ABSTRACT
The world’s largest SRELIM, India’s Dalits (the former Untouchables) remains unambiguously near the bottom of India’s caste system as measured by status and income2 despite a substantial reduction in disparity since Independence in 1947. Today there is a Dalit urban middle class, (although few are in it, perhaps less than 5 percent of the Dalit population), which simply did not exist before Independence. A more basic indicator if it is literacy: at the mid-nineteenth century, Dalits were close to totally illiterate. Today, half of adult Dalits can read and write. Above all, India has in place what might be called the “basics of Dalit emancipation.” These include constitutional stipulations formally prohibiting Untouchability and its entire works while providing broad-reaching preferences. In addition, there are strong national antidiscrimination laws (although weakly enforced) plus militant and diverse private organizations promoting Dalit mobility and human rights. Nevertheless, in many ways the current situation resembles India’s pre-Independence caste status quo. Most Dalits are still in their traditional occupations and antagonistic rural roles, in which they continue to be victimized as a consequence of India’s traditional rural values, customs, and norms. In India, human-rights ways have yet to trump folkways. Dalits also continue to be divided by language, customs, religion, and their own informal class hierarchy. These divisions limit their political “muscle,” notwithstanding their weight as a sixth of India’s total population. India has spectacular achievements in growth rates, atomic energy, information technology, democratic politics, the arts, agriculture, etc. Yet for the majority of the population, the nation is still a lowincome, mainly traditional, rural country at an early stage of economic development. The limited degree of social change explains to a large extent why
most Dalits remain in their millennia-old, traditional, stigmatized, subaltern, low-status, involuntary position relative to the Indian majority. That said, it is also important to add that in addition to the basics of Dalit
emancipation, the central government has taken a very strong stand against untouchability by introducing the most extensive system of preferences in the world in an attempt to bring Dalits into the mainstream. This is complemented by five impressive statutes designed to uproot the most destructive and obvious institutions of untouchability, as well as a string of commission reports and reviews assessing results and providing strategic approaches and other recommendations. Most effort and resources have been put into the system of reservations of public-sector jobs and higher school admissions for Dalits as the main mode of eliminating Dalit disadvantage and exploitation. Results, however, have fallen short of aspirations. Reservations have many shortcomings and may not be a promising approach for dealing with the caste system, which is by far the biggest obstacle to Dalit mobility. In terms of the mobility model discussed in Chapter 3, entrenched prejudice,
discrimination and above all, India’s history of slow growth before the 1980s, explain why most Dalits still remain in the traditional rural setting, subject to an age-old caste system, notwithstanding what can be described as heroic efforts at the national level to transform their reality. For the five case studies of this volume, India has the lowest parameters for the four independent variables that affect Dalit progress to parity because:
1 With most of the population still living in rural areas, it is at an early stage in development. As a result India’s caste system is still intact. It is probable that development to the point where nearly half the population has urban residence is a necessary condition for sufficient disintegration of the caste system to permit Dalit integration into the mainstream.
