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Date:23-10-17

Caste, a shadow in 2017 India

Abheek Barman 

On October 13, the Supreme Court threw out a petition seeking to ban a book by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd.Shepherd is a Dalit scholar who, over decades, has researched and published on atrocities and humiliations inflicted on lower caste folk by upper castes.The Supreme Court upheld the right to free expression, freedom of speech and so on. This is welcome.Indians talk big about democracy, justice and rights, but when it comes to books, we develop ultra-thin skins and shed our vertebrae. Formally or informally, we’ve banned books ranging from a novel by Salman Rushdie to a historical study of Shivaji and even a biography of tycoon Dhirubhai Ambani.Voltaire said he might entirely disagree with the views of someone, but would die to support his right to air those views.

This is Axiom 1of free expression. Axiom 2 says your freedom ends where my nose begins. Free expression doesn’t extend to hate speech or abuse, to stir up violence.Ilaiah aspires to the standards of scholarship practiced by Bhimrao Ambedkar: logic, evidence and illustrations from texts or real life.Both expose how conservative Hinduism is blind to social justice and its toxic outcomes.If you’re reading this, chances are you believe that ‘meritocracy’, not affirmative action like reservations, is the way for Indians to get ahead. Our affirmative action reserves seats in primary and higher education and some jobs for backward castes and tribes – in government institutions. Since Dalits pay the same taxes as anyone else, governments must plough some of it back for affirmative action.We now have a Dalit president, the second one after KR Narayanan. Mayawati, a qualified lawyer from the University of Delhi, overcame twin handicaps of being a woman and Dalit, to become chief minister of Uttar Pradesh four times.

Private Sector

Our private sector opposes affirmative action, especially job quotas for disadvantaged Indians. With very few exceptions, India Inc. blathers about ‘meritocracy’ to keep minorities and lower castes from soiling their precincts. Anecdotally, most traditional businesses are dominated by Baniyas or Vaishyas, one of the three top varnas.Surely, things must have changed for the better in 21st century India? Pooh. Post-liberalisation,India’s top new companies have been manned at the helm by upper castes.

Anecdotes can mislead. But in 2012, D Ajit, Han Donker and Ravi Saxena of the University of Northern British Columbia published a startling study of the relationship between caste and corporate control in India, in the Economic & Political Weekly (‘Corporate Boards in India: Blocked By Caste?’ August 11, 2012, goo.gl/nuu8MN).Of the 4,000-odd Indian companies listed at home or overseas, they selected the top 1,000 by asset size. Of these, they found upper castes, including numerically small ones like Syrian Christians, formed 92.7% of the members of top Indian corporate boards. Of these, 46% were Vaishyas and 44.6% Brahmins.Does this imply some kind of upper caste, male solidarity to keep lower castes and women out? To answer that, they used a test that measures diversity among a population, called the Blau index.

They found that 70% of all company boards were entirely forward-caste and male; the overall tendency, measured by something called ‘skewness’, was to perpetuate this norm.Indians love any scrap of praise thrown our way by the US. Remember, in 1955, President Lyndon Johnson signed rules that force any company with contracts worth $50,000 or more with government to follow affirmative action. This doesn’t enforce quotas, but measurable standards of ethnic and gender diversity. Even private companies with no government sales follow these rules.

Farm Performance

This year, Shankar Rao of the Council for Social Development, Hyderabad, published a landmark paper in EPW. He asked whether and how caste affected farm performance. Dissecting data from National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) surveys, Rao found lower castes grow crops that fetch lower prices, have lower productivity and rely more on highcost moneylenders, compared to upper castes.

For example, in the high-output kharif (monsoon) season, the average scheduled caste (SC) farm household makes Rs 38,000 worth of crop per hectare (pHa). Its upper caste counterpart makes nearly Rs 54,300 pHa. SC farmers can afford inputs worth Rs15,200 pHa; upper castes spend more than Rs 19,000. SC farmers, who grow less than 17% of their total output as cash crops, make less money than upper castes, 26% of whose output is devoted to commercial crops. SCs borrow 57% of their loans from highcost informal lenders, compared to 44.7% for upper castes.A 2,100-year-old casteist, violently exploitative and misogynistic text called the Manusmriti was supposed to have guided our ancestors’ ideas about right and wrong. We believe we’ve come a long way since. But from factory to farm, many of its economically crippling practices continue to thrive.

