The Argumentative Indian

by Amartya Sen

  Belonging to a privileged class can help women to overcome barriers that obstruct women from less thriving classes. Gender is certainly an additional contributor to societal inequality, but it does not act independently of class. Indeed, a congruence of class deprivation and gender discrimination can blight the lives of poorer women very severely indeed. It is the interactive presence of these two features of deprivation – being low class and being female – that can massively impoverish women from the less privileged classes.

  Similarly, turning to caste, even though being lower caste is undoubtedly a separate cause of disparity, its impact is all the greater when the lower-caste families also happen to be very poor. The blighting of the lives of Dalits or people from other disadvantaged castes, or of members of the Scheduled Tribes, is particularly severe when the caste or tribal adversities are further magnified by abject penury. Even the violence associated with caste-related conflicts tends to involve a great deal more than just caste.

  For example, the Ranveer Sena in Bihar may be a private army that draws its sustenance from the upper (in this case, Bhumihar and Rajput) castes, and the victims of brutality may typically be low-caste Dalits, yet the predicament of the potential victims cannot be adequately grasped if we do not take note of the poverty and landlessness of Dalits, or place the conflicts in a broad social and economic background. This recognition does not suggest that caste is unimportant (quite the contrary), but it does make it necessary to place caste-related violence in a broader context in which class, inter alia, belongs. The basic issue is complementarity and interrelation rather than the independent functioning of different disparities that work in seclusion (like ships passing at night). Given the wide reach and generic relevance of class, related to poverty and wealth, ownership and indigence, work and employment, and so on, it is not surprising that it tends to rear its ugly head in a great many conflicts that have other identifications and correlates.

  In fact, there is also considerable evidence that affirmative action in favour of lower castes has tended to do much more for the economically less strained members of those castes than for those who are weighed down by the combined burden of extreme poverty and lowness of caste. For example, ‘reserved’ posts often go to relatively affluent members of disadvantaged castes. No policy of affirmative action aimed at caste disadvantage can be adequately effective without taking account of the class background of members of the lower castes. The impact of caste, like that of gender, is substantially swayed by class.

  Or consider the deprivation that is generated by communal violence. Members of a minority community can indeed have reason for fear even when they come from a prosperous class. Yet the raw danger to which targeted communities are exposed is immensely magnified when the persons involved not only belong to those communities, but also come from poorer and less privileged families. This is brought out by the class distribution of victims of Hindu-Muslim riots around the time of independence and the partition of India. The easiest to kill among the members of a targeted community are those of that group who have to go out unprotected to work, who live in slums, and who lead, in one way or another, a thoroughly vulnerable life. Not surprisingly, they provide the overwhelming proportion of the victims in communal riots.

  My own first exposure to murder, at the age of 11, occurred when I encountered a profusely bleeding Muslim daily labourer, Kader Mia, who had been knifed by Hindu assassins just outside our home in Dhaka (he died in the hospital to which my father took him). Almost his last words to me were that he knew he was taking a heavy risk in coming to a largely Hindu region of the city, but he had to do it in the hope of earning a little money from some work (he was on his way there when he was knifed). Kader Mia died as a victimized Muslim, but he also died as an unemployed labourer, looking desperately for a bit of work and money.

  This was in 1944. The riots today are not any different in this respect. In the Hindu-Muslim riots in the 1940s, Hindu thugs killed the unprotected Muslims, while Muslim thugs assassinated the impoverished Hindu victims. Even though the community identity of the exterminated preys was quite different (Hindu and Muslim, respectively), their class identities were often extremely similar. The class dimension of sectarian violence tends to receive inadequate attention, even in newspaper accounts, because of unifocal reporting that concentrates on the divisive communal identity of the victims rather than on their unified class identity.

  This remark would apply also to the recent communal killings and victimizations in India, for example the anti-Sikh riots that were organized in Delhi following Indira Gandhi’s assassination, the anti-Muslim brutalities that accompanied the terrible days that followed the demolition of the Babri masjid, and so on. Class is an ever-present feature of communal and sectarian violence.

  What we need, therefore, is some kind of a dual recognition of the role and reach of class that takes into account its non-uniqueness as well as its transformational function. We have to recognize, simultaneously, that

  (1) there are many sources of disparity other than class: we must avoid the presumption that class encompasses all sources of disadvantage and handicap; and

  (2) nevertheless, class disparities are not only important on their own, but they also tend to intensify the disadvantages related to the other forms of disparity.

  Class is neither the only concern, nor an adequate proxy for other forms of inequality, and yet we do need class analysis to see the working and reach of other forms of inequality and differentiation.

  Inequality, Concurrence and the Underdogs

  Aside from the variety of factors that contribute to inequality, there is also the important issue of the form that inequality may take. Here, it may be thought, class speaks in many voices, with much discordance. There is truth in this recognition, but once again this may not weaken the overwhelming relevance of pre-eminent class divisions in understanding the plight of the underdogs of society. We have to see simultaneously the distinctions as well as the interconnections.

