34.For further analysis of the Gates Foundation’s involvement in privatizing education, coupled with drastic reductions in government spending, see Jeff Bale and Sara Knopp, “Obama’s Neoliberal Agenda for Public Education,” in Education and Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012).
35.Joan Roelofs, “The Third Sector as a Protective Layer for Capitalism,” Monthly Review 47, no. 4 (September 1995): 16.
36.Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003).
37.Eric Toussaint, Your Money or Your Life: The Tyranny of Global Finance (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005).
38.Roelofs, “The Third Sector as a Protective Layer for Capitalism.”
39.Ibid.
40.Ibid.
41.Ibid.
42.Erika Kinetz, “Small Loans Add Up to Lethal Debts.” Hindu, February 25, 2012.
43.David Ransom, “Ford Country: Building an Elite in Indonesia,” in The Trojan Horse: A Radical Look at Foreign Aid, ed. Steve Weissman with members of the Pacific Studies Center and the North American Congress on Latin America (Palo Alto, CA: Ramparts, 1975), 93–116.
44.Juan Gabriel Valdés, Pinochet’s Economists: The Chicago School of Economics in Chile (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
45.Rajander Singh Negi, “Magsaysay Award: Asian Nobel, Not So Noble,” Economic and Political Weekly 43, no. 34 (2008): 14–16.
46.Narayan Lakshman, “World Bank Needs Anti-Graft Policies,” Hindu, September 1, 2011. Speaking to the Hindu, Navin Girishankar, one of the main authors of the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group study, said that “on the one hand there is a need to foster demand for good governance by helping improve the government responsiveness to pressures through greater transparency and more disclosure policies…. The Indian experience, including the Lokpal bills, might dovetail with this type of strategy.”
47.Alejandra Viveros, “World Bank Announces Winners of Award for Outstanding Public Service,” April 15, 2008, http://africa.gm/north-america/united-states/washington-dc/article/2008/4/17/world-bank-announces-winners-of-award-for-outstanding-public-service.
48.Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).
49.See Roelofs, “Third Sector as a Protective Layer for Capitalism.”
50.Press Trust of India, “Infosys to Bid for UID Projects, Sees No Conflict of Interest,” Indian Express, June 27, 2009
51.Justin Gillis, “Bill Gates Calls for More Accountability on Food Programs,” New York Times, February 23, 2012.
52.Robert Arnove, ed., Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad (Boston: G. K. Hall, ^80). In the essay “American Philanthropy and the Social Sciences,” Donald Fisher outlines US foundations’ role in shaping political thought through influence over university disciplines worldwide.
53.See Foundation Center, “Foundation Stats,” 2014, http://foundationcenter.org/findfunders/topfunders/top100assets.html.
54.See Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy.
55.Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2007).
56.Devin Fergus, Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of American Politics, 1965–1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009).
57.The Department of Defense links to the King Center’s website and continues to play an active role in shaping how the United States celebrates King’s legacy.
58.See Roelofs, “Third Sector as a Protective Layer for Capitalism.”
59.P. Vaidyanathan Iyer, “Dalit Inc. Ready to Show Business Can Beat Caste,” Indian Express, December 15, 2011.
60.The ORF has also been directly involved in Modi’s ascent: of Modi’s participation in a conference hosted by Google, one ORF fellow said, “He is trying to project himself as a modern person who is keen on developmental issues and this summer offers him a platform to reach out to people of the younger generation—what we call aspirational India.” See Neha Thirani Bagri, “Google Hosts Narendra Modi at Tech Summit,” New York Times, March 20, 2013.
61.See “Raytheon Aligns with Indian Companies to Pursue Emerging Opportunities,” Raytheon.com, November 13, 2007.
62.Engels and Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party.
A PERFECT DAY FOR DEMOCRACY
1.Sandeep Joshi and Ashok Kumar, “Afzal Guru Hanged in Secrecy, Buried in Tihar Jail,” Hindu, February 9, 2013. Even the lawyers who argued for his death sentence decried the secret hanging as a “human rights violation.” See Manoj Mitta, “Afzal Guru’s Secret Hanging a Human Rights Violation: Prosecutor,” Times of India, February 13, 2013.
2.See Joshi and Kumar, “Afzal Guru Hanged in Secrecy.”
3.Sumegha Gulati, “SAR Geelani, Iftikhar among Those Placed under Detention,” Indian Express, February 10, 2013. During the trial, Geelani was presented as the mastermind of the 2001 attack, though he was eventually acquitted.
