-places to public spaces to the extent they can. So, the grounds around a supermarket and the area within it are developed such that those who don’t really need to buy anything will still come there. A public space is, therefore, useful, but not devoted to a particular cause. It is multifunctional, but most importantly, it is where people of diverse backgrounds happily congregate without any direct purpose. An ideal public space would be one from where other dedicated non-places could be accessed, depending upon the needs of specific individuals. When Instrumentality Becomes Primary Considerations of this kind require a frame of reference that neither individuals nor neighbourhoods, acting out of their own interests, can perform. Nor can voluntary groups and activists do the job because they simply lack the resources, as well as the information, needed for the purpose. They can be active sounding boards, and good urban planners must involve them, but ultimately it is the state that has the responsibility to deliver. At this point it is worth digressing just to clear the point that public space has a political content to it, but is not a partisan one. True, most cities are slanted towards the better off and against poorer sections, but it is not as if the tables need to be turned for good urban planning. Though cities can be contested areas (see Foucault, 1975: 226-230), and India offers many examples of that (see Kundu, 2003), it is not class war that is the answer. An ‘Athenean agora’ is the other antipodal utopia (Harvey, 2005),

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but good urban planning can be realistic if it keeps ‘public space’ centre stage. Master Plans of different cities give us an idea of how the idea of public space figures, or does not figure, in the calculations of their framers. In the Master Plan of Delhi 2021 (MPD, 2021), meeting certain targets for designated classes of people dominates the scene. But where is the attention to whether a city has a heart that beats? There is an acute housing shortage in Delhi so if that requires regularising the irregular then so be it (MPD, 2012: 31­ 40). About 4.8 million people, may be more, need housing in Delhi which means another million homes, at least, need to be constructed. To make some advance here, a number of steps are advocated. These include in situ slum development, construction of cheap homes and reclassifying as legal structures that may have been illegally built. Meeting this pressing concern overpowers all other thoughts and little attention is paid to aesthetics, or public space, in this connection. Poor Housing or Housing the Poor The poor housing sections that the MPD 2021 went about constructing were ugly to begin with, so they became uglier in quick time. Several slum rehabilitation structures were not just unappealing to look at, they were difficult to live in. Imagine setting up home in a box like unit which is several floors high with no balcony, moving space, or lifts. Getting water up so many floors and maintaining the premises in working order are both expensive to operate and difficult to upkeep. Who would willingly call such places home? They would hardly qualify as ‘space,’ but could easily be categorised as ‘non-space’. This is because it would not matter much to one occupying such a unit to move to another unwelcome non-space. Though the MPD 2021 states that between 50-55 per cent of new residential units in the city should be reserved for the poor, but not a word about aesthetics

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here. A visit to any of these places would demonstrate this ugly fact face front. Those from Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) are entitled to units as small as 30 square metres in governmentsponsored housing projects. Not just the size and construction material of houses for the EWS need to be questioned, their locations too are very unhelpful to the poor. Many of the new resettlement areas are over 20 kilometres from the city where most of the jobs are. A further affront to the idea of public space comes from the disregard to pedestrians and those who would rather cycle to reach their destinations. First, cycling should not be seen as a poor person’s mode of transportation and, second, there should be safe cycling lanes, in addition to pedestrian zones. In fact, the Master Plan of Delhi 1960 did emphasise the need to lay cycle tracks that would act as arterial routes across the city. However, this aspect finds no mention in MPD, 2021. The question of ‘pedestrianisation’ gets only seven lines in this over 300-page document, and public art, laughably, receives just one paragraph. Clearly, not even cursory attention is paid to issues of public space where people across classes meet in pleasurable, aesthetic and functional surroundings. What blinds us from seeing this fact clearly is the seemingly laudable instrumental goal of providing mass housing for the poor, regardless of quality. That such an approach smacks of populism rather than citizenship often escapes minds in a hurry. When such predispositions rule it is hardly surprising that non-space easily trumps space. This is why it is easy to spot class differences in the way people inhabit, work and shop in Delhi. As ‘public spaces’ are absent it explains the persistence of gated communities in Delhi as well as long stretches of squalid quarters in the city. Even where green belts are proposed, it is done with the intention of letting the city breathe, but not planned with the idea of keeping it beautiful. Instrumentality wins once again. Predictably, then, these green belts are in disuse, have often been encroached

Urban Planning for “Citizens” 117 upon and all too often the authorities have looked the other way (MPD, 2021: 18). This, sadly, is not just limited to Delhi, but characterises other cities too, including Bengaluru, often considered to be the garden city of India. Planning for All In the mid-1950s, New York saw a tussle between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs as they had contesting views towards urban planning. Moses favoured bulldozing neighbourhoods he considered ‘blighted’ to build modern structures and avenues.1 Not only did Soho and Little Italy come in the way, he did not even hesitate to invade Washington Park. Jacobs, on the other hand, was principally inclined towards establishing affable neighbourhoods and creating ‘space’ where it did not exist (Jacobs, 1961; Moss, 2017). Needless to say, the powers that be sided with Moses and this profoundly disappointed Jacobs; in fact, she left for Canada soon after. Robert A. Caro’s Pulitzer Award winning work on Robert Moses highlights how Moses is reputed to design roadways and bridges such that they would prevent poor blacks from accessing parks and beaches. He also proposed street designs such that depressed neighbourhoods would not have adequate access to health and civic services and that this would drive poor blacks away from the city. Even Georges-Eugene Haussman’s objective of rebuilding Paris in the mid-nineteenth century was designed to remake the city as a paradise for the better off. A shiny, beautiful metropolis may be awe-inspiring to behold but it need not be citizen-friendly unless it pays attention to the creation of public space. In all these instances it is obvious how the state can determine urban design, or lack of it. Though the above are well known instances, let us not forget that the state has often, in recent times, inclined in the other direction too. This has helped in establishing ‘space’, in many state-sponsored projects, where urban dwellers sense a feeling of membership with their surroundings. Notwithstanding the earlier negative stories of New York, Mayor Bloomberg’s appointment of Amanda Burden has made a difference.

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Ms Burden realised that just green spaces were not enough if they did not attract people to use them for pleasure on a regular basis. It was not just about parks, but to make them such that they would draw residents to it in a number of ways at all times of the year (see www.ted.com/speakers/talks/amanda_burden; accessed on August 25, 2014). The High Line Park in New York is an exemplar in this regard. Detroit’s efforts to redo the abandoned workshop of Chrysler company is another instance of a similar kind of effort. More spectacularly, Dresden and Coventry provide us paradigmatic illustrations of how the notion of ‘public space’ makes a difference. Both these cities were bombed faceless by aerial strikes in the Second World War. Dresden chose to return to a more aesthetic version of its past and even used Bernardo Bellotto’s eighteenth century portrait of the city as a model. That is how keen the planners were in creating the space they once associated Dresden with. This effort has been a remarkable success and the reconstruction of Frauenkirche Church is a testimony to it. Coventry, on the other hand, chose to be purely functional under Donald Gibson and the contrast with Dresden is very striking. Coventry is staid and dull while Dresden is not just pretty, but also inspiring. Warsaw too, decided to recreate its older spaces, post-World War II. In more recent times we have the splendid example of Bilbao, in Spain’s Basque country. In 1980, post-Franco, Bilbao was a grey, dank and polluted city which aroused no special feelings in anybody. Then the Guggenheim Museum was made. It was an architectural marvel all right, but it transformed the ragged character of the neighbourhood as well. The Nervion River in its vicinity which was a filthy affair earlier now attracts a large number of citizens who derive pure joy from its clear waters. We also tend to forget, as Robert Moses did when he was thinking of New York, that crime is often linked to the kind of city we live in. This relationship is overlooked in many town planning exercises and that is a shame for there are abundant facts that call out for a need to be sensitive to this aspect.

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Crime and the City If you are walking in a small town you might wish for an extra pair of eyes, arms and, yes, faster legs. Contrary to popular belief, most Metros, which have more than a crore living in them, have lower crime rates than cities with a much lower population; between two and three million. Here, Delhi is the exception to the rule, and don’t let that fool you. True, in terms of crimes that fall under the IPC, Delhi tops all other towns, metros included and there are no sunglasses large enough to hide this shame. Could Delhi’s unique feature arise because of its close proximity to Uttar Pradesh? This state leads all others in practically every kind of crime—from murder, abduction, kidnapping, right down to attacks against women. Mumbai and Kolkata are probably better off as they don’t face UP’s osmotic pressure. This leads us to an anomaly. One would have normally expected other mega cities like Mumbai and Kolkata, with populations above 18 million and 14 million respectively, to carry a knife between their teeth like Delhi does. Yet, that is not the case. Instead, Delhi’s lead is followed by much smaller towns, with populations of less than three million; places like Kochi, Jaipur, Patna and Indore. In fact, if total crimes are taken into account, which includes those charged under the IPC and SLL (or, Special and Local Laws), Delhi is at the fourth spot and the top two are Kochi and Nagpur. Delhi slips again to the fifth position when it comes to murder rates, well behind Patna, Nagpur, Lucknow, and Jaipur. Patna, once again, leads in the number of kidnapping cases followed by Delhi, but after it, smaller cities like Lucknow, Nagpur, Jaipur and Indore take overall with a population below three million. That over 30 per cent of youth between 15 and 29 years of age are idle, that is not in employment, education or training, is certainly a factor that boosts crime. What, however, adds to this fuming churn is the 2011 Census finding that there are 84

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million literates and 33 million illiterates who are unemployed, and diploma holders are the highest among them. Here, then, are vagabond youth, with a piece of paper in their hands that can’t land them a job. Teamlease reports that only 18 per cent of those vocationally trained find work, but only 7 per cent of these in formal employment. If small towns, rather than metros (with the exception of Delhi) are where criminal activities are high, one needs to also factor in the kind of urbanisation India is going through. Under equal conditions, a non-tier 1 city applicant has a 24 per cent lower chance of finding work and can expact a salary that is Rs. 66,000 less per annum. The National Sample Survey also shows that the chances of getting a salaried job, that is one with some security, are much higher in larger cities than in smaller ones. But as metropolises like Delhi and Mumbai are showing a declining growth rate and Kolkata and Chennai may well have become stagnant, good jobs are getting harder to land in these places. Under such conditions, it is only those with big city networks who have access to these better jobs, and those who don’t must, of necessity, go to smaller towns. In these smaller urban sites, the situation is different; jobs are not only more difficult to find but they are mostly informal and ill-paid ones. Consequently, towns like Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Meerut, Patna, Pune, Jaipur, Kochi, Nagpur, Indore, and so on are not just getting bigger, but bloodier too. This is because it is the literate unemployed who are largely circling this territory, foraging for work and they have dreams much grander than what the unschooled can imagine. Unmet aspirations are socially more troublesome than empty stomachs! Imagine what the atmosphere must be like when 15,000 graduates, in 2016, applied for the position of sweepers in Amroha, UP. And when even this scaled down ambition fails, crime could easily become the default option. Mahesh Vyas, of CMIE, is right

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when he says that what we face is not a demographic dividend but a “demographic demon”. It is not a coincidence that juvenile criminals (the only category on which the crime bureau provides socio-economic information) are overwhelmingly children who have been to high school. Literate people migrate much more than illiterates do. This should check the prejudice among the metro middle class that big cities are running wild with illiterates from everywhere. This is a deep fried, crunchy opinion, but is completely fact free. In truth, the migration rate among those at the lowest income bracket is much below those who are better placed. In rural India, only three per cent of those in the bottom income decile migrate, compared to 17 per cent of those in the top. When it comes to urban male migration alone, the rate at which college graduates enter cities is more than double that of the “not literates”. Connecting the dots, the following picture emerges. Educated migrants move to small towns where well paid jobs are rare and this leads to a kind of social anger that is difficult to control. Once this happens, can crime be far behind? If India is to plan safer cities then our planners must think holistically and the issue of crime should not be overlooked given how clear the facts are on this matter. There are so many reasons then which call out for a need to place public space at the top of the agenda of city and town planners. Public anger and frustrations cannot be cured by highrise and broad avenues. These architectural marvels must make room for humble “public space”. This is not something that can come about on its own. It needs a prime mover. State as Prime Mover There are many more examples, globally, where the creation of space, and not just non-space, has been uppermost in the minds of urban planners. In all such cases, it has been possible because of initiatives that were generated by the state. Tall buildings, massive boulevards and intricate clover leaf flyover can create a feeling of

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awe, but not of membership. Who will want to walk alone in New York’s Wall Street at night? The state then acts as a prime mover and whether a city supports the creation of space or just non-space is a matter of choice. For this to happen, an overall vision is needed. In making this vision realisable and sensitive to collective citizenship concerns it is wise to involve bodies of local self-governance. Sadly, in India, such institutions suffer from large deficits and cannot even handle simple urban tasks such as water, salaries, drainage, etc. The 74th Constitutional Amendment of 1992 gives formal recognition to municipalities and is tasked with performing 18 clearly delineated functions, including urban planning. In practice, however, state governments decide everything, including property tax. As a result, urban planning becomes a jumble, of diverse projects without coherence. This prompts the alternate belief that voluntary groups, regardless of their diverse provenances, can fill the gap. Without question, they can instigate certain processes, activate mass opinion, but the final task will always remain for the state to accomplish. No doubt, non-spaces are essential, but they should not dominate all; in fact, they can be tempered by spaces that surround and ensconce them. An office district need not be unfriendly and unwelcoming after dark and housing for the poor need not be ugly either. NOTES 1. Late Mr. Jagmohan’s efforts at rebuilding Shahjahanabad in the old city of Delhi also gave evidence of forcing new structures on old established neighbourhoods and rid them of unsavoury characters.

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Individuals Possess Rights, Governments Perform Duties: Citizenship and Social Policy

Liberty and the Common Good It would be appropriate to begin my presentation with a thought that Nanabhoy (Nani) Palkhivala left behind for us to ponder over. It seems particularly appropriate for my purpose and I have adopted it as my precious mantra. We all know Nani Palkhivala as a formidable jurist, but he was an equally gifted political theorist and it is to this aspect of the man that I now turn to. In an address where he outlined his vision of India, Palkhivala said, recalling Alexis de Tocqueville, that “Liberty” does not stand alone. She needs to hold hands with law, justice, the common good and civic responsibility (Palkhivala, 2000, see also Palkhivala, 1990). Much has been written about the intimacy between liberty and law, but I am particularly struck by Palkhivala’s belief that it should also be paired with the common good and civic responsibility. I believe these words immediately bring us to the heart of “citizenship” which, if anything, calls out to the common good of the people and to the civic responsibilities of the state. At this point it is necessary to be cautious and not be deflected by notions of ‘individual duty”. This, as we hope to show, would dilute our understanding of both individual rights and state responsibilities. Duty and liberty, at the individual level, do not sit well together. The former, that is, duty, belongs properly to the realm of the state

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as an aspect of its civic responsibilities. Rights, on the other hand, are meaningful only when they refer to individuals. If this were not so and if duties were to be heaped at the individual’s door, it would let the state off the hook and wander about wantonly. Please note, a democratic state, in its truest form, does not seek to be let off the hook, but strives to stand up and be counted. In the following pages, there will be several occasions to return to this theme. The central pillar of democracy is the conferment of rights to individuals. This is what distinguishes this form of governance from earlier regimes where people were identified by the kinds of duties they had to perform for superior authorities. Democracy turns the tables on this dispensation. Now the state must perform duties towards individuals for the latter have been granted specific liberties, as fundamental rights, by the Constitution. Rights and duties each have their allotted position. As we all know, there are two kinds of rights that democracy grants. The first set of rights protect individuals from capricious treatment in public life and are anti-discriminatory in essence. They disallow consideration of race, religion, creed, or gender to influence matters of justice, employment or any other form of civic engagement. The second kind are known as civil liberties for they give the individual certain enabling rights; such as the right to free speech, the right of a fair trial in court, the right to vote, and so on.1 Rights and Duties Quite clearly, these rights are fundamentally designed to protect the individual from state excesses as well as from those who might have undue power and influence in society. There is nothing here about duties that individuals must perform. As all individuals have the same rights and liberties, any infringement of these by any person, or by the state, is an offence. The individual is supreme and it is the individual who is the primary candidate for protection. Against this background what the individual must watch out for is not to break the law and if that were to happen then the

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person concerned would have to face legal consequences. Notice also, these rights are stated in absolute and unambiguous terms. There is no such thing as the partial right to vote or a somewhat fair trial in court. If the right to free speech is curtailed under certain conditions (such as, threatening sovereignty), then anything outside those limitations should remain unthreatened. This leaves no scope for negotiating between “more” or “less” of any of these rights. That is where the matter ends; the individual has no duties but must obey the law, or else! The state’s job is to uphold the law and to ensure that no discrimination occurs on account of gender, sex or any other accident of birth. The democratic state has been conceptualised in two different ways. Both views agree that the state must uphold the law which protects the individual from discrimination and allows for the exercise of civil liberties. However, their disagreement is important to consider for democracy today is at a stage where the duties of the state are becoming a source of serious debates. This brings us directly to Palkhivala’s exhortation that liberty must be paired with a conception of the “common good” and of “civic responsibility”. We have not paid adequate attention to these questions in the context of liberty because there has not been enough emphasis on citizenship, and what it entails. The right to vote does not exhaust the contents of citizenship, yet as this is routinely cited it gives the impression that this constitutes all of it; at least, a huge chunk. Popular though such a perception is, the end result of it is unfortunate. Voting is not all and, moreover, it is largely an episodic act, even a calendrical event. What the concept of citizenship must foreground is that the state perform its duties so that individuals can exercise their rights and realise themselves substantively. The Indian Constitution is remarkable for mentioning the word “citizen” in the first sentence which no other Constitution does, not the American, not even the French. Yet, to give body to this assertion, the bare bones of individual rights need to be fleshed out with state-borne duties. Our Constitution diverts our attention

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from this project by raising the issue of individual duties in Part IV A of the Constitution. Fortunately, this section of the Constitution is not legally binding like the rest of it is. At the same time, we must recognise the slippage that might occur if duties are assigned as individual responsibility and not as that of the state. This basic fact is not fully integrated in much of our thinking on this subject. Why, even John F. Kennedy led us astray on individual duties when he declared in ringing tones at his inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” What one does for one’s country is an outcome of how much the state supports the citizen; that is the proper sequence. Even if one were to accept that individuals have duties, they are of little significance for citizenship and only apply within a limited coverage area. For example, the duty of not dirtying public places is not as effective as a law prohibiting such behaviour. It is when such a law is enforced relentlessly does public hygiene become a habit. Or, the duty, say, of reporting a crime. Why, there is a law that enjoins an individual to do just that. Yes, one can have duties as a parent, but that is not in the public sphere. However, to abuse, or neglect, your child is a criminal offence, punishable by law, because your child is a little citizen. In fact, I contend, we should keep asking what the state can do for the individual so that the individual can function as a true citizen. Only by efforts such as these can we make the coupling of liberty with common good and civic responsibility come alive as Palkhivala would have liked it to be. It is true that a large part of Western political theory was unsympathetic to the idea of a state performing designated duties. This was on account of the fear that it may become overbearing and resemble Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union. The long shadows these memories cast, followed by the protracted cold war, made political theorists wary of state intervention in uplifting individual welfare. What if the ruling

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dispensation disallowed civic liberties for what it considered to be the greater glory of the collective? This apprehension was not unfounded given the live encounter Europe faced with fascism and state socialism. It is this, for example, that kept Isaiah Berlin (1969) from dilating at greater length on the social welfare outcomes that his conception of positive liberty could entail.2 As is well known, Berlin’s negative liberties denoted absence of constraints at the individual level, but he recognised that this was not enough. As people act in groups and collectives, we need positive liberties too so that we may realise ourselves. A Robinson Crusoe is not a real person. However, in my view, it would be limiting the role of positive liberty if it applies only to enable groups and collectives to substantively manifest the potentials of individuals in them. Positive liberty must also include how the state can enhance and facilitate individual well-being and that is when we begin to encounter the significance of citizenship. For this reason we choose to leave behind Isaiah Berlin and opt instead to build on Palkhivala’s advice to link liberty with the common good and civic responsibility. Public Policy Most importantly, when liberty is linked to the idea of the common good it makes the connection between democracy and citizenship more intimate. It also signals the fact that the fear of a Hitler or a Stalin no longer haunts our minds. As these ghosts from the past have receded, newer concerns now dominate our thinking. For example, the question of the state delivering health and education to all is now capturing political debates all over the world. This demand is phrased in terms of the duties of a democratic state and its current domination of public imagination is quite impressive. It is not as if the demand that the state performs duties in the sphere of health, education and housing is new; it has been a fact of life in most of Europe for several decades now. Yet, significantly, a country like America, which hardly gave any credence to universal

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health, is now warming up to this idea. Democrats are warring over it in plain sight, for example, in the current US Primaries. What is surprising though is the number of Republicans today who are not dismissing state-funded universal healthcare as an incendiary socialist ploy. A major reason for the obfuscation in the appreciation of citizenship is because rights have frequently been confused with policy. Civil liberties are given to individuals, but when we talk of the “common good” we move from the realm of rights to that of state-level duties, in other words, to matters of social policy. Nobody has a right to healthcare, or to education, but these are matters of policy that emanate from the right to life. They enunciate, in clear terms, policies that a democratic state should promote should it wish to encourage citizenship. However, several critical issues are overlooked when policy aspects, such as healthcare and education, are framed as if they were rights in themselves. If, for example, a child is found playing marbles and not in a classroom, who should one hold responsible? The parents? The school Principal? The District Magistrate? Also, how must they be punished? A jail term? A heavy fine? We don’t really have answers to such questions. Any time we raise the issue of rights, we must be able to unambiguously declare its violation as a defined crime and take it to the proper authorities for adjudication. This is clearly not possible in the two cases I mentioned above, and there are many more. However, if we abandon rights and instead stress policies, we would be on firmer ground. The policies would then indicate the officials who are responsible if a certain non-compliance is noticed. It would also hand out the appropriate punishment for not fulfilling one’s officially stated job description. All of this would be explicitly formulated. There is more to come, and this too is crucial for Palkhivala’s linkage of rights with the common good. Civil liberties, strictly speaking, provide enabling conditions for framing policies on health, education, and so on. They do not spawn other rights, but

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help in framing adequate policies which give rights meaning in the context of pressing contemporary conditions, and these may change. After all, rights must be nimble enough to express social concerns, as and when they come up, and this can only happen when they are realised as policy. If health and education, for example, were stated as rights, not only would issues of responsibility/culpability, be overlooked but so also the delivery of these services. This is why it is dangerous to amass our stockpile of rights for we are neglecting the need for policy. As Andre Beteille remarked, most appropriately: “Unfortunately, the role of social policy in dealing with disparities has been undermined by the enthusiasm for creating more and more rights to solve every kind of problem” (Beteille, 2005). The multiplication of rights (initially encouraged by the UN) has taken our eyes off questions of policy where the criteria of efficacy and responsibility are paramount. Hence, it does not matter how well a “right” does in practice, so long as we can boast of its presence on our records. A poor quality school satisfies the “right to education”; a suffocating 75 square yard unit satisfies the “right to housing”; poor hospitals, likewise, satisfy the “right to health”. Notice how the right is satisfied but quality and performance delivery receive scant attention, if any. This is why we should know where to draw the line on rights and think of policy instead. When we conjoin Beteille’s observation with Palkhivala’s insistence to couple rights with collective welfare, the world of social policy lights up. Once there is a policy on say, healthcare or education, we now know what patients and students can expect and who is responsible for the performance of these services. Stated as pure rights, the tendency will be to satisfy them at the lowest levels, without fully realising them. In India, there has long been an unfortunate bureaucratic practice of delivering health, or education, to the underprivileged but with minimal attention to the quality of service. This is why

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health for the poor is today tantamount to poor health. While disagreements exist on the effectiveness of the PMJAY scheme in India and if we have the funds for it, the important fact is that quality care for the poor is currently on the agenda. The question may well be asked: Why is it important for a democracy to actively consider universal policies, such as on health, education or housing? It is at this point we should recall the seminal work of T.H. Marshall (1950) on citizenship. Citizenship Marshall believed that citizenship first conferred an equality of status on all individuals and then leaving them free to develop as they choose. To quote Marshall: “Differential status …was replaced by the single uniform status of citizenship, which provided the foundation of equality on which the structure of inequality may be built (Marshall, 1950: 34).” When Marshall insists that citizens first deserve an equality of status he is emphasising the need to make people equal at the start, and not at the finishing line. Marshall is in no mood either to hold back those who wish to be different because a maximalist state has its own plans and pre-existing standards. This is what makes his quotation above, so masterful. At one stroke Marshall undermines the maximalist state of Marxists as well as the minimalist state as advocated by those like Hayek (1944) and Nozick (1974). A proponent of Hayek might well say that we are being unfair to him for in the Road to Serfdom, there is a mention of providing a security net, albeit of a minimum kind. Hence, some minimum of food (does this mean tweaking the basic caloric requirement?); a minimum of housing (does this mean a hovel?); a minimum to preserve health (or is it just life?). Minimums of this kind only help to salve one’s conscience, but do little to salve a really sick person, or make a hovel a home. How can a person surviving on such minimums ever compete against those who have lucked out in the natural lottery?

