by Amartya Sen
It is, however, important to avoid the much-aired simplification that argues that all India needs to do to achieve fast economic growth and speedy reduction of poverty is greater reliance on the global market and on international trade. This reflects, in fact, a serious misreading of the variety of factors that have contributed to the kind of economic success achieved in China, South Korea, Thailand and other countries in East and South East Asia. These countries did emphasize international trade and made fine use of the global market mechanism. But they also made it possible to have broad-based public participation in economic expansion, through such policies as extensive schooling and high literacy, good health care, widespread land reforms, and some considerable fostering of gender equity (not least through female education and employment).
This is not to doubt that India can achieve reasonably high growth rates of aggregate GNP even with the rather limited social opportunities that exist in India. For one thing, it can continue to do extremely well in industries that make excellent use of India’s accomplishments in higher education and technical training. New centres of technical excellence, like Bangalore and Hyderabad, can prosper and flourish, and India can even accelerate its progress along the lines that it has already established well. This will be a substantial achievement of considerable economic importance.
Yet even a hundred Bangalores and Hyderabads will not, on their own, solve India’s tenacious poverty and deep-seated inequality. The very poor in India get a small – and basically indirect – share of the cake that information technology and related developments generate. The removal of poverty, particularly of extreme poverty, calls for more participatory growth on a wide basis, which is not easy to achieve across the barriers of illiteracy, ill health, uncompleted land reforms and other sources of severe societal inequality. The process of economic advance cannot be divorced from the cultivation and enhancement of social opportunities over a broad front.*
The products that China exports to the outside world include a great many that are made by not particularly highly skilled labour, but schooled and literate labour nevertheless. Their production generates much employment, with a great deal of income going to poorer sections of the community. Utilization of the world market for such exports requires production according to specification, quality control and an informed consciousness of the economic tasks involved. Good school education is central for these tasks. Similarly, good health is extremely important if productive effort and economic schedules are not to be affected by illnesses and intermittent absence.†
Basic education, good health and other human attainments are not only directly valuable as constituent elements of human capabilities and quality of life (these are the direct pay-offs of schooling, health care and other social arrangements), but these capabilities can also help in generating economic success of a more standard kind, which in turn can contribute to enhancing the quality of human life even more. If there is something that India can learn from China’s post-reform experience in the 1980s onwards about making skilful use of global markets, there is also much that India can assimilate from China’s pre-reform experience in rapidly expanding the delivery of basic education and elementary health care.
Political Voice and Social Opportunity
If social and economic tasks are so interrelated, what about links with the politics of democracy? While it has frequently been claimed that democracy is inimical to fast economic growth (India itself has been cited often enough to illustrate this specious thesis), there is little statistical evidence to confirm this. Indeed, even the limited success of India in recent years in raising economic growth shows that growth can profit more from a friendly economic climate than from a coercive political environment.*
India has certainly benefited from the protective role of democracy in giving the rulers excellent political incentive to act supportively when disasters threaten and when an immediate change in policy is imperative. India has successfully avoided famines since independence,† while China experienced a massive famine during the failure of the Great Leap Forward when faulty policies were not revised for three years while famine mortality took from 23 to 30 million lives. Even today India is, by and large, in a better position than China both to prevent abuse of coercive power and to make quicker emendations if and when policies go badly wrong (this issue is discussed, among other themes, in Essay 8).
Democracy gives an opportunity to the opposition to press for policy change even when the problem is chronic and has had a long history (rather than only when it is acute and sudden, as is the case with famines). The weakness of Indian social policies on education, health care, land reform and gender equity is as much a failure of the opposition parties as of the governments in office. In comparative terms, the political commitment of leaders of some of the less democratic countries has often led to more achievement in these fields than has been produced by the working of democracy in India. The educational and health achievements of Maoist China illustrate this well.‡ Indeed, post-reform China has made excellent use of China’s pre-reform accomplishments (particularly, in raising basic education and health levels across the country) to make its market-based expansion after 1979 draw widely on the capabilities of a better educated and healthier population.
Only in some parts of India have the failures of social achievement been adequately politicized. The state of Kerala is perhaps the clearest example, where the need for universal education, basic health care, elementary gender equity and land reforms has received effective political backing. The explanation involves both history and contemporary development: the educational orientation of Kerala’s anti-upper-caste movements (of which the current left-wing politics of Kerala is a successor), the early initiatives of the native kingdoms of Travancore and Cochin (outside the British Raj), missionary activities in the spread of education (not confined only to Christians – a fifth of the population), and also a bigger voice for women in family decisions, partly linked to the presence and prominence of matrilineal property rights for a substantial and influential section – the Nairs – of the Hindu community. Over a very long time Kerala has made good use of political activism and voice to expand the range of social opportunities.
