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7/21/2019 Breaking the Silence – Page 7 – the Caravan
by egregiously obscene forms of inequality, the term “revolutionary” seems extravagant, even five
decades after Weiner pronounced his judgment. But determining what constitutes “revolutionary”
social change depends on how that change is measured—and in the second decade after Independence,
the distance that India had travelled from its starting point would have indeed seemed immense.
Political equality had been enshrined in the Constitution, untouchability had been delegitimised,
political representation was widely shared, zamindari had been abolished, a new development
paradigm was instituted, and the state defined its goals in terms of common welfare.
And yet by another measure—of how much more India would have to achieve to become a minimally
equal society—even this progress was small comfort. Formal political equality did not translate into
substantive empowerment; abolishing untouchability barely cracked open the hierarchies of caste;
political representation coexisted with deep prejudice; zamindari abolition did little to alleviate the
vulnerabilities of small farmers and landless labour; development was shockingly slow at expanding
opportunities; and the state’s promise of welfare seemed like a cruel mirage to hundreds of millions of
Indians condemned to poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy and disease.
Much has transpired since Weiner’s preliminary assessment of the career of equality in India.
Economically, India has broken out of the paradigm of low growth that always seemed to make
material prosperity so elusive. This new growth is producing far-reaching changes in income,
occupational structures, lifestyles and aspirations. Politically, India’s democracy has deepened, giving
hitherto marginalised groups impressive representation and recognition. Administratively, the state
has acquired unprecedented resources to spend on programs ostensibly designed for inclusion. And
there is a palpable change in social consciousness: political democracy has induced a sense of agency
and empowerment across different groups in society; today inclusion is a demand of citizens, not a gift
given from on high.
Yet these very changes are compelling the debate over equality to take a paradoxical turn. On the one
hand, there is impatience with the idea of equality. While an acknowledgement of formal equality isnow enshrined in India’s self-image, the politics of equality are often associated with hypocrisy and
pretense. One camp in the debate blames India’s ills in large part on an excessive rhetoric of equality—
talk that is regarded as a license for maintaining outmoded forms of state control that for decades
trapped India’s economy. From this perspective, equality talk has always been a license for economic
irrationality: it was used to justify all manner of subsidies, controls and patronage schemes that did
nothing but retard development. Growth may be producing new forms of economic inequality, the
argument goes, but at least it is more effective at reducing poverty. It is also creating the conditions for
a more durable equality of opportunity, by providing the resources for things like education. An
excessive preoccupation with equality is seen as a stumbling block: it produces policies that do nothing
but appease the conscience of India’s privileged, even as these policies do little to dismantle deep
structures of inequality. Let us get on with growth, it is argued, and the opportunities it produces will,
somehow, at some point, take care of equality concerns. Equality, on this view, is both a ruse and a
distraction.
This sentiment captures a scepticism generated by India’s development experience. It is also of a piece
with new India’s self-image of tough-mindedness, not bound by pieties of the past. Yet, on the other
hand, this posture is deeply fragile. While equality talk may not have served us well, deep social and
economic inequality remain obdurate realities in India. It may be a crude measure, but India’s Gini
coefficient—a measurement of the uneven distribution of wealth—is rising. Acute forms of social
segregation remain a reality. A large number of social struggles continue to be animated by the
indignity of inequality and powerlessness. Despite significant reductions in poverty, it is difficult to
deny that India still breathes an oppressive atmosphere of social inequality. The idea that growth and
economic development represent our best chance of unsettling fixed hierarchies of power has some
truth to it. But we cannot get away from the fact that growth is bringing in new challenges of
inequality, which we ignore at our peril. It is also true that much of the political discourse of equality
has been hypocritical. But here we must acknowledge that debates over growth and equality rarelymanage to dent the psychological resistance we have erected to avoid confronting uncomfortable facts
about inequality.