4.Mohammad Ali, “Muslim Groups See Political Motives,” Hindu, February 11, 2013.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF HANGING AFZAL GURU
1.Ahmed Ali Fayyaz, “Two Days after Hanging, Letter Reaches Azfal’s Wife,” Hindu, February 11, 2013. Fayyaz notes, “Seals and signatures on the communication make it clear that the letter was written on February 6, or three days after the mercy petition was rejected, and dispatched only a day before the execution,” making it clear that the late notice was deliberate.
2.News desk, “Kashmir’s One Month since Afzal Guru’s Hanging: 350 Civilians, 150 Cops Injured, 4 Dead,” Kashmir Walla, March 10, 2013.
3.See “Afzal Guru Papers” online: “Full Text: Supreme Court Judgement on Parliament Attack Convict Afzal Guru.” IBNlive.in.com, February, 9, 2013. See also Arundhati Roy, ed., A Reader: The Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2006), and Mukherji, December 13.
4.“Short of Participating in the Actual Attack, He Did Everything …,” Indian Express, February 10, 2013.
5.“Afzal Guru Papers”: “There is no evidence that [Afzal] is a member of a terrorist gang or a terrorist organization, once the confessional statement is excluded. Incidentally, we may mention that even going by confessional statement, it is doubtful whether the membership of a terrorist gang or organization is established.”
6.Praveen Swami, “Terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir in Theory and Practice,” India Review 2 (July 2003). See also Muhammad Amir Rana, A to Z of Jehadi Organizations in Pakistan (Lahore, Pakistan: Mashal Books, 2004).
7.See Yug Mohit Chaudhry, “Why Balwant Singh Rajoana Shouldn’t Be Hanged,” Hindu, March 29, 2012.
8.For new evidence on just how deliberate the hanging was, see “Government behind Parliament Attack, 26/11: Ishrat Probe Officer,” Times of India, July 14, 2013.
9.Bashaarat Masood, “The Grand (Standing) Mufti of Kasmir,” Indian Express, February 7, 2013. See also Bashaarat Masood, “J&K Lawyer to Challenge Grand Mufti’s Status,” Indian Express, February 7, 2013, and Aijaz Hussain, “Kashmir Girl Band Breaks up after Threats,” Boston Globe, February 6, 2013.
10.Aijaz Hussain, “Kashmir Police Publish Nuclear War Survival Tips,” San Diego Union-Tribune, January 22, 2013.
THE DOCTOR AND THE SAINT: THE AMBEDKAR-GANDHIDEBATE
1.For this account of Khairlanji, I have drawn on Anand Teltumbde, The Persistence of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders and India’s Hidden Apartheid (New Delhi: Navayana/London: Zed Books, 2010). For one of the first comprehensive news reports on the incident, see Sabrina Buckwalter, “Just Another Rape Story.” Sunday Times of India, October 29, 2006.
2.For an analysis of the lower court judgment, see S. Anand, “Understanding the Khairlanji Verdict,” The Hindu, October 5, 2008.
3.On July 11, 1996, the Ranveer Sena, a privileged-caste, feudal militia, murdered twenty-one landless laborers in Bathani Tola
village in the state of Bihar. In 2012, the Patna High Court acquitted all the accused. On December 1, 1997, the Ranveer Sena massacred fifty-eight Dalits in Laxmanpur Bathe village, also in Bihar. In April 2010, the trial court convicted all the twenty-six accused. It sentenced ten of them to life imprisonment and sixteen to death. In October 2013, the Patna High Court suspended the conviction of all twenty-six accused, saying the prosecution had not produced any evidence to guarantee any punishment at all.
4.These are some of the major crimes against Dalits and subordinated castes that have taken place in recent times: in 1968, in Keezhvenmani in the state of Tamil Nadu, forty-four Dalits were burnt alive; in 1977, in Belchi village of Bihar, fourteen Dalits were burnt alive; in 1978, in Marichjhapi, an island in the Sundarbans mangrove forest of West Bengal, hundreds of Dalit refugees from Bangladesh were massacred during a left-led government’s eviction drive; in 1984, in Karamchedu in the state of Andhra Pradesh, six Dalits were murdered, three Dalit women raped, and many more wounded; in 1991, in Chunduru, also in Andhra Pradesh, nine Dalits were slaughtered and their bodies dumped in a canal; in 1997, in Melavalavu in Tamil Nadu, an elected Dalit panchayat leader and five Dalits were murdered; in 2000, in Kambalapalli in the state of Karnataka, six Dalits were burnt alive; in 2002, in Jhajjar in the state of Haryana, five Dalits were lynched outside a police station. See also the documentation by Human Rights Watch, Broken People: Caste Violence against India’s “Untouchables,” New York: Author, 1999) and the Navsarjan report: Navsarjan Trust and Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights, Understanding Untouchability: A Comprehensive Study of Practices and Conditions in 1589 Villages, n.d., http://www.indianet.nl/pdf/UnderstandingUntouchability.pdf.
