On Friday 14 Sep 2007 6:30 am, Indrajit Gupta wrote: > FWIW, we already have criminal castes, registered and tagged, and dragged > into the local lock-up as the usual suspects whenever a crime takes place. > Nothing new, dates back to the British.
Exactly IG. My problem is that I do not personally subscribe to the theory that there are "criminal castes" or "classes of people who are more likely to be criminals" That is why I see the correlation between poverty, low salaries or salary disparity and increased likelihood of criminal behavior as being a slippery slope down which societies have frequently headed in the past while branding entire groups of people as being more likely to show criminal behavior than other classes. I believe the casual declaration of an entire class of people as being criminals is a type of discrimination that comes frequently and easily to Indians in particular because of the twin facts that such class discrimination is already endemic in India and these views are already commonplace in Indian society. "Traditional knowledge" is handed down in families that teaches that criminal or immoral behavior actually does occur more commonly among identifiable groups. I meet such people time and again and I suspect that others do too. Perhaps such bias occurs in other societies too, but it is important to see if it exists because such attitudes represent a fundamental barrier to the social change necessary for development. shiv
