Yes, Casteism Still Thrives In India, But Not Entirely Because Of Brahmins, State Apathy Is The Problem
Casteism isn’t a phenomenon that came out of some medieval evil doings of the Brahmin clan alone, the corrupt, casteist, & socialist state are to be blamed for it, too.
Caste & Politics Over It
The alleged rape of a Dalit woman in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh, by four upper-caste men has again flared up caste issues in India’s politics, and society, in general, some political outfits capitalized on it & some brought up caste issues which genuinely required attention & discussions, some took to streets to express their anger over mismanagement of the U.P. government with respect to victim’s dead body, at the end of the day, people criticized the state apathy for rape victims throughout India’s 70 years of emancipation.
But, as usual, some people & political factions made a mess out of this incident, they found a way to flare up caste ‘conflicts’ in India, mostly from the left-of-centre, some concerns were genuine, like law and order, poorly maintained and staffed police, and police stations, & most importantly, the patriarchal contemporary society which has found another reason to put blame on women for their ‘immodest behavior’ & actions vis à vis near men. We’ve come a long way; where rape victims die due to state apathy, people’s indifference & men’s insensitivity. Another death, cold blood, & another issue to capitalize on, while dozens of women commit suicide because of inaction.¹
Are Poor Upper-Caste People Better Off Than Poor Dalits?
Because of this incident, one question has been raised, or rather put forward as a fact by many people, that Dalits are more prone to violence & threats, as crimes like rape & murder, than poor upper-caste people, according to statistics presented by those people: Dalit women are more prone to sexual violence; they are more likely to live less & more likely to be malnourished. But aren’t these statistics same for poor upper-caste people as well? Let’s see some data, below.
According to some surveys, SCs and STs collectively form only 11.25% of the population of the six biggest cities of India. Of these cities, only three cities exceeds the rest of those cities mentioned earlier, are over 10% in terms of Dalit population.
According to a Mint report: ‘Of these, the share of SC/ST population exceeds 10% in only three — Chennai (17%), Delhi (16%), and Bengaluru (13%). And, in all three, a large proportion of SCs and STs is clustered in wards neighbouring railway lines, suggesting that many of them could be living in slums and lacking access to civic amenities.’ ²
When you look closely into these databases, you’ll find progressive states like West Bengal fare so low on integration of Dalits with upper-caste people, from the same mint report: ‘The share of SC/STs in the other cities — Hyderabad (8.4%), Mumbai (7.5%), and Kolkata (5.6%) are relatively lower, which makes it trickier to compare their spatial segregation with other cities. An index of segregation computed by the researcher Pranav Sidhwani that takes into account the distribution of a particular caste within a ward vis-à-vis the caste population in the entire city shows that Kolkata has very high levels of segregation among the cities with lower share of SC/ST population. A cluster of eight wards spread across eastern Kolkata (in a city with a total of 141 wards) accounts for roughly a third of the city’s entire SC/ST population. Hyderabad and Mumbai have relatively lower levels of segregation, and a more uniform distribution of SC/STs.’
Many reports on Dalit-poverty has found that poor upper-caste people & poor lower-caste people have the same level of life expectancy & same level of education; according to an ‘Economic Times’ report: ‘a young woman aged 20-24 from a poor, rural household is 5.1 times as likely as one from a rich urban household to marry before the age of 18, 21.8 times as likely to have never attended school, 5.8 times as likely to become an adolescent mother, 1.3 times as likely to have no access to money for her own use and 2.3 times as likely to report she has no say in how money is spent.’
Life expectancy at birth, caste-wise, was estimated at:
63.1 years for scheduled castes (SC);
64.0 years for scheduled tribes (ST);
65.1 years for other backward classes (OBC);
68.0 years for others.
The reason for this much apathy is poverty, lack of education, & lack of facilities. It’s easy to simply make it a caste issue. Correlation between literary rate, poverty, urbanisation and life expectancy could be seen in any country in the world. Pick any data of any country & you’ll realize the correlation between: poor background, education, & equal opportunities.
From the same ET report, correlation between life expectancy and urbanisation: “Life expectancy for women was 73.70 years in urban centres and 69 in rural areas while the comparative figures for men were 71.20 years and 66.40 years.” ³
The solution to eradicate this evil system is urbanisation, access to education, & lifting people from poverty. People who make it about caste actually do it for politics and un-intentionally (intentionally) make sure that the problem never gets resolved. Ironically these idiots would also oppose free-market based moderated-capitalism, which has lifted millions out of poverty worldwide. See the data, as they say: “The 2011 Census data reveal that at national level Dalits with a literacy rate of 66 per cent lag 8 percentage point behind the average literacy rate of country (74 per cent).”
Communists & Socialists had ruled Bihar for decades, same with U.P. What have they done to eradicate these differences? “Stand with dalit women,” they say, what does this "stand" actually means? They have no solution to the problems, socialism certainly isn’t a solution for poverty. Analyse the data when liberalization of India happened and look how the life expectancy improved among all the classes. They will throw around words like "stand with the oppresed,” "fascism,” etc., & the young will certainly fall for them, since who doesn’t want to be on the morally upright path. But when you stand & think what are the solutions these marauders propose to you, you can see through their foolishness & facade, clearly. ⁴
“India’s annual growth in GDP per capita accelerated from just 1¼ per cent in the three decades after Independence to 7½ per cent currently, a rate of growth that will double average income in a decade.” ⁵ ⁶
Someone would tell you, stand for morally right issues but does not provide you solutions. People who claim to fight casteism by opposing Capitalism, run as far as you can from them. Socialism ruled India for 40 to 50 years, Feudal-Socialist policies gave no results. At this moment, looking at the data, eradicating poverty, and giving access to education would lift the Dalits out of any known social evil, at any point of time you could imagine.