5.Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches (hereinafter BAWS) 9, 296. All references to B. R. Ambedkar’s writings, except for Annihilation of Caste, are from the BAWS series published by the Education Department, Government of Maharashtra. All references to Annihilation of Caste (henceforth AoC) are to the Navayana edition (New Delhi, 2014).
6.Rupa Viswanath writes in “A Textbook Case of Exclusion,” The Indian Express, July 20, 2012: “Where ‘Dalit’ refers to all those Indians, past and present, traditionally regarded as outcastes and untouchable, ‘SC’ is a modern governmental category that explicitly excludes Christian and Muslim Dalits.” For the current version of the President’s Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, which tells us who will count as SC for the purposes of constitutional and legal protections, is entirely unambiguous: “No person who professes a religion different from the Hindu, the Sikh or the Buddhist religion shall be deemed to be a member of a Scheduled Caste.” She goes on to say, “It was only under Congress rule, in 1950, that the President’s Order explicitly defined SC on the basis of religious criteria, although Christian Dalits were excluded from SC for electoral purposes by the Government of India Act 1935. From that point onwards, Dalits who had converted out of Hinduism lost not only reservations, but also, after 1989, protection under the Prevention of Atrocities Act. Later, SC was expanded to include Sikh and Buddhist Dalits, but official discrimination against Muslim and Christian Dalits remains.” If Christians as well as Muslims who face the stigma of caste were to be included in the number of those who can be counted as Dalit, their share in the Indian population would far exceed the official 2011 Census figure of 17 percent. See also Note 2 to the Preface of the 1937 edition of AoC (184).
7.On December 16, 2012, a woman was brutally tortured and gang-raped in a bus in New Delhi. She died on December 29. The atrocity led to mass protests for days. Unusually, a large number of middle-class people participated in them. In the wake of the protests the law against rape was made more stringent. See Jason Burke’s reports in the Guardian, especially “Delhi Rape: How India’s Other Half Lives,” September 10, 2013.
8.National Crime Records Bureau, Crime in India 2011: Statistics (New Delhi: Author, Ministry of Home Affairs, 2012), 423–24.
9.Privileged castes punish Dalits by forcing them to eat human excreta; this often goes unreported. In Thinniyam village in Tamil Nadu’s Tiruchi district, on May 22, 2002, two Dalits, Murugesan and Ramasami, were forced to feed each other human excreta and branded with hot iron rods for publicly declaring that they had been cheated by the village chief. See S. Viswanathan, Dalits in Dravidian Land: Frontline Reports on Anti-Dalit Violence in Tamil Nadu (1995–2004) (Chennai: Navayana, 2005). In fact, “The Statement of Objects and Reasons of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989” states this as one of the crimes it seeks to redress: “Of late, there has been an increase in the disturbing trend of commission of certain atrocities like making the Scheduled Caste person eat inedible substances like human excreta and attacks on and mass killings of helpless Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and rape of women belonging to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.”
10.According to the tenets of their faith, Sikhs are not supposed to practise caste. However, those from the Untouchable castes who converted to Sikhism continue to be treated as Untouchable. For an account of how caste affects Sikhism, see Mark Juergensmeyer, Religious Rebels in the Punjab: The Ad Dharm Challenge to Caste (New Delhi: Navayana, 1982/2009).
11.BAWS 1, 222.
12.For example, Madhu Kishwar writes: “[T]he much reviled caste system has played a very significant role in making Indian democracy vibrant by making it possible for people to offer a good measure of resistance to centralised, authoritarian power structures that came to be imposed during colonial rule and were preserved even after Independence.” Madhu Kishwar, “Caste System: Society’s Bold Mould,” Tehelka, February 11, 2006.