Individuals Possess Rights, Governments Perform Duties 131 Nozick too would prefer a minimalist state which does no more than enforce contracts and take action against external aggression, civic violence and thefts. Truth be told, minimum standards of the kind Nozick would prefer actually benefits the status quo so long as everybody possesses what is legally theirs (Nozick, 1974: 151). However, Nozick adds, encouragingly, if any collective wants to build its very own utopia, they should go ahead and may many utopias bloom. The state should, however, stay out of such endeavours. In such conditions, if some additional good is delivered to the poor, then that should be left to voluntary and philanthropic bodies, and should not be part of state responsibilities. On no account, advises Nozick, should the state fund such services by taxing people (Nozick, 1974: 235). To quote him: “Holdings to which…people are entitled may not be seized, even to provide equality of opportunity for others” (Nozick, 1974: 235). This leaves the citizen, as enunciated by Marshall, out in the cold. As should be clear by now, Marshall’s citizenship privileges “equality of opportunity” over “equality of ends”. He is not suggesting that the state lend its weight in any one direction, or outcome, say fascist or communist, but give everybody equal opportunities to be different. It is by facilitating this outcome that citizenship is realisable and not just by the vote alone. Though Marshall belongs to a different school of thought, there is much that can be added to his views by recalling the contributions of John Rawls (1971). Rawls is clearly interested in distributive justice that is close to Marshall’s heart, but anathema to Hayek and Nozick. Rawls encourages us to enter into a thought experiment which imposes a social contract condition upon us (1971: 17). Imagine an assembly of people who place themselves voluntarily behind a “veil of ignorance”. In this condition, no member knows what their actual class or status position really is in society. When the veil is lifted, they may discover their class/status location which could well be at the bottom of the social rung.

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Under these conditions, those responsible for devising social policy would choose to protect the least privileged in society. This is because, once the veil is lifted, they might well find that they belong to this category (Rawls, 1971: 136 and passim). Rawls is, therefore, very mindful of the natural lottery and that individuals can be placed disadvantageously for no fault of theirs. If, at this stage, we align Marshall with Rawls, the case for redistribution becomes rational and not just well meaning. It is now in the interest of the social planner to be kind to the underprivileged for that underprivileged person might well be the planner; that is, once the veil is lifted. The Rawlsian route is not just about stooping to help the least privileged, it also protects those who are better off. This stands to reason for those behind the veil of ignorance may find themselves to be among the privileged once the blinds are removed. Consequently, they would press for an optimal outcome where helping the worst off does not take away from the well-being of others. In other words, a fine balance is called for which, in truth, is hard to implement. Rawls discusses this aspect at length when he considers the need for taxation to raise funds to provide redistributive social services (Rawls, 1971: 278). Obviously, a position such as this is in conformity with advocating state participation in universal health and education because people need these services as citizens.3 Without these provisions, the natural lottery would determine lives, with some exceptions, from start to finish. For a democracy, such a state of affairs, as Palkhivala too argued, is totally indefensible (Palkhivala, 1984: 5). Reservations Often such assertions are misunderstood as being against free enterprise or even as socialism which believes in the equality of ends. Palkhivala is easily identified as a champion of free enterprise, but he was also a socialist though, as he said, of the right sort. His

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brand of socialism was not of the kind that devoured private property (in the name of nationalisation) without adequate compensation. Like Marshall, he was opposed to the notion of equality of ends, but championed, instead, fairness and justice, which he called the “kernel” of the socialist doctrine (see Palkhivala, 1990). “True socialialism,” Palkhivala wrote, “means the subordination of private gain to public good” (1984: 55, see also 59). Consequently, like Marshall, Palkhivala too believed in free enterprise but with a social conscience that cares for “citizens”. This side of Palkhivala is not adequately recognised, but it should be. For him, free enterprise did not mean rampant and reckless accumulation of wealth for that could be detrimental to the well­ being of the society as a whole. Palkhivala could not have been more forthright when he said: “Quite a few Indian businessmen… are much more interested in their own personal prosperity than in the future of the country… (Palkhivala, 1990).” Palkhivala gave evidence of his concern for fairness in dealing with the downtrodden when he espoused the policy of Reservations. At the same time, he drew our attention to the fact that when the state plans a special provision for a targeted group, then the designated population must be in a minority. This is in conformity with Marshall for when a measure is designed for the majority, it should be presented as a universal policy, such as on health and education, and not a targeted one. Following from this one could legitimately argue that Reservations for Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) are justified because they are meant for a minority. However, when the Other Backward Classes demand Reservations, it is not fair as we are now targeting a majority population. (Palkhivala n.d.). Bluntly summarised, Palkhivala’s judgement on this, in all likelihood would be: Ambedkar, “Yes”, but Mandal, “No”. In this regard, we need to be sociologically sensitive and attentive to the fact that OBCs never faced social discrimination as SCs and STs did. As it has been often pointed out, many who belong to the

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OBC category are , more often than not, the dominant community/ caste in rural India. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that in several cases they could well be the principal exploiters of SCs and STs in village India. Against this backdrop, it is wise to heed Palkhivala’s caution against Reservations going into overdrive as this would put at risk our constitutional aim to build a casteless society. Difficult Democracy There is no doubt that upholding the cause of citizenship requires “eternal vigilance”. Palkhivala tirelessly campaigned in favour of this principle, time and again, to ensure that our civil liberties, which are prominently listed in Articles 14-32, remain untarnished. The Keshavanand Bharati case, where Palkhivala excelled, concluded that fundamental rights cannot be amended by Parliament as they constitute the Basic Features of the Constitution. Why is this such a landmark case that will stand the test of time and should be a beacon to constitutional democracies everywhere? We often forget that democracy is not only the most recent human arrangement, but also the most difficult one. All previous regimes were, in contrast, easy, especially from the perspective of those who are perched at the top. Monarchy, fascism, slavery and theocracy are much simpler to practise as there is no bar on the powers of the ruling class, other than a loosely moral one. The ideologies of such regimes flow almost naturally and do not require careful juridical and theoretical examination. Democracy, on the other hand, centralises a sentiment that is not easy to nourish, in fact, it is one that goes against what we consider to be human nature. Regardless of where we are in time and space, an unshakable anthropological truth stands out. Human beings everywhere tend to spontaneously divide among themselves claiming that their community is superior to all others. This is not true only of the Hindus, or the Chinese or the French. It holds even for the Kung people in the Kalahari desert (who are supposedly just exiting from being hunters and gatherers); in fact everywhere.

Individuals Possess Rights, Governments Perform Duties 135 Given this rock solid empirical truth, imagine the hard work democracy must buckle down to accomplish. The core tenet of democracy is citizenship and the core principle of citizenship is “fraternity”. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar said that it was easy to plan for equality and liberty, but fraternity was something else. Fraternity demands the collapsing of distance between communities, the disregard of ethnic and religious differences, such that public life is unaffected by these passions. To carry out this task effectively, we have to go against the spontaneous tendencies in human beings which is why democracy is so hard to observe. Dictatorships and tin pot potentates often call the countries they are ruling over with an idiosyncratic iron hand, a democracy, or a republic. These terms are usually accompanied by a rather ornate description of the ruling regime’s public presentation of itself. This might quite easily give the impression that democracy is very easy to accomplish as lowly tyrants can call themselves democratic, almost at will. Such misrepresentations of democracy are, of course, preposterous, and they could be easily discredited. However, there is another insidious danger that should also be highlighted, and Palkhivala did just that. We need to remember that while citizens have the right to vote, and vote they must, this does not mean that majority rule is everything. When it is just the mechanical act of adding up polling numbers without paying attention to issues of civil liberty and fundamental rights, we have left citizenship way behind. We might still be nationalist but that would, by itself, not amount to democracy. While a nation-state is a pre-condition for a democratic state, it is certainly not its defining feature. Rabindranath Tagore, very early on, cautioned us against excessive nationalism for that could blur our appreciation of citizenship where fraternity, not enmity, counts. He saw in it dangers that most others did not quite perceive. Further, nationalism tends to dwell on the past, on historical defeats and victories, or periods of joy and sorrow, forgetting the

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future task at hand. Citizenship is, on the contrary, future oriented, and starts determinedly from the present. One might even say that citizenship is agnostic, or unmusical, to things historical. This might appear excessive, but in politics myth and tradition stand in for history and tend to dominate popular consciousness. Learning to forget is an important lesson. India has defied most Cassandra complected views of many experts. From the time we became independent, scores of academics, commentators and foreign observers have predicted that India would soon break up into small parts. This has not happened, on the contrary, USSR is not what it used to be and countries like Spain are facing serious fissiparous tendencies within. Many of the same worthies also predicted that India’s democracy was a very fragile entity and would not last the wash. Once again, India has held election after election for nearly seventy years and nearly 900 million citizens are eligible voters. This does not mean that democracy’s task is over. In a true democracy, of course, the task is never over. After every great accomplishment is consolidated, a new goal, a new ambition, rises and citizens are prepared for yet another conquest. We are lucky that we had many luminaries who constantly alerted us to the task of citizenship and Nani Palkhivala stands right in the front row when we think of them. His advice that we look at rights, not on its own, but in concert with the “common good” and “civic responsibility” must always be remembered. He demonstrated this precept not just in words but in practice, most notably in the courtroom, time and again. His message speaks boldly not just to lawyers, but to activists of all hues, academics of all persuasions and to watchful citizens everywhere. NOTES 1. The right to property is often included as a civil liberty in many countries, but India is not one among them. 2. “Once I take this view”, Berlin says, “I am in a position to ignore

Individuals Possess Rights, Governments Perform Duties 137 the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture in the name, and on behalf, of their ‘real’ selves, in the secure knowledge that whatever is the true goal of man ... must be identical with his freedom” (Berlin 1969, pp. 132–33). 3. It is here we disagree with Marshall. Matters such as the delivery of health, education, housing, etc., are not in the realm of social “rights” but of social “policy”, for reasons mentioned earlier. Beteille (2005) is a better guide in this regard.

8

Confidence Crisis: Liberalism

as a State of Exception

Test of Confidence Holding a liberal regime to stay liberal needs much more than ideology: it needs confidence. There is probably no liberal state that has been continuously liberal without slipping in and out of illiberal politics for fairly long periods. This is because, at one time or another, all these countries have faced a confidence crisis. When that happens, liberalism is no longer all virtue but ridiculed and derided by the very people who once pledged it unending loyalty. From a Marianne holding up the torch of Liberty it soon becomes a truant lady of the night. This is best exemplified when a liberal state is in a wartime crisis, but civil unrest can set it off too. Under these circumstances, some of the staunchest liberal democrats are quick to shed their hitherto deeply cherished liberal values. Without their feet so much as being subjected to the fire, they unhesitatingly cheer for what they now call a “higher” value, namely, the protection of the nationstate. Even Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ to habeas corpus eight times during the American Civil War. In 1866, after that war ended, the US Supreme Court held that Lincoln had unduly exceeded his rightful authority. History records several repetitions of this scenario across the Western world. Once tensions ease and normalcy returns, it is often realised that curbs on liberalism during that period were probably

Confidence Crisis: Liberalism as a State of Exception 139 excessive and unwarranted. Yet when a nation’s confidence is threatened, liberalism is seen as a sinister force that needs muzzling. After the crisis is over, liberalism returns, duly polished and in full glory once again. Is liberalism then only for the good times? Instances from History After World War I ended, many Americans wondered if the contrarians of that period were really all that subversive as they were made out to be. They found enough reason to castigate President Woodrow Wilson for exaggerating the dangers the US faced as well as the depiction of his political opponents as divisive and dangerous. In their cool and considered post-war judgement, they went so far as to contend that the 1918 Sedition Act in the US was unnecessary and harmful. America’s return to liberalism did not last very long. Hitler’s ascendancy caused major anxiety attacks in the US’ so-called liberal democratic establishment in the late 1930s. In quick time, liberalism began to sound odious once more giving rise to a mood that was reminiscent of the earlier World War I days. Civil libertarians were cautioned to be “realistic” by those very people who were, till recently, committed liberals. Even President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), widely held as a leading liberal voice, doubted if his liberal minded Attorney General Francis Biddle was “tough enough” to let go of his liberalism now that the US was threatened by Germany. After all, the earlier attorney general, Frank Murphy, had promised to demonstrate to Roosevelt that America was not “a soft, pudgy democracy”. Winning World War II was not enough. America had to also go through the mad McCarthy period soon after. It was only years later, in 1983, that the US Congress sanctioned a full study and concluded that the wartime internment of ethnically Japanese American citizens ordered by FDR was a product of “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” Now that the US was on top of the global heap and an economic magnum power it

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was easy to come to this judgement. It was a good time, all in all, to ring in liberalism once again. Britain’s liberalism also waxed and waned in lockstep with its rise and fall of confidence. During World War I it promulgated Regulation 14B which allowed detention without trial of hostile suspects accused of disloyal conduct. When World War II happened, Britain promptly issued Regulation 18B which sanctioned pretty much what the earlier Regulation 14B had. Churchill happily sanctioned Regulation 18B and his enthusiastic exhortation to “Collar the lot!” testified to his endorsement of going illiberal. His support for largescale internment of alien enemies in the absence of meaningful individual review as well as his support for their deportation—with at times tragic consequences—do not stand among his better legacies. In 1943, even Churchill found it odious because it made some of his friends and relations look suspect, yet he did not lift Regulation 18B. France too has had long periods of illiberalism well after the difficult years of World War II and the Vichy regime. The Algerian War of Independence brought out that recessive gene and France passed several emergency decrees which curbed individual freedoms. October 17, 1961 was a particularly gruesome day in Paris when atleast 200 protesters against the Algerian war were killed. Police Chief Maurice Papon who was in charge of that operation was later discovered to be the same person who, during World War II, had deported 1,600 Bordeaux Jews to certain death in concentration camps. The Inconstant Moon Liberalism, sadly, is quite like the inconstant moon. Even the best and brightest democracies have given in to prolonged, dark illiberal phases which coincided perfectly with a crisis of confidence facing them. Watching over every wellfed and contented liberal regime in the happy playpen stands an illiberal sentinel waiting to rush in when an elbow is grazed. If liberalism is that powerless, how stable

Confidence Crisis: Liberalism as a State of Exception 141 can this phase ever be? Glorious courage may well be grace under pressure, but liberalism, in contrast, is a kiss off for it is grace when there is no pressure. The moment confidence declines, liberal values run for cover. This justifies calls to strengthen the nation-state and human rights suddenly become impediments. Even the mightiest countries have taken this route on the ground that airy liberal values only help anti-nationals and undermine the spirit of patriots. The US, for example, recently went through just this process when the illiberal slogan “Make America Great Again” cascaded down from the White House. India’s tolerance of illiberalism predates the 1975 Emergency for it has allowed all manner of preventive detention going back to the Nehruvian days. That these provisions have been put to work by successive governments demonstrates how routine this practice has become: hardly exceptional. When they were first sanctioned it was believed to be necessary because India had just won independence but a bitter partition of the country meant a hostile neighbour and internal secessionists. Under these circumstances, normal legal procedures, the argument went, were too unmuscular for the job and needed illiberal heft. Clearly, liberalism lacks the grits and guts to stand on its own. When the rough house begins, politicians and short-term economic self-interest can easily bully it into submission. With these factors forever in play, confidence in one’s nation-state are like golden moments in liberalism’s short span: they disappear just when you think you are having the most fun. When confidence starts drifting away, only the lonely will hold themselves accountable. But for most, this is the moment to look for somebody to blame. On such occasions, nations feel the need to customise a blameworthy opponent drawing from history, myth or recent territorial confrontations. These fifth-columnist “others” must necessarily be cast as devious outsiders. They have wormed their way in by feeding on the generosity of their hosts but have, all the while, been sharpening their knives.

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Seen thus, liberal values are much like noblesse oblige. It’s a favour that confidence and wellbeing allow, but can easily be cast as foolish and self-destructive indulgence. In difficult times, universal human rights, the cornerstone of liberalism, is painted as artful flummery that just comes in the way of effective governance. Anthropologist Victor Turner was probably right when he argued that goodwill and camaraderie are actually signs of anti-structure (hence exceptional) because structure is obedience, hierarchy and separation. This explains why it is not at all difficult to front human rights when one’s confidence is on a high. At such times, liberalism does brilliantly for things are going swimmingly well. The image in the mirror is just fine, so where is the need to bawl at somebody else? At the same time, it must be acknowledged, largeheartedness is good but it is temperamental and idiosyncratic, liable to be turned off on a whim. And that is exactly how it has happened, again and again. Noblesse oblige can petulantly turn into lèse-majesté and Marie Antoinette exemplifies this perfectly. It is important to call out whenever generosity poses as liberalism because the latter is principally about seeing oneself through the eyes of others and is not self-congratulatory and indulgent. Liberalism requires extreme discipline, from start to finish, which is unnatural in a normal, non-experimental setting. It is a fragile and delicate disposition which takes very little to crack into pieces. Intersubjectivity and Science as Preconditions It is difficult to be a liberal for two principal reasons. The first is that it requires us to be Intersubjective and consider others as our equals and to craft policies keeping that in mind. This goes against an anthropological truism which holds that humans project others not as just being culturally different but, in essential terms, also inferior. It is possible that they may be wealthier and more powerful at present yet, fundamentally, they will always be flawed. Regardless

Confidence Crisis: Liberalism as a State of Exception 143 of geography or economic development, this powerful prejudice is present everywhere: from the hunter-gatherer! Kung San of the Kalahari desert to the white supremacists in the US. The second reason why it is so difficult to be a liberal is that it forces people, the leaders and the led, to be scientific in everyday matters. Just as in science, all truths are provisional, so also a liberal outlook should regard all policies correct till a better one comes up. Earlier regulations might need complementary ones or, perhaps, be overturned completely, when new facts emerge. This goes against the basic thrust of politics which, as Karl Mannheim (1991) noticed, favours an inflexible attitude to decisions once arrived at. Thus, while it may have once been a good liberal policy in India to let community-based personal law to remain untouched, there is a resistance to review it even after the initial coordinates of that decision have disappeared. Edicts may be carved in stone but the ground beneath them can shift away. It is rank inflexibility, however, which characterises much of our politics and statecraft. This explains why Churchill found it difficult to rescind Regulation 18B, or why FDR held on to his draconian 1942 Executive Order 9066 that interned US citizens of Japanese descent, and also why many professed liberals in India are reluctant to give up their protective attitude towards dysfunctional public enterprises. Inflexibility is a failing that colours all politics, but it is particularly hurtful when liberals succumb to it as well. There is no policy that is liberal forever other than the principle of human rights, which is but the motherboard. In fact, it should be the protection of these human rights on a labile terrain that should energise liberals to be flexible and nimble and not remain tied to a dictum arrived at long ago. None of the tentative and fairweather-friend qualities of liberalism come through in any of the established treatises on this subject. The lasting impression one gets from the classics is that once liberalism is explained and adopted, it remains a strong

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redoubt (or embankment, at the least), which protects universal human rights. It is, however, possible to argue that John Rawls (1971) comes closest to accepting the fragility of liberalism. In his theory of justice one has to self-consciously adopt an intersubjective attitude and consider policies from the viewpoint of the most deprived. This suggests a superior commitment to a rare value and it will, therefore, always need an extraordinary confluence of good fortune to get activated. The Rawlsian social contract is leadershipdriven and requires a voluntary submission to the principle of intersubjectivity. As it is not a mass act, it can easily wilt under popular pressure. Against this backdrop it would be incorrect to label illiberalism as a “state of exception” as many contemporary scholars, such as Giorgio Agamben (2005) tend to do. If liberalism is a lashing that coats the illiberalism that lies at the core, then we must reverse the usual understanding of what constitutes the “state of exception”. It can be Done When a nation’s confidence is rattled, it reveals its illiberal heart. At which point, liberalism, or what passes for it, comes through as a fleeting state of exception. When put to the test of confidence, it has rarely, if ever, managed to survive. Illiberalism is now, clearly, a much more enduring rule for that is what governments turn to when in trouble. If it takes a crisis to bring out a person’s character, then, by the same logic, it should also reveal a nation’s essence. Liberalism usually moves by fits and starts and only after being prodded by exceptional leadership whose occurrence is unpredictable and infrequent. Thus, while subsequent periods of Illiberalism might undermine the products of these good times, some kind of muscle memory remains which can be activated. Sadly, liberalism’s career is not a linear one which is why if one’s biography coincides with the bad times, and chances are at will, the only liberalism one will experience will be from books.

Confidence Crisis: Liberalism as a State of Exception 145 As always there are exceptions to even this rule on exceptions. Post Franco, Basque Spain stands out for the confident audacity with which it revved up its democratic institutions even while it was going through serious separatist crisis. Other governments in this precarious economic and political situation might have touted nationalism over democracy, but here it was different. The newly elected government of Spain’s Basque Country did not let the militant ETA derail it from its democratic agenda and powered ahead on all cylinders. Its sheer thrust blew the secessionist militants owing allegiance to the Basque Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) out of the water. Today, many offices of the Basque Country government display a banner at the entrance saying: “ETA No.” That it is able to do so with popular approval is because it leveraged its democratic institutions to the full and delivered, in quick time, to the Basque people way more than they had asked for. In fairness, though India did approve of several clauses that allow for preventive detention, on the whole it deserves credit. It stood out, in 1947, as a remarkable gemstone among the heap of ragged nationalist regimes in Africa and Asia who conveniently used crisis to junk democracy wholesale. India had way more confidence than those others which is why we must add to the strengthen the liberal elements in our Constitution and not cede them away when the bugle calls foretelling a crisis. This is why citizenship demands the will to be doggedly confident.