  There are many different forms of deprivation: economic poverty, illiteracy, political disempowerment, absence of health care, and so on. These distinct dimensions of inequality are not entirely congruent in their incidence. Indeed, they can yield very different social rankings.3 The tendency to see deprivation simply in terms of income poverty is often strong and can be quite misleading. And yet there are also powerfully uniting features in the manifestation of severe deprivation. This is partly because different types of handicap reinforce each other, but also because they often tend to go together at the extreme ends, dividing the general ‘haves’ from the comprehensive ‘have-nots’. The absence of a conceptual congruence between different types of deprivation does not preclude their empirical proximity along a big dividing line, which is a central feature of classical class analysis.

  Some Indians are rich; most are not. Some are very well educated; others are illiterate. Some lead easy lives of luxury; others toil hard for little reward. Some are politically powerful; others cannot influence anything. Some have great opportunities for advancement in life; others lack them altogether. Some are treated with respect by the police; others are treated like dirt. These are different kinds of inequality, and each of them requires serious attention. Yet often enough – and this is the central issue in the centrality of class analysis – the same people are poor in income and wealth, suffer from illiteracy, work hard for little remuneration, are uninfluential in politics, lack social and economic opportunities, and are treated with brutal callousness by the police. The dividing line of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ is not just a rhetorical cliché, but also an important part of diagnostic analysis, pointing us towards a pre-eminent division that can deeply inform our social, economic and political understanding. This concurrence of deprivation adds to the overarching relevance of class as a source of inequality and disparity.

  When I come to discuss the issue of what I called ‘friendly fire’, the role of such manifest concurrence in the li
ves of the extreme underdogs of society will become particularly relevant. Many of the distributional institutions that exist in India and elsewhere are designed to defend the interests of groups with some deprivation (or some vulnerability) but who are not by any means the absolute underdogs of society. There is an understandable rationale for seeing them as ‘friendly’ institutions in the battle against class divisions. Yet if they also have the effect of worsening the deal that the real underdogs get, at the bottom layers of society, the overall impact may be to strengthen class divisions rather than weaken them. This is the sense in which their effects can be seen as ‘friendly fire’, and I am afraid there is a great deal of this phenomenon in Indian public policy as it stands.

  It is extremely important to study the issue of ‘friendly fire’, though not because it is the largest contributor to class divisions in India: traditional factors, such as massive inequality of wealth and assets, immense gaps in education and other social opportunities and so on, remain central to our understanding of the brute force of class divisions. Yet these traditional features are now supplemented by new barriers, some of which were created precisely to overcome the influence of class, but end up having the opposite effect.

  I can illustrate the point with a great many examples. I shall, however, concentrate in this essay on exactly two paradigmatic illustrations, dealing respectively with food policy and elementary schooling, both of which have a major bearing on the lives of the most deprived among the Indian people, that is, the hungry and the illiterate.

  Food Policy and Hunger

  India’s record in countering hunger and famine is strangely mixed. The rapid elimination of famine since independence is an achievement of great importance (the last real famine occurred in 1943 – four years before independence), and this is especially so in contrast to the failure of many other countries – most notably China – to prevent famine. Whenever a famine has threatened, the safeguards of a democratic process have come into operation, with rapidly arranged protective policies, including temporary public employment, which give the threatened destitutes the money to buy food. The mechanism of famine prevention in India has been discussed in my joint book with Jean Drèze, Hunger and Public Action.4 It is a record, we argue, of considerable achievement.

  And yet India’s overall record in eliminating hunger and undernutrition is quite terrible. Not only is there persistent recurrence of severe hunger in particular regions, but there is also a dreadful prevalence of endemic hunger across much of India. Indeed, India does worse in this respect than even sub-Saharan Africa.5 Calculations of general undernourishment – what is sometimes called ‘protein-energy malnutrition’ – show that it is nearly twice as high in India as in sub-Saharan Africa on the average. It is astonishing that despite the intermittent occurrence of famine there, Africa still manages to ensure a higher level of regular nourishment than does India. Judged in terms of the usual standards of retardation in weight for age, the proportion of undernourished children in Africa is 20 to 40 per cent, whereas the percentage of undernourished Indian children is a gigantic 40 to 60 per cent.6 About half of all Indian children are, it appears, chronically undernourished, and more than half of all adult women suffer from anaemia. In maternal undernourishment as well as the incidence of underweight babies, and also in the frequency of cardiovascular disease in later life (to which adults are particularly prone if nutritionally deprived in the womb), India’s record is among the very worst in the world.7

  A striking feature of the persistence of this dreadful situation is not only that it continues to exist, but that the little public attention it gets, when it gets any at all, is so badly divided.* Indeed, it is amazing to hear persistent repetition of the false belief that India has managed the challenge of hunger very well since independence. This is based on a profound confusion between famine prevention, which is a simple achievement, and the avoidance of endemic undernourishment and hunger, which is a much more complex task. India has done worse than nearly every country in the world in the latter respect.