According to a Cato Blog: “Even in rural areas, Dalits have increasingly moved up the income and social ladders in the last two decades. One survey in the state of Uttar Pradesh shows the proportion of dalits owning brick houses is up from 38 percent to 94 percent, the proportion running their own businesses is up from 6 percent to 36.7 percent, and the proportion owning cell phones is up from zero to one-third. Some former serfs have now become bosses. A rising proportion have become land-owners, and sometimes hire upper-caste workers. Even more revolutionary, say dalits, is the change in their social status. Once they were virtually bonded laborers, and could not eat or drink with the upper castes. Today the bonded labor system is almost gone, and dalits operate restaurants at which upper castes eat and drink. They remain relatively poor and discriminated against, but economic reform since 1991 has revolutionized their social and economic status.” ⁷
In fact, those willing to introduce caste–based reservations at every institution of this nation are the Herculean casteists of all, spitting balderdash, and blathering insubstantial claims, nothing much. Thousands of SCs & STs get admitted to higher educational-institutes and then realise there aren’t any caste–based cut-off for examinations & semester tests, as there were during admissions, and end up dropping out from the University. The students, even though having attained admission into the prestigious University, can’t compete with merit, and end up leaving studies, as there’s a substantial difference between actual merit-based competence and lower cutoff–based competence. The dropout rate among Scheduled Castes (SC) & Scheduled Tribes (ST) undergraduates was excessively higher in India’s halfway-subsidized specialized institutes somewhere in the years of 2016 and 2020, according to Rajya Sabha information. The end depended on the quantity of new confirmations and dropouts in 72 such Universities. While just 23% of those conceded were from the SC/ST people group, 31.5% of the individuals who exited were from these groups. Additionally, ST students who exited framed 4.4% of ST affirmations in the period considered while the general normal was just 2.5%. The contrast between the extent of SC/ST dropouts (SC/ST dropouts as a % of complete dropouts) and their extent in confirmations (SC/ST students as a % of in general admissions) was moderately extremely high in five IITs - Palakkad, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Madras and Delhi. The contrast between the SC/ST dropout rate (dropout in the class as a % of confirmations in a similar classification) and the non-SC/ST dropout rate was generally high in the IISER institutes.
Conclusion
To conclude, we know that SCs have the highest percentage of poor people among any caste group. We also know that they are one of the least urbanized section of the Indian society. Nonetheless, as the data says, SC groups perform bad in almost every section of the society. Take for example, the free corporate sector that has very little government influence over board decisions. Here also, they perform very ineffectively. Take higher position jobs in IITs and professors in central universities, similar performance. Together SCs, STs and OBCs make up just 9% of total faculty in IITs and 6% in IIMs. Some of the institutes have no SC or ST faculty. ⁸
Take sports like cricket too, there also the government has little to no presence over the selection process of team members. ⁹ “290 different men have played test cricket for India. However, only four belong to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.”
Take Higher education institutes, for instance. ¹⁰
Reports say: “Over the years, hundreds of new castes have been added to the OBC category. Recent country-wide protests demanded inclusion of Jats, Yadavs, Marathas, and the Patidars, all of which are in no way oppressed. Not all castes among the Other Backward Classes (OBCs), entitled to reservations are reaping the same benefits. The Indian Express reported today that 97 per cent of all jobs and admissions, reserved under the OBC category have been claimed by just under 25 per cent of sub-castes. 983 communities --37 per cent of the total -- did not get a single job or admission, the report said.”
Now, there can be two reasons for this vulnerable performance in all of the sectors mentioned above. Either, it’s because SCs & STs have higher number of poor people, are vastly unurbanized, & have lower literacy standards. OR, every single Indian institute for higher education, Cricket Board (Which comes under BCCI, which is not run by the government), companies & corporations (again, free operations), government colleges, and every other institute is casteist. We already know the effects of urbanisation & poverty on education, performance in life or living standards & HDI. So, it is clear what the reasons are. Therefore, when people make it about caste they aren’t actually solving the problem. The solution is to take these people out of poverty and encourage them to live in urbanized environment. Their dropout level will go down, they will have better access to infrastructure, so that equality of opportunity doesn’t become a hindrance in their way to success.
Reports say: “Around 56% of the students studying in IITs across India fall under General Category. Students under OBC, SC & ST category constitute 25%, 13% and 6% respectively.”
Even after reservations? Look at the percentage of students in higher studies. Look at percentage from higher to lower cutoffs, it’s similar to the sequence corresponding their poverty level and urbanization data provided above. ¹¹ This too: ¹².
Even reserved seats in IITs for PHD hardly gets filled: “IITs have been unable to fill seats reserved for tribal students, who, along with scheduled castes (SCs) and OBCs, now add up to more than 50% of caste-based reservations of all available seats.” ¹³
The reasons are clear, they suffer from such poor performances because of poverty and deprivation of modern infrastructure. So you see, pro–state–capitalism political parties building more IITs and AIIMSs in India is the thing that will end casteism. Not these Socialists who take every opportunity to create a caste divide among their own. It’s when the businesses get big and start employing people that casteism would end, not with simply balderdash campaigns. As businesses get big people start moving from villages to cities or the current towns get bigger and gets modern infrastructure. With more infrastructure and educational institutes, there is more interaction between various castes and this leads to less caste-based-discrimination all over. So you see, leftist leaders, I know their intentions are good, but they lack understanding of the situation. These people with their semi-literate politics will ensure that casteism never ends. These individuals have ruled Bihar for decades and look at their state of infrastructure, pathetic, and horrendous.