9

Source Credibility and Campaign

Redundancy: The Merits of Slow Thinking

Natural Stupidity Covid and Kumbh Mela provide near laboratory conditions to figure out why social policies go wrong. This time our accent is not on policy advisers and experts, but on politicians who operate solely on electoral compulsions. In this, we cannot but recall Amos Tversky, Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman’s colleague, who said that most of the time we don’t study artificial intelligence but natural stupidity (see: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256­ 019-0038-z). Social scientists, planners and political leaders are loathe to accept this, but it is true; we are either studying stupidity or manipulating it. Economics, Political Science, Sociology, each studies its own brand of stupidity and disciplines are built on that foundation. However, in general we can distil the various stupidities that exist around us into two main categories. The first is to believe that people are comprehensively ignorant and only scientific advice from experts can save them. Smart as this may seem, at first sight, it is actually stupid, for these advisers do not take into account the context of social interventions. The science they talk about is in an abstract world, much like a frictionless surface. True public policy needs to take on board the reality of the context before a line of action is recommended. There is good science in that realm too, and it is a whole lot better. However, this requires involvement with

Source Credibility and Campaign Redundancy 147 the real world which is one that is populated by citizens who are located at different points in the social structure. Are people comprehensively stupid to resist science? A slum dweller may not be stupid in disregarding social distancing norms but ignores them because they are impractical and very difficult to observe. Likewise, poor workers may resist inoculation for fear they would lose wages, first on account of the effort needed to get the shot and then to recover from its after effects. The science is good, but the context makes them suspect. As we see, following science has major, measurable inconveniences for unclear benefits. So are poor workers, stupid? Not really. What would have been a better science is if we understood the real life constraints that most people functioned under and then created policies and issued advisories. When, for example, there is scarce water in a slum dwelling, washing hands for 20 seconds each time is for all practical purposes, unrealistic. To keep insisting on this will only turn people cynical of what is “Covid appropriate” behaviour and the consequences of that are disastrous. The second kind of mistake goes in the reverse direction. It holds that people’s choices are inviolable, even sacred, and it would be incorrect, if not immoral, to disregard them. This is a species of starry eyed populism where the state abdicates responsibilities and allows popular myths, beliefs and customs to dominate, even when there is good contrary evidence. Policy planning must, of course, consult citizens, but must not bow to popular will when scientific evidence goes against it. Individuals, by themselves, will look out for their specific best interests and these may not be good for the society as a whole. It is important to take a clear headed stand here which is consonant with the principles of democracy. It is the job of the state, its very visible hand, to support citizenship, which is the collective, and not be swayed by unexamined prejudices or selfinterests. What we overlook quite often in such cases is that the loudest voices in the populace are usually of those who are best

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organised and armed to forward their own sectional interests. Their ability to guage what is in their favour as vox populi is because the rest lack the instruments, energies and organisation skills to make their view heard and felt. So, what passes as popular opinion is often sectional bias parading as general will. Watch out! Undermining the basic tenets of citizenship where we are equal at the base is evident in both the scenarios just mentioned. What is good for the privileged should not be denied to the underprivileged as far as specific policy issues are concerned. When a policy is unmindful of real constraints and when a policy only indulges popular assumptions without testing them for their efficacy to meet actual needs they are both anti citizens. People, by themselves, don’t think of the larger good and this is not surprising as all of us occupy very specific social positions, both structurally and culturally. Nor, is it an act that is aligned with democracy to let a cultural preference trump citizenship considerations where the minorities or the disadvantaged are not taken into consideration. Policies that fail to pass the citizenship test are actually outcomes of a process that bear a stunning resemblance to what Daniel Kahneman considered “fast thinking” (Kahneman, 2011). Unfortunately, fast thinking of this kind has many reputable sponsors whose advice, predictably, cleverly hides sectional interests. Milton Friedman famously advocated this approach with the clever caveat that choice exercised should not hurt others. However, no clarity here about the hurt to those whose choices have been denied. For example, disallowing Kumbh Mela’s shahi snaan may constitute hurt to devotees, but it can also spread the disease. So, which hurt is greater, as hurt cuts both ways. Administrators who want to tick boxes and think their job is done are victims of the first variety of “thinking fast”. Politicians who are thinking of the next election and not of the general welfare of citizens are usually the most susceptible to the second kind of “thinking fast” for they do not pause to consider how exactly will their electoral strategies affect citizens. Earlier, we had devoted our

Source Credibility and Campaign Redundancy 149 attention to administrative experts, usually economists, but here the emphasis will be on politicians who are driven principally by electoral considerations. When the compulsion is of this order it is easy to make the slip and believe what the electorate want in the heat of the election is what is actually good for citizens. To centralise citizenship even as participants sound the election bugle requires “slow thinking”. Our recent experiences with the Covid pandemic give enough ground to demonstrate our contentions. We still require another important concept to be introduced before that task is fully addressed. Source Credibility It’s time now to bring in another critical variable besides fast and slow thinking, and that is “credibility”. Credibility, or lack of it, further thickens the plot and that often creates a comedy of errors when advocating social policy. Apart from lifetime experiences that conditions our choices, accepting information depends more on the credibility of the source than on the content on the knowledge given out. In both cases, fast thinking is evident as we come to decisions very fast. If in the past a certain doctor cured me of influenza then the same doctor must be the right one to go to when I have Covid. If I win your trust, say on language rights, I might also get you to campaign for the environment, even though you may have never earlier thought of it. Sources that have won credibility, either because of their economic sagacity, cultural purity or military heroism or incorruptibility, influence people more than scientists ever can. This is because science takes long but once your mind has decided, after deliberation, to trust a source of information, it is much easier to go with it. After credibility is secured, the same source can dispense other information and the chances are that they will be accepted without further scrutiny. The credibility test once won, has a long shelf life.

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Sadly, political leaders who are considered credible sources of information and wisdom, spoil it all by not fully trusting their powers. Consequently, they keep trying to win people over when they no longer need to resulting in what may be called “campaign redundancy”. On account of this, popular views get a further boost from leaders who could have just as easily used their “source credibility” (Umeogu, 2012: 112-115) status to scotch them. By giving in to “campaign redundancy”, high source credible leaders needlessly cede much of the advantages they toiled so hard to acquire. While no amount of source credibility could have made leaders enforce social distancing in slums, matters may have been different in the case of the Kumbh Mela or in election shoutouts. However, because of campaign redundancy, leaders did not want to offend what they believed was the popular mood and went ahead with both these events. As a result, given the source credibility of leaders, the masses found no reason to stay away from Hardwar or from the election battle grounds, both of which attracted lakhs of people. This was a near perfect staging of a comedy of errors. Leaders did not want to risk dialling down pilgrimages and election rallies for fear of switching off people. So they played to what they thought was the gallery little realising the redundancy of it all. As they already had credibility in the bag, the masses would comply if election canvassing were made virtual or the Kumbh Mela largely “symbolic”. Therefore, the masses need not have been pampered and pampering ended up actually hurting the masses. Our brain has a way of discouraging difficult decisions and promoting easy ones. This is why Amos Tversky said that most of the time he studied natural stupidity. In one case, our brain chooses the stupid route of trusting past practice and being more comfortable with what is tried, tested and familiar. In another case, we depend on others to provide us with thought leadership especially those who have proven their credibility, even if that were only on one significant, momentous occasion. This is also a stupid move, but it happens all the time.

Source Credibility and Campaign Redundancy 151 This kind of mass suspension of difficult decision-making is usually the preserve of the young because they come to conclusions swiftly and mistake conviction for correctness. The older one gets the slower is one’s response and thus greater the possibilities of coming to decisions which need deliberations. In such instances a leader’s source credibility will not carry as much weight as it would with the young who are quick to react. In all likelihood, this has to do with the consciousness of age where physical infirmity also tells the mind to go slow and think more. Those who believe in scientific advice, are also willing to change their opinion if science changes its mind and if its recommendation are properly contextualised. This is difficult for a majority of people want certainty all the time. That is why when they see a source credible leader without a mask and disinterested in social distancing, they feel the old, comfortable world is still around and they need not panic. Established behaviourial practices continue because source credible leaders are afraid to test their strength and that helps the corona virus to happily multiply. Going Against the Tide Are there ways we can overcome this tendency towards choosing the easiest of all options? Is it possible to “think slow” in politics. Remember, some of democracy’s major advances happened because leaders did not just kick the tyres to see if the vehicle was travel worthy. Instead, they took a hard look at the machine, tuned it up, even changed some of its parts. This is how democracy grew to include women, minorities and propertyless people. One could add to this list, the banning of child labour. Today, many take these features for granted, forgetting that they did not come easy. Most important of all, these great changes happened because leaders with source credibility did not waste their advantage in “campaign redundancy”, but used it to alter people’s ways. None of the significant milestones of democracy, mentioned earlier, came about because that is what people wanted. In fact, the majority

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often did not, but source credible leaders persisted and that is why democracy is what it is today. What Bertold Brecht said about art is equally valid for democracy. For Brecht, art should not mirror the world but, like a hammer, smash it. Source credible leaders too, should not waste their advantage in mirroring the world and indulging in campaign redundancy. They should, like good artists, instead break the mirror for the greater good. There is no ideal moment either to break the mirror for ducks will never, on their own, stand in a row. When child labour was abolished in Britain, poor coal miners did not like it. It took at least 15 years for the benefits of school education to show up, but leaders persisted and weathered that storm and today they are admired for holding up their end. This process of abolishing child labour began in Britain in 1833, but it took the 1878 Factory Act and the 1880 Education Act to finally eradicate it. It was a long struggle and much of this was achieved, not by people pressure, but because leaders with source credibility fired. Without mass support, these heroes pulled with their teeth till they finally succeeded. This is true for practically every major democratic achievement, including India’s fight against untouchability, where Gandhi stood firm and took on majority prejudices. Given the crisis laden situation in India today, it is time leaders realised how wasteful “campaign redundancy” is and prepare themselves, instead, to smash the mirror. We have dithered for years on major social reforms, making room instead for what we thought were ‘popular beliefs’. That led to wasting resources on needless subsidies, both to the rich and the poor. We spend more, in real terms than USA does, in subsidising the farming sector in India, but it is still so poor. The comedy of errors plays out in so many diverse settings. Instituting measures that would rid our economy of informal labour, setting up universal health and insurance schemes, making quality education available to all, require leadership. This is not the

Source Credibility and Campaign Redundancy 153 work of a maverick who gambles on a turn of dice in a crap shoot. None of these happened easily elsewhere for they required leaders to take gutsy risks in order to secure long-term gains. The mirror only reflects the status quo, no matter how tarty the subject makes itself out to be. “Campaign redundancy” bolsters this tendency and it is time we acknowledged that. Recognising Campaign Redundancy Once the mirror is smashed, a new world opens up, especially for leaders who already have a bagful of credibility at hand. They can now leverage their advantage to accomplish tasks whose significance does not strike the masses who want instant gratification. We have had many leaders blessed with source credibility, yet very few junked campaign redundancy to help people out of their stupidity and set up a true welfare state. If they had, workers would not be scurrying to their villages today fearing another de facto, if not de jure, lockdown. The current pandemic has clearly not been enough to break the thrall of campaign redundancy. Murphy’s law was still in full operation here for all that could go wrong had gone wrong. Yes, it will require time and effort to rid informal labour and set up universal health and education. But leaders with source credibility can, at least, take the lead in terms of Covid appropriate behaviour and keep people from doing what comes naturally to them, that is, being stupid. For this our elected representatives need to call campaign redundancy’s bluff. Milton Friedman’s votaries are wrong because individual choices do not add up to social good. The powers of the “unseen hand” are vastly exaggerated much like the way we hope “herd immunity” will finally deliver us from the pandemic. What we now know is that if herd immunity were to happen on its own, without the “seen hand” of inoculation, millions would die before that kind of cover is achieved. Is all that suffering really worth it? Even those who live through it will have lost loved ones and such losses are irreparable.

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Individuals on their own exhibit stupidity at nearly every turn and rarely rise above that level. The belief that individuals are rational and rationalities add up to make the society rational is a dangerous proposition that Friedman encouraged. The wisest thing humans can do is to encourage solidarity for we live together in this limited planet and nature always does what it has to do. Which is why nature is neither good nor bad, wise or stupid, and that is true for viruses as well. It is for us to be wise for unlike nature, we have also the choice to be stupid. What is clearly not stupid is democracy because democracy’s fundamental precept is fraternity. Unfortunately, like everything not stupid, it takes time, diligence and contemplation to realise its worth. Fast thinking, which encourages campaign redundancy, must be given a rest. When we link our individual fates to those of others, all of us are better served. Just think: private hospitals and schools would be of a higher standard, if they survived at all, once universal health and education were offered at quality levels. This is the time, if there ever was one, for leaders to recognise the severe negative fallout of campaign redundancy and prepare, in full consciousness, to maximise on their social credibility. If people have to be helped out of their stupidity, leaders must take the lead and realise their role as fraternity’s pom-pom bearers. Source credibility takes long to acquire which is why it is a real pity if it is squandered in campaign redundancy and in yielding to popular impulses that move from issue to issue with great rapidity and with little thought. Sadly, it is not just leaders who often squander their source credibility. In these Covid times we find that doctors too are undermining their institutional and personal source credibility. So many of them are needlessly, dangerously too, prescribing Remdesivir to fight Covid-19 just because their patients pressure them to do so.

10

The Public and Private in Policy Making:

Lessons for Media and Covid Control

Public, Private and Citizenship Norms In public policy formulations there is a tendency, the world over, to confuse the distinction between the public and the private, leading to miscommunication between citizens and the state. Such unfortunate outcomes impact a number of areas that are especially relevant in many contemporary matters. When the significance of what constitutes the “public” and what makes for the “private” are unclear, difficulties arise in establishing a principled position in policy formulations. We can see this when it comes to media policy and also, more urgently, in establishing state guardrails in these Covid times. We need to begin, however, by realising that for a comprehensive understanding of the terms public and private we must acknowledge that this distinction comes to life only when citizenship enters the historic stage. It is only because this aspect is either overlooked, or elided, as often is the case, we fumble over policies that require conceptual clarity regarding the tie between the public and the private. Citizenship was never relevant in pre-citizenship times, nor in contemporary undemocratic regimes. In such societies the need to conceptualise and distinguish the public and the private and chart their relationship were irrelevant too. Once citizenship is inaugurated, a new social dimension opens up with the individual

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becoming at once both a member of the collective and yet retaining an autonomous space. This duality is a completely novel social fact, in the Durkheiman sense of the term (Durkheim, 1982). Just as other Durkheiman social facts, citizenship too is external, general and constraining, and the last feature needs to be specially mulled over. Thus while there are many things a citizen can do, it is not as if this freedom comes without constraints. It is, therefore, a duplex phenomenon, again quite Durkheiman, but we must now take leave of him and move on. Citizenship, first and foremost, allows the individual to aspire to a truth that is individually satisfying. Even so, while interacting in society, this person is also bound by restraints. There is then a constant tension between the two, a feature that will never be known in pre- or non-citizenship contexts. In these other societies where citizenship does not figure, truth is handed from above and Karl Mannheim called that objective epistemology (Mannheim, 1991). For Mannheim, it did not matter if this truth was declared from the pulpit of the church or from the ramparts of the fort. Even a non-religious declaration of an objective epistemology that binds all is contrary to citizenship and to secularism too. Clearly, citizenship will not survive in such societies even if they make spectacular claims of conducting popular elections. This is because the public and the private are not vibrant features here. Yet, democracies often falter for they have an incorrect, or incomplete understanding of these two terms and that impedes the successful articulation and deployment of public policy, thus muddying the waters. On account of not fully accounting for the true context of citizenship there is a marked tendency to confuse the public and private as that which happens in the open against things that take place behind closed doors. There is also another extremist interpretation that flaunts the bells and whistles of freedom by proclaiming the private world is superior to the public or, at least, not constrained by it.

The Public and Private in Policy Making 157 In these latter renditions, the private assumes a freewheeling existence and holding it back is considered tantamount to the denial of freedom. This too is unfaithful to the true meaning of the terms private and public, in fact, it does make light of the relationship between the two and often the public is derided and fired upon from the shoulders of what is erroneously deemed as the private. With some luck, we hope to make good our claims in the following pages and demonstrate that with a clear understanding of public and private, policy formulations become more limpid, persuasive as well as mindful of citizenship. Citizenship and its Significance In line with T.H. Marshall’s conception of citizenship where it is not just about voting, but primarily a provision in modern democratic societies, that confers equality of status to everybody. This equality, Marshall asserts, is the starting point on whose foundation, individuals can choose to be different in terms of class, or lifestyle, or whatever, but that is the end result. It needs also to be clarified that ‘status’ equality here refers primarily to health, education, environmental conditions and justice; not power, prestige or wealth. To bring about this equality of status as the starting point, it is important to clarify what cannot be done by anybody, regardless of who they are. These are the constraining features which must not be overlooked. This set of proscriptions properly defines the ‘public’ domain. If it applies universally it is because citizenship confers an equality of status regardless of birth, creed, class or power. The regime of the public must be respected and it is only under its constraints that individuals can choose to exercise options in their ‘private’ lives. The ‘private’ zone gets activated when individuals exercise their choice from among the options the ‘public’ allows them to. Individual choices are constrained by restrictions imposed by the

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‘public’ but if they pass that test then they are available without hindrance to all citizens. This clarifies why the public and the private are complementary phenomena and not butting heads in combat, as is often believed. Popular perceptions, notwithstanding, the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ are not on opposite ends. They act together in a complementary fashion in order to help put ‘citizenship’ in practice. This takes away arbitrariness from public policies. Therefore, when the private is offended, so is the public, and vice versa. In truth, both are being perjured simultaneously. Once again, contrary to popular renditions, the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ do not signify the ‘outdoors’ versus ‘indoors’, or between ‘open’ and ‘secret’ knowledge. This is why the home is not one’s castle as family members were citizens before they were wives and children. For this reason, domestic violence is not ‘private’ but becomes a matter of ‘public’ concern. In other words, for a truth to rise to the level of the public where it can now exert constraint, it must be general and apply to everybody and, therefore, be seen as a formulation that is beneficial to all regardless of sectional interests. For this we need specialist agencies which have specific competencies to argue out a truth in the public domain before it can be accepted. Even after this happens, the truth remains provisional and open to challenge but always on the basis of demonstrable facts whose existence is open for all to see, feel, hear and smell. It is thus not limited to a privileged, unspecialised, multipurpose intellectual class that alone is entitled to deemed “truth facts.” In sum, these truths are not what Mannheim would call “objective epistemology” as this knowledge is constantly scrutinised. The public realm is constituted of measures based on specialised truths and they apply to the whole without qualifications of creed, race, wealth or social status. Rendered thus it might seem that this binds the individual in every dimension, where then does the private matter at all in such a scenario? Is this then another

The Public and Private in Policy Making 159 objective truth, not delivered by all powerful agencies such as the state or the church but by clusters of asocial specialists working out of Ivory towers? Indeed, it is only when state proclamations leave room for choice, which is the zone of the private proper, that they truly become public. While the public categorically states what cannot be done, the private explores the options that are available within these constraints. To understand this aspect in a grounded fashion, the analogy of sport might help. The Paradigm of Sport First, remember, the metaphor ‘level playing field’ comes from the arena of sport. So, no favourites, all are equal at the starting point, as in citizenship, and the referee cannot be partial. The whistle will blow only when a foul is committed, but not when a brilliant midfield dribble, or cover drive, is executed. Brilliance comes from choice functioning under rules. Excellence in sport would not happen if there were no rules of constraint. It is because these rules exist that extraordinary sports people and athletes rise to the top. In earlier times, coinciding with epochs that did not know citizenship, there were no sports, only games. The rules changed constantly, often whimsically, most always dictated by the court and willing courtesans. In such settings, it was far from proper to best the patron in a contest for that would not be de rigueur at all. At the same time, the referee, it should be noticed, blows the whistle, or declares a foul, when a participant breaks the rules. The whistle never sounds when a player does something innovative within the rules. This pressures sports people to challenge themselves all the more and that is how legends are born in the field. A Gavaskar or a Tendulkar in cricket, a Michael Jordan or Shaqil O’Neil in basketball, a Pele or a Messi in football or a Usain Bolt in athletics, excelled in their domains because there were rules. Without rules that mark out unambiguously what cannot be done,

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analogous to the realm of the public, there would never be sustained and ever growing excellence in any dimension of human activity. When people played games and not sports there was no excellence. It was a pastime, an indulgence. In some so-called “tribal” societies, games were played to bond communities and the question of excellence or victory and defeat never arose, nor was there a codification of rules that were universally known. We should also bear in mind that modern sports, where the public and the private zones are clear, the contest is not gladiatorial where no rules apply other than vanquishing the opposing contestant. This is why a cage fight in contemporary times will never rise to the level of modern sports. Public and Private in the Media After the terms “public” and “private” receive the clarity they deserve, it helps us to effectively deal with the contrary claims of privacy protection and open public information. This issue has dogged many mass media-related policy issues and that they don’t come to satisfactory conclusions is because they commit the original sin of sloppy classification. In the media world, just as in sport, there should be a clarity of rules of what cannot be done, not what can be done, or should be done. Like in sport, the referee blows the whistle only when a media outlet brings out material without proof, or mines personal information for selfish gain, or trades collective interests for selfinterest. Nor should a ‘sting’ operation detailing personal lives, which have no public import, be defended in terms of freedom of expression. If news items or editorials, or broadcasts obey public norms but are censored it is like a referee disallowing a legitimate goal. Under these circumstances, public reaction should be just as it is when a referee acts partially. The public too can be threatened if motivated and powerful people, singly or in concert, frighten or bully the umpire, or a media outlet, to alter the outcome of an event.

The Public and Private in Policy Making 161 So, it is important to protect the collective from motivated individuals just as it is to protect the individual from an overbearing collective, even the government. Citizenship helps both causes by clearly spelling out the closeness between the public and the private, and without positioning one against the other as if in battle formation. This is why any decision on whether a media outlet has violated the right to privacy or endangered collective security must be weighed carefully on the scales of citizenship. Once we are clear about the distinctions between the public and the private its application to the media becomes immediately transparent. The ‘public’ now comprises restrictions in terms of what cannot be published or broadcast by anybody because they offend collective citizenship interests. Freedom of speech and expression must be exercised within these constraints. At the same time, even if certain media items appear tasteless, provocative or vulgar, to some, they cannot be banned if they pass the test of the ‘public’. Come to think of it, media excellence also comes from individual, private exploration of choices that abide by the limits set up by the public. The exposure of the Watergate scandal is a sterling example of how private decisions taken in full awareness of professional and public conduct rules, bring out the best in journalistic reporting. A scoop that breaks all rules is poor reporting. Just as in sports you have media stars too, counterparts of Gavaskar and Michael Jordan, who played by the rules and won. Unctuousness in the media and favouritism would make this sector more like a game than a sport; an activity where rules are idiosyncratically formulated and weighted in one direction from the start. Naturally, when the media is a game and not a sport, there will never be excellence in the field. The main purpose of the game is to please the patrons or to while away time with no investment on the part of the spectators. Contrarily, when the media is akin to sport, the spectators must also be conversant of rules that constrain and would, therefore urge media specialists to constantly attain greater heights.

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Public Policy and Covid Regulations The Covid-19 pandemic has obviously taught medical sciences several lessons, but it has also had a profound unsettling impact on a range of social sciences. This experience has also made one aware of the negative consequences when freedom of choice is elevated and considered independent of the norms of constraint. It is not always understood that the constraints the public imposes on citizens brings out excellence by limiting the choices available. As is well known by now, many societies had great difficulty in curbing free will regarding the implementation of Covid norms. Several democratic states implored the public to abide by certain norms and do the right thing, but that did not go down well in far too many cases. The opposition to them was widespread and received great prominence. All of this, paradoxically, occurred repeatedly in many advanced democracies in Europe and North America, where the idea of freedom was exalted above all else in the name of democracy. Democracy, it must be remembered, is not joyful indulgence in games but one hemmed in by universal rules of constraints, as in sports. All of West Europe, including USA, saw significant resistance to such restrictions and hence the pandemic kept growing there. Even today, there are instances of protestors, in very large numbers, who believe these restrictions are undemocratic invasions to their right to privacy. They don’t like to be told “what to do” by a nanny state, or, those with a harsher bent of mind, an “overbearing state”. From Spain to USA, it has been very difficult to put in place Covid appropriate behaviour. Obviously, societies that have not taken kindly to relatively non-invasive advisories, such as social distancing and mask wearing, will find contact tracing very difficult too. No surprise then that in the West, both mass testing and contact tracing have fared badly. They were popularly captioned, in several quarters, as edicts which were of a “big brother” genre growing in all directions in a totalitarian fashion.

The Public and Private in Policy Making 163 The European Union Trade Commissioner for Internal Market voiced this fear when he said that fighting Covid-19 is fine but “we will not compromise on our values and privacy requirements.” Liberty was seen as paramount, as if without constraints. It was all private and no public which, as we examined earlier is an affront to both these concepts. This brought out an aspect that had hitherto not come to the surface. What became increasingly apparent is that in many Western democracies, liberty was valued in purely individual terms and not as a corollary to citizenship which also instructs restraint for the sake of the public. Here, sadly, liberty went wild like a team of horses that have broken free. There is no doubt that liberty is important to curb arbitrary state power but not when that is already in check by the rules of citizenship. It was arbitrary, monarchical, irresponsible governments that prompted Thomas Jefferson to say: “When governments fear the people there is liberty. When people fear the government, there is tyranny.” In line with this thinking, Judge Richard Posner of the seventh Circuit Court of USA said in a landmark judgement: “The men who wrote the Bill of Rights were not concerned that government might do too little for the people but that it might do too much to them.” According to Posner, the Constitution protects citizens from state oppression, without imposing positive obligations on the state. This is where the lacuna lies in such early configurations of democracy. Liberty was not properly in step with citizenship where the latter was supposed to lead the dance. The prominence accorded to negative laws that curb state activities gave the individual the pride of place, without restraint. This may seem like an idealised scenario, but there is no denying that such an attitude routinely courses through the ideological veins of a large number of citizens in Western democracies. How else can one explain the quick trigger resentment among sizeable sections in these countries when masks, vaccinations and contact tracing were insisted upon in order to combat Covid?

