It might amuse you, Shiv, to read up on the Athenian political organisation in
the 5th century BC. In view of what you've written here.
You might find that your thoughts are in the same grooves as the Athenian
political reformers, when they sought, rather successfully, one might add, to
eradicate the impress of tribe on the polity.
A note of warning: what they didn't finally manage to engineer out,
unfortunately, was the divide between oligarch and democrat. The US scuppered
itself in about 300 years; the Athenians, not having the benefit of previous
example, took rather less.
shiv sastry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Sunday 26 Aug 2007 11:21 pm, Ingrid wrote:
> > My experience ''at the grassroots" certainly confirms that caste (and
> > gender) biases are a significant barrier to development. I've just
> > returned from southern Tamil Nadu where caste atrocities are a daily
> > affair. Have witnessed much the same in Maharashtra and UP. And have no
> > reason to believe it's any different elsewhere. Beyond that, however, is
> > the fact that we simply haven't achieved democracy beyond the political
> > kind. And continue to put faith in technocratic solutions of the
> > government scheme, microcredit, mid-day-meal variety as a substitute.
> > Rural and tribal India continue to be "our inconvenient truth" - one we
> > would wish away if we could as we'd like to urban slums, infanticide and
> > the like.
True. I forgot to mention gender issues - which is possibly a Freudian slip
indicating a bias of ignorance in my own mind.
Caste and gender issues have a vise like grip on Indian society. With caste
having everything to do with family, power and inheritance, it's no wonder
that "control of the female" becomes a convenient imperative.
The social structure in India seems to have evolved into an extremely robust,
resilient and long lasting animal. While we may lament the inadequacy of
technocratic solutions in changing things, it may be worth recalling that a
millennium of influences like "egalitarian" Islam and British "rule of law"
have done nothing to change the state of affairs despite the fact that all
these issues were recognized and documented by Islamic writers and later by
the British.
What Islam and the British did were again superficial, and did not reach the
heart. Islamic leaders upset the existing power structures of the high-caste
elite and imagined that this would somehow free and empower those that were
lower down the pecking order. The British, for all their "dispassionate"
contempt for native pecking orders, actually empowered the upper castes
further and did not touch anyone else apart from a few cosmetic and much
tomtommed "outlawing" of "thuggee" and "suttee"
Surely, the failure of three different top-down systems over a thousand years
in removing the most indolent caste and gender issues, and related social
ills must offer some lessons to us?
Perhaps top-down imposition of something or the other is is never going to
work. Neither is the removal of caste barriers near the top (by mixing and
churning), because caste "layers" exist independently at every depth. Mixing
at the top has no effect on the middle or bottom. Nobody has managed to cause
"mixing" at the bottom. How does one go about doing that? What is it about
the system that makes it so robust? Does one have to "forcibly mix" and try
and change a robust existing system to achieve ends like better literacy,
maternal and infant mortality?
Can we not have "reserved schools" and "reserved hospitals" for adivasis for
example.
shiv
Indrajit Gupta
'Ramsharan', 396, TT Krishnamachari Road,
Teynampet,
Chennai 600 018.
+914455511138
+919884375777
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