This essay is premised on the idea that the way we think about inequality matters a lot to the shape it
takes and to the prospects for its diminishment. At present, Indian thinking about inequality suffers
from a triple burden. The topic is cloaked by a deep and pervasive culture of avoidance. But even when
it becomes a focus of political reflection, the outmoded idioms through which we imagine equality
become new straitjackets that impede solutions. And this, in turn, distorts the understanding of the
instruments we use to address the problem. This essay cannot do justice to the full complexity of the
problem; it is a modest attempt at clearing some cobwebs. But India urgently needs to confront thisissue anew. Or else inequality will remain India’s original sin: reappearing in the face of every
resistance, casting a shadow over all social relations, acting forever as a rebuke to the Indian
experiment.
2
The Culture of Avoidance
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THE TOPIC OF EQUALITY IS A DIFFICULT one in any society; it conjures up a complex of hopes and
fears. The greatest modern theorist of the psychological burdens of equality, Alexis de Tocqueville,
proposed that societies that enshrined formal political equality would find it difficult to talk about real
inequalities, because formal equality allows us to throw a veil over deep social inequalities. But in
India it is a particularly difficult subject to discuss. The experience of inequality—and its associated
indignities—is commonplace and visceral. To confront it fully is so existentially disturbing that it is
often kept at bay by a whole series of interdictions and stratagems.
For those at the bottom of a deep well, the mere act of looking up at the heights to be scaled can be
dispiriting; for those at the top, the act of looking to the depths at which human beings are confined is
likely to cause vertigo. The net result is a taciturn avoidance played out in Indian homes and streets. It
is not that the poor are not aware of the deep indignities they experience or the chains that bind them.
It is not that the privileged are not aware of their deep complicity in a disfigured social system of
inequality. But any frontal representation of this reality is more likely to induce an intellectual and
moral paralysis.
Powerful representations of this reality—like the astonishing literature produced by Dalits—are
politely acknowledged, but rarely internalised in our consciousness. When books like Katherine Boo’s
Behind the Beautiful Forevers, or even Hollywood entertainments like Slumdog Millionaire, enter
middle-class consciousness, they cause discomfort. This is not because they remind Indians of
something we had forgotten, but because they represent an assault on the elaborate psychological
fortifications we have constructed to cope with a reality we know all too well. It is precisely because
the indignities associated with inequality are so widespread that we find it hard to talk about them. But
the avoidance has created a self-perpetuating system, which is rarely frontally challenged. Everyone
hopes the system will change, but absolves themselves of the responsibility for bringing about that
change.
This deep existential discomfort with the topic might seem to be at odds with the fact that the struggleover equality defines a great deal of modern Indian history. Certainly it is impossible to imagine any
modern society that does not take equality seriously. But taking equality seriously only gets us so far.
The nature of our foundational commitments to equality varies considerably—and even if we achieved
clarity over those commitments, transforming them into a social reality requires confronting a
complex set of forces. Concepts do not automatically translate into reality: which is why equality can
often seem both normatively inescapable and socially impossible at the same time—an ideal on which
everyone agrees but one that can never be entirely fulfilled.
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For similar reasons—that commitments do not necessarily entail outcomes—it is also a mistake to
think that foundational religious commitments explain much of the story of equality. In the canonical
story of equality in the West outlined by Tocqueville, Christianity did provide a standpoint from which
to affirm equality—but then it took almost two millennia for this discovery to be embodied in social
institutions. In India, this story is usually told in reverse: Hinduism, the dominant conceptual
framework of the subcontinent, constructed a deep, enduring and disfiguring ideological edifice of
inequality. This framework, with its fusion of coercive, ideological, economic and religious power,
pitilessly condemned large masses to the most insidious forms of subordination mankind has known.