Date:23-10-17

BJP vs Mersal

No political party should harass filmmakers or act as a parallel censor board

TOI Editorials

The Vijay starrer Mersal enjoyed a successful worldwide release this Diwali, beating for example the opening day collection of Rajinikanth’s Kabali in Chennai. It then got a big publicity boost from an unexpected quarter: various BJP netas who fumed that the film has made “incorrect references” to GST, Digital India, the state of healthcare in India and Singapore. Inevitably, a scene that provoked them has been leaked online. However political pressure has been brought to bear on the filmmakers to snip the ‘offending’ scenes, which may yet succeed.

Crying about hurt sensibilities sometimes seems as common an accompaniment to watching films in India as popcorn. But when the game of hurt sensibilities spins out of control, it endangers the industry that has made us proud in the world, entertained and uplifted and inspired us, and given India considerable soft power. It’s bad enough when government is not able to protect a film from violence by non-state actors, for example when the Padmavati set or theatres screening PK were vandalised. But at least government should not be party to harassing filmmakers. When Union minister of state for finance and shipping Pon Radhakrishnan summarily demands that Mersal’s producer remove “the untruths regarding GST” from the film, it sends a disturbing signal that government denies both debate and ease of doing business. 

The fact is that Mersal has been certified by CBFC and it is not for the minister or anyone else to set up a parallel censor board of their own. In general governments need to grow a thicker skin. Giving dramatic voice to aam admi’s frustrations is one of the things in which Indian cinema justly takes great pride. Silencing the voice instead of addressing the frustrations is not in national interest.

Date:23-10-17

5 ways to combat pessimism about the hunger index

SA Aiyar

Dear Narendra Modi,

You protested recently that some people sleep well only after spreading pessimism all round. Rahul Gandhi responded by highlighting global pessimism: India has slipped to 110th among 119 countries in the Global Hunger Index of IFPRI (International Food Policy Research Institute).Now, many problems may be exaggerated by international organisations. But you will bore the public by criticizing technical flaws in the Global Hunger Index (GHI). Instead, you need to show that India is far less hungry than critics allege, and that you are remedying problems that are real.

The GHI is based on four measures: undernourishment, under-5 child mortality, stunting (shortness for age) and wasting (low weight for height) of children. None of these actually measures hunger. A more accurate title might be World Child Nutrition Report, but IFPRI prefers “hunger” as a sexier sales pitch.India is one of the few countries with hunger data in NSSO surveys. These show that hunger declined from 16% of the population in 1983 to 1.9% in 2004-05. Instead of trumpeting this as a success, you have stopped asking questions about hunger altogether in your surveys!

Why? Many feel embarrassed by such a low hunger ratio. After all, India is still poor. Besides, huge subsidies to two-thirds of the population look unwarranted if only 2% are hungry. Poverty experts like NC Saxena explain away low NSSO hunger ratios by saying people are too ashamed to admit hunger. He then cites a UNDP survey of 16 of the poorest districts reporting serious food inadequacy in 7.5% of households and some inadequacy in 29%. With no sense of irony, Saxena thinks people responding to UNDP surveys suddenly lose all the shame they suffer from when responding to NSSO surveys!Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton and Jean Dreze found that calorie consumption in the poorest 25% of the population had actually fallen from 1,683 in 1987-88 to 1,624 in 2004-05 despite substantial income increases. Additional income was used not for more calories but to switch to superior foods and non-food items. Clearly the poor have priorities other than calories. To insist that their reported and demonstrated lack of hunger is illusory is patronising elitism.

Many studies show that mechanization has greatly reduced calorie requirements. Instead of walking for miles, people now cycle or take buses. Agriculture, industry and services have all become highly mechanized, reducing dramatically the use of manual labour. Yet the calorie norms have not been reduced. This greatly exaggerates undernourishment.