13.See Béteille, “Race and Caste,” The Hindu, March 10, 2001. Dipankar Gupta, formerly professor of sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, was part of the official Indian delegation that in 2007 opposed the Dalit caucus’s demand to treat caste discrimination as being akin to racial discrimination. In an essay in 2007, Gupta argued that “the allegation that caste is a form of racial discrimination is not just an academic misjudgement but has unfortunate policy consequences as well.” See his articles “Caste, Race and Politics,” Seminar, December 2001, and “Why Caste Discrimination Is Not Racial Discrimination,” Seminar, April 2007. For a cross-section of views on the caste–race debate at the United Nations Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination, see S. K. Thorat and Umakant, editors of Caste, Race, and Discrimination: Discourses in International Context (New Delhi: Rawat, 2004), which features counter-arguments by a range of scholars including Gail Omvedt and Kancha Ilaiah. Also see Balmurli Natarajan and Paul Greenough, eds., Against Stigma: Studies in Caste, Race, and Justice Since Durban (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2009).
14.For a response to Béteille and Gupta, see Gerald D. Berreman in ibid. Berreman says: “What is ‘scientifically nonsensical’ is Professor Béteille’s misunderstanding of ‘race’. What is ‘mischievous’ is his insistence that India’s system of ascribed social inequality should be exempted from the provisions of a UN Convention whose sole purpose is the extension of human rights to include freedom from all forms of discrimination and intolerance—and to which India, along with most other nations, has committed itself” (54–55).
15.See www.declarationofempathy.org.
16.Bhagwan Das, Thus Spoke Ambedkar, Vol. 1: A Stake in the Nation (New Delhi: Navayana, 2010), 25.
17.Inter-caste and intra-gotra marriages are resisted in the name of “honor”; in extreme cases, the couple, or one of the partners, is killed. For an account of the case of Ilavarasan and Divya from Tamil Nadu, see Meena Kandasamy, “How Real-Life Tamil Love Stories End,” Outlook, July 22, 2013. For an account of the consequences of violating “gotra laws” in Haryana, see Chander Suta Dogra’s recent Manoj and Babli: A Hate Story (Penguin Books, 2013). Also see Aniruddha Ghosal, “Day after Their Killing, Village Goes Quiet,” Indian Express, September 20, 2013; and Prem Chowdhry Contentious Marriages, Eloping Couples: Gender, Caste and Patriarchy
in Northern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007).
18.In 2009, Ahmedabad-based Navsarjan Trust and the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights published a joint report, “Understanding Untouchability” (http://www.indianet.nl/pdf/UnderstandingUntouchability.pdf). It listed ninety-nine forms of untouchability in 1,589 villages of Gujarat. It looked at the prevalence of untouchability under eight broad headings: 1. Water for Drinking; 2. Food and Beverage; 3. Religion; 4. Caste-based Occupations; 5. Touch; 6. Access to Public Facilities and Institutions; 7. Prohibitions and Social Sanctions; 8. Private Sector Discrimination. The findings were shocking. In 98.4 percent of villages surveyed, intercaste marriage was prohibited; in 97.6 percent of villages, Dalits were forbidden to touch water pots or utensils that belonged to non-Dalits; in 98.1 percent of villages, a Dalit could not rent a house in a non-Dalit area; in 97.2 percent of villages, Dalit religious leaders were not allowed to celebrate a religious ceremony in a non-Dalit area; in 67 percent of villages, Dalit panchayat members were either not offered tea or were served in separate cups called “Dalit” cups.
19.AoC 17.7.
20.M. K. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Electronic Book) (New Delhi: Government of India, Publications Division, 1999), vol. 15, 160–61. All references to Gandhi’s works, unless otherwise stated, are from this edition (referred to hereinafter as CWMG. Wherever possible, first publication details are also provided since scholars sometimes refer to an earlier edition of the CWMG.
21.Cited in BAWS 9, 276.
22.Cited in CWMG 59, 227.
23.UNI, “India’s 100 Richest Are 25 Pc of GDP,” November 20, 2009.
24.A Reuters report dated August 10, 2007, and referring to “Report on Conditions of Work and Promotions of Livelihoods in the Unorganised Sector” by the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector included this statement: “Seventy-seven per cent of Indians—about 836 million people—live on less than half a dollar a day in one of the world’s hottest economies.” https://ruralindiaonline.org/resources/report-on-conditions-of-work-and-promotion-of-livelihoods-in-the-unorganised-sector/.
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