i'd like to respond now to one comment by kiran here. he says:
So are you trying to suggest that Banks would have been all inclusive if they remained private ? Unlikely. Even those 10% would not have been there.by 1980, employees in nationalized banks numbered around one million. more than 9 lakhs of those were from the upper castes. you could say around 9 lakh upper caste families (more than 5 million individuals) benefitted directly from the nationalization project.
those were national resources that were deployed to nationalize and run those banks- but they employed, almost exclusively, upper caste individuals and lent money, almost exclusively, to upper caste individuals. did nationalization reduce caste inequalities? it aggravated them. upper caste individuals, long used to privileges, were rewarded with new positions of privilege just as naturally as in the past. and the lower castes paid for those privileges just as naturally as in the past. but the key difference was: if you were a landlord in the pre-modern era, feudal honour required that you make sure those who worked for you didn't starve. the new privileges carried no such price.
how many million lower caste individuals paid for the privileges of those 5 million upper caste individuals? how many of those 5 million would actually admit that caste is a problem? most of them would probably say: it had no role to play in their lives.
what would private banks have done? by 1980, they definitely wouldn't have been able to reward 5 million upper caste individuals with privileges and made several million more lower caste individuals pay for those privileges.
Posts
5 comments:
You make a lot of sweeping statements in your post. It would help if you could provide references to support the numbers and the conclusions that you draw.
sagarone,
that's a sweeping accusation- please tell me what numbers do you think need a reference?
are private bank employees more caste-diverse than nationalized banks?
the answer requires some sort of statistical references rather than bald statements on feudal honor.
anon,
the post is not about whether private banks are more or less caste diverse than psu banks. it's about how 'national resources' have been misused to promote upper caste interests.
It is rather presumtous to assume that Marginalized people are highly productive and their surplus is stolen by the upper castes. Most cases the marginalized people are highly non productive, unskilled and unemployable folks.
Post a Comment