Former Niti Aayog chief Arvind Panagariya argued that international norms on child stunting and wasting were wrong. India has higher life expectancy at birth, lower infant and child mortality, and lower stillbirth and maternal mortality rates than most African countries, yet international norms show Indian children to be more stunted and wasted than African ones. Something is seriously wrong here.Yet, whatever the exaggerations, surely there are genuine problems too. India’s child mortality rate is 47 deaths per 1,000 births, against 38 in Bangladesh, 27 in Indonesia and 10 in Sri Lanka. This may have more to do with insufficient vaccination and nutritional awareness than hunger, but is a problem nevertheless.

Again, many studies reveal discrimination against women, especially female children, in food and health spending. A man who tells surveyors there is no hunger in his household may speak for himself and not his wife and little girls. This may be more a gender than food problem, but nevertheless needs remedying through a massive awareness campaign on the evils of gender discrimination, the special needs of pregnant women and babies, and the case for female empowerment through self-help groups.Research by Dan Spears and others has shown that even when calories are consumed, they are not absorbed because of diarrhea and insanitary conditions. Full stomachs may therefore translate into stunted bodies. The answer is better sanitation rather than more food subsidies.

Mr Modi, you can do five things to rebut Rahul Gandhi and IFPRI. First, restart measuring hunger in NSSO surveys: international organisations will find that difficult to ignore. Second, revise Indian calorie norms in view of widespread mechanisation, and urge world bodies to follow suit. Third, combat critics spinning data with counter-spin. Spin your own emphasis on gender equality to say it also attacks maternal mortality and child stunting. Spin your Swachh Bharat scheme to boast that, as the first politician to aim for an open- defecation-free India, you target not just cleanliness but malnutrition. Finally, implement the Food Security Act’s promised cash benefit to pregnant and lactating women, naming this project after Deen Dayal Upadhyaya.

Date:23-10-17

देश-विदेश में हमेशा बेहतर रही हैं गठबंधन सरकार

टीसीए श्रीनिवास-राघवन

मानसिकता क्या होती है? हमारे आसपास हर कोई यह मानता है कि मानसिकता यानी चुनिंदा स्थापनाओं पर ऐसा विश्वास जिसे किसी भी कीमत पर हिलाया न जा सके। यह अपने आप में बेहद खतरनाक बात है। इसकी वजह से आप में यह सोच उत्पन्न होती है कि कोई विशिष्टï विचार केवल इसलिए सही है क्योंकि आप उस पर यकीन करते हैं। इस बात से लगभग हर व्यक्ति इत्तफाक रखेगा कि ब्रिटिश औपनिवेशिक शासन की बदौलत देश में कई मानसिकताओं वाले लोग रहे। इनमें से एक अहम मानसिकता यह आभास दिलाती है कि किसी भी देश के लिए दो दलों वाली राजनीतिक प्रणाली ही सबसे बेहतर शासन प्रणाली होती है। इस मानसिकता के मुताबिक इस सोच से प्रस्थान यानी एकदलीय शासन या बहुदलीय शासन की ओर प्रस्थान करना सही नहीं है। परंतु यह राजनीति को देखने का सही तरीका कतई नहीं है। सन 1967 में देश में पहली बार गठबंधन सामने आया और तब से ही यह बहस निरंतर चली आ रही है।कांग्रेस पार्टी ने भी अपने हित में एक मिथक को बढ़ावा दिया कि गठबंधन की वजह से सरकार चलाना मुश्किल हो जाता है। इस मिथक को जानबूझकर प्रश्रय दिया गया। यही वजह है कि जब भी किसी एक दल को सत्ता मिली तो इसे पूरी सराहना दी गई। इसी प्रकार जब भी गठबंधन सरकार की बात सामने आई तो अनिच्छा और निराशा देखने को मिली। परंतु सच्चाई एकदम उलट है। देश में सन 1989 के बाद 25 वर्षों तक गठबंधन सरकारें ही सत्ता में रहीं। इन्हें भले ही बुरा माना जाता हो लेकिन सच यह है कि देश को सबसे सुखद आर्थिक परिणाम इसी काल में मिले। भारत में गठबंधन सरकारों के अधीन बहुत तेजी से विकसित हुआ।