Making India a Caste-less Nation

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The basis for any differentiation and discrimination amongst any groups of people; ideas; thoughts; things, inanimate or animate; requires separation and inequality; which is to say that there exist separate entities and these distinct entities are unequal. The starting point, therefore is defining the separate entities.

For this purpose, some attributes or characteristics, occurring naturally or acquired are used to create compartments or silos and then the entities are aggregated within those compartments or silos.

For example, gender is a natural characteristic – male, female and inter-sex; which can create three silos; to be followed by saying that the people from different silos are different or the same.

The outcome is little or no differentiation and discrimination within the silos but total differentiation and discrimination across the silos.

Age or height is another natural characteristic, while income, wealth, educational attainment, or occupation are acquired attributes or characteristics.

When attributes or characteristics have a continuum (discrete or analogue), the continuum is divided into ordered silos – low, middle and high; or child, adolescent, young, middle-age, old and so on. Ordered groups have some problems in being purposive and having boundary problems. We can leave that for the experts.

Religion is an attribute acquired by birth or by baptism. So is caste; acquired by birth or by family migration (adoption, marriage). Religions, Castes, inter-religion relations, and inter-caste relations in India have a long history.

Religion and caste remain an integral part of the Indian constitution. Indian constitution recognises attributes or characteristics of religion and castes and goes on to differentiate and discriminate amongst different silos of religion and castes. India is thus a nation where religion-based discrimination and caste-based discrimination is institutionalised. Caste follows people through their working lives. Could that be the cause of the problems?

Religion-based discrimination and caste-based discrimination is a political hot-potato. Previous caste policies have failed to make a meaningful impact in reducing caste-based discrimination or in improving the lived experiences of lower castes. Every successive government, however, is reluctant to concede that undesirable outcomes of affirmative policies advanced in the name of social justice, be it on the basis of religion or caste, have far exceed the anticipated consequences.

Any reluctance to acknowledge the existence of institutional casteism is, perhaps, a reflection of the domination of public institutions by men who have been the major beneficiaries of caste-based discrimination. Discrimination feeds into the elite culture in academic and other professional institutions and such culture is maintained through ‘othering’, with questions such as ‘Where do you come from?’, ‘Which school did you attend?’ often posed in ways that reinforce the outsider status of lower castes. Unless there is an acceptance of existence of Institutionalised caste-based discrimination at governmental level, nothing may work in minimising, if not entirely eliminating, such discrimination.

Difficult to acknowledge, the fact remains, that a sizeable proportion of Indian people have strong casteist tendencies. Government needs to make a decision to fast track the caste equality strategy rather than a caste-based affirmation.?

Social justice strategy in India is based on the principles of Equality of Opportunities (EO) and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI).

EO and EDI approaches have possibly perpetuated casteism in that they have failed to make a meaningful impact on the lives of people from lower castes. ?This is because EO and EDI commonly adopt a colour-blind approach in ways that fail to recognise how historic patterns of inequality and power relations combine to skew societal outcomes against lower-caste people. Further, these approaches tend to advocate solutions which shift the burden of casteism to the victims. That is, EO and EDI approaches by implication work on the assumption that there is a ‘fair playing field’. This means that anomalies in outcomes are viewed as the results of individual deficiencies. In this regard, the task of organisations is presented as seeking ways of addressing these individual deficiencies (for example through reservations, relaxing eligibility conditions, additional training, mentoring, and coaching) rather than fixing the structures of casteism which combine to weaken the agency of lower caste people. ?

CASTE ABOLITION PLAN

Anti-casteism is the only approach that will help to eliminate casteism. Contrary to the understanding of many, casteism is not dichotomous, in that the opposite of casteism is not non-casteism. Instead, casteism is a continuum wherein the casteist individual is at one end, the non-casteist is in the middle and the anti-casteist is at the other end. Significantly, this understanding suggests that the opposite of casteism is anti-casteism. This is because while non-casteism may be positive in intention, it is passive in action. Further, like all people in society, non-casteists are often instilled with casteist stereotypes from early ages which they commonly internalise and which can surface in times of anxiety. It is this type of response that gives rise to what is sometimes referred to as ‘unconscious bias’.