The contribution of modern and radical politics to Kerala’s social progress is sometimes underestimated. At the time of Indian independence, in 1947, the proportion of literate people in Kerala, while higher than in the rest of India, was still quite low. The work for the achievement of literacy for all happened mostly in the second half of the twentieth century. Also, the state of Kerala was formed, on linguistic lines, at the time of independence by putting together two ‘native states’ – Travancore and Cochin – which were formally outside the British Raj and one area – Malabar – from old Madras in the Raj. At that time, Malabar’s level of education was far lower than that of Travancore and Cochin. But today the three regions are very close together, practically indistinguishable from each other in terms of school education. The credit that is due to participatory and vocal politics should not all be given away to favourable past history.*
The Use of Voice
It is hard to escape the general conclusion that economic performance, social opportunity and political voice are deeply interrelated. Despite the political facilities provided by India’s democratic system, the weakness of voices of protest has helped to make the progress of social opportunities unnecessarily slow. That, in turn, has not only been a serious handicap in itself for the quality of life in India, it has also served as a major drag in the process of economic development, including the range and coverage of growth and the alleviation of economic poverty. As was discussed in Essay 2, political voice is extremely important for social equity, and to that recognition we have to add the connection between equitable expansion of social opportunities and the force, range and reach of the process of economic development.
In those fields in which there has recently been a more determined use of political and social voice, the
re are considerable signs of change. The issue of gender inequality has produced somewhat more political engagement in recent years (often led by women’s movements in different fields), and this has added to determined political efforts at reducing gender asymmetry in social and economic fields. There is a long history in India of women’s prominence in some particular areas, including in the sharing of leadership positions in politics.* While those achievements were themselves linked with the use of women’s voice (helped by the opportunities of participatory politics in recent centuries), their reach was largely confined to relatively small segments of the population (often women members of the urban elite). An important aspect of the strengthening of women’s voice in contemporary Indian public life is the broadening of this social coverage.
There is, however, still a long way to go in removing the unequal position of women in India, but the increasing political involvement about women’s social role has been an important and constructive development.* There is also some achievement through the increased politicization of educational inequalities in general and the neglect of basic health care, especially for the poor. These disparities receive more public attention today than they did earlier, and the effects of that favourable change can, to some extent, be already seen in the relative progress made in spreading medical attention and educational opportunities. Again, there is still a very long way to go, but positive developments demand acknowledgement, if only to overcome the persistent cynicism that often characterizes public perception about what democracy can or cannot do.
The possibilities of public agitation on issues of societal inequality and deprivation are now beginning to be more utilized than before. There has been much more action recently in organized movements based broadly on demands for human rights, such as the right to school education, the right to food (and, in particular, to midday school meals), the entitlement to basic health care, guarantees of environmental preservation, and the right of employment guarantee. These movements serve to focus attention on particular societal failures, partly as supplements to broad public discussions in the media, but they also provide a politically harder edge to socially important demands. The interdependences between economic, social and political freedoms gives a critically important role to the use of democratic opportunities and to the deployment of political voice.
The remedy for many of the central failures of Indian society is closely linked to broadening the force and range of political arguments and social demands.† The ‘tryst with destiny’ is thus partly an invitation to further engagement and encounter. What Nehru hoped would happen automatically with the independence of India may continue to be neglected unless it is demanded with an insistence that makes it politically critical in a democratic system. It is not enough to continue to have systematic elections, to safeguard political liberties and civil rights, to guarantee free speech and an open media. Nor is it adequate to eliminate famine, or to reduce the lead of China in longevity and survival. A more vigorous – and vocal – use of democratic participation can do much more in India than it has already achieved.
10
Class in India*
In his speech on the ‘tryst with destiny’ delivered on 14 August 1947, with which the last essay began, Jawaharlal Nehru talked not just about freedom from British rule, but also about his grand vision of independent India.† Nehru was particularly determined to remove the barriers of class stratification and their far-reaching effects on inequality and deprivation in economic, political and social spheres. It was a thrilling image that could rival Alfred Tennyson’s eloquence: ‘For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, / Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.’ It was good for free India to be told, at the defining moment of its birth, about the possibility of ‘all the wonder that would be’.1
Nehru’s vision was not fulfilled during his own lifetime. There is nothing surprising in that, since the vision was ambitious. What is, however, more distressing is the slowness of our progress in the direction to which Jawaharlal Nehru so firmly pointed. But that is not all. There is disturbing evidence that the battle against class divisions has very substantially weakened in India. In fact, there are clear indications that at different levels of economic, social and political policy, the debilitating role of class inequality now receives remarkably little attention. Furthermore, support for consolidation of class barriers comes not only from old vested interests, but also from new sources of privilege, and this makes the task much harder.