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If, on the other hand, one understands freedom and constraints in terms of private and public acting conjointly and in a complementary fashion, strengthening each other, the appreciation of Covid norms would have been greater. In this case the norms too would have been clearer and there would be little fudging, negligible contrary advisements, nor the frequent shifting goalposts. That these happened repeatedly in state proclamations regarding Covid control was because free will was elevated beyond citizenship on the streets and the states did not have a reasoned response to all of this. Our elected representatives were themselves unclear of the relationship between public and the private. Now to add meat to the bones. If the public norm was consistently a negative one then that would have encouraged citizens to choose from the range of private choices open to them once the proscription was fully in place. The public, as we have said repeatedly, tells citizens what they cannot do as in rules of sports. These rules do not tell one how best to bend a ball into the net or to execute home runs in baseball. That is left to the individual. In keeping with this, the public rule should have unambiguously commanded that “you cannot infect fellow citizens”, or something similar in “thou shalt not” terms. After that citizens should go ahead and search for options that this negative injunction allows. The public realm, as we emphasised earlier, only instructs one on what cannot be done, leaving room for the private world to devise what can be done within these set constraints. Covid rules that were sent out by most states made the first error by not stating the principal command in negative terms. Instead of insisting on “what cannot be done”, which is how the realm of the public is carved out, most governments sent out advisories on “what should be done”. Accordingly, we were told to take vaccinations, maintain social distance, wear masks and vaccinate ourselves. These were all in the realm of choice and many rebelled at being told what to do.

The Public and Private in Policy Making 165 Imagine a cricketer being instructed by the rule book to wield a long handle or a footballer told just how to kick the ball. These are techniques and are at the level of choices and much depends on what suits each player individually. As the public aspect was dulled, governments kept thinking of more pleasing alternatives for a long time to win back the trust of the people they supposedly represent. This led to sudden changes in advisories, contradictory information on social distancing, ambiguity regarding vaccine periodisation, all of which put together made a dog’s breakfast of the whole matter. Therefore when there was popular resentment at various places, the respective governments kept fumbling for a guiding principle to push forward their Covid agenda. They are still looking! Instead of approaching this issue in terms of “what should be done”, governments took a different tack in terms of “what cannot be done”, matters would have been quite different. Obviously, the ground rule regarding public proscriptions have to be in accord with citizenship. This meant it should apply equally and where each citizen is charged to behave as citizens first and individuals later. Now, had the government directives been based on the principle that “you cannot infect others” then as citizens there would be no ground for people to complain. How can you say it is my free will to harm and infect others? It is similar to saying my free will to kill as I please is being taken away. It is only after the ground rules are laid out in terms of a blanket negative injunction, the realm of the public leaps to life and takes centre stage. This also activates John Stuart Mills’s “harm principle” but only after a clear statement of what actually constitutes harm in specific instances. This then provides the foundation for specific laws with negative injunctions. If you cannot infect fellow citizens then what are the private options open? Some may hire a private plane to their secluded estate on a faraway island, some may pack a tent along with canned food and head for the forests, some may never leave home and sit out the pandemic as if they were in a bomb shelter. But there may

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be others who would choose to wear a mask, get vaccinated and maintain social distancing norms. This would lead to excellence in a variety of ways. The most immediate innovations took place in the technology that enabled mass production of high quality masks that kept out viruses more effectively than any other such contraption of the past. On a higher level, it encouraged superior science to produce vaccines at unimaginable speed to combat the pandemic. Without this negative rule that you cannot infect others such developments may not have happened at all and, if they did, they would have occurred at a glacial pace. Instead, because these rules impacted commerce and education, science galloped at full speed at several levels. Specialists in digital communication discovered new technologies and portals to disseminate information. Conservationists also probed and pushed the frontiers on alternatives sources of energy. Sadly, this relationship between the public and private where both supply life blood to each other was not fully perceived when Covid norms were flouted. Citizenship was crippled on this account in several Western countries for so many failed to note this vital connection between private and public, between what cannot be done and what can be. The overall lesson is that all knowledge behind public formulations must stem from experts with high source credibility, and these must be uniformly applicable to all and they must allow for private choice because it is out of the latter that excellence develops. This is as true of sports as it is of the media as it is in terms of delivering the best to citizens in times of a pandemic.

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Defying Arithmetic in 2019 Elections

Cultural War Not Rational Choice What chance does anybody have in getting normal citizens to come out in praise of a dam well built, or a road perfectly laid? Next to nothing! Good work, up front transparency and no swindles add up to a political ho-hum; it puts collective action to sleep. Now change the setting: factor in a botched up dam and a potholed highway and watch activism swell. No doubt about it: anger fills political sails like nothing else; not contentment, never endorsement. While there is little evidence of collective goodwill yanking up politics, negativity is the stuff protests are made of. The greater this sentiment, the more knuckles it waves in your face, the quicker it charges up political batteries. Likewise, our ballots are aimed at keeping somebody out rather than getting somebody in. We vote against those we dislike the most and not for those whose past and present we think well of. Just because voters are queuing up patiently, do not mistake them for pacific individuals. Their gradual progress to the ballot box hides the fact that nearly all of them are actually in a mission mode. It is the inability to accept this truth that forces rational choice theory to make its first big misstep in tracking voting behaviour. Barring card carrying political cadres, ordinary people are hardly influenced by either a candidate’s individual merit or by a party’s good looks. What gets them going, if they ever get

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going, is to make sure that somebody in that lineup is thoroughly trounced, perhaps even disgraced. It is this rumble that makes for an imagined movement though there is no flag or banner to signal its presence. Voters get their high not because their candidate has won, but because somebody else has lost. Contrary to what rational choice theorists hold, voters, rarely if ever, grade candidates on the basis of past performance and programmes. The positive “will-do” aspects of a party manifesto are not nearly as compelling to the voter as the scent of negativity. For example, nothing had changed in Delhi since Modi swept the polls in 2014. In fact, reports suggest, he boosted FDI, charmed Obama and even unleashed a host of public projects. Yet, by February 2015, Aam Admi Party made a sudden and spirited come back. Was this because after long months in the BJP sun, there were some who longed for a little shade? What elements conspire to create this sort of negativity is hard to imagine in advance, which is why there is always an element of the box office in election outcomes. In 2014, Narendra Modi profited because public perception was against the Congress. Manmohan Singh was inert and expressionless, and the mother and son duo reeked of privilege. They just had to go. As this mood gathered momentum, so also did Modi’s prospects. His past record and future promises were cast aside; what mattered most was that Congress had to lose; it had become such a big turn-off! It was only much later when Modi supporters untied the victory package that, to their disbelief, Sakshi Maharaj and Yogi Adityanath also tumbled out. By then it was much too late; the delivery boy had already left. On account of voter concentration on pure negatives our electoral history records many instances of unwelcome surprises. V.P. Singh won because Rajiv Gandhi was the most not-wanted person. Only later did his supporters realise that the man they successfully pumped for was besotted by OBC Reservations. When Rajiv Gandhi came in the country had had enough of violence in Punjab, but he soon brought upon the Babri

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Masjid fiasco. Or, when Indira Gandhi was defeated in 1977, voters had no idea what the Janata Party stood for; in fact, even the Janata Party did not have a clue. Much later, well after election fever subsides, the futility of ideologies and track records becomes evident. Only then analysts begin to wonder why the losing party got such a raw deal. After all, the UPA, with all its flaws, had brought in the Right to Information Act, challenged colonial land acquisition laws, even initiated the women’s reservation bill. Much of that counted for nothing because the negativity concentrate built around corruption in high quarters and an unattractive leadership simply took over. Nitish Kumar did a remarkable job in building infrastructure in Bihar, but his association with the UPA stained him with that same negativity, as it did the DMK. For most voters, whether they support the incumbent or not, they do not finely position the candidates on offer in terms of an approval ranking. Rational choice theory may think otherwise, but as far as the electorate is concerned, it is really between two opponents, most of the time. There is, in one corner, the person they want defeated, and in the other corner stands a candidate that the voter thinks can best do the job. The voter is indifferent towards all other aspirants and they barely get a nod. Rational choice theorists cannot face up to this fact as it makes a mockery of their construct of the cold calculating individual. For them, rational voters obey the principle of transitivity whereby if A is preferred to B and B to C, then A will always be chosen above C. This obviously demands a finely graded preferential ladder. In a real election, however, the contest is essentially between two gladiators where the principle of negativity trumps that of transitivity. For the bulk of the electorate what matters is that if a certain candidate has to be kept out who then, from among the rest of the aspirants, can accomplish this end best. If a voter wants A to be defeated and if for this job B is seen as the most suitable candidate, then the voter will choose B. This will happen irrespective of

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whether or not the same voters may consider C and D to be better people, or parties, in isolation. In the given context, however, they count for nothing; just a wasted vote. What puzzles most rational choice theorists is why an individual even takes the trouble to vote in the first place. As a single ballot will hardly change an electoral outcome, is it worth the effort to tie one’s laces and trudge to the voting booth? If rational choice theorists put stock by this argument it is simply because they believe that political decisions mimic economic ones. Those who play the market must effectively value and rank all possible investment alternatives along the transitivity principle. To do otherwise would be unwise and foolhardy. But elections are a different matter altogether, and this is for two main reasons. First, mobilisation, as we noticed at the start, works best on the principle of negativity, which is not how economic decisions take place. Second, and more importantly, elections are a public event where one is given a bounded time horizon within which votes must be cast and an electoral decision made. This opportunity will not come tomorrow; in fact, it may not come for the next five years. In contrast, the stock market rings in a new beginning every morning and also allows economic choices to be made and unmade in a single working day. In addition, elections take place in the open. There is a marquee, a designated voting counter, polling agents and a buzz that grows as the line of waiting voters gets longer. In many ways, this scene resembles a mobilisation, a political crowd but without a visible leader. What motivates the electorate then is about the same as what galvanises a procession. Substitute the anger against a dodgy dam or a leaky pipeline with that against actual politicians and parties, and the drive to come out and vote becomes so much clearer. For politics and politicians, a good enemy is a joy forever. This is what makes elections not a matter of rational choice, but a culture war. Voters need a good enemy which is why elections are almost always a cultural war.

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New Truth, New Rules The 2019 General Elections in India demonstrate that certain sociological truths which were gradually unfolding before us for some time had finally tossed the veil and revealed themselves. We see clearly now that elections are nearly always the site for culture wars and Narendra Modi saw this fact clearly in the runup to the 2019 General Elections. Instead of depending on caste arithmetic he swung in favour of stirring up a cultural chemistry. This gave Modi a head start and before others wised up to the altered circumstances, he changed the rules of engagement and won the day. Even now his opponents cannot figure out what happened and why they lost so thoroughly. They wonder if they should perhaps have not emphasised the Rafael deal as much as they did; perhaps their income scheme for the poor came too late in the day; maybe they should have bullied Modi with more personal allegations. They self-flagellate, but with feathers, which is why they don’t realise that the fault does not lie in this or that political programme they had put out, but in the very nature of their being and constitution. They had not evolved to be in step with changed circumstances, and therein lay the problem. What then are these truths that Modi read well and others had not and which, at long last, had come out in the open? The first observation, right off the bat, is that the traditional elite, who were the old power wielders, are resented primarily for being who they are. The mass of electorates in 2019 are not like what the voters were like earlier. There is a strong resentment among them against those who are privileged and inheritors of wealth. That is pretty standard stuff, but what gives this added significance is the cornering of behavioural attributes and social connections that come from generations of being favoured. The newly emerging aspiring class feel that their labour stays largely unrewarded as these elite representatives control the top spots with minimal effort because of their near monopoly of these cultural

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markers. They are the cultural proletariat and hence more deserving of recognition. This anger has been growing for some time, but did not find an outlet earlier, because nobody gave it body and substance the way Narendra Modi did. Yes, “chowkidaar chor hai”, and whatever else, could well have been off the mark, but as a class, the old power holders, comprising primarily the inheritor category, were not acceptable any more. It really did not matter what they said, or promised. It was who they were that was a turnoff. Their wealth, by itself was not an issue, as much as their way of life which they never worked to earn. This created a massive “status gap”, or “status differential”, that leaders were unmindful of earlier, but which cried for attention. The second truth Modi grasped, and this is a consequence of the first, is that the old electoral calculations, based on caste arithmetic do not work. It did for a few decades after independence, but not any longer. This trend too can be traced to the decline of the old elite who, at one time, did well with such calculations for they depended on their connections to woo leaders from different fractions. The Status War When addressing the first issue, viz. the inefficacy of the old elite style of Indian politics, we find that the antagonism against the privileged is not expressed in terms of “class war” as much as it is in terms of “status war.” It is not as if the economic structure is being questioned. What is being contested is why should those with inherited privileges occupy the top positions when they have not really slogged for it. Modi’s recognition of the “cultural proletariat” not only set the Congress back but introduced a fatal complication in the accepted notion of cultural capital. Decades have gone by but aspirations released by a post-agrarian economy have not been realised. Schools have come up and the population now is more literate but not at the level that could

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make them employable. Skills are still languishing and most of the machinery used in Indian manufacture continue to be imported. All of this basically leads one to conclude that the millions leaving low yielding agriculture find it difficult to progress economically as urban employment has not grown by much. Most important of all is the daily, constant awareness among the underprivileged of how divergent their lifestyles are from those of the elite. They may have known this earlier, but in the closed feudal economy the elite also had the power to quash any sign of resentment, even nascent upstart like behaviour. That has now changed largely because feudalism is long gone. Thus, while the elite hang on to their lifestyles they can no longer actually personalise their likes and dislikes to hinder or promote the ways the less privileged live. Therefore, unlike in the earlier period when the underclass quietly swallowed their pride, the situation is very different in contemporary times. Nor is it that humiliations suffered at the work place can leap across and singe relations at home as well. That gives enough brooding hours and space in which to nurse resentment and give it a future. Consequently, the cultural attributes these better off sections display, from the frequent use of the English language to their affluent lifestyles, have now become objects of ire, not of awe, at the popular level. The privileged are viewed as undeserving of their positions of eminence as they are beneficiaries of family wealth and connections and did not acquire their elevated status on their own. Their so-called “cultural capital” now carried negative connotations. On the other hand are the mass of the underprivileged who are scrambling hard to be seen, heard and respected and are still not making the grade. Till that happens, the argument goes, how can India be strong? “Naamdars” versus “Kaamdaars” Modi deftly crafted this hot, melting iron by casting them into two different moulds. On one side were the inheritors, the “naamdaars”,

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whose present fortune depends on their past connections. They are bearers of family name and reputation and this gives them a clear advantage. He contrasted this class with the “kaamdaars”, that is those who live by their honest labour, with no family resources to fall back on. Their work, however, remains unrewarded because they have been pushed to the margins as the “naamdaars” have taken all the plum positions and set up high cultural barriers. Undoubtedly, there is a lot of truth in this construction and there are people ready to buy it for it satisfies a felt moral need. Narendra Modi emblematised this attitude and he accomplished this by just being himself. Across the aisle, Modi found in Rahul Gandhi a typical “naamdaar” who, once again, exemplified this status by simply being himself. This truth cannot be dodged for Rahul is a fifth generation political leader and shows no embarrassment about this fact. As the Congress also teems with people of similar backgrounds, it was easy to characterise it as a party of the cotton woolled elite. In contrast, Modi positioned himself with the others as a “kaamdaar”. He recurrently recalled how his lifestyle and upbringing were diametrically opposed to those of the Gandhi family, what with their Western upbringing, frequent trips abroad and their expensive hobbies. On the other hand, Modi dwelt on his indigent childhood, his hardship years as a young man and wore his deprivation like a badge of honour. This contrast between contestants had never been an issue in the past. India has always had the rich and the poor but they figured in a distant, even academic, third party fashion. Now, for the first time, the distinction was concretised and named and there were actual people bearing these tags on either side of the political divide. This heightened cultural and lifestyle differences between candidates which immediately benefited Modi’s campaign. Just look at the election results. It is not just Rahul Gandhi who was politically crushed when he lost his Amethi seat, but a similar fate was reserved for his

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cohorts and close associates too. The list of vanquished include the likes of Jyotiraditya Scindia (a princeling and Madhavrao Scindia’s son), Jitin Prasada (Jitendra Prasada’s son), R.P.N. Singh (also a princeling and C.P.N. Singh’s son), Vaibhav Gehlot (Ashok Gehlot’s son). These are all “inheritors”, all Congress, and they all lost. It is also significant that the holders of “inheritor” status, but belonging to other political parties opposed to the BJP, were drubbed too. The names include that of Dimple Yadav (Akhilesh Yadav’s wife and Mulayam Yadav’s daughter-in-law), Ajit Singh (Charan Singh’s son), Jayant Chaudhary (Charan Singh’s grandson), Nikhil Kumaraswamy (H.D. Kumaraswamy’s son) and once again, the list goes on. If Jayant Sinha (technically, also an “inheritor”) of BJP won, he had the Modi wind at his back and he also disclaimed his ancestry by opposing his father. There were a few privileged people (technically, “naamdaars”) who also won in these elections, but only because they were with the BJP and deferred to Modi’s leadership. Punjab, true to type, hybridised this grain with high yielding returns for the Congress. Chief Minister Amarinder Singh is generally addressed by the title “Captain”, which he earned, “kaamdar” style, in the Indian Army. This effectively underplayed his other honorific, Maharaja, to which he was born, “naamdar” style. An exception, one might say, that seems to prove the Modi rule. Aspirations and Resentment In many ways this election was a repetition of 2014, but the prickly resentment against the inheritor class was not so easily apparent then. This sentiment first came to the surprised attention of many observers when demonetisation happened in 2016. The Opposition followed academicians who, from their perspective, classified it as an economic bomb that would devastate the unorganised sector. Yet, members of the underclass welcomed it and the experts could not explain why. What they did not factor in was the profound resentment the economically marginalised and underprivileged had

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towards the better off. On the surface it appeared as if there was a sense of cordial clientelism among the less privileged, but the alienation and anger seethed underneath. Unlike the experts, the poor saw demonetisation in cultural, not economic terms. For them it was primarily an instrument that kicked the rich in the stomach, and they openly rejoiced in this image. Yes, they would lose their jobs but as they were used to being poor they would make do and survive. On the other hand, it is the opulent seths (moneyed class) who have been lanced right through their stuffy pretensions and are now hurting.They are staying up nights, counting their cash and whining over lost pleasure retreats. This is the fate they truly deserve and only Modi could have handed it to them. This point of view was repeated time and again among the less privileged and they were not hesitant in expressing it. A peon in a government office told me that the way demonetisation was carried out clearly shows that God has gifted Modi to the Indian people. In other words: “It’s the culture, stupid.” In all this, Modi was careful in not unleashing a class war; it was a “status war” he was after. Why should women cook over smoky wood stoves, like he said his mother did? Get them out of this drudgery and give them cooking gas instead (the Ujwala scheme). Why subject one’s kin, especially the women in the family, to the shame of going to the fields? Get them off such embarrassments and give them toilets instead (the Swacch Bharat scheme). It is not really how effective these projects were that mattered, what seems to count is that Modi is out there straining to flatten lifestyle differences. Jobs are scarce now, they were scarce earlier too, so what is new? The newness was that Modi addressed status concerns: a bank account, a gas cylinder, an indoor toilet. That’s what is new. Modi went on to elaborate that these everyday issues of pride were never quite emphasised in the past because the “inheritors”, unlike him, had no up close understanding of how the poor lived

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and the honour they longed for. There have been inadequacies in both the cooking gas and toilet projects, but Modi repeatedly invoked them, full blast, as his major achievements. Importantly, this effort made an impression on the consciousness of the poor, because, as the saying goes, it is the thought that counts. It is time now to place matters in context. For this we need to go back and highlight how the post-independence constitutional abolition of landlordism deeply impacted Indian society. At one stroke, it took the ground away on which the landed elite had long planted itself. When this policy was first inaugurated, the peasants and marginal farmers were too new to the altered set up to realise how it could dramatically empower them in quick time. In their minds, and in the muddy fields, they still lacked the confidence and the wherewithal to strike out on their own. This allowed the earlier feudal masters to continue as patrons, but the notice period had already been announced. When Lifestyles Clash Over the past 70 years their once powerful status as patrons and overlords had all but gone, but their wealthy ways stayed with them. This is the paradoxical position chartered members of the old elite find themselves in now and it is this contradiction that is playing out in contemporary politics. Here is a category of people with wealth, education and social connections, but they are all inwardly oriented. In the past, they were also the locus of everyday power, they could enter your homes, favour you or ruin you. Now that ability is no longer there, but all their lifestyle trappings are still, by and large, in place. This shows up in the frequent use of English by the inheritor “naamdaar” class, and by the fact that their social circles are, to a large extent, pre-determined by family ties. It is this that continues to provide them with privileged access to the upper reaches of the bureaucratic and management rungs. At the same time they are incapable of being patrons, like their forebears were, but can hold

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up their noses like their ancestors once did. This lacks conviction today and the underclass is quick to seize upon it. One of the reasons why the valorising of Hindu tradition found popular sympathy was because of the belief that the other side, the “naamdaars”, were happier with Western cultural trappings than their own. This Westernisation was not just limited to the spontaneous use of the English language by this class of elite, but also in terms of their absorption of Western habits and manners. Naturally, it was immensely satisfying for the non-elite “kaamdaars” to showcase an alternate cultural storehouse and position it angularly against the “kaamdaar” ways. Now that democracy has politically levelled the field between classes, the cultural ire against the privileged inheritors is palpable. They are not patrons either in the way some of their parents and grandparents were. The largesse and idiosyncratic benevolence of this superior class are no longer substantial, nor critical, enough for the once supplicant subaltern people to quietly suffer their pretentious deportment. Even so, they still have an impressive head start because of their education, contacts and social skills—all of which can take generations to cultivate. This makes it pointless to economically displace this class for, at the aspirational level, there are many who would like to be in the economic spaces the “naamdaars” now occupy, but with a cultural difference. Understandably, BJP is both cautious and prudent in not encouraging the one big wrecking ball solution to end all solutions. What counts for more, politically, is to hit back at the culture snub that the non-“naamdaars” sense on a daily basis. Narendra Modi sensed this growing feeling well before others. He not only kept his distance socially from the inheritor class, but even his close political allies were nearly always self-made individuals. What Modi successfully accomplished with this “naamdaar”— “kaamdaar” distinction was to give the underprivileged a sense of just power and to present himself as a role model without carrying out a full-blooded revolt against the establishment. As long as the

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“naamdaars” were shorn of their influence and their aura in the political sphere a moral victory is scored. The BJP sang this tune repeatedly and Modi amplified it. At the same time, there was no need for economic philippics, or disturbances. The stock market has responded positively to Modi’s victory and the “kaamdaars” feel satisfied that at least the political “naamdaars”—the inheritors, were put in place. This provided them with a sense of satisfaction as it salved their feeling of cultural humiliation at the hands of the better off. Even the first generation wealthy could identify themselves with the “kaamdaar” metaphoric tag as they too feel culturally undermined by the “naamdaars”. The status war, has multiple economic classes on both sides and this makes economic restructuring an unworthy exercise. Everybody loves money, especially when it is in your pocket. What counts the most is that Modi ushered on stage a festering anger which was waiting and stamping its feet in the wings. In other words, the “naamdaar”—“kaamdaar”separation is the political expression of a culture struggle, and Modi expertly filled its sails. The inheritor class, as a consequence, are holding on to their cultural attributes like safety vests in a sinking ship. A major reason for this, as already mentioned, is the actual inability of the once elite community to be patrons and power wielders any longer, note, for instance, the absence of big landlords today. In addition, and as a follow-up, the once client communities have, through democracy, seen the advantage of the vote, upward mobility, and the opening up of new economic opportunities outside the control of earlier patrons. This makes them way more confident of themselves and in readiness to cock a snook at the earlier inheritor class. However, as lifestyle divergences are still so wide, there are many status gaps yet waiting to be bridged. This feeling has been expressed primarily at the political level, as of now, but it is not over yet. The social scenario will be seriously impacted if the ambitions of “kaamdars” are not realised soon enough. If the actual advancement of the “kaamdaars” does not occur in terms of

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jobs and economic opportunities in the not too distant future, one would feel its repercussions quite palpably before long. Now that the lid is off and earlier social inhibitors, such as family and social ties, have been undermined, if aspirations of “kaamdaars” are unmet in real terms, it is quite possible that social disruptions may occur frequently and randomly. This could show up in elevated crime figures particularly in urban areas. It is worth keeping in mind that status war advances also create two consequences. First, they give confidence to those who once felt humiliated. Second, as a fall out of the first, this confidence also encourages impatience in getting one’s way. Patronage and Caste Arithmetic Changing gears, this General Election further confirms that caste calculations do not work. In the old days, say till about the mid-1970s, the country was still very rural. The change away from feudalism was well under way but non-agrarian and urban opportunities were slow in coming. This was the reason why the voting generation of the time still looked upto patrons for guidance and for their idiosyncratic benevolence. Their children, who constitute the bulk of voters today are, as we mentioned earlier, not in awe of feudal leftovers any longer. Caste politics worked as long as the old patrons were politically powerful. They could command their clients to vote for a person who nearly always belonged to the elite overlord’s family or social circle. This is why it was possible to predict along caste lines and analysts were quite satisfied with this and did not dig further. It just reconfirmed their exotic understanding of caste where those at the top of the hierarchy were unquestioned leaders for the rest. What they never paid attention to was the fact that the subaltern castes did not accept the degradation they suffered routinely. In fact, the so-called lower castes, all along, harboured alternate origin tales which challenged those that the literate Brahmanical castes had put out. In these myths all castes, including those the Brahmanical

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considered “polluting”, saw themselves as exalted beings and better than the rest. If they happened to be subjugated at present it was on account of deceit, or lost wars, or even because some Gods have mercurial temperaments. However, as these origin stories, or jati puranas, were usually transmitted orally and, for generations in hushed tones, the world outside had not heard of them. Yet, when feudalism collapsed and the earlier landed elite no longer called the shots, the hitherto subjugated castes asserted their pride, broadcast their origin tales and energetically entered politics. As the remnants of landlordism (zamindari) slowly disappeared, many peasant castes raised their heads. When they looked around they realised that their future lay in urban jobs as the rural economy could neither sustain, or bind them. In time, a class of peasants, emerged to take up leadership positions in rural India. They had enough grains in the kitchen and relatives in the police and lower level administration to have the audacity to speak up. This is how certain castes, such as the Jats and Yadavs of Uttar Pradesh (UP), for instance, rose to political prominence in the 1980s. Their superior influence created the exaggerated impression that these castes numerically outnumbered the rest in certain constituencies. This misperception felt real because, till the late 1990s, rural political activists largely belonged to these dominant peasant castes. This let them, ganglion like, to forge the aspirational nerve ends of diverse, less endowed, rural classes, and retain the leading role. Lalu Prasad Yadav or Mulayam Singh, in Bihar and UP, respectively, are products of this process. The matter appeared settled, but it was not. Democratisation continued its work and had gradually seeped through to create a liberating effect among the poorer peasantry too. The Kurmis, Koeris, Lodhs and the Nonias, and other like communities, felt this upward surge and, in quick time nurtured a number of literates and notables from among their kin and clan. They were now ready to showcase their very own virtuosos and did not need the help of Jats and Yadavs any longer. This is where we are at today.