In fact, many of the ideological polemics against inequality in India are just critiques of Hinduism in
various forms—which have in turn spawned a series of reactions that attempt to sever the connection
between Hinduism and caste, or to point out that the tradition was not quite what its detractors made it
out to be. These polemics have their place, even though they often fail to get historical nuances right
and simplify a complex historical inheritance to the point of caricature. But all these historical
arguments run up against one paradoxical and incontrovertible fact of Indian history. India has
produced immense intellectual radicalism, heterodoxy and dissent, all of which could be put in the
service of equality. And yet this intellectual radicalism—whether in the Mahabharata, Buddhism, Kabir
or Nanak—has been so easily reconciled with the orthodoxy of social structure; the facts of inequalityseem to swallow all religious or metaphysical attempts to escape it.
So the obsession with the question of whether Indians “believe” in equality, or whether the concept has
any cultural roots here, is therefore somewhat misplaced. John Locke could “believe” in Christianity
and equality, and yet put up with slavery—the issue is not so simple.
As the philosopher Bernard Williams pointed out, in all societies the demands of equality and justice
are often immobilised in the name of something called social and economic necessity. The issue is
where and how these lines of necessity come to be drawn. For example, all societies tolerate high
degrees of inequality in property and income, not because they are just, but because these are seen asnecessary, often for the preservation of other goals like efficiency. These institutions then come to be
seen as necessary ones. What drives equality is not so much a series of abstract arguments about
concepts, or large changes in the character of people, but some inchoate sense of the boundaries of
social and economic necessity. It is rarely the case that arguments for equality move us towards
particular social arrangements. Indeed, it is often the reverse: the degree to which particular economic
and social arrangements are seen as necessary determine the boundaries of equality. We first justify
the structure of privilege in terms of necessity—according to imperatives of economic efficiency or
social stability, for example—and then limit our commitment to equality to adapt to that necessity. The
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forms of genuine empowerment. It is harder to mobilise a politics of equality in a society whose elites
have just acquired the self-conception that they are egalitarian. The Constitution was not just a
psychological life raft for Dalits; it also gave India’s elites a means to overcome their own burdens of
bad conscience, and allowed them entry into the respectable world of modernity.
But the transition to democracy did not massively disrupt the established social order: the fact is that
democracies have turned out to be extremely conservative, and slow to combat inequality. Back in the
18th century, Adam Smith had predicted that a democracy, the United States, would be among the last
countries to abolish slavery, and it took a brutal civil war to bring that about. Almost no democracy hasseriously expropriated the rich—and there is a case to be made that elites enthusiastically embraced
democracy precisely because they recognised that the big fear it once induced, of the poor voting out
the rich, proved to be largely groundless.
Democracy, in the Indian context, proved the surest way of keeping more radical and revolutionary
forces at bay. The powerful quickly realised that far from dispossessing them, democracy would allow
them to exercise power in new ways. It would take a long essay to describe why democracy has turned
out to be a relatively conservative force. But it is fair to say that democracy served the interests of
power more than it went against them.
The acknowledgment of the necessity of democracy was followed by claims for the functional necessity
of equality in the modern world, on what we might call the grounds of efficiency. This idiom also had
its genesis in the independence movement, as thinker after thinker came to the conclusion that the
superiority of the West consisted largely in the capacity of its states to enlist the productive energies of
the entirety of their populations. Prosperity and power demanded enhanced productive capacity. At
some point, this thinking went, caste might have been a functional mode of social organisation; it had a
historical role in the distribution of productive capacity, and even promoted the development of
individual skills in designated occupations. But it no longer conformed to the functional requirements
of modern society. The mode of organising society had to make a transition from hierarchy to equality
because this was a functional necessity. This argument, first devised in the context of caste, could easily
be extended to other categories like gender. Inclusion, as it were, became a desirable goal because it
was necessary for growth.
The attraction of this argument is not to be underestimated. Arguably even now whatever little
commitment we have to welfare and human development is not motivated by ethical concerns: it is
driven, if at all, by the practical necessities of running a modern economy. Our lack of human
development, for instance, evokes less an ethical anxiety about inequality, and more a concern for
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national competitiveness. The people still remain a subject to be worked on, so they can be enlisted in
the project of unleashing the nation’s productive power. The problem is that this concern goes only so
far as the elites perceive these things to be practically necessary.