By contrast, anti-casteism is a conscious process of actively thinking about and changing the structure, systems, processes and procedures that may give rise to caste-based differential outcomes. A critical aspect of the success of the plan is that Government must be convinced of the importance of adopting an anti-casteist approach in developing the plan. ?

A CO-CREATION APPROACH

The approach to rolling out the plan needs to be collaborative and must involve the cooperation of a variety of groups. The Piloting Group must recognise the value of evidence- based change from the onset. There need to be rapid reviews of evidence on the substantive areas of concern. Such evidence would help in isolating the key problems in the individual policy areas, to understand how these have been interpreted and dealt with in the past, and to understand the intersectional implications of the various courses of action that would be explored. This would also involve working with leading caste practitioners and researchers not just from business and management backgrounds but also from healthcare, education and other policy areas.

The Piloting Group needs to involve representatives of key organisations and institutions but must place members of lower castes at the centre, as the key stakeholders, whose lived experiences of casteism would be pivotal to the recommendations and approaches adopted in the plan.

It is important to ensure that the Government policy officials (who are predominantly upper-caste) have some understanding of the impacts of the policies they develop on the end users, in this case lower castes. For this purpose, external members of the lower castes groups need to be recruited and matched carefully to work with individual policy leads. They would be employed as ‘Community Mentors’ and among other things, their role would be to help the policy leads to understand the dynamics and impacts of casteism. This is important work and the mentors must be properly remunerated.

IMPLEMENTATION

Previous research contributions into the implementation of diversity and inclusion initiatives commonly point to the difficulty that organisations have in controlling the agency of managers who do not always value or identify with the diversity agenda. This reluctance to engage with diversity creates an implementation gap (a gap between what is intended and what is realised). To this end, developing an approach that closes the implementation gap is key to the success of any initiative, and this is even more important in relation to anti-casteism.

Theoretically, this problem is linked to culture, and planned culture change (change in basic underlying assumptions or what is commonly referred to as ‘hearts and minds’ change) is difficult to achieve. ?

There are two competing techniques in terms of bridging the implementation hole; whether the implementation of the plan must depend on appealing to the goodness of individuals, organizations and establishments to do the right factor and include anti-casteism (voluntarism), or whether or not individuals, organizations and establishments must be made answerable for their actions in permitting casteism to thrive and have to be nudged to do the right things (compulsion).

Indispensable identity issues like caste require a different strategy to be effective. Because individual attitudes towards identity (as in caste) are relatively fixed, these positions usually require some form of compulsion to change behaviours while attempting to win hearts and minds in order to bring about long-lasting change. The supporting argument in this regard is that no comparable change has been achieved in history without some form of compulsion. In fact, it is argued that it would have taken much longer to abolish untouchability, ‘Bandhua Mazdoori’ or ‘carrying night soil on head’ if we waited for the hearts and minds of people to change. Similarly, women’s employment in combat roles within the armed forces might not have been possible if it were left to the good people of India to change their minds to bring about organic change. The change in the outward manifestations (behaviours, structures, and processes) of culture could have long-term implications by influencing the way in which the underlying values, beliefs, and assumptions of culture are perceived and rationalised.

As the implementation progresses, it will be difficult to manage the multiple and conflicting interests and expectations of the various stakeholders involved (government, public bodies, business, upper caste groups and lower caste groups). Lower caste groups, who have been subjected to casteism for generations, will be impatient, expecting change to be swift and comprehensive. On the other hand, upper caste groups will be concerned, and may even object to the perceived costs of the changes that will need to be made. The government will have internal culture issues to deal with, and will want to present itself as a model of good practice for others to follow. Upper caste groups will be caught between support, fear, and anxiety, as some may see this as a ‘zero-sum game’ that benefits them at the expense of lower caste groups. The piloting group’s success will in part be determined by its ability to manage these conflicting interests and expectations, as well as how quickly it achieves some of the key milestones in the roadmap.

It will take several years to assess the results. The task of making India anti-casteist is immense and will face many challenges. However, we can be sure that the ‘anti-casteist India’ campaign would have laid the foundations for social transformation that will undoubtedly have a profound impact on the dream of ?????? ???? 2047 (Developed India by 2047).

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