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Caste Demography Very soon the competition heated up and became really intense as each caste found the legs to stand up for itself. This should have brought to attention the fact that in no parliamentary constituency does any one caste have absolute numerical preponderance. The Yadavs, for example, constitute only about seven per cent of the population of Uttar Pradesh (UP), and yet the popular view among scholars and media people is that Yadavs rule chunks of UP. Likewise, Jats are but eight per cent of West UP’s population and nowhere close to being a majority, or even numerically dominant, community. In most cases then, there are at least five to six castes of roughly equal numbers and this runs counter to the popular view that a single caste can determine political outcomes. As nearly always there are two major contenders in any constituency, most people are forced to vote outside their caste. The demographics, such as they are, do not allow even the diehard casteist to vote every time for his or her own caste. This hard truth has never been properly appreciated and analysts have gone about as if single castes can numerically dominate constituencies. On occasions, they even assumed that castes whose traditional occupations were similar, such as in agriculture or crafts, naturally came together. Such conclusions can only come about if one has an incomplete comprehension of caste. The origin tales and specific practices of each caste actually create a sense of “mutual repulsion” (to quote Celestine Bougle) in the caste order. There is nothing then in caste ideology that brings castes together, but everything that separates them. Under these conditions, if one were to plan one’s election strategy purely on the basis of caste arithmetic, one is bound to go wrong and end up with an ejection strategy. Castes ideologies do not sponsor natural friends, but only natural enemies. Therefore, if castes seem to come together, look carefully. There is always something outside of caste, such as the coincidence of

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economic interests, that have bought about these caste combines. The OBC mobilisation for Reservations in urban jobs and educational institutions provided that secular goal that overrode caste differences. But now that this end has been, more or less, realised, it will be a long time before that kind of OBC consolidation repeats itself. Narendra Modi was right once again. He did not depend on caste arithmetic, but the other side did. The belief that the Yadavs and Jatavs could combine and win came to grief as they just did not have the numbers. They indulged in caste arithmetic and put forward their caste heroes, only to be upended at the elections. What Modi did instead was to gather the other castes under BJP by portraying Yadav and Jatav leaders as being self-obsessed by their respective caste interests. Modi let the Yadavs and Jatavs paint themselves into a corner and walked away with the rest. The bulk of rural voters, of diverse caste backgrounds, had no sympathy for Yadav or Jatav attempts at aggrandisement. It is true that when the old landlords’ power waned, the better off among the peasant and Scheduled Castes (the Yadavs and Jatavs, respectively) had the upper hand. This should not be taken to mean they could retain this advantage in perpetuity. Just as the feudal elite lost their domination, so did the once better endowed subaltern castes. The difference is that for the latter their political diminution happened quicker. Modi’s crusade against “naamdaars” had an important spillover effect when strategising rural votes. “Naamdaars”, Modi argued, trusted their past connections and patron like ties in being able to control caste arithmetic. They knew specific caste and community bosses and believed that making deals with these personages would see them through at election time. Modi chose a different route that was not caste specific and this had distinct advantages. Not only did this strategy free the BJP from faulty caste arithmetic, it also allowed Modi to win over all those, from different castes, who felt left out in the past years

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of Yadav dominance. One needs to add to this the addition of Yadav dissenters too. Put them together and the reasons for Modi’s massive victory in rural India is easily understood. Incidentally, this is exactly the game plan Modi had adopted when it won the 2017 Assembly elections in UP. The BJP was smart enough to learn from it and the BSP-SP front lost because it did not care to draw lessons from this experience. No doubt there are slow learners, but they are much better than the “no learners”. Recall now what we said a while back about how with advancing democracy every caste has succeeded in generating its very own troupe of virtuosos and important personages. This explains why all castes today can match virtuoso for virtuoso with those they had earlier looked up to with some reverence. Further, with the shift to an urbanised, non-agrarian economy, fortunes among those of the same caste have also begun to widely differ, creating further internal cleavages. Thus, while the Congress and caste parties like Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party were nursing exotic plants in named flower pots, “naamdaar” style, Modi went about ploughing the whole field, carefully avoiding the pots. The harvest is there for all to see. Modi has a bumper crop and the others have come a cropper. It was then a combination of the popular resentment against the cultural markings of the class of inheritors (“naamdaars”) who had nothing to show but their privileged breeding and the failure of caste arithmetic that propelled Narendra Modi to victory. In the final analysis, one must admit, Narendra Modi is a better sociologist than most professionals in the business. Source Credibility Let us take another look at “source credibility”. As Narendra Modi’s “naamdar” versus “kaamdaar” slogan easily captivated millions, he had won what sociologists call “source credibility”. The status war that this distinction symbolised made

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immediate sense to many and did not require much persuasion. As Modi initiated this process, the mantle of “source credibility” came easily to him. From this point on, with a high credibility rating on his side, there is a greater willingness to endorse other issues that Modi might wish to emphasise. These matters will tend not to be closely quizzed as he has already established his credibility stature. If anybody else were to raise similar issues the same people might want greater scrutiny. This, however, will not apply to Modi for he is now a “credible source”, a kind of truth fount, who can’t be wrong. For example, when Modi fired warning shots to alert India against Pakistan’s territorial ambitions, even those far from the national borders, such as in Karnataka, were energised. Again, after the “surgical strike” in Balakot by the Indian Air Force on Pakistani terrorist targets, any doubts of the efficacy of this action was treated as unpatriotic by many. Normally, it would take a victorious army marching into enemy territory, after a bitter war, for people to be so euphorically charged. But because Modi had already wowed hearts and established credibility among broad sections with his well orchestrated attacks on “naamdaars” that accolades for Balakot were handed readily to him. On the obverse side, and this is a collateral benefit, any questioning of the government’s position on Balakot was seen as distasteful at the popular level. Yet, the Congress went on and on. Once again, it misread the graffiti on the wall. This aspect of “source credibility” can be seen in other areas too. It has been seven decades since India became independent and there are many signs of development for which earlier governments deserve credit. Literacy is up four times, infant mortality down three times, poverty percentages reduced by more than a third. What remains stubbornly present are low levels of meaningful employment and now a high number of educated unemployed. The pressure point is not absolute poverty but “relative deprivation”. Politically speaking, this is much more incendiary, as it also carries a cultural baggage. As people are now better educated and also because

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urbanisation opens doors in one’s imagination, they demand much more than their poorer and less literate parents. Under these conditions expect the sense of relative deprivation to be heightened as there are now bagfuls of unrealised aspirations. A large number of the unemployed have degrees, but from lower grade management and technical institutes. They know a smaltering of English, but feel the language barrier terribly. Add to this their complete rejection of their parents’ humble occupation, and one can get an idea how profound their sense of deprivation really is. They are ready to roll and are looking for leadership and direction. They were cheering on Anna Hazare in 2011, but that affair felt like a vacation crush; it started and ended so quickly. In Modi, however, they can see the prospects of a long relationship and have aligned their fates with his, Modi promises to deliver on health, education, employment and says he wants more time; five years is just not enough. This explanation may not have held good for many others, but because Modi contrasted six decades of “naamdaar” rule with but half a decade of his, the majority found his claim credible. After all, he is the first person to culturally confront the elite; if he could do that, he must also be right about the rest. Winning credibility is somewhat like knowing how to cycle. Once you get it, you can’t quite lose it.

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Why Other People Matter:

Empathy and its Policy Implications

Empathy Counts Empathy is not a moral value, like goodness, but a social norm of immediate public relevance. We often equate empathy with sympathy just as we do when we merge the concepts of morality and ethics and thus impoverish the meanings of these terms. On a regular basis we face a number of issues whose resolution appear doughty and difficult simply because we have not cultivated our capacity for empathy more assiduously. This might get somewhat easier if we realise how some of our best social virtues arise out of interacting with others. We become more efficient as a society if the ruling classes tune themselves to learning from others rather than refining rituals of distance that the privileged alone have the capacity to. This is not charity, nor just goodwill. This actually helps even the elite: the better off, the ruling political classes, as well. Social policies become more efficient once we draw in “other people” into policy calculations. It is a fallacy to believe that some people have the ability to barricade themselves from the rest and yet do well. When disasters happen it might seem at first glance that it is only other people who are involved, but give it time and its effects will gradually reach the farthest quarter up on the hill. The acceptance of this reality can perhaps get a lift if we stop to appreciate who it is that actually, bodily, and empirically, comes out

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to help others in distress. It is rarely the affluent but the members of the less favoured classes who rise to the challenge. This is not surprising for at the end of the day, good manners too cannot be cultivated in the close confines of elite clubs and snob soirees. Risk Awareness and Modernity Give us something ordinary to do and we will spike it with dangers that would make an astronaut balk. We take the craziest risks when bursting Diwali crackers, riding a bike, working at a construction site, and so on. On the face of it, none of these acts are hairy, but we manage to make them that way. In 2018, on Dussehra day, a tragedy, scripted in hell, was played out in India. Heedless of the dangers involved, hundreds assembled on a railway track near Amritsar, not to catch a train, but to view fireworks on display. Along came an engine at full speed and killed 60 people on the spot. We invite risks just as we would wedding guests, and damn the costs involved. Our record for extravaganza on this front is quite staggering. As many as 3,447 people died in India due to fireworks/ crackers in the decade 2005-2014. This is way higher than the 1429 the deadly dengue killed during the same period. About 28 motor cycle or scooter riders died daily on Indian roads in 2016 because they didn’t wear helmets. In the past four years, or so, a total of 23,013 passengers were killed while trespassing railway tracks, alighting from running trains or falling off them. Another study points out that as many as 452 workers lost their lives between 2013 and 2016, because normal precautions were not taken. What constitutes fire hazards rarely concern Indian town planners and architects. Unbeknown to us, we live, love and feast on tinder boxes with matchsticks in our hands. There are several quick explanation for this, two claimants among them stand out. The most common one, of course, is the belief in Karma; what will be, will be. That still does not explain why, in other spheres, we exhibit so much aggression and ambition.

Why Other People Matter: Empathy and its Policy Implications 189 Then there is the catch-all “poverty syndrome” that serves us so well in explaining away issues. The fact is that not just the illiterate poor take unnecessary risks; about 15 motorists die every day for not putting on their seat belts. Our risk blind attitude is promiscuous and affects all classes. On a different, somewhat scholarly, note, some experts believe that risk awareness and modernity are linked. In a traditional society, people were aware of natural disasters but not empowered enough to question man-made ones; or, if they did, it was at their own peril. As institutions of that period were fashioned by the powerful, for the powerful, the subalterns and the lowly submitted to them. It is this that discouraged risk awareness, not karma-bred culture or poverty. But once modernity dissolves these ancient arrangements, new systems emerge that encourage us to take control of our futures. This prompts across the board scrutiny of given social practices without fear of retaliation. When this happens, can risk consciousness be far behind? So who sets the pace for risk awareness, ordinary folks or the society? The short answer is: society. For the general population to be risk aware, public institutions must take the lead. Only then would people be empowered enough to act as their own advocate which, incidentally, is the central tenet of modernity. This does not mean we must carry a meat axe every time we step out. But the popular recognition of risks is a correlate of the realisation that each of us matter. Laudable though this sense of self-confidence may be, it cannot bootstrap itself. People perceive and act upon risks more readily if the general system is risk sensitive—if the overall system is modern. For example, in India, most people disregard fire hazards because they are not on the agenda of administrators and builders. Over the years we have had many elections, but never has air pollution been an issue.

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Overcrowded trains ply unchecked, so it is not surprising that passengers should fall out of them. Labourers can hardly change the ways of contractors, so they routinely slip off scaffoldings without complaining. Such issues grab our attention sporadically, but soon drop off the table. This non-modern attitude is also manifest in the sphere of health. Where hospitals and legal systems take patients first, risk awareness is encouraged among the sick. They are incentivised to be better informed because hospital protocol now listens to them and not just to the doctor. Apart from rare instances, Indian medical practice is not risksensitive and, therefore, not as modern as it should be. As most doctors in India set themselves up as unquestioned authority, to quiz them becomes an act of insubordination. This is what socialises patients to suspend risk-related concerns and leave everything to the specialists. A modern state is one that recognises risks people face and pre­ empt them from happening, no matter how brightly packaged they may be. This spurs self-reflexivity which is open to all, but some embrace it more readily than others. People respond for they now have agency. This forces public service providers to heel, immediately impacting a host of institutions from transportation to health to construction, and more. On occasions, when it comes to risk recognition, a modern state may well be ahead of the people, and that is to be welcomed. To be risk sensitive in an un-modern world can make one lonely, even an object of ridicule. It like yelling “fire” in a theatre when everybody else is enjoying the show. On the other hand, once we begin to appreciate that those others in danger, or possible danger, could be us, look how different the word appears then. When a disaster strikes a properly functioning modern society, it is usually an accident. In a dysfunctional, low efficiency society, on the other hand, a disaster is nearly always a tragedy because it need never have happened.

Why Other People Matter: Empathy and its Policy Implications 191 If people perish after consuming spurious drugs, it can hardly be called an accident. Likewise, it was no accident either when school children in Bihar’s Saran district or in Tamil Nadu’s Neyvelli district died after eating their midday meals. There is just a needle­ point difference between producing spurious drugs and serving poison on a midday meal platter. Yet no Education Minister or Chief Minister, nor the myriads of white collar ranks in between, felt the prick and gave it a thought. Nor what happened in Uttarakhand, or the disaster in Ladakh, simply accidents—they were tragedies from start to finish. When they struck it was because authorities refused to read the warning signs even when they came up in dark, bold fonts. When pushed and shamed, ministers might condescend to conduct an enquiry into the “event” as if it were an accident, but never into the systemic neglect that brought it about. This lets the corrupt off the hook so that they can kill another day. Disasters and VIP Paraphernalia If India has had more than its share of tragedies, that masquerade as accidents, it is because the everyday lives of our leaders are so unlike the everyday lives of everyday people. Both in Uttarakhand and Ladakh, those who had connections were rescued first leaving the rest to look at death in the face. VIPs get away lightly even in a tragedy, but the trick is to never be in that situation in the first place. Ministers and their minions lead customised lives, surrounded by VIP pomp, specially designed to separate them from those they supposedly represent. Advanced democracies suffer accidents, and not tragedies, because the law, correctness and propriety compel them to identify with ordinary people. This cuts out the spread of tragedies for every life, however ordinary, is worth saving. Disregard for others, equals low efficiency and together they lead to greater VIP pomp and ultimately to corruption. To get a taste of this, think of the time when Andy Murray won the Wimbledon championship. At his moment of triumph, many

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Indian eyes on TV were trained on the British Prime Minister, David Cameron. He was in the stands and the question that arose in our minds was: “Will he? Or won’t he”? Well, he didn’t. Andy Murray exulted when the final point was won, as did all of Britain. He ran up the stands to meet his coach, trainers, girl­ friend and mother, but not once did he turn to David Cameron. The Prime Minister got not a smile, nor a glance, let alone a formal acknowledgement. Surprisingly, nobody saw anything amiss, not the officials, not the spectators and not David Cameron. That afternoon displayed not just the best in tennis, but an object lesson in democracy too. David Cameron did not give away prizes later, pose for the media with the champion or give a speech. He just collected his jacket, left the stadium and went home like everybody else. It is the ordinariness of being a Parliamentarian, a Minister, even a Prime Minister, that marks out a democracy from all other systems of governance. We would never have allowed anything remotely resembling the Wimbledon situation to happen in India. It does not really matter what the occasion is, even if it is a book release or a wedding, VIP security does not relent one bit, nor does VIP protocol. The name of the game from the start is to separate the everyday life of political leaders from the everyday lives of the rest. There are many degrees of separation between the world of Indian VIPs and those who are outside the honey pot. From Z plus security and Z security to the hierarchy of beacons on official cars, every bit is designed to separate the political class from others. All this would have been funny had it not been at our expense. A red beacon with flasher is higher than one without it, which in turn is superior to a non-flashing Amber beacon meant for garden variety VIPs like Additional Commissioners of Income Tax. A car without a beacon just does not count! In Britain, the use of official cars is for just a handful of Cabinet members. Others have to make do with the government

Why Other People Matter: Empathy and its Policy Implications 193 car pool and go to work carrying their own lunch boxes and attaché cases. Even an Under Secretary in India would balk at this kind of effacement. Remember how Parliamentarians, across political lines, came together as they did in 2011 to justify salary hikes as well as other privileges like making 50,000 free phone calls (which works out to seven hours on the phone a day every day for a year). VIP paraphernalia in India thus conspires, at every level, to insulate the leaders from others. This explains why nobody in authority ever wants an examination of the system. If the midday meal scheme suffers as a consequence, or if landslides continue to ravage Uttarakhand, corrupt processes are not questioned—at best only specific incidents are and that too as if they were accidents. Not surprising then that democracies work best when ordinary lives receive dignity. This is why tragedies overwhelm accidents in our lives while it is the other way around in democracies where VIPs count for much less. We need to realise that VIPs and important people don’t make society as much as the common people do. To be social is to feel for one another and to be able to share common horizons. Yes, indeed, each one of us will have special ambitions, tragedies and triumphs, but to be able to empathise with others depends to a large extent on similar lifestyles and aesthetics. As we shall soon see, a middle class is when the bulk of the society have much that overlap and meet in the way they live. This is why creating a middle class should be every democracy’s ambition. As things stand, there is a wide gulf in our country, and in many other developing societies, between the elite and the rest. All too often the former do not notice how much they owe to common people and social scientists too forget that institutions need everyday people doing everyday things. This is why there are many more instances of poor people rising to the challenge of saving others in distress than it is among the elite classes in our society.

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The Poverty Bond and the Generosity of the Poor One horrible night in 2016, a fire in the mixed neighbourhood of Shahdara killed three people and injured many more. This story hit the headlines, as it should, but there is an uplifting end to the tale. While the building blazed, several absolutely unrelated people went inside the inferno and saved many lives. Neither of the two, the devastation or the valour, are new; in fact, in most disaster stories they feature together. Yet, we rarely pause to wonder how people can be so selfless in a world so selfabsorbed. Carelessness and negligence cause these tragedies, but absolute kindness creates heroes from nowhere—they don’t even wear masks or capes. They are usually ordinary, unremarkable people, more often than not, strangers to those afflicted and, most significantly, rarely ever posh, not even from the confirmed middle class. There is this old sociological nugget that goes as follows: in the everyday presentation of self, the higher one rises socially, the fewer friends one has. The number of sycophants may grow, but that of true buddies, with whom you can let your hair down, decreases with every notch you climb. The reverse then should also hold: as you go down the status hierarchy you gather more friends and fewer sycophants. Obviously, the poorer you are, the fewer inhibitions you have, and this that lets you connect across class divides. Therefore, when bad times come, as they will, you are not looking for wood to knock because you have friends by your side. The following story has not been picked up by the press, but it is also true. Two lepers begging at a traffic light come back to push a stalled car with their forearms, carefully avoiding their bandaged hands. When the engine finally guns and the vehicle takes off they wave the driver goodbye, but that gesture goes unanswered. No car owner within eyesight bothered, nor did any well dressed pedestrian. If they had, that driver would have surely thanked them and exchanged polite greetings.