Diverse Disparities
This is a difficult subject to deal with, for two distinct reasons. First, class is not the only source of inequality, and interest in class as a source of disparity has to be placed within a bigger picture that includes other divisive influences: gender, caste, region, community and so on. For example, inequality between women and men is also a major contributor to inequity. This source of inequality used to be fairly comprehensively neglected in India even a few decades ago, and in this neglect the single-minded concern with class did play a role. Indeed, about three decades ago, in the early 1970s, when I first tried to work on gender inequality in India, I was struck by the fact that even those who were extremely sympathetic to the plight of the underdogs of society were reluctant to take a serious interest in the evil of gender discrimination. This was to a great extent because of the firmly established tradition of concentrating almost entirely on class divisions as a source of inequality. That single-mindedness is no longer dominant, and there is increasing recognition of the importance of causes of disparity other than class divisions, including inequality between women and men. Even though gender and other contributors to inequality still require, I would argue, more systematic attention, nevertheless there has been a considerable enrichment of the versatility and reach of public discussion in India.
There is, however, an interesting issue that goes beyond the ‘whether’ question to the ‘how’ question. Should these different sources of inequality be seen as primarily ‘additive’ to each other (‘there is class and then there is also gender, and furthermore, caste, and so on’), or should they instead be treated together, making more explicit room for their extensive interdependences? These different sources of vulnerability are each significant, but no less importantly, we must see that they can strengthen the impact of each other because of their complementarity.
Class, in particular, has a very special role in the establishment and reach of social inequality, and it can make the influence of other sources of disparity (such as gender inequality) much sharper. The intellectual gain in broadening our comprehension of other types of inequity has to be followed with a more integrated understanding of the functioning of class in alliance with other causes of injustice. Or, to put it differently, class is not only important on its own, it can also magnify the impact of other contributors to inequality, enlarging the penalties imposed by them. The integration of class in a consolidated understanding of injustice is of paramount importance given the need to address, simultaneously, different sources of inequality, related to class, gender, community, caste and so on, and given the overwhelming role of class in the working of each of the other contributors to inequality.
A second source of complexity lies in the fact that some of the new social barriers reinforcing rather than weakening the hold of class divisions come – as it were – from the ‘friendly’ side of the dividing line; they can, in fact, be rooted in institutional devices that are intended to be among the remedial features against class division. For example, public programmes of intervention can protect vulnerable interests and thus serve as a good instrument in the battle against class-based inequality. However, they can also have regressive consequences if the battle lines are wrongly drawn, or if the remedies are wrongly devised.
In fact, what the armed forces call ‘friendly fire’ – whereby an army is hit by its own firing rather than by enemy shelling – is a concept that may have relevance not just in the military spheres b
ut in social fields as well. The actual impact of supportive public institutions and public policies has to be constantly scrutinized. The operative impact of institutions and programmes that have been instituted as anti-inequality devices requires probing investigation in an open-minded – rather than in a fixed, formulaic – way.
I shall take up these two issues in turn: first, the need for an integrated understanding of the contribution of class in the combined impact of diverse sources of inequality; and second, the possibility of ‘friendly fire’, which requires us to rethink the old battle lines against inequality. In particular, the relevance of new barriers strongly suggests the need to re-examine the ways and means of confronting class inequality.
In this essay, I shall try to identify two specific issues to examine in trying to understand the far-reaching relevance of class in India: first, the ‘integration issue’ (to see the influence of class as not merely additive, but also as transformational), and second, the ‘institutional issue’, in particular the role of institutional features – new and old – in reinforcing and even strengthening class barriers.
Class, Gender, Caste and Community
The significant presence of non-class sources of inequality is an important recognition that can be combined with the acknowledgement that there is hardly any aspect of our lives that stays quite untouched by our place in the class stratification. Class does not act alone in creating and reinforcing inequality, and yet no other source of inequality is fully independent of class.2
Consider gender. South Asian countries have a terrible record in gender inequality, which is manifest in the unusual morbidity and mortality rates of women, compared with what is seen in regions that do not neglect women’s health care and nutrition so badly. At the same time, women from the upper classes are often more prominent in South Asia than elsewhere. Indeed, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have all had, or currently have, women Prime Ministers – something that the United States (along with France, Italy, Germany and Japan) has never had and does not seem poised to have in the near future (if I am any judge).