caste is passe

you bloom where you're planted.

the god of all angsts, blooming in print and in person across global cities, says: 'Poverty too, like feminism, is often framed as an identity problem.' she should write another 5,000 or 30,000 word essay castigating this short film maker for wrongly framing the problem of poverty.. the maid's not poor because her mother is a maid and her mother was also a maid and her mother was also a maid and her mother..

poverty is what happens to the maid when her livelihood is destroyed because of the neo-liberal excesses of the state directed by the dark forces, the foundations. poverty is what happens when she's displaced and is forced to move to another neighbourhood and work as a maid. now she's blooming where she was planted. right, god?

let them eat dignity

one dalit, one adivasi, now deceased, one muslim and no obcs in the 14 member national advisory council. ten member working group on 'food security' has one dalit and one muslim. upper caste india must be starving. five member working group on 'communal and targeted violence bill' has one muslim and one dalit. no obcs. the working group on 'tribal development' (9 members) has one dalit, and one adivasi, again the late ram dayal munda. and again, it seems like upper caste india needs development more than anyone else. what does the nac do? save the lives and, more importantly, livelihoods of those least represented in the nac. livelihoods are more important because saving them involves more money and power. lives, as everyone who lives in india knows, are cheaper.

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interesting word: livelihood. you could be making wicker mats, earning enough to keep your family hungry for only half the year, and suddenly you could lose your livelihood, be displaced, because an sez grabbed the forest where you got your raw material. sad.

but there are more chances, 99 times more perhaps, that you could be displaced, gradually or faster, even as you continue to do what you've always been doing: making mats.

life is what mukesh ambani does or arundhati roy does: never going hungry. what you do is die slowly, or faster.

the problem is: the state and society recognize ambani and roy. even if their jobs were interchanged, and roy ran a petrochemicals company and ambani was a writer, they would still be recognized and rewarded. even if roy lived in antilla and ambani only visited it. but you'd not be recognized, except as a livelihood.

the word 'livelihood' is a package of insults. you're lazy, you're ignorant, you're without merit: that's what they imply when they say they want to save your livelihood. why don't they talk about saving you? you're dirty, you're useless, you're a burden. you're low caste.

most of the lower castes are livelihoods, hardly human. you're a livelihood, a noun in neuter gender. they're ashamed to refer to you by name.

you will continue dying even if your livelihood is 'saved'. you were dying since your father's time, your grandfather's time, when there were no ambanis around. you'll die even if there were no ambanis around, now. you were dying when people like roy, or her father or her grandfather were doing life, quite well.

your livelihood will die if the private sector expands, as it did when the public sector expanded. and if roy or ambani tell you that's wrong, they're wrong. the evidence of the last sixty years, of the last two centuries quite clearly doesn't support their arguments.

livelihoods will only bring you certain death, but saving them is big business for others, as i said earlier.

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the idea of livelihoods for some and modern jobs, careers and professions for others fits in nicely with the varna scheme of things. the best experts on the new varna order in the country work in the nac. like in the old days when learned rishis played counselors to kings. listen to aruna roy explain what's dharma..er..dignity: 

Naurti is a great speaker; she understands issues and speaks concisely. We will always remember her for the set down she gave Surjit Bhalla the right wing economist in a TV talk show. He suggested that India’s rural employment guarantee act was money down the drain – a dole to every family would do better. She contemptuously suggested to him that if that was the case he should stay at home and twiddle his thumbs – she would pay him a daily wage (even if what she earned in a month would probably be less than what he earned in a day)! He blustered indignantly, as she asked him if he knew anything about the dignity of work.

naurti's dharma or dignity lies in digging trenches and filling them up. aruna roy's lies in working in the nac. surjit bhalla, the adharmi, seems to have forgotten that dignity is one's birthright. that it isn't about how much you earn but about how you earn it. how does it matter if some birthrights mean more money and others involve more sweat? that doesn't mean some are more equal, or treated with more dignity, than others. it only means some births were right, others weren't.