Why Other People Matter: Empathy and its Policy Implications 195 The many annual bravery awards tell a similar story of compassion. Take, for example, the teenaged Gaurav Kawdujy Sahstrabuddhe, who rescued his playmates from drowning. He came from a poor working class family. In fact, the first bravery award was given by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1957 to Harish Chandra Mehra, who was only 14 years old at that time. He saved the life of our first Prime Minister by cutting open a burning tent set up to celebrate Gandhi Jayanti. Just as well, Panditji had some non- VIPs by his side. Decades later, Mr. Mehra, retired—a tired, defeated clerk, in a government establishment. The famous Bapu Gaidhani Award which was also set up for bravery, in 1988, is named after a person whose real identity is not clear. The story goes that a terrible fire once raged in Nashik and an unknown man, right off the streets, dashed in and saved many from certain death. He then heard cows mooing in panic as they were tethered and the fire was nearing them. He somehow managed to set them free but died in the process. The word “Gaidhani” in the award is to denote this person’s devotion to cows. His real name is still not publicly known. Then there is the Sanjay Chopra and Geeta Chopra Awards that are given to persons of exceptional courage. In all, nearly a 1,000 young people have been selected for these honours, but if one were to take these prize winners together, the overwhelming majority would be from not-so-well-off backgrounds. Courage is, probably, evenly distributed, but the willingness to do something risky to help unknown others increases as one goes down the status ladder. This is why a greater degree of camaraderie can be worked up at short notice among the starch-less, simple people. Note, for instance, how quickly drivers make friends with their kind while waiting for their bosses to turn up; or, the number of villagers who crowd a hospital ward to help a sick friend, or relative. Travel cattle class by train and very soon people begin chatting and, before long, start sharing food and family news. The first class, some carriages

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away, has strangers sitting edgily side by side. So, if there is any bonding at all in our society, it comes from the poorer quarters. This is what makes citizenship so hard to realise: the better off are just out of it. In elite parts of Mumbai one finds many travel agencies advertising slum trips for prosperous travellers. Many of these agencies are doing extraordinarily well, especially after the grand success of the Hollywood film, The Slumdog Millionaire. These tours are meant to showcase dreadful poverty to people who hardly know what it is about. Indian slums and alien planets are equally foreign to most Westerners. Yet, when they return they are not repulsed by the poverty they saw. Instead, they are surprised—even astonished—at the many happy faces among the very poor. How could that be? The quick explanation is to link slum cheer to Indian culture, but that misses the point. The truth is that poverty is friendship-friendly. Those at the top will never know this joy. A slumdog, at bottom, can be a millionaire at heart. They will never make it to history, but are they of no worth? History, Heritage and the Past When we look back at some of the most endearing, memorable and aesthetic aspects of our past a few things begin to fall in place. For one, we realise clearly that if history were all about great people doing great things, we’d be much poorer as a result. What we need to remember is that the past is not only about singular people fighting wars and conquering kingdoms. It is the chronicling of these that causes so much social discord in the present, but our past is also heritage and this is what brings us together. When we think of planning our future as a society, we ought to remember our heritage, perhaps more than our history. Is Taj Mahal history or heritage? The answer depends on which of the two doors we take when we step into the past. One could

Why Other People Matter: Empathy and its Policy Implications 197 well be marked “His” and the other “Her”; because through one you see History and through the other, Heritage. In many ways, history is the way a patriarchal narrative presents itself. There are goals to be accomplished and there are grand personages forcing them. Peasants and workers, artisans and traders are drawn in, but they did not start the plot. Whether it be war or peace, or license to make and sell, those below either submit or rebel on a stage set by others. Heritage is very different. It is about ordinary people who are skilled, resourceful, adventurous and risk taking; but not war like, nor policy driven. Heritage proceeds in peace and there are no great movers and shakers, no princes and potentates when its story is being told. It is about farmers and herders who tamed the wild to breed edible seeds and food; about merchants and craftspeople who braved mountains and deep waters to exchange knowledge; about rustic engineers and metallurgists who first hammered copper. Their combined contribution to our normal, routine lives is much greater than what warriors have accomplished, or emperors have bequeathed. Is Taj Mahal then history or heritage? Is it beautiful because a powerful ruler ordered it be made or because of the magic that craftspeople created? These workers had gathered from different parts of India, as well as from Central Asia and Turkey and it is here that Islamic and Hindu motifs merged. In none of this was the throne involved. Makrana came from Rajasthan, jade and crystal from China, jasper from Punjab, and sapphire from Sri Lanka. Notice the mix of Hindu and Islamic traditions in the red sandstone carvings of Jehangiri Mahal of Agra Fort, or in the colonnades of Mughal courtyards whose balconies are supported by brackets. Or take the earlier Deccan Sultanate period (1500-1700 AD), when Asia and Europe met in the plateau and promiscuously reproduced. This fusion was not ordained from above, but crafted from below where skills and talents met in camaraderie and not in a cage fight.

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Navina Haider, of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, has drawn our attention to the kalamkari of that period which carried Hindu, Islamic and European motifs. Not just that, the Decca standard (or alam) of the time looked east to display the Chinese dragon in fine detail. If seventeenth century Jaipur carpets showed European designs up front, Venetian paintings reciprocated by depicting Turkish “Ushak” carpets with intricate borders and geometric cartouche patterns. Heritages, everywhere, unite vast territories that histories and kingdoms divide. We all know of the enmity between Aurangzeb and Dara Shukoh, but that is history telling at its best. Behind its back, heritage was at work in the Mughal court itself. Dara Shukoh’s wife, Nadira, painted Mary Magdalene in a style that deliberately imitated Tintoretto, the great sixteenth century Italian artist. That is how deeply European art was appreciated in medieval India. Apparently, European motifs and painting from the New and Old Testament were also doing the rounds in Akbar’s court. None of this was of any consequence, however, when Akbar made history and captured Chittor. Nor did this grand historical event change the course of heritage. That proceeded with combinations and re­ combinations, linking past and present, near and far, in perpetual sympathy. Europe too was inspired by the Orient. Renaissance Italian drapery openly copied Chinese patterns, just as Gothic builders transformed Saracenic and Islamic architecture. The dazzling silk drapery in St. Mary’s Church in Danzig, a revered Christian place of worship, is clearly Arabic in style. Tin-glazing earthenware, in particular, Venetian Majolica, drew heavily from the Orient, especially its blue enamel and flower tendril designs. Seventeenth century Chinese weavers learnt about the Sehna knot from Persia and used it extensively to make their very distinctive carpets. Even Buddhism did not travel alone from India. It impacted textiles in China with a proliferation of patterns featuring bulls, elephants and tropical trees.

Why Other People Matter: Empathy and its Policy Implications 199 The patriarchal aspect of history and the feminine tone of heritage can also be gauged from another perspective. Deborah Tannen, best selling author and sociolinguist, pointed out that while men engage in “report talk”, women are better at “rapport talk”. For example, observe a party scene. Men tend to crack the loudest jokes, provide the definitive answers and generally strive to be the life and soul of the evening. Women, on the other hand, make connections through everyday issues, quotidian dilemmas, information about illness and health, securities and insecurities of jobs and marriages. In none of this conversation are voices raised or attention demanded, as in the case of masculine “report talk”. History and heritage are analogous to masculine report talk and feminine rapport talk, respectively. While the former studies successes and failures of singular projects, the latter unites little deeds of some of the smartest people who have gifted us the wisdom of the ages. They have done this in unobtrusive, peaceful exchange, without bells and whistles. How else did we get high art, delicate crafts and majestic constructions, such as the Taj Mahal? It is the gentlest of heartbeats that powers the heaviest lifter. To make our past reveal its humanity our attention must shift from history to heritage, and from documents to monuments. Once we do that we realize the worth in ordinary people and the contributions they can make to make our lives complete. Ultimately, it is this awareness that truly makes us wellmannered and civilised. Manners Make the Middle Class When facing the mirror we suck in our stomachs and tell ourselves we are a trim, fit middle class. Deutsche Bank has an encouraging report which says that over 300 million in India are middle class and the number is growing (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Poverty_in_India; accessed on January 14, 2021). That is the airbrushed portrait but when we step back the flab returns for all

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the world to see, but by then we are looking the other way. We have critiqued numbers of this kind much earlier in this text, but here let us ask the question: Is it money that makes the middle class? Or, is it something else? To get on to the scales and weigh in as world-class middle class, the first exercise to follow is a regimen of good manners. Before a middle class society came into existence there was patronage and privilege. While the lesser orders bowed and scraped as good courtesans, the nobility could be filthily abusive. In India, we need to absorb that lesson, en masse, before we even entertain the ambition to call ourselves “middle class”. A middle class society, when it comes into existence, alters the rules of social interaction and levels hierarchies like never before. From now on everybody is middle class regardless of their economic condition. The emphasis is not on acquisition or wealth, but how one relates to other people. The first rule, the warm up, is to internalise the dictum that our social positions are interchangeable and that in the natural lottery of life, the status and class we occupy depend primarily on chance and random selection. Wanting to be “modern” begins with good manners; not cars, stereos or even blue jeans. It is simply a matter of putting the horse before the cart. Manners are all about how we treat others whom we don’t know personally, and probably never will. If Europe has a head-start of more than a hundred years over us it is not because they got to commodities and consumerism first. The advantage they sprung on the rest of the world was in evolving social manners. While we were still aspiring to be good clients to mercurial patrons, they were learning to treat their social others as equals. As early as 1873 Professor Thomas E. Hill wrote a runaway bestseller called the Essential Handbook of Victorian Etiquette. It flew off the racks and even carried the recommendation of Schyler Colfax, then Vice-President of USA. It was not just another book destined for libraries, but was read and re-read avidly by the public. It had a mass appeal because it addressed a genuine social aspiration.

Why Other People Matter: Empathy and its Policy Implications 201 This work is essentially about manners. It instructs us on how to behave with those who may not be equally fortunate. To begin with, Professor Hill cautions: “Do not always commence a conversation by an allusion to wealth.” This is smack-bang contrary to what we naturally tend to do once our circumstances improve. The good professor also advised: “Do not call upon a person in reduced circumstances with a display of wealth, dress and equipage.” In India, given our standards, equipage would include your chauffer-driven Nano; so park it at a distance. The course just gets tougher as we go along. “Do not make a parade of being acquainted with distinguished or wealthy people or visiting foreign lands. All this is no evidence of any real genuine worth on your part.” But practically every member of our “middle class” would give an arm and a leg to invite a VIP to dinner and boast about it later? Likewise, when we travel abroad we have more fun thinking of our envious neighbours back home rather than the visit itself. Is it allowed to speak glowingly of one’s culture and civilisation to foreigners? Never, advises Professor Hill, should one “be overboastful in praise of one’s own country.” Yet, we are nearly always doing just that. In the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games the presentation of our traditions and the commentaries that accompanied it were demonstrations of unabashed self-praise. No wonder Tagore abhorred nationalism for its intrinsic bad manners. By late Victorian times good manners had evolved, as Professor Hill’s book demonstrates, even though consumerism, fast cars and the Bose sound system hadn’t. Manners crystallised in Europe for it was followed by the welfare state that put citizens in the centre. From now on universal health and education at quality levels was open to all. This policy equalised hierarchies like never before. Tony Blair’s grandfather was working class, but his father could send him to a private school in Scotland, and the rest is history. This is not an exceptional story. Many leaders and game changers in contemporary America and Europe have similar

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biographies. Sweden was neither rich nor corruption free, but after the introduction of universal health and education, it is a front ranker today- and a very middle class society. Swedes don’t know what snobbery means, but out there good manners will take you places. Today, every politician in America and Europe is reaching out to the middle class- not the workers, not the capitalists. This is because good manners strengthened welfare policies that made almost everybody middle class, sharing broadly identical lives. Not only are there about 300 million registered cars in USA, but 4.7 million of those below America’s poverty line own automobiles and 2,90,000 of these officially poor actually possess three vehicles or more. To get anywhere near that we have to work hard. Only 3 per cent of Indian families own cars and internet penetration is but 5 per cent at most. But can we attain Western living standards by pure material acquisition and emulation? We have tried that for years and yet 23 per cent of our people have to forego medical treatment because they cannot afford it. Further, about half our school going children are unable to master a simple paragraph, or compute elementary sums. Copy-cat materialism is clearly not working. It’s not in the Yellow Pages, but there is a one stop shop for good manners. It is run by the Welfare State and open only to the middle class. Therein lies the secret of good policy making. Don’t just remove poverty. Go and make the middle class! There are many aspects of being middle class and just like the issue of manners, as it prompts us to think of social others, and being considerate as a social obligation, it also has other advantages. If we agree that other lives matter as much as ours, then that will also impact the way we look at risks and protect ourselves, as a collective, against needless danger.

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Three Theses on Method

Now that we have come to the end of our presentation, it is time to summarise the main methodological lessons that emerge from these pages. There are three methodological issues that come up repeatedly, not just in this volume, but in sociology too, and they all call out for attention. First, how should social science view philosophy? Second, how best to integrate quantitative information in qualitative analyses? Third, how should we interact with the subjects of our fieldwork and the extent to which we can speak for them? In this essay, I shall attempt to sort out these issues in a fashion, I believe, is scientific. It took me several years to do this, but in the end it relieved me of the many methodological doubts I faced right till I was midway into my profession. I hope my contemplations on this subject will be useful to my fellow colleagues, especially to those just starting out on their academic career. These ruminations brought home to me the importance of scientific arguments. As a science, sociology too demands testable propositions based on theoretical principles that constantly expand the domain of explanation. An excessive infatuation with philosophy and statistics might make us lose sight of this, but worse, make us dreadful philosophers and statisticians too. Sociology, indeed all social sciences, should be mindful: (a) of objectively demonstrating an argument; and (b) of premising the argument in theory and not in belief or numbers. Science is about

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the phenomenal world, but it is also about explanation that does not depend on extrasensory or subjective preferences, nor plays second fiddle to statistics. When we distinguish sociology from philosophy or from statistics, this does not make them our enemies. Philosophy and numbers have their utility to social science, but only as adjuncts. They can both help, but only after they are put in their place. In no way, and on no account, must they contest the primacy of sociological theory or undermine sociology as a science. Sociology is Philosophy-Neutral Philosophers help us in two ways. Their primary import is to provide guidelines on how one should live one’s life and what one must privilege in one’s routine existence. Kierkegaard, Sartre and Nietzsche are exemplars of this aspect of philosophy. Leaps of faith, honesty to oneself and readiness to rebel are the kinds of exhortations these philosophers exclaim in ringing tones. Additionally, philosophers also instruct us on how to access meanings of things that are ultimately subjective. The questions such as ‘What is beauty?’ ‘What is the essence of things?’ and ‘Why live if we must die?’ have bothered Kant, Hegel and Heidegger, among others. Yet, in spite of their absorbing arguments, their conclusions are, at best, beliefs and lack objective standards. This does not take away from the fact that philosophy helps us live fully and arrive at life choices that are fundamentally our own. Philosophers respond to issues that worry and disturb humans everywhere. Religion, at least its spiritual side, also asks questions that bother us all, but as they are premised on an afterlife, or what happens after we die, sociologists can easily skirt around them. Thus, while we have little difficulty in separating religion from social science, we are often seduced by philosophy. This happens when we use philosophical aphorisms or statements to buttress what is strictly a matter of science. In all sciences, social science included, propositions must have an empirical bearing because they are proof-demanding.

Checkpoint Sociology: Three Theses on Method 205 Objective truth in science aspires to the status of statements like ‘wood floats’ or ‘earth revolves round the sun’ regardless of what a ‘higher authority’ might advocate. Scientific propositions are demonstrable and communicable projections of phenomenal reality. As communicability is essential, scientific language cannot be rhetorical and rich with meaning. The unit of a scientific fact is datum, and that datum should be accessible to all. When a healer sees an aura around a patient, this separates that specialist from the rest on a supranatural principle, for others, less gifted, cannot see that glow. A modern doctor, however, looks at the thermometer, hears through the stethoscope and examines scans, and so can any other interested person. Should one’s the body temperature be recorded 98.4°F, it will be the same no matter who reads the thermometer. It will not budge if the language of communication is English or Hindi, or if the doctor is an existentialist or a Hegelian. If a person has pneumonia, the stethoscope will pick up the bubbling heave of the lung, which again would be a culturally neutral experience. This ability to communicate facts objectively is the strength of sociology as a science. An existentialist may ‘laugh’ with Kierkegaard at established custom, or condemn it as ‘bad faith’ like Sartre did, but where is the proof? A Kierkegaard or a Sartre stands out for the ability to express a sentiment elegantly and well, not for objective verification. If along comes Hegel and objects to Sartre or Kierkegaard, asserting instead that institutionalisation is essential to prevent ideas remaining in the air, how can that be proven? If Sartre says, ‘hell is other people’, but Emmanuel Levinas is convinced that ‘ethics is other people’, whose argument should one side with? Is there an objective marker? No. Just because Sartre mocked institutional structures does not mean peasants are justified in revolting. Just because Hegel said that one should adhere to institutions does not mean peasants should not revolt. How does one prefer one over the other? At the end, we

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remain enraptured in the realm of beliefs and predispositions, both alien to scientific method. I can choose to be Hegelian or Kierkegaardian, and I do not need facts to tell me if I am right or wrong. If Nietzsche recommends we must live dangerously to know what life is, it must resonate with my subjective experience, not objective proof. Philosophy helps one gain wisdom, while science adds to phenomenal knowledge; the two need not tread the same path. At the same time, philosophers can sometimes be methodological watchdogs. A Sartre or a Nietzsche may tell us how to lead a good life, but some philosophers, like Kant and David Hume, also alert scientists about errors they often commit. Hume, for example, warns us against accepting causation too quickly, and Kant cautions us to keep enquiries into science away from religion. It is, therefore, necessary to know when to quote philosophers, for they rarely provide scientific advice. One can use them, but only playfully, as embellished footnotes, or else sociology runs the danger of becoming excessively connotative in its language. Science flourishes on clear, denotative communication with ‘show it to me’ facts, where there is no ambiguity of meaning. Undeniably, philosophy is a storehouse of inspiration, just as religion is. Yet, just as we should not use Sartre or Hegel to justify our sociological conclusions, we should not quote from the Gita, or the Bible either. After all, neither religion nor philosophy is concerned with factual proof as much as with belief. That philosophy is not about the afterlife does not make it scientific. True, Vedanta inspired Jagdish Chandra Bose, but only laboratory work helped him make a scientific breakthrough—a fact that both Tagore and Vivekananda appreciated. Samkhya may provide an analogy between prakrit and energy, but to understand the first law of thermodynamics, we must go beyond the sage Kapila to Rudolf Clausius and William Rankine. Marx played ‘coquettishly’ with Hegel’s formulaic rendition of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. However, when demonstrating the

Checkpoint Sociology: Three Theses on Method 207 significance of socially necessary labour in capitalist economies, the dialectic was nowhere in the picture. Aristotle felicitously claimed that society was like an organ, but Durkheim’s thesis on the division of labour stood independent of him. Culture too can muddy the waters for science. Imagine a Zambian, Indian or Korean scholar searching for the relationship between law and society being told that the Greek myth Antigone provides the key. The job of science is precisely to free itself from cultural infractions, yet many contemporary sociologists and anthropologists ignore this dictum quite merrily. By now, it should be easy to multiply such instances. While Western scholars tend to provincialise social sciences and make them European, many Indians do their own version of the same process. They Indianise sociology or social anthropology, even political science, by drawing chunks from Hindu or Islamic texts, even shlokas and nagmas, rhymes and couplets. Numbers Do Not Always Count The second piece of caution I have in mind relates to numbers and to the use of statistics in social science. Sociologists and allied disciplines must learn from numbers, but statistics is an instrument and not a substitute for science. The fact that tables and charts have an aura about them is undeniable, but when they are used, they must be used with discretion, and always as tools. In particular, we must be careful not to begin an argument based solely on GDP figures, inflationary trends, wage differentials, capital output ratios, etc. Very often, while brooding over these numbers, a correlation springs to our mind, or a clever mathematical play appeals to our intellect. That is not how quantitative data should be used in social science, or any science. Before we let numbers enter, we must have an intellectual argument, fully armed with propositions that relate to one another empirically in an explanatory schema. Numbers often come in at this point to test the validity of the overall propositional package. If

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numbers do not help, the argument, attractive though it may seem, would have to be modified, or even abandoned. The beginning, however, is the intellectual argument. For example, there may be a strong propositional connection between low division of labour and the dominance of penal law, but do numbers justify the claim? Or, can numbers support the Marxian argument that links business cycles to competitive capitalism’s hunt for profit aided by abstract labour? That an intellectual argument should precede numbers becomes significant even when we contemplate our current post-Covid-19 efforts to restore our society and economy. Numbers tell us of job loss, so should one hand out cash to push up buying power? Numbers tell us inflation is rising, so will not giving out money spike inflation? Can numbers alone help us decide? Further, how should we interpret the numbers of labourers heading to their rural homes post the Covid-19-induced lockdown in India? After all, only a small proportion of the total workforce was on the highways. Was this then a social fact of little import? Or, should the same figures be seen as an index of something grave and systemic? Clearly, we need an intellectual argument first. Numbers also tell us that if exports go up, the GDP rises; should we thus continue with the sweatshop conditions under which most of our exported garments are produced? Numbers tell us that if the exchange rate is lowered, then exports would go up, but what if this raises the price of the imported machinery we use to manufacture our export items? Will we not then lose out in the price war? In case one’s intellectual argument is that good working conditions lead to better products, then sweatshop environs are a bad idea; instead, we should harvest skills and increase R&D. If the intellectual argument suggests that parents want their children to have a better life than their own, then investment in education becomes more critical than encouraging exports.

Checkpoint Sociology: Three Theses on Method 209 Numbers tell us that literacy rates have risen, but then why are we so far behind in fundamental research? Numbers tell us that private hospitals and schools have better outcomes; should we hence privatise these services? But if an intellectual argument suggests that without universal health and education for all, even elite services would suffer, where would we stand on privatisation? Or, should the average consumption of eggs per week in India rises from 1.00 to 1.75 eggs, would this mean poverty has been dented? What is the tipping point when we can confidently say that poverty is on its way out? Poverty has many correlates that play a significant role in its perpetuation, and therefore, getting rid of it must also take multi-pronged efforts. This is why the qualitative positioning of the intellectual argument must take precedence over quantitative assertion using numbers. Likewise, statistics should not be used for trivial purposes. We all know poverty is rampant, or that informal labour dominates our economy, or that millions suffer from malnutrition. Why then play mathematical games with these figures? Intersubjectivity and Fieldwork My third methodological thesis concerns the way we consider the subjects of our research. There is no doubt that sociology’s strongest suit, one that it inherited from social anthropology, is first-hand fieldwork. Unlike other social-science disciplines, such as economics, history and traditional political science, sociology is incomplete without primary research. Economists can get by with already published statistics, historians can profit from archival offerings, and political scientists too can gainfully browse through constitutions and laws. But for sociologists, of all kinds, data emerge only from live interaction with people at the ground level. This is why sociological data collection, through fieldwork, is such an intense, personal exercise. What then forces sociologists to introspect on how they should relate to those they interview, and often live with, over long

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periods? As ‘subjects’ of research, they stand outside one; yet, are they primarily exterior objects? A fieldwork relationship may start that way, but for a true understanding of ‘others’, we must step out of our skins and see them as ourselves. This is not an easy task, for the subjects of a sociologist’s research can often span vastly different cultures. Yet, if the ‘other’ remains the ‘other’, the book view will dominate the field view, and cultural virtuosos will be heard more intently than actual, everyday human beings. People, no matter how foreign, become intimate only when you see them in you. One does not have to come from an alien setting to be different; even our neighbours are not us. Fieldwork allows us sociologists to know ourselves better, but only after we begin to see the ‘other’ in us. When you place yourself in the shoes of the ‘other’, what seemed remote, or inaccessible, loses its exotic and wondrous features and becomes a ‘normal’ phenomenon. Beware, a host of famous sociologists have advocated special lenses to study India because, according to them, India’s uniqueness renders universal concepts meaningless. They believe India is exceptional, for only here is the adherence to hierarchy so complete that lower castes consider it morally correct, and proper, to participate in their own subjugation to upper castes. This ‘exceptional’ vision of India will, however, change once the researcher willingly trades places with the ‘subjects’ of the study. One might use the term ‘intersubjectivity’ to define this method. So, instead of special lenses to study India, why not place oneself intersubjectively into the study and ask what one would have done in such a situation? It is almost certain that the sociologist undertaking this task would resist bowing down to somebody because the other person is supposedly made of superior substances. It is not difficult to internalise that some other people may be stronger, wealthier and so on, but to believe that they are essentially superior to you in their very being is very hard to acknowledge. Should the sociologist finds this difficult to accept, then this

Checkpoint Sociology: Three Theses on Method 211 privilege ought to be extended to the ‘subjects’ of the study too? Once this is done, data begin to appear in the shape of caste-origin tales that contest the idea of ideological submission to a single hierarchy. We now see that caste status is built not on consensus but on power and wealth. Hurray, India is normal! This compels us to add the prefix ‘so-called’ whenever we use terms such as ‘upper caste’ and ‘lower caste’. True, contestations over ritual hierarchy may not always be in the open, but they exist subjectively all the time, as origin tales abundantly testify. Intersubjectivity, as a method, can alert the researcher to look for this data which might, otherwise, be missed altogether. We often hear complaints that Indians prefer to be graduates and stay jobless rather than learn vocational skills. However, when we look at employment data, we find that vocational-diploma holders are jobless too, in which case, why not be a jobless graduate? That way, at least one’s social ranking is higher than that of a vocationaldiploma holder. Would you not do that too? Farmers in Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan are advised not to grow cotton next to paddy because parasites can switch from one crop to the other and wreak havoc. If this advice is not observed, it is because the cotton crop is too delicate, its market price is too variable, and paddy is a good standby with a minimum support price. If you were in the place of these farmers, wouldn’t you also shun the same advice? Most qualified allopathic doctors are urban-based and expensive. One posted in a primary health centre looks at the job as a punishment posting and has little time for poor people; besides, the line outside the allopathic counter is always very long. Under these circumstances, if an indigent person seeks help from an unregistered medical practitioner, would they be irrational? Ask yourself. This kind of methodological intersubjectivity takes away the strangeness in others, and what seemed exotic now appears normal. This exercise too works within limits. What will remain difficult to fathom are the innermost emotions of people—what makes them

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laugh or cry. We can write about them, but we cannot laugh or cry with them. But then, we are not gods. This should also tell us that intersubjectivity is more than participant observation. One can spend hours, days and months in the field and not engage in intersubjectivity because those being studied are still the ‘other’. Fieldwork can harbour hubris and a sense of superiority which intersubjectivity easily quells. Imagine somebody studying you. How would you feel? Science and Freedom These methodological considerations become relevant only when one is free to think and investigate. Prosperous countries like China and Russia are woeful in the social sciences because they lack freedom. Interestingly, not just philosophy and science but religion too needs freedom; otherwise, the dominant belief becomes theocratic and spirituality gives way to rituals. Without freedom, science quickly degenerates into mere technology and imitation, and eventually, it becomes just about control. Toss freedom out, and you would spell the ruin of philosophy, for all thought would turn fascist. Mannheim said that secularism meant the freedom to think freely and not just to think independent of religion. Secular thought can, therefore, go against an irreligious state as well. When there is freedom, philosophers can explore, unhindered, preferences and basic assumptions outside empirical verifications. With freedom on its side, science can win votaries to objective, empirical statements, without the backing of the church or the state. Existentialist or Hegelian, everybody can plainly agree that our world is heliocentric. With freedom comes the liberty to investigate and objectively verify empirical reality, regardless of one’s political or religious persuasion. Sadly, this freedom, which is such an essential condition for social science, is something that academics cannot enforce; only politicians can do so. Yet, without this freedom, social science will wither away, and so will wisdom.