In spite of their limitations, these instrumentalist policies could have contributed to alleviating the
spectre of human suffering if they had actually given citizens the means to participate in a modern
economy. The state tried, and partly succeeded. But an odd mixture of the failure of democratic
accountability, administrative myopia, and some startlingly obtuse policy choices made this project less
credible, even on its own terms. In some ways, the failure of the state exacerbated the trust deficit thatis at the heart of the politics of inequality. Among the privileged, even those who would have been
inclined to let the state take actions to increase equality recoiled at the prospect of a state that fed its
own insatiable logic rather than achieving concrete outcomes. While the poor continued to regard the
state as oppressive at worst, and at best an institution from which political ingenuity could extract
small favours.
WHILE ELITES HAD THEIR REASONS to infuse equality with some content through their ideas of
democracy and development, a more powerful impetus was given to the idea by the struggles of
oppressed groups themselves, led by figures like Narayana Guru, Jyotirao Phule and Ambedkar. If
there has been anything revolutionary at all about social change in India, it is the transformation in the
consciousness of hitherto marginalised groups like Dalits, who at every turn began to resist the chains
of subordination. This transformation manifests itself in several ways: in large scale caste-based social
movements; in the extraordinary production of writing and literature that has still not been noticed by
the mainstream; in quiet but confident acts of daily resistance; and in the sheer drive to defeat the
odds. This is an undoing of inequality through acts of agency and resistance, a refusal to let social
necessity determine the horizon of possibility.
These social movements revolutionised the consciousness of oppressed groups, and produced a new
sense of dignity and self-esteem that is behind so much of the new energy in India. But in their current
form there are inherent limitations to what they can achieve. If India’s elites obfuscated the distinction
between being anti-untouchability and being anti-caste, many of these movements conflated the
politics of being anti-upper caste with being anti-caste. In politics, many of these movements managed
to displace existing power holders. But as Sudipta Kaviraj has pointed out, they were based on a logic
of equality that measured progress on the basis of caste: in this equation, the degree of equality is
defined by the share of caste power in institutions like the state.
But one consequence of this conception of equality is that it has placed an enormous burden on
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when Hindu reform hollowed out to the point where all that was left of it was an insecure nationalism,
the whole project began to lose steam. In the early 1960s, the great sociologist MN Srinivas posited that
“Sanskritisation” and “Westernisation” were the two possible idioms through which marginalised
groups could seek recognition. The great cultural story of equality today is that Sanskritisation is
almost dead as a social project, and has been replaced almost entirely by “Westernisation”.
The final idiom in which equality has been framed in India came from a radical ethical vision, shared
by an assortment of thinkers ranging from Vivekanada and Gandhi to the non-Marxist left. India has
not produced many systematic tracts on equality—a revealing fact in its own light. But in the non-Marxist tradition from Gandhi to Ram Manohar Lohia, equality has been seen not in terms of political
or social relations, but as related to the perfecting of the self. To simplify somewhat, relations of
inequality are produced largely because the individual self is not ordered in the right way. Either the
self is in the grip of ignorance caused by egoism; or the self is possessed by the wrong kind of desire,
which requires it to exercise power over others. On this view, the primary challenge of equality is not
about our relationship with others, it is primarily about crafting the right relationship with one’s own
self. The root of inequality, in some form or the other, always lies in an exaltation of materialism,
which compels us to seek domination over others.
There is much that is acute in this kind of analysis, and it does focus attention on what kind of peoplewe would have to be to practise egalitarian politics seriously. But as a means of achieving equality, it
proved counter-productive, for it immediately tied the politics of equality to an idiom of renunciation.
As a cultural ideal, this had an enormous appeal—even now, there is a strong cultural association
between the politics of egalitarianism and the politics of self-denial. Its great achievement was to create
a certain embarrassment about wealth, or at least conspicuous consumption, and to induce a form of
self-restraint that is now wearing thin. But the association of saintliness and the politics of equality
made it an ideal few in the human species could practise. This ethical critique of the self could not
provide a workable politics of equality for a nation committed to harnessing productive growth—and
where the scourge of poverty made renunciation, paradoxically, seem like a luxury few could afford.
