Opinion The Hindu rate of backwardness

In the 1959 film Anari,there is a scene where the simpleton-hero played by Raj Kapoor is working in a restaurant kitchen.

July 28, 2013 05:28 AM IST First published on: Jul 28, 2013 at 05:28 AM IST

In the 1959 film Anari,there is a scene where the simpleton-hero played by Raj Kapoor is working in a restaurant kitchen. He finds a cockroach in the large pot of daal and he tries to throw it away. But his employer fires him and says,If there is a cockroach in the daal,you dont throw the daal away,only the cockroach!

Indian children up and down the country have been fed mid-day meals with entire zoos of worms,insects,lizards,cockroaches sprinkled with insecticides. Chhapra was just an extreme case which drew our attention to this widespread practice just as the Delhi gangrape case had highlighted the struggles in the daily lives of women. The sarkar mai-baap can be as negligent as a stranger passing by. After all,the purpose of all such state-funded programmes is not primarily to deliver the good or service,but to allow middlemen and women to enrich themselves.

The question arises why is the Indian State so bad at performing the tasks it sets for itself? In their recent book,Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen point out the importance of education and health,but they pin their hope on the State to deliver. They know that the Indian State has failed to deliver these items not just for the past 20 years of neo-liberalism,but even during the halcyon days of Nehru-Gandhi socialism. The first 40 years of development had high ambition for steel mills and dams and machines to build machines,and not primary education or health. It created IITs and IIMs for the elite jobs it was creating.

The Indian State can deliver a nuclear bomb and launch satellites but not universal primary education or decent public health. This is not an accident. It is a choice made by the elite who have been in power for 60 years and reflects their values. Indian progressives love to talk about socialism but what they mean by it is very different from what it means in the West. Western socialism used the State to help poor masses. Indian socialists used the State to project elite power. The reason is that Indian society lacks a very basic element,which is present in most societies. This is the equality of respect,the basic idea that all human beings have equal status.

Hindu society is a caste society and caste denies the simple idea of status equality. In class societies,there is inequality of income and wealth but once feudalism disappeared,there was no status inequality. In the US,race was central to the denial of status equality,but that was fixed by the struggle for civil rights. India has adopted the political equality of one adult one vote. But in social terms,caste inequalities add to class inequalities. The Indian State has been mainly manned by upper caste elites and they do not consider the lower orders deserving of education and health.

How do we know that? Dreze and Sen show how Japan achieved 100 per cent literacy within 40 years of the Meiji Revolution. This was because all Japanese were considered equal. In India,you can see the contrast in these matters between the South and the North. Even mid-day meals are better in Tamil Nadu,which has been offering them long before the North Indian states began. The reason for this is the vibrant anti-Brahmin movement that exploded across the South. The radical views of Ramasamy Naicker are at the root of the egalitarian welfare provision of Tamil Nadu. Periyar was anti-caste and anti-Congress,which he considered a Brahminical party. Indeed,Tamil Nadus welfare programmes date since the time Congress lost power and the DMK gained control.

Alas in North India,the Brahmins remained dominant. They did not want to spend state revenue on educating shudras let alone the ati-shudras. So,we had BIMARU states until,in the late 1980s,the Congress hegemony of power ended and OBC parties came forth. So let us say that India wasted 40 years with a Hindu rate of backwardness. Now we have GDP growth. All we need is social equality to deliver inclusion.