Appendix

Vignettes: Policy against Prejudice

Self-Examining Biases Hans Georg Gadamer, the famous hermeneutic philosopher, proposed that all analysts should begin by first examining their inherited beliefs on the subject under study. In other words, just because they are scholars, it does not necessarily mean they are immune to biases and prejudices that prey on everybody else. An intellectual is first a social being and, as such, susceptible to the many failings that ordinary people must contend with. It is quite easy to find the subjects of your study wanting in rationality, objective thinking and a holistic view of the world. Yet, it might well be the case that there are several other factors staring at you which are equally prejudicial but you do not recognise them as such because they are sitting inside you. These, therefore, evade attention and because it is intellectuals who carry these parasites unknowingly, their effects are much more damaging on a social scale. Very often, we miss this aspect for we readily grant a pass to a point of view that has recently been advocated to upset a past prejudice. Slow thinking, once again, reveals itself by declaring this novel feature as bias free while it is very likely that one kind of bias has merely replaced the other, older variety. The recency of a current belief does not make it prejudice free, nor is it that all received wisdom is necessarily slanted. In this chapter we shall examine a few such instances to show

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how prejudices hide behind what we often consider to be an unbiased opinion. It is not as if the conclusions drawn here are infallible but if they are able to rouse a certain amount of query in regions of certitude then our job will have been done. Misplaced Debate on Beef Eating “Make the cow a national animal”, declared Maulana Syed Ashrad Madani, President of the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind. He said this not so much to buy peace as to bring sanity to the issue of beef eating. Both sides have misplaced priorities, and this is bad for our brains. Those who argue that minorities are being pampered should ask themselves, why then, in aggregate terms, are Muslims always poorer than Hindus? At the same time, a fact check is advised for those who think banning beef is anti-secular. True, Hindus are forbidden to eat the cow but neither does Islam ordain that it be slaughtered. Muslims would certainly not lose their faith if they did not get a regular ration of beef. In fact, some of the best cuisines from Awadh, Hyderabad and Kashmir, are mutton based and, in all such instances, the connoisseur would be horrified to stir cow meat into the pot. Nor is it that the veneration of an animal is strictly a Hindu peculiarity. The Egyptians believed the cat was sacred; the Zoroastrians, like the Hindus, revere the ox as their prophet was, in lore, saved by one; the Cherokee Native Americans give the eagle a special place and nobody is allowed to mess with it. The gentle turtle is also an object of worship among many peoples, ancient and modern. In a number of cultures it is forbidden to kill the totemic symbol of the community, be it an animal, even a plant; why, sometimes also a creature nobody has ever seen. The Chinese have a near totemic relationship with the dragon, Czechs with a doubletailed lion, but none of these animals actually exist. Humans and nature interact in ways more complex than the dichotomy between “us” and “them”.

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Beef is banned in 24 out of 29 Indian states; besides our Constitution also directs us to protect the cow. Other countries have outlawed other kinds of meat for reasons not always religious. However, when a law prohibits the consumption, or slaughter, of a certain animal, then it applies to every citizen, without exception. In Germany, Britain, Ireland, France, South Australia, among several other countries, dog meat is banned. In six states in America you cannot flip dog flesh on your hamburger grill. As you can’t pet a dog and slaughter it too, eating its meat would mean farming the animal and keeping it under conditions in which chickens and turkeys are bred. This thought, by itself, is so revolting, that plating dogs for a meal is now a hideous crime in many parts of the world. Curiously, even where eating dog meat is allowed, there are restrictions on slaughtering it. Such is the case in Appenzel and St. Gallen districts of Switzerland. If you are hopelessly addicted to dog meat, you have to go somewhere else, and the space for that is shrinking. Now even Taiwan, post-Westernisation, has banned the sale of dog meat. The Chinese, for a long time, had no inhibitions against this kind of protein, but now some qualms are emerging. It is often argued that this is an outcome of the one-child policy which allows for more time, room, and emotional space for raising a pet. Under these conditions, the dog, predictably, is the most popular choice in many homes. It is hard to imagine this for as recently as in 1983 Beijing, it was illegal to keep a dog as a pet. Eating a horse was not particularly encouraged in USA, but it is known to have happened. When it did, it was usually under strained circumstances; even salt may be running low. Today, however, there is a specific law against horseflesh in USA and there is nothing religious behind this. It is true that over 600 years ago Pope Gregory II had instructed St. Boniface to campaign against horsemeat, but when the last horse slaughter house was closed in America in 2007, nobody remembered what a Pope had once said. The horse, the dog, the cat, is treated as a pet in many cultures,

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which is why eating them is not just bad manners, but illegal too. It does not matter where the sentiment to ban the eating of a certain animal comes from: it may be religion, or because of a certain affection towards a species. But whenever this prohibition is in place, the arm of the law is equally muscular and long. Under these circumstances, it is pointless to demand dog meat as a legal claim; it would be laughed out of court. Doubtless, there will be random attempts to trick people into buying dog meat as goat meat, or horse meat as beef, or selling cat meat as rabbit meat. This practice must have been prevalent enough for there is, in fact, a Spanish saying: “To pass off a cat as a hare.” In India, sadly, gau rakshaks often set out to “pass off ” buffalo meat (sometimes any meat) as beef, to create terror among Muslims. Well-meaning secularists, on the other hand, frequently end up falling on their swords. When gau rakshaks turn murderous they should be single-mindedly tried for their crimes. Why blunt this thrust by simultaneously arguing that eating beef is a democratic right? To insist on beef in India, in the name of secularism, is just as ridiculous as demanding a dog or horse in a New York restaurant. All that is forbidden need not be holy! Why should only certain animal proteins be considered repulsive? Surely, there is no true answer to this as it all rests on culturally variable value preferences.. To accept a predominant view on this matter does not make the issue ethnic and sectarian by itself. There is not much point, other than grandstanding, to wear a tuxedo to a pillow fight or to pull in “secularism” to combat cow slaughter. Makes sense then to accept what is the predominant view in any society on this question without drawing the question of secularism into the debate. If, for example, I were to like dog meat but my entire neighbourhood finds it revolting does not mean I am being denied my secular right to a particular diet.

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Martyrdom Examined Another area which causes considerable heart burn is in the identification of who is to be revered as a martyr? As we have seen, one person’s terrorist is often another person’s martyr. Is it just a word flipping over, or is there something more profound that separates the two? We need to resolve this question conceptually. Only after we have done this we can be on firm grounds when we deal stringently against terrorists, and make no concessions to their claims of being martyrs for a cause. There is no room for relativism in this regard. A terrorist can never be a martyr. It is argued here that there is a sure way of separating a terrorist. Once this definitional aspect is clear in our minds, legal prosecution of terrorists can proceed without the unnecessary and inconvenient obstacles that the issue of martyrdom poses before it. Let us see how. Last week, we celebrated Guru Tegh Bahadur’s martyrdom day. Barely was that over when, 48 hours later, came the tenth anniversary of Mumbai’s 26/11 tragedy. While in the first case, we reverentially remembered a saint and a martyr, in the latter, we recalled the horrible memory of the terrorist attack in Mumbai. For us Indians, Ajmal Kasab, captured alive and wriggling, was justly tried as an unrepentant serial terrorist. His role in the 26/11 massacre filled our TV screens with surround sound effect. Yet many in Pakistan mourned him as a martyr when he was hanged and thought his execution was a “big loss to Muslims”. Hafiz Saeed, of Lashkar-e-Taiba, even led a prayer grieving his death, with thousands in attendance. Saeed was not alone in pouring kerosene on this fire. The Pakistan wing of Taliban and Al Qaeda, not to forget David Headley, all commended Kasab, some even vowed to “complete his mission”. When Nawaz Sharif suggested that Kasab may have had links in Pakistan, it even upset the Press Council in that country. How could there be such completely different takes on one man? Some reflection tells us that the mere fact of dying for a cause

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does not distinguish a martyr from a terrorist. In this regard, the more important criterion is whether one will kill for a cause, or not. A true martyr does not physically attack anybody and, what is more, does not fight back, not even in self-defence. Guru Tegh Bahadur fits this definition perfectly. He knew that a violent death awaited him, yet he went ahead to plead the cause of Kashmiris who came to him for help. Imam Husayn, the grandson of Prophet Muhammad, also died without offering any resistance. He too was aware that he was heading towards a dangerous terrain but still felt he had to give peace a chance. This is why, among the Shias, Imam Husayn is considered to be the “Lord of Martyrs”. Likewise, in the Christian faith, St. Sebastian was a true martyr. There he stood in the public square, with folded hands and bended knees, submitting quietly to the stoning by a wild mob. Among those who participated in this assault was Saul, who later repented, converted to Christianity, and became St. Paul. The Macabee brothers are martyrs for the Jews as they too refused to fight back even as they were tortured for observing their dietary taboos. A true martyr then does not just die for a cause, but dies without hurting anybody; not even a hand on someone’s collar. A terrorist, on the other hand, starts out to kill for a cause and if death should happen it is passed off as collateral damage. The distinction between martyr and terrorist is dramatically illustrated in the life and thoughts of our very own Shaheed Bhagat Singh. Many in India know Bhagat Singh as a gun toting romantic figure, but this is not how he would have wanted to be remembered. It is true that Bhagat Singh killed John Saunders, a police officer, to avenge Lala Lajpat Rai’s death. He was on the run after that and successfully evaded the police for months. Yet, very soon his views on the political necessity of violence changed and he practically asked to be arrested. He did this by bursting a harmless bomb, little more than an elevated fire cracker, in the Assembly. It hurt no one and he waited quietly for the police to take him away.

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Why? One gets a clue to this in many of his writings, such as “Why I am an Atheist,” or the one he addressed “To Young Political Workers.” He never hid the fact that he was briefly a terrorist; but that was a passing phase. He soon realised that those who uphold the ideals of socialism and anti-colonialism “do not throw bombs on innocent people.” This is light years away from how Al Qaeda, or Taliban, trains jehadis. For them, killing for a cause is the first order of business; it is a cherished value in itself. Violence is what puts meat on the bones of their ideology. Today, Bhagat Singh is rightly known as a martyr, not so much for his attack on Saunders as for his peaceful protest in the Assembly and subsequent surrender. He wanted to “make the deaf hear” and this could never be accomplished by “killing some important people.” This explains why, unlike a terrorist, a martyr never considers an entire community to be the enemy. Bhagat Singh was not against British people but the colonial structure that some of them represented. The enemy, in this case, was not an undifferentiated population for there were innocents too on the other side. For the terrorists the matter is very different. Not only do they see themselves as a homogeneous lot of faithful believers, they also see the others as an equally homogeneous bunch of faithless “unbelievers”. Therefore, an attack against any one of them is legitimate for it is an attack against all. There are no innocents among those who are not in their ranks. Hate is much easier to nurture than compassion. This is why a terrorist can never rise to be a martyr. As an aside we may consider why soldiers, even the bravest ones, are not martyrs because they get into the fray to kill and be killed. This is why they are awarded bravery and gallantry awards and not worshipped as peace loving and peace seeking martyrs are. Even here, as soldiers fight at the command of their superiors,

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civilians are not to be harmed and, further, there is an attempt in democratic societies to limit the casualties at war. Unlike a martyr who goes in to die, a soldier is willing to die but hopes to escape this fate and the likelihood of this goes up in a democracy. A combat soldier’s life is not in his hands alone for there are directives from above to which he must respond. Nevertheless, in a democracy, where every life counts, no leader can justify too many deaths. Martyrdom is not what states would like to sponsor, least of all a democracy. It was not always that authorities were so mindful of limiting deaths on the battlefield. The Duke of Wellington thought the common soldier was the “scum of the earth.” Frederick the Great believed it was pointless to worry about whether a wounded soldier lived or died. Louis Napoleon did not have a regular treatment unit in his war camps. In fact, the French had a rather poor record on this score till the Third Republic of 1870. Before democracy came to Europe, casualties of war were way beyond what would be acceptable in any democracy today. In the English Civil Wars from 1642 to 1646, the death toll was four times greater than the numbers of British soldiers who died in World War II. Again, in the American Civil War, ten times more American soldiers died (North and South combined) than in World War II. As democracy advanced in USA, so did the concern for the welfare of soldiers, most of all, in containing mortality in the battlefield. Lives matter in a democracy and America’s ceaseless striving to minimise war casualties is the reason for its turn towards drone attacks and remote warfare. Just compare: The American Civil War resulted in 4,98,332 casualties which was more than the deaths in World War I, World War II, Vietnam War (lasted 11 years), Gulf War (still on from 2001) and Iraq War (lasted seven years) put together. It does not do any good to a democratic state if their soldiers die in battle and calling them martyrs does not quite cut it. The major reason why Americans were reluctant to enter the World Wars was

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because they did not want to sacrifice “flowers of youth” in battle. In World War II, America suffered 2,91,557 deaths, but Japan (not yet a democracy) lost over 2.3 million soldiers. The legendary General George C. Marshall said that if USA had suffered even a tenth of the number of casualties the Japanese had, there would have been a Congressional Enquiry and heads would have rolled. Post World War I, the US Military ramped up its efforts to curb battlefield deaths. About 58,000 US combat forces died in Vietnam, which was a sticker shock to Americans. Yet, this was nothing compared to over 1 million Viet Cong soldiers and an equal number of Vietnamese civilians who died in the same war. Yet, neither Lyndon Johnson nor Richard Nixon could weather the protest that broke out in USA when body bags started coming home. To a significant extent, USA’s much talked about “military­ industrial complex” stems from this caution of not losing lives in battle. As there is constant pressure to minimise “boots on the ground”, American forces are becoming increasingly dependent on drones and long-distance precision targeting. These sophisticated new war machines cause heavy damage to the enemy and, at the same time, cut back on American casualties. In the Iraq war, over one million Iraqis died against 4,431 US soldiers. Seen against this background, it is easier to understand why in democracies today martyrdom appears a historical relic. Nobody should have to die to uphold a cause and if that were to happen, something quite undemocratic is afoot and should be addressed immediately and corrected. When certain terrorists are called martyrs it is an abomination because they did not die in peace, but were more than prepared to kill peaceful people with violence and hatred. True soldiers never kill non-combat people, which is why a terrorist is not a soldier either. To consider a terrorist a martyr or a soldier intrinsically offends both these terms. Terrorists are remembered, even by their admirers, for the devastation they have caused on civilians, for example, the

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9/11 carnage. Soldiers are remembered for their bravery against enemy soldiers in the line of duty and for following orders by the country’s legitimate authorities. A martyr is remembered for selfless sacrifice performed in peace, always in peace, for the cause of humanity. Water Farmland or Sports Grounds From the battlefield to the sports field, many of our unexamined prejudices stay with us and impact what some might consider matters of leisure and good natured fun. We are rightfully wary of how we irrationally use water in our country. There are three crops, namely, rice, wheat and sugarcane that consume as much as 80 per cent of our country’s water supply. As if this were not bad enough on its own, there is the added fascination for green lawns around our homes, and for velvet green pitches where ball sports are played. The broad based aesthetic preference on such matters, however, does not arouse ire across society, as it should. Some years ago there was quite a controversy as to whether Maharashtra should water its cricket grounds or conserve water for agricultural purposes. In 2016, the Bombay High Court explicitly stated that it was a “criminal wastage” to water cricket grounds. A judgement such as this raises a few eyebrows and not just of those who promoted the IPL in cricket, but others too who believe that a green lawn is a desirable thing to have. What escapes their attention is that the fascination for grass is a colonial import and along with it came a variety of ball games, cricket and golf, for example. This development marked a radical aesthetic break from standards set in traditional Asia, India included. Few realise that a grassy lawn is not as unproblematic and natural to cultivate, nor do we pause to think why traditional India never really played any ball games. Or, to put it more directly, why did all ball games originate in Europe, mostly in Britain where grass grows abundantly and naturally.

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Once the British brought sports like cricket, hockey or golf, grass became essential. When it comes to keeping golf courses in shape, the gallons of water needed goes well past being scandalous in the Indian context. It is near impossible to play any of these ball games well on hard, gravelly, earth. None of our traditional sports needed well tended grass because none of them required a ball: not Kabbadi, not Khoko, not Mallakhumb, not Thangta; and the list goes on. Quite obviously, the sports we play, and entertain ourselves with, must match our physical environment. Grass grows abundantly in Britain which is why all ball sports first began there. As the empire grew, these sports found favour first in its colonies, then gradually, to other parts of the world. Many European sports too depended on these British exports; so powerful was the influence of this tiny island worldwide. Nursing the texture and finish of the village green in an English village is the easiest thing to do, therefore, playing a game of cricket or golf is just no bother. Football, for example, began with the Shrovetide matches in medieval England. Field hockey, a game we once played well, was invented in London and the first international match was between Ireland and Wales–both places where grass grows in abundance. Move to Asia where rain is patchy, or visits the region only during the monsoons, and grass becomes a luxury and expensive to cultivate. Consequently, ball based sports never got a look-in, that is till the Europeans, more specifically, the British, dropped in. Growing grass, even for a private lawn, is also British in origin and most of us do not realise how much damage that does to an environment where water is a scarce commodity. Before Europe dominated Asia, our gardens were not known for their green expanses as they were in England. The lawn is always the centrepiece of a British garden but not so in Asia, not even in Iran. What matters most in oriental gardens, where the weather is hot, is to have cool places to duck into. This explains why these

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gardens have many resting places where flowering fruit trees provide both shade and beauty. In fact, if one were to look at miniatures of Iranian or Mughal gardens of the past, then it is quite clear that the Koranic understanding of paradise played an important role in their making. The gardens, such as the Iranian Chaharbagh, were fashioned near streams and water sources so as to afford a fountain and water channels; growing grass was not on the gardener’s to-do list. This aspect comes out clearly in several traditional Islamic gardens whose portraits we have today. In fact, the Garden of Eram in Shiraz, which is now a UNESCO heritage, has hardly any grass at all, not even of the wild kind. Some of these Iranian gardens became so well known that they were emulated not just in Mughal India, but in Europe too. The famous garden at Versailles in France has been clearly inspired by the gardens of Iran. Here again, we find rectangular arrangement of trees with grass playing a very minor role and that too in strictly confined spaces. Polo is the only ball game that was played in traditional times, particularly in regions northwest of India, right upto Iran. Qutubudin Aibak was impaled while at this game and so was his son, paving the way for Iltutmish to take over. Why, some even believe that Alexander died of exhaustion after a polo match. It was obviously a game indulged in with great passion; but on green grass? Hardly. Interestingly, Iranian miniatures rarely show a green field where polo is being played. The ground is either brown or yellow, and it is only in very few instances that horses are seen stamping on grass. This is so unlike contemporary polo grounds, where grass is essential. Arguably, the best of these were built in Argentina, sponsored by European settlers and encouraged by the wide open “pampas”–where grasses flourish, but trees are rare. When the Shandul polo ground, the highest in the world, was made in GilgitBaltistan, it was under British supervision and, naturally, it was all lush and green.

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But the traditional Afghan polo, called Buzkashi, was, and is still, played on a hard earth surface but without a ball. In this version of the game, a carcass of a sheep, or goat, is what rival teams on horseback fight over to get to the opponent’s end. It was “Talibanned” in Afghanistan, but so popular was Buzkashi that it has made a huge comeback in recent times. What the British call badminton actually originated in India and China, but here again there was no ball but a shuttlecock. In Manipur a game called Yubi Lapki is played but instead of a ball, it is a coconut that is passed around. Ping pong, that is so associated with the Orient today, is however, an English invention and the name was actually trademarked by a London sport equipment dealer. If farm lands or cricket pitches is a modern Indian dilemma it is because we missed saying, when we should have, that “the ball stops here.” From a gentleman’s sport let us move to a more visceral sport, one that involves violence to animals. This pastime is not gentlemanly at all, and yet it gives us another perspective on how heavily prejudices weigh on policies. Redefining Torture That there are two sides to Jallikatu, those who are for and those who are against, only shows that India is both global and updated on the prejudice scale. If we walk back to the past, sensitivity to torture, of any kind is a rather contemporary phenomenon, showing up first in the nineteenth century. Till then, worldwide, the torture of both humans and animals was taken as normal. Yet, it is not as if our sensitivity today to animal and human torture makes our views on this subject free of prejudice and untested aesthetic preference; much like our take on green lawns. Between 1807-50, as if making up for past injustices, our collective consciousness suddenly woke up to ethically question the torture of all living beings. Is it just coincidence that around this

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time, in Britain, for example, slave trade was abolished, the 1832 Reform Act was passed, and bear baiting, even dog fights, became illegal? Conferring respect to ordinary electorates was accompanied by a ban on cruelty to animals and people, as if one entailed the other. Till then, voters were limited to a select few and hanging was a popular, town square, event. Likewise, to set dog against dog, or bear against dogs, were huge draws often patronised by the rich and powerful. Elizabeth I, reportedly, could not tear herself away from such spectacles. It would appear then that with the increase in democratic awareness, we also became mindful of animal life. Decades before Darwin came on the scene, nineteenth century attitudes were inclined towards accepting humans and animals as somewhat continuous creations. Therefore, what applied to us was now being extended to include other living creatures too. By this token, convicts, their wickedness notwithstanding, deserved consideration as well. Again, it was in the mid-nineteenth century, that the hangman’s rope was lengthened so that death would be quick; the earlier short drop left the condemned person dangling for long. Crucifixion, stoning, or the Chinese practice of Li Ching, where the convict’s flesh was slowly sliced off (hence the phrase, death by a thousand cuts), were no longer considered civilised. Likewise, in 1839, Britain banned punishment by drawing and quartering as this involved the strewing of the dead person’s body parts. All of this is crazily off the charts today, but in the past they were seen as normal, even fun. Though we still continue with capital punishment, yet we strive to make it as pain free as modern medical knowledge will allow—enter the lethal injection. No more howling and cheering from a frenzied crowd; the sentence is now delivered within prison confines. All these changes have happened in recent times as old fashioned torture is no longer acceptable. Humans and beasts, individually

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and singly, are not to be put in pain, and if they have to die, because we must punish, or we must eat, let us deliver the blow as softly as we can. Yet, when man and beast are performing together in acts that involve pain, sometimes death, there has been much stronger resistance against banning them. This is true of jallikattu, the bull fight and the fox hunt. All these three were once banned and then un-banned. On these matters, the struggle between status quoists and change agents has been very contentious and bitter. The Catalonia region of Spain disallowed bullfights, but the Spanish Supreme Court ruled against it. The fox hunt likewise won judicial approval and, for the time being, jallikattu has also earned a reprieve. Unlike dog fights or bear baiting, these are no longer instances of outright animal torture as humans are also involved. This is what makes jallikattus and bullfights appear sporty for now there is an aura of uncertain outcome, though highly controlled. Consequently, guilt is replaced by participatory euphoria and it is this that gives them the look and feel of being cultural and harmless. If, however, only the rich participate in the sport, as in the case of tiger hunts, then such acts do not become “cultural”, deserving of popular approval. Foxhunting was never passionately defended as long as it was limited to the aristocrats. From the 1950s on, numerous foxhunting clubs, with middle class membership, sprang up all over Britain lending this activity a democratic character. The Spanish bullfight has always been a spectacular public sport, not just because it entertained large crowds but also because matadors came from the ranks of ordinary people. It is this, as well as their skills that together made bullfighters like Antonio Ordinez, Luis Diminguin, and Manuel Benitez (also known as El Cordobez) such super stars. Jallikattu still does not have its home-bred heroes, but it too is a popular sport that has become culture as it pits man against beast, rather ordinary men against ordinary beasts. It is almost as if we are compelled to demonstrate our mastery over nature at regular

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intervals. But because we are blessed with a cunning, a trait that animals do not possess, we pick on four-legged creatures that are not carnivores, nor are naturally dangerous to us. We hunt foxes, that attack poultry, or we fight bulls that have no quarrel with humans. Nobody would like to take on tigers or grizzly bears and then call it culture. As humans we need to show off or display our cultural might and we do this best by fighting the weak, never the strong, not even those who are our equals. This is what prompted the anarchist, Count Kropotkin, to remark that nature is not “red in tooth and claw”, but people are. Therefore, if we have to stay modern, in the true sense of the term, we cannot condone certain popular practices simply because they are there. Once we become conscious that the conception, and even spectacle of torture, is contextual and variable, resistance to festivities like jallikatu can probably be better overcome. Aesthetics and Hygiene Together When Swacch Bharat was inaugurated it seemed to raise the broom, but resident filth was difficult to dislodge. Rivers remained opaque and, in spite of health warnings, landfills went on smoking. At the same time, undeniably, more toilets were built than ever before. While between 1986 and 1999 about 9.4 mllion lavatories were constructed, Swacch Bharat, in the past four years alone, built about 49 million more. Yet, the sight and smell of India remain dirty; piles of garbage, cows gorging on plastic, dirty rivers, filthy drains. Together these comprise health hazards like nothing else. This tells us that Swacch Bharat cannot be accomplished by toilets alone. While toilets can be constructed on a mission mode, using them and becoming conscious of cleanliness is a different matter. None of that can happen without a mindset change as even the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation has acknowledged. This is the most difficult job.

