What I said was neither false neither a hagiography. It is just a balanced look. And besides history is very subjective and is prone to propaganda.

But in India where you have people who can identify by non-mutually exclusive categories like language, caste, class, religion, political ideology, and so on, what you end up with are a whole bunch of groups who are too small to dominate.

If the main cause of sectarian violence in India is religion (i.e. the Hindu/Muslim divide) wouldn’t you say that Hindu’s as a group represent this large dominant group?

So, if I look at the bloody riots in Gujarat against Muslims, was the violence perpetrated by one caste of Hindu’s living in that state or did various Hindu groups (regardless of caste) band together to commit the violence?

Things may be bad have been getting progressively better since independence,so even people in poverty have a stake in the country. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_India Poverty wise the post liberalization phase has been a golden age, with huge decreases. The problem is the growth may not be enough to meet the new aspirations of the people.

Thanks for that answer, but how will India ever get rid of it’s caste system? And are there cases of Dalits or untouchables who have moved into the middle-classes in present day India?

A caste in India is basically a community. India has a first past the post electoral system, so that further increases the power of communities. There are limited economic resources there are strong incentives for communities to undercut each other. That said communities do change, and dissolve and as communities die out, the caste system weakens. Of course, if pure self interest takes over instead, what replaces the caste system will probably be worse.

what policies should Nehru have followed immediately after independence?

Immediately after independence? Russian roulette for himself instead of Russian economic policies for India .

nm, many people…. Having lived in Bihar for a time, where the caste system is still very deeply entrenched, and mix that with poverty for most people (regardless of caste) and there are many situations were just trying to help a Dalit child can be dangerous to your life– the place I volunteered at had two well-qualified Indian women teachers come from outside the area to teach the Dalit children, and they were brutually attacked and raped to drive them away– upper caste people in that area do NOT want the dalits to get an education– because the small level of power they hold over them is tenuious and could easily disapear with a little education– they don’t want to have to compete with jobs, and also lose the uneducated poverty-sticken dalits who make up their work force in the fields.

Bihar is an extreme, of course, and does not represent all of India, but there are certainly cases all over the country were Dalit children have not been allowed into school- govt school or not– to make sure education is available in all communites for all people, the police force and school faculty would have to strongly believe in allowed ALL children in the school, otherwise pressure from locals to keep Dalits away from school can easily suceed.

When desegregation of scholls occurred in the U.S. the police force and military had to be employed to protect the children and allow them in the schools.

Actually I’d argue part of the reason for India’s (relative) institutional stability has been it’s large amount of diversity. Reflecting on Federalist #10 would suggest that a large, diverse republic will be better at protecting its minorities than one with a clear and dominant powerful class. To have a civil war you need a set of clear cleavages to fight based on. But in India where you have people who can identify by non-mutually exclusive categories like language, caste, class, religion, political ideology, and so on, what you end up with are a whole bunch of groups who are too small to dominate, but too big to trample. Of course, you also end up with endless patronage politics, corruption, and slapshot implementation of policies. Things that are certainly not helped along by political parties that make a point of expanding the role of the state in acting as social engineer.

If I were a British gentleman Governer who only wanted to fleece India why would I bother with stopping Sati or increasing the marriagable age for girls after incidents of injury of teenage girls during sex. Why would I care for those brown native girls? Why would I bother setting up experimrntal dairy farms like the Imperial Dairy Farm at Bangalore where research was conducted to increase milk production by Indian farmers? Why would I bother (at times against bitter religious opposition), setting up partial sewage system and water pipe-lines into Indian cities? Why would I bother setting up Hospitals and send English doctors to villages? Nor would I care about the exploitation of the lower castes. Why should I? I say just loot and leave. Why set up schools and universities? There are many such cases which escape me now. But if they never had a civilising mission, all this would not have taken place.

Probably as a gentleman, you want to attribute higher motive to what you are doing. Maybe guilt. My point is not to criticize what was done. What was done in the past was in the past and I do not want to indulge in lynching the dead. But, atleast be clear on the history and not build false hagiographies.

The fact that we still refer to him as a “Black President” might suggest that we still have a “race system” doesn’t it? People identify themselves by race/ethnicity here. It’s part of our culture. The issue is discrimination based on that which needs to be tackled.

Assuming they are free public schools in India (funded by the government) – who would stop a Dalit child from attending such a school?

If they are bullied or teased in school they will be less likely to go. Small communities can also impose upon the teacher to not admit them. The bigger problem, of course, is simply the lack of public schools. With tuition and limited seats for programs people are going to compete for whatever is left. If you make a point of not mentioning or specifying someone’s caste in a classroom though, the kids will end up playing together. If you want to reform a society that really is the best step.

What exactly differentiates different castes? are the customs different? is the language different? what?

Caste (varna) was never really put into place in India (at least as far as we have records). It was more of a normative idea about how society ought to be structured. Different rulers tried to arrange society in accordance with the system and some came closer than others, but like the “Pirate’s Code” the idea of splitting society off into 4 mutually exclusive groupings was a rough set of guidelines about how society should be structured. In reality a commercial economy and the kinds of limited governments we deal with in ancient India would have precluded any kind of large-scale enforcement of rules. It was just an informal idea that some people are roughly in the business of state/administration, scholastics/religion, farming and trading, or doing odd jobs.