  In this context, it is particularly remarkable that India has continued to amass extraordinarily large stocks of food grain in the central government’s reserve, without finding good use for them. In 1998 the stock was around 18 million tonnes – close to the official ‘buffer stock’ norms. It has climbed and climbed since then, firmly surpassing 62 million tonnes at the time this essay was written (as a Nehru Lecture in 2001). To take Jean Drèze’s graphic description, if all the sacks of grain were laid up in a row, this would stretch more than a million kilometres, taking us to the moon and back. To see it in another way, the stocks substantially exceeded one tonne of food grain for every family below the poverty line.

  The counterintuitiveness – not to mention the inequity – of the history of this development is so gross that it is hard to explain it by the presumption of mere insensitivity – it looks more and more like insanity. What could be the perceived rationale of all this? What could explain the simultaneous presence of the worst undernourishment and the largest unused food stocks in the world (with the stocks being constantly augmented at extremely heavy cost) ?

  The immediate explanation is not hard to find. The accumulation of stocks results from the government’s commitment to high minimum support prices for food grain – for wheat and rice in particular. But a regime of high prices in general (despite a gap between procurement prices and consumers’ retail prices) both expands procurement and depresses demand. The bonanza for food producers and sellers is matched by the privation of food consumers. Since the biological need for food is not the same thing as the economic entitlement to food (what people can afford to buy given their economic circumstances and the prices), the large stocks procured are hard to get rid of, despite rampant undernourishment across the country. The very price system that generated a massive supply kept the hands – and the mouths – of the poorer consumers away from food.

  But does not the government automatically remedy this problem through subsidizing food prices compared with the procurement prices – surely that should keep food prices low to consumers? Not quite. The issues involved are discussed more fully in my joint book with Jean Drèze, India: Development and Participation (2002), but one big part of the story is simply the fact that much of the subsidy does in fact go to pay for the cost of maintaining a massively large stock of food grain, with a mammoth and unwieldy food administration (including the Food Corporation of India). Also, since the cutting edge of the price subsidy is to subsidize farmers to produce more and earn more, rather than to sell existing stocks to consumers at lower prices (that happens too, but only to a limited extent and to restricted groups), the overall effect of the subsidy is more spectacular in transferring money to medium and large farmers with food to sell, than in giving food to the undernourished consumers.

  If there were ever a case for radical class analysis, in which ‘the left’ could take ‘the right’ to the cleaners, one would have thought that this would be it. To some extent, we do see such criticism, but not nearly enough. The dog that does not bark is the expectable howl of criticism from the perspective of class analysis.

  Why? This is where the diagnosis of ‘friendly fire’ becomes relevant. When the policy of food procurement was introduced and the case for purchasing food from farmers at high prices was established, various benefits were foreseen, and they were not altogether pointless, nor without some claim to equity. First, building up stocks up to a certain point is useful for food security – necessary even for the prevention of famines. That would make it a good thing to have a large stock up to some limit – in today’s conditions, perhaps even a stock of 20 million tonnes or so. The idea that since it is good to build up stocks as needed, it must be even better to build up even more stocks, is not only mistaken, but also leads to shooting oneself in the foot.

  I must also examine a second line of reasoning in defence of high food prices, which also comes in as a good idea and then turns counterproducti
ve. Those who suffer from low food prices include some who are not affluent – the small farmer or peasant who sells a part of his crop. The interests of this group are mixed up with those of big farmers, and this produces a lethal confusion of food politics. While the powerful lobby of privileged farmers presses for higher procurement prices and pushes for public funds to be spent to keep them high, the interests of poorer farmers, who also benefit from the high prices, is championed by political groups that represent these non-affluent beneficiaries. Stories of hardship among these people play a powerful part not only in the rhetoric in defence of high food prices, but also in the genuine conviction of many equity-oriented activists that this would help some very badly off people. And so it would, but of course it would help the rich farmers much more, and cater to their pressure groups, while the interests of the much larger number of people who buy food rather than sell it would be badly sacrificed.

  There is a need for more explicit analysis of the effects of these policies on the different classes, and in particular on the extreme underdogs of society who, along with their other deprivations (already discussed), are also remarkably underfed and undernourished. For casual labourers, slum dwellers, poor urban employees, migrant workers, rural artisans, rural non-farm workers, even farm workers who are paid cash wages, high food prices bite into what they can eat. The overall effect of high food prices is to hit many of the worst-off members of society extremely hard. And while they do help some of the farm-based poor, the net effect is quite regressive on distribution. There is, of course, relentless political pressure in the direction of high food prices coming from farmers’ lobbies, and the slightly muddied picture of benefiting some farm-based poor makes the policy issues sufficiently befuddled to allow the confusion that high food prices are a pro-poor stance, when in overall effect they are very far from that. It is said that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So unfortunately is a little bit of equity when its championing coincides with massive injustice to vast numbers of people. It is, again, a case of ‘friendly fire’, even though the involvement of the rich farmers’ pressure groups thickens the plot.