a step back

PATNA: Rajput ‘paratha’, Bhumihar ‘poori’, Brahmin ‘kachauri’, Yadav ‘chapati’. Ever heard of these cuisines? These are allegedly served at Sri Krishna Medical College and Hospital (SKMCH), Muzaffarpur to the medicos. Here a 'thali' is identified with the caste of the customer.

why don't they go a step ahead, or take a step back, and serve 'education' that is identified with the caste of the student?

save the lower castes from the state

i've always believed that the state can't save the lower castes. a state-run economy is the worst thing that could have happened to the lower castes after independence. because the state had always been a pain in several tender parts of the collective body of these castes since the beginning of..caste. a modern state with modern technological capabilities: india's socialists didn't/don't realize how much more painful it could be. roads, telecommunications, motorized transport bring the lower caste individual cowering in the furthest corner of the country so much closer to the state. the best modern government for the lower castes would have been one that ensured that every individual among them got definite access to something that his/her forefathers had always been deprived of: good education. and socialist india tried to do everything but that. this article, reinforcing my beliefs, tells you how the lower castes in one indian state had actually prospered because the state had declined:

From 1993-94 to 2004-05 the poverty ratio declined 14% (from 57.24% to 43.06%), compared to an 8% decline in India as a whole and a less than 2.5% decline in Orissa (which has now surpassed Bihar as the state with the highest headcount ratio of 47.76%). Even more surprising, the headcount ratio of the very poor halved in Bihar from 28.29% to 14.65% compared to a 5.74% decrease in India and an actual increase in Orissa (from S. Mahendra Dev and C. Ravi, 2007. These figures are from the 61st round of the NSS and are for united Bihar). While this improvement was from a very low base, it is still surprising given the dismal condition of public institutions and the lack of investment in the state during this period. A combination of higher wages for agricultural laborers and remittances from an increasing number of migrants, many of whom experienced increased labor mobility as traditional patron-client relations and bonded-labor ties broke down, explains this surprising decline in poverty.

There is, in fact, a fundamental tension between lower caste empowerment and state directed development. The key levels of the bureaucracy and the police have long been controlled by people from upper caste backgrounds in Bihar and this control served to reinforce the domination of upper caste landlords in the countryside. In 2002, for example, out of a total of 244 Bihar cadre officers of the elite Indian Admistrative Service, 135 were from upper caste groups, while only seven officers came from the three largest backward caste groups (based on my approximate data). The political assertion of lower castes from the early 1990s resulted in a deep-seated conflict between a new lower caste political leadership and a largely upper caste bureaucracy, police, and judiciary. This is why the politics of caste empowerment resulted in a general breakdown of public institutions in Bihar. Since upper caste control of these institutions had reinforced structural inequalities, however, this also explains why the poor did better than we might expect despite the RJDs government's dismal development record.

[thanks, prof.swarup]

rss/cpm

'I would dub the CPI (M) party as being the equivalent of the RSS for the Congress. They are anti-reform and completely xenophobic. What the country needs is a secular-reform combination; the Left is secular but not pro-reform. They do not give a monkey about the poor. Their concern is limited to public sector employees. They are interested in promoting a dole culture. The problem here is that the middle class receives a lot of dole. The poor do not receive dole and so the Left is caught up in the rhetoric of redistribution. They are using the poor to protect the privileges of the middle class. Everyone knows that the whole public distribution system does not help the poor. The money is not percolating down; rather it is reinforcing a self-serving state apparatus.'

meghnad desai has lived abroad too long - the cpm is the rss. and the rss is the cpm.

inclusive growth

one of the upa govt's refrains has been 'inclusive growth'. one way of interpreting this mantra : there would be no disinvestment. which means all the upper caste jobs in the public sector would be saved.

and what about the lower castes? they have the nrega. when in doubt about what the manusmriti has to say on certain issues, the upa government consults the marxists and others.