What people usually talk about when referring to social issues is caste (jati). An individual caste is a “lineage group,” somewhat analogous to a “clan” or “tribe” in other societies. There are differences in norms, customs, interpretations on religious beliefs, and so on that can range from subtle to extreme. Some might be patrilineal and others matrilineal even though they live in the same village, for example. It is an idea rooted in specifics of Indian history. Indian society was (and is) made up of migrants and the integration of numerous tribes around the subcontinent under a larger religious/cultural identity. The system that came up was a way of maintaining a lot of that diversity of customs that came with wave after wave after wave of migration over the past several thousand years while still being able to interact and trade with each other without fighting too often. Every time another big group of people moved in it was like splashing on yet another splotch of paint onto a Jackson Pollock. All the shapes and colors work together, but they were also distinct in themselves, and the end result ends up being a mind-blowingly complicated and unGodly mess. These individual jatis get roughly mapped onto some slot among the varnas, but historically there were always instances of various castes moving up and down the prestige chain as well as moving into and out of different lines of work.

A few hundred years in the modern world, though, and a lot of the differences slowly melt away. Some of them went away by fiat. A matrilineal clan, for example, could no longer be matrilineal since the British administration allowed descent and property to be passed down the paternal line only. Other stuff changed just because it wasn’t relevant anymore as the economy became more commercialized and later on industrialized. People still hold the last names and the knowledge of lines of descent and there are still some vagaries as to what specific variations of myths and stories they tell and what kinds of jobs they do. For the most part though, the only real difference at this point is the money and contacts people have.

Some priestly families also start teaching kids the Vedas at a very young age, which makes sense because that kind of huge info-dump only really works when your mind is young and malleable. But for the most part people do whatever job they can get. My family never thought me how to raise crops and the only martial skills I have are from Brazilian jiu-jitsu. So much for my half-vaishya/half-kshatriya parentage. The discrimination is pretty much just people using whatever leverage they can to get goddies for themselves while beggaring their neighbors.

There are a few stray thoughts I can come up with, which are somewhat complementary: if he were interested in a socialist path to industrialisation he should have promoted much stronger land reform and collective rights for the poor in the country rather than violently suppressing movements in that direction; he should have appreciated the congress party’s/india’s political structure and realised that it was going to be impossible to sustain the license raj without a stronger and more autonomous state because the subsidies being granted would become monopoly rents through the political process (i.e. no one could ever take them away, leading to no stick and all carrot cake); he should have understood that other people would come along who refused to acknowledge that india had a structural break in gdp (i.e. accelerated its industrialisation) in 1950 that was larger than the one in 1980, and that those people would besmirch his name, not understand the valuable function that economic nationalism and non alignment played and continues to in strictly economic terms, etc.

however, most of this is pie in the sky – one person doesn’t make history – even someone with as much power as nehru had in 1950. i think the biggest failure of nehru was his role in contributing to Partition rather than being a bit more farsighted (even a confederal arrangement might have at least allowed a slow glide to three separate states – which is what the cabinet mission plan entailed).

his second biggest mistake was helping to turn kashmir into a perpetual war zone and flashpoint.

his second third biggest mistake was inadequate succession planning and institution building.

but with all of these, you’d have to research if that would be possible. and there are broader questions that are more important – like is industrialisation worth it, or was gandhi right?

2) What were some of the other transition points to move away from babudom/license raj before the 80s?

1965/1966 would have been one maybe, when the Congress system (and planning, and productivity growth) collapsed. However, these things don’t happen over night. what you can say is that the trajectory, which included several wars with pakistan, a war with china, several famines, resort to food aid from the united states and forced devaluation that was politically untenable, state repression in 1971 during the emergency and at other times, infighting among the elite that spilled over, and the development of Indira Gandhi as a very shortsighted leader might have played out differently.

but then, most people’s image of ‘babudom’ is associated with the post 1960s license raj anyway. all the ideas about stagnation and perpetual inability to solve anything and black money are generated in the 1965-1980 period. very few people look at things like the culture of a steel mill in chattisgarh and how it reduced caste-based economic and social inequalities (compared to the private sector) through an ideology of equality – jonathan parry has written about this in ‘two cheers for reservation.’ or for that matter, that the 1980s ‘take off’ couldn’t happen without the capacities that were built on the basis of the plannign period.

anyway, i feel unmoored in this discussion so don’t take this comment to heart too much – just random stream of consciousness.

Assuming they are free public schools in India (funded by the government) – who would stop a Dalit child from attending such a school?

What exactly differentiates different castes? are the customs different? is the language different? what?

Also, would you say that the creation of the state of Pakistan was the best thing that happened to India in terms of keeping it from descending into civil war? i.e. It created a country where 80% of the population were Hindu’s and it would be crazy for the Muslims (who remained) to think that they could fight such a large majority?

Africa’s civil wars are largely created because very few countries have such a large homogeneous group. So, you end up with continuous inter-tribal warfare because you do not have a super-majority that can overwhelm any threats from a minority group.

And are there cases of Dalits or untouchables who have moved into the middle-classes in present day India?

There are literally millions of dalits who are part of the middle-class; they also a good representation at the highest level of politics. But relative to their overall numbers this is still quite a small percentage. Also, they tend to be mostly at the lower-levels of the middle-class and with many poor relatives outside the middle-class.

In the villages and countryside, their continues to be harsh discrimination against them, refusal to allow education to their children and access to shared resources and so on. Laws have been passed to outlaw discrimination but they are poorly enforced, especially in the countryside when the land is usually owned by non-dalits and these people also control the police force.

India and African countries such as Kenya or Nigeria do have a lot of similarities. And, yes, some of what you are describing Kenya is common in india, especially in the more backward northern part of the country.