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Nor has the presence of toilets, even when readymade and handed out on a pan, created an atmosphere that encourages cleanliness. It is often said that India is dirty for everything associated with pollution and filth is for the so-called lower castes to clean. Yet, if the subaltern people were meant to do all the dirty work, why then are their habitations unclean as well? Assuming that in the next four years all, or nearly all, Indian households will have toilets, will that make this country noticeably clean? Chances are that it will not. According to a conservative government figure, post-Swacch Bharat there is piped water in 1.5 lakh out of 2.45 lakh villages that have indoor toilets. Further, the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) also shows that over 80 per cent in 2014 reported that they had improved sources of drinking water since 2012. That, however, has not changed the fact that only 6.4 per cent of villagers dump garbage in a designated dumping spot. What then are the main drain blocks to Swacch Bharat? At this point, it is tempting to turn to European history for an answer as our notions of civic cleanliness are largely drawn from Western experiences. But the differences between us and them are really quite vast. Nevertheless, by plotting these variations we might get an idea of how to add depth to mission “clean India”. First, the sanitation drive in the Western world began as early as in the mid-1850s, way ahead of anything along those lines in India. Clearly, they have a head start over us. Second, Europeans, unlike caste Indians, do not believe that what leaves our body, such as excreta, sweat, or even hair, is polluting. Consequently, they have little revulsion, or inhibition, in cleaning the dirt they create. Third, manual scavenging was not looked down upon in Europe. Even in nineteenth century England, many undertook this job willingly because they made good money out of it. Such people were known as “gong farmers”, and it was a job to covet if you wanted to get rich quick. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, all over the Western

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world, “miasma” and high smell were associated with fever. Therefore, when the River Thames was declared the “big stink” in the mid-1850s, British law makers were concerned as even the curtains in Parliament began to smell high. In 1878, survivors of a capsised steamer named Princess Alice feared the smell of the river more than the engulfing water of the Thames. Rumour has it that a rhinoceros in the London zoo died in 1873 because of this stench. Such was the power of the theory of smell and “miasma”. The theory of “miasma” was subsequently proved wrong. It was replaced in the late nineteenth century by the ‘germ theory” of Pasteur and Koch (even earlier, if we consider John Snow’s study of how cholera spread). Nevertheless, the belief in “miasma” pointed to environmental factors behind ill health. This helped in creating the right ideological climate for accepting public sanitation and hygiene. Edwin Chadwick’s 1842 report on sanitary conditions in Britain was premised on the theory of fevers and by 1871, a fullfledged department was formed to look after sanitation in UK. Environment, however, plays an insignificant role in the Ayurveda. Consequently, unlike the conception of “miasma” in Europe, the Indian system of medicine does not connect open filth and stenck with ill health. Even seasonal fevers, like vattaja jwara (monsoon fever), pittaja jwara (autumn fever) or kaphaja jwara (spring fever), are not really attributed to surroundings outside the body. Illness is internal balance gone wrong and the external world is largely neutral. Hence, connecting good health to a clean environment does not come as easily to us as it does to those who fear “miasma”. Therefore, toilets alone will be of limited use unless the Swacch Bharat programme also creates an abhorrence towards the sight and smell of filth. As this is a different aesthetic it needs a combination of persuasion and law to promote. What must we face squarely to make this happen? It is important to launch an all out aesthetic war against the caste ideology that values inner body purity over external cleanliness. Unfortunately,

Appendix

231

we don’t have the theory of “miasma” riding shotgun with Swacch Bharat. Toilets without public hygiene is like a broom without a brush! Numbers without sociology is just about that useful. Culture of Spitting Close to the issue of toilets, hygiene, and aesthetic, is the concern over public spitting. Once again, we tend to see it as an incurable social practice, embedded in the culture of chewing betel leaves (paan) and tobacco and are resigned to it. It might help policy planners to know that spitting, public spitting, that is, was widespread in other parts of the world, including Europe. This might provide an object lesson on how to conquer this unhygienic habit and also create an alternate aesthetic. Is there a lesson here for India where we are combatting not just TB, but now coronavirus too? We are not the world’s first spitters but let us not be the last in combating this social menace. Social distancing will, hopefully, become unnecessary in the not too long run. We, however, have an opportunity now to rally public opinion against spitting and this could be for our everlasting good. If the Western world could overcome the spitting urge, so can we, indeed, why can’t we? Anti-spitting sentiments first rose among European aristocrats and the haute bourgeoisie. This happened well before Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch propounded the “germ theory”. Only later, the more common classes in cheaper seats began to adopt this view, clearly imitating their social superiors. Science can only do so much, it is how the upper echelons behave that often turns things around. So far, the Indian elite has shown little interest in giving up public spitting. To ask Indians not to spit is met mostly with disbelief. It is almost as if nature would stop and birds would die. That may now change as the coronavirus fear has prompted Madhya Pradesh MLAs and parliamentarians to wear masks to work. As a facial mask is spit inhibiting, once our netas begin to use it as an

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essential accessory, the general masses too might do the same. At long last, a glimmer of hope. We should remind ourselves that Europe’s success in combating spitting was not because of law or science, as often believed, but because the elite considered it repulsive. Till the eighteenth century Europeans (much like many Indians today), believed that it was wrong to swallow one’s spit. The great fifteenth century Dutch philosopher and theologian, Desiderius Erasmus, strongly advocated spitting out saliva for moral and physical reasons. This is why spitting continued among the lower classes even after the European courts and big merchants had condemned it as disgusting. When, in 1842, Charles Dickens berated the Americans for public spitting, he was upset not because the poorer classes were indulging in this practice but because members of the American elite were. This aversion to spitting might have remained an upper class affectation, and no more. The two Great Wars of the twentieth century changed all that. They brought about massive social mobility and economic growth. Now there was a sudden surge in the numbers of the newly arrived middle classes who had one driving ambition and that was to imitate the well born. This truly ended public spitting in the West. In the final analysis it was not science, but the good old urge towards status emulation and social climbing that did the trick. By the 1930s public spitting had become so rare that, among other things, spittoons began to disappear from bars in London. If left to science, germ theory would have impacted a very limited area. Outside laboratory confines, science made cameo and uninspiring appearances primarily in the field of law and public health, but not in everyday life. In 1896, New York banned spitting citing TB as the major reason. Very soon about 150 other American cities followed. In 1898, French authorities moved in the same direction. This, however, did not significantly lower incidents of public spitting, either in Europe

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or in America. Even though TB, not bullet injuries, was the major reason most World War 1 soldiers were discharged from active duty, public spitting continued unabated on and off the battlefield. South Korea and Singapore provide contrary examples. Both these countries successfully banned public spitting by law; incidentally, they have also been the most effective in battling the coronavirus. Korea’s Confucian education and its longstanding army presence (that has habituated people to seeing officials in hazmat suits) are often put forward as reasons for the country’s success. So far, Korea and Singapore (not even China) have been exceptions to the rule. Unlike the impersonalised Confucian etiquette we, in India are traditionally tuned to individualised guru-shishya norms. Our politics too does not support regimentation, but mild, slow release anarchy. Most importantly the Indian upper classes, in the main, see nothing wrong about public spitting. It is routine to see massive amounts of glob floating out of luxury cars in India. It is not as if there is a paucity of laws against public spitting in our country. One of the earliest was passed in 1939 by the Madras Government. Since then, in independent India many states, such as Delhi, Maharashtra, Bengal and Uttarakhand have instituted clear sanctions against spitting. But nobody really cares, not even the law enforcing authorities. Clearly, it requires elite disapproval of this practice as a necessary condition. That will nearly always be Stage 1. Now that our law makers are wearing masks to work we might have arrived at Stage 1 of this process in our own unique Indian way. As facial masks are spit inhibiting attachments our legislators will soon set a new social norm, or aesthetic, against spitting. Once this happens, Stage 2 is waiting to take over what with the purported claim that millions are entering the Indian middle classes today. This facial gear, if widely adopted, could bring public spitting to a stop. Can this be true? Can we actually win our spat against spitting?

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Conclusion Hopefully, the examples of cultural self-examination in the preceding pages clarify some of the thorny predicaments many policies fall prey to. In most of these instances, the obstruction arises not always out of determined and calculated sectional interests. That may be true in a limited number of cases, but what is emphasised here is that we compound the problem by our reluctance to ask ourselves if our prejudices and presuppositions have gone unnoticed and under the radar. History has often been disputed in terms of the linear stories it tells. On the other hand, looking at empirical variants from the past opens our mind to the various possibilities that humankind has experienced on a number of singular subjects. Once we have seen the variations in time, and in space, it is easier to take a clear­ headed decision on what one’s policies towards certain pressing problems should be. Minimally, a contextualised and comparative view would help in clearing the field of needless misperception. Cultural sensitivity does not mean obeisance to existing cultural practices and beliefs, but also the ability to fathom the many diversities in cultural presentation and not to be bound by any one manifestation of it. This gives elbow room and a breadth of vision to the policy planner which, in turn, forces citizens to be more informed as well.

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Index

1918 Sedition Act in the US 139 B.R. Ambedkar 77, 107, 133, 135

Babri Masjid 168

Aam Admi Party 168

Backward Class Movement 95

Abraham Lincoln 138

Bahujan Samaj Party 95, 184

Adivasis 94

Baniyas 85-87

Agarwals 86, 94

Bapu Gaidhani Award 195

agrarian politics 74

below the poverty line 13

agricultural labourers 74, 76

agriculture 15-16, 22, 30, 69, 71­ Bertold Brecht 152

Bhagat Singh 218-19

72, 79, 81-82, 173, 182

Bharatiya Janata Party 96

Ahirs 95

alternatives sources of energy 166 Bharatiya Kisan Union 75

America/USA 22, 30, 56, 91, 98­ Bhoodan movement 73

99, 110, 127, 139, 141, 152, BJP 168, 175, 178-79, 183-84

162-63, 200-02, 215, 220-21, bonded labourers 70

Brahmanical castes 180

233

American 36-37, 99, 107, 125, Brahmans 84, 86-88, 90, 92-94

Buddhism 102, 198

138-39, 214, 220-21, 232

Civil Rights Movement 99

campaign redundancy 146, 150-54

Civil War 138, 220

capitalist farmer 74-75

elite 37, 232

caste 36, 77-78, 83-99, 107, 133­ Andre Beteille 129

34, 171-72, 180-84, 210-11,

Anna Hazare 186

229-30

anti-poverty measures 32

arithmetic 171-72, 180, 182-84

anti-racist struggle 97

calculations 180

artisans and traders 197

Artisans Dwelling Act 35

combines 183

competition 85

Aryans 86

demography 182

Austro-Hungarian Empire 109

identities 89, 91, 94-96

Index ideologies 182 politics 85, 180 system and identity 88 Chandals 93 chaturvarna 86-88 child labour 34-35, 51, 54, 151-52 China 27-29, 40, 44, 55-57, 67, 197-98, 212, 225, 233, 235 Christianity 102, 110, 218 citizenship 31-32, 34, 60, 100, 103­ 06, 108-13, 116, 122-23, 12­ 28, 130-31, 134-36, 145, 147­ 49, 155-59, 161, 163-66, 196 collective 122, 161 rights 104 civil liberties 124-25, 128, 134 colonial rule 88, 100 colonialism 97, 101-02 Community Health Centres 15 comprehensive health insurance 37 Congress 139, 168, 172, 174-75, 184-85 consumer price index 26 contemporary farmers’ movement 75 contract work 51 contracted job 11 copy-cat materialism 202 Corn Law 35 corruption 26, 32-33, 77, 169, 191, 202 and malpractices 33 Covid-19 17, 19, 64, 146-47, 149, 153-55, 162-66, 208 appropriate behaviour 147, 153, 162 CSR 66 cultural capital 172-73

241

chemistry 171 identity 90 practices and beliefs 234 Dalits 88, 91-92 Dara Shukoh 198 dark complexions matter 98 David Cameron 192 David Hume 206 democracy 31-32, 34, 102-06, 110­ 11, 124-25, 127, 130, 132, 134-36, 139, 145, 147-48, 151­ 52, 154, 162-63, 178-79, 184, 192-93, 220-21 demonetisation 19, 26, 53, 175-76 DMK 169 dominant peasant castes 181 Durkheim 156, 207 economically weaker sections (EWS) 116 education 14-15, 29, 33, 37, 66, 83, 119, 127-30, 132-33, 152-54, 157, 166, 177-78, 186, 191, 201-02, 208-09, 233 and health 33 election rallies 150 emergency 25, 140-41 employment 11, 14-15, 21, 29, 37, 39, 49-50, 54, 56, 61, 119-20, 124, 173, 185-86, 211 Europe 21, 64, 91, 97, 106, 109-10, 127, 162, 197-98, 200-02, 220, 222-24, 229-32 European 34, 36, 86, 90, 99, 163, 198, 207, 223-24, 229, 231-32 exploitation of women workers 34 Factory Act of 1875 35

242

Checkpoint Sociology

farmers 11, 30, 58, 70, 74-76, 81,

Minority and Guardianship Act

177, 197, 211, 229

108

suicides 11

Succession Act 107

feudal minority 100

Hinduism 86, 92, 102

feudalism 101, 173, 180-81

Hitler 127

Fidel Castro 36

household industries 22, 80

fight against untouchability 152

human development 36

financial crisis 27-28

human rights 141-44

formal sector 23, 53, 58, 83

freedom of expression 160

Iliya Nikolayevich Ulyanov 36

full-blooded revolt 178

India 9, 13-16, 19-25, 27-32, 36­ fundamental rights 124, 134-35

38, 40, 44, 50-59, 61-65, 67­ 74, 76-85, 87-90, 92, 97-100,

Gandhi 52, 88, 152, 168-69, 174,

102, 104, 106-08, 114, 117,

195

120-23, 129-30, 134, 136, 141,

Gandhian ideal of cottage industries

143, 145, 152, 171, 173-74,

52

181, 184-85, 188-93, 197-201,

gau rakshaks 216

208-11, 216, 218, 222, 224-25,

Germany 22, 27, 44, 55-56, 64,

228-29, 231, 233

126, 139, 215

India’s democracy 136

Green Revolution 72, 74

India’s intellectual 38

Gujars 95-96, 99

India’s Rural Net Domestic Product

Guru Tegh Bahadur 218

89

Indian Air Force 185

Harijans 94

Indian

health 15, 25, 29, 33, 35, 37, 46,

capitalist class 62

117, 127-30, 132-33, 137, 152­ economy 64

54, 157, 186, 190, 199, 201-02,

elite 36-37, 231

209, 211, 228, 230, 232

labouring classes 18

Hegel 204-06

politics 172

Heidegger 204

society 12, 177

Hindu 20, 90, 96, 107-08, 134, 214

variant of “colourism” 97

Adoption and Maintenance Act Indira Gandhi 169

107

individual rights 123, 125

and Islamic traditions 197

Industrial Disputes Act (IDA) 18

civilisation 92

Industrial relations 38

hierarchical system 83

inflation and subsidies 27

India 92

informal labour 10, 17, 24-26, 40,

Marriage Act 107

45-47, 52, 54, 60, 63, 152-53,

Index

243

209

local self-governance 122

informal sector 10, 24-25, 47, 53, Louis Bonaparte 36

57, 83

Information Technology 16, 23

Mahendra Singh Tikait 74

industry 16

Maheshwaris 86

insurance schemes 152

majority-minority divide 100

inter-caste relations 83

malnutrition 15, 209

Islam 102, 109, 214

Manmohan Singh 168

Islamic and Hindu motifs 197

Mao Zedong 36

Marathas 86-87, 94

Jagdish Chandra Bose 206

Marx 206

Jains 86, 108

Marxists 130

Janata Party 96, 169

Master Plan of Delhi 115-16

Jatavs 96, 183

middle class 16, 19, 31, 34, 36, 121,

Jati Puranas 85, 181

193-94, 199-202, 227, 232-33

Jats 84, 86, 88, 94-96, 99, 181-82 minorities 101-06, 109, 148, 151,

Jawaharlal Nehru 195

214

John F. Kennedy 126

politics 103

John Rawls 131, 144

protection 104

John Stuart Mills 165

Mochis 93

Jyotiba Phule 92

modern Industrial society 35

modern society 190

Kant 204, 206

modernity 34, 188-89

Karl Marnnheim 143, 156

Morya tribe 94

Khandelwals 86, 94, 96

MSMEs 28, 52-54, 56-59, 64, 66­ Kierkegaard 204-05

67

Koeris 95, 181

multiculturalism 111

Kshatriyas 85-87, 94

multitasking villager 70

Kumbh Mela 146, 150

Muslims 19, 94, 214, 216-17

Kurmis 95-96, 181

Naamdars versus Kaamdaars 173

labour laws 11, 33, 37-38, 65

Nanabhoy (Nani) Palkhivala 123,

Lala Lajpat Rai 218

126,132-36

land reforms 73, 75, 78

Narendra Modi 61, 168, 171-72,

landowner-landless labour confron­ 174, 178, 183-84

tations 73

National Commission for Enter­ landowning cultivators 70

prises in the Unorganised Sector

liberalism 138-44

46

Lin Biao 36

National Rural Employment Guar­

244

Checkpoint Sociology

antee Scheme 77

National Sample Survey 28, 40, 72,

76, 80, 120, 229

National Skill Development Centre

57

nationalism 91, 100-05, 109, 135,

145, 201

nationalist majority 100

natural disasters 189

natural stupidity 146, 150

Naxalite movement 74

NDA government 57

Nie Rongzhen 36

Nietzsche 34, 204, 206

Nitish Kumar 169

non-farm employment 15, 80

non-remunerative occupations 70

nuclear family 70

196, 199, 202, 209

alleviation 11

rates 13, 17

syndrome 189

powerful lobbies 37

Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas

Yojana 57

Productivity Linked Investment

Scheme (PLIS) 59

provident fund 11, 40, 48, 60-61

public distribution of food 33

Public Health Act 35

public policy 13, 31, 33, 97, 127,

146, 155-56, 162

public service providers 190

Purusha Shukta 89-90, 93

Rabindranath Tagore 135, 201, 206

Rajiv Gandhi 168

Other Backward Classes (OBCs) Rajputs 86, 88, 94-95

133-34, 168, 183

rational choice theorists 168-70

consolidation 183

rational choice theory 12, 167, 169

mobilisation for reservations relative deprivation 185-86

183

reservations for the Scheduled

reservations 168

Castes & Scheduled Tribes 36

right to education 129

Pakistani terrorist 185

right to health 129

Panchayati Raj Bill 36

right to housing 129

peasant 74-75, 95, 99, 181, 183

Right to Information Act 36, 169

and marginal farmers 177

rights and duties 124

and workers 197

ruling classes 187

political class 36, 187, 192

rural

popular beliefs 152

economy 15, 72, 88, 181

Portuguese Civil Procedure 109

India 22, 68-71, 73-74, 77-81,

post-Mandal Commission recom­ 121, 134, 181, 184

mendations 95

migrants 20, 24, 71

poverty 11, 13-14, 17-18, 20-21,

political activists 181

31-34, 36, 58, 66, 70, 73, 77­ urban nexus 81

78, 110, 185, 187, 189, 194, Rural Non-Farm Employment

Index (RNFE) 80

Sakshi Maharaj 168

Samajwadi Party 184

Sanjay Chopra and Geeta Chopra

Awards 195

Sartre 204-06

Scheduled Castes 36, 95, 133, 183

security of employment 37

Sexual Harassment Act of 2013 61

Shudra 94

Sikhism 102

skill development programme 28,

57

slums 14, 21, 77, 150, 196

development 115

Slumdog Millionaire 196

social

distance 33, 164

distancing norms 147, 166

policy 9, 123, 128-29, 132, 149

reforms 152

relations 78, 84

responsibility 34

security 40, 65

socialism 26, 33, 127, 132-33, 219

sociological sensitivity 13

Stalin 127

Subornobaniks of Bengal 86, 99

Succession to Crown Act 110

surgical strike in Balakot 185

Swacch Bharat Scheme 176

245

201

travel cattle class 195

Tribal India 108

Ujwala Scheme 176

underprivileged 129, 132, 148,

173, 175, 178

unemployment 18-19

Uniform Civil Code 108-09

universal education 37

unorganized sector 16, 22, 37, 53

untouchables 84, 91-92

UPA 169

urban India 19-20, 22-23, 72, 82

urban planning 112-15, 117, 122

V.P. Singh 168

vaccinations 163-64

Vedic hierarchy 87

village studies 71, 82

village-based manufactories 22

VIP paraphernalia in India 193

Vivekananda 206

Western democracies 163

Western living standards 202

Women’s Reservation Bill 169

workers

industrial 76

informal 17, 27, 55

management relations 25

marginal 15

migrant 17-19, 21, 51-52, 66,

Thakurs 86

74

traditional customs and practices

semi-qualified and half-literate

111

24

traditional elite 171

urban 21

traditional sociology 82

working class 28-29, 39, 50, 54, 62,

traditions 89, 102-03, 106, 197,

195, 201

246

Checkpoint Sociology

World War I 139-40, 220-21 World War II 118, 139-40, 220-21

Ye Jiyaning 36 Yogi Adityanath 168

Yadavs 95-96, 181-83

Zhou Enlai 36