The net result was that in Indian politics, the critique of inequality was so closely tied with a critique of
materialism that it became identified with a glorification of poverty itself. It did nothing to address the
question of what an egalitarian politics appropriate to an economy committed to growth and
expanding material well-being would look like. It was a Left-tinted politics of virtue, as it were, but it
remained credible only insofar as its protagonists were virtuous.
Taken together, these five idioms have given content to our ideas of equality over the course of the past
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century. But as we have seen, each of them had its own considerable limitations. The idioms of
democracy and development, which posited equality as a necessity for the attainment of other aims,
advanced equality only to the extent that it served the imperatives of elite power. The struggles of the
oppressed transformed the consciousness of the victims of oppression, but then got stuck on a narrow
measure of representation that reproduced the very identities the idea of equality was meant to
overcome. The idea that the worst aspects of tradition could be transcended without making the whole
tradition despicable proved to be a very fragile concept. And finally, the critique of material inequality
turned out to be more a critique of materialism than of inequality.
4
Instruments of Change
EQUALITY ALWAYS HAS a significant material dimension, and many would argue that the limitations
of the idioms outlined above stem largely from their inability to confront the material aspect of
inequality. Indian Marxists would be the first to make this point, though they have not been the only
ones to think about the material realities of inequality, as can be seen from the long list of struggles,
past and present, over material issues like access to land, labour, forests, minerals, credit, capital and
welfare. But even here, old ways of thinking about material equality—like our exhausted idioms—havealso become straitjackets, obstructing our ability to address new challenges.
In part this is because growth has made our material identities more complex. It is one thing to think of
a farmer just as a farmer; it is another thing to think of him in a context where he is also a consumer,
or located on the cusp of aspirations that might lead him to move out of farming altogether. Similarly,
our ideas about labour in a closed economy aren’t necessarily relevant for matters of labour welfare in
an open, global economy. In all these cases, the balance of considerations in designing policies to
address material inequalities is decidedly more complex than it once was; as a result, our old
instruments for producing a greater degree of economic equality may no longer work as intended.
The most prominent example of this new reality is the issue of land. Inequality of access to land
preoccupied the nationalist imagination: Gandhians thought their anti-materialism would lead to the
voluntary abnegation of land; Nehru and other liberals believed the state should and could engineer a
modicum of land redistribution. In an overwhelmingly agrarian economy, the vision of an egalitarian
utopia centred on land reform. But as a rule, democracies have not been very successful at
implementing radical land reform, and India’s experience was no different. It was able to abolish
zamindari, the most egregious form of land-based exploitation. But in many states, the whole structure
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of formal and informal rights that lay below the level of the zamindar was never decisively sorted out,
producing an intense agrarian struggle.
At present, however, in the context of India’s uneven development, the politics of land are playing out
very differently. The issue of land has become central to conflicts in our society, whether in the case of
tribals desperately trying to secure the rights to use their traditional lands, farmers contesting land
acquisition, or disputes over urban zoning and development. But while land remains an issue of great
social contention, it is, with some exceptions, not the locus of an egalitarian politics. For several
reasons, land no longer seems a plausible mechanism for producing equality; in fact, land assets arenow a means by which inequality is reproduced and exacerbated rather than reduced. In much of
rural India, the quest is now to get off the land: the fragmentation in landholdings, combined with
dramatic shifts in economic aspiration, has made the prospect of working the land far less desirable;
access to small landholdings no longer appears to be a source of empowerment.
Land acquisition has also become a mechanism for deepening inequality in three distinct ways. First,
property rights, which were weakened in India to facilitate land reform and help the poor, ironically
ended up dispossessing them even more. Second, the price of land, and the willingness of farmers to
part with it, depends largely on its value: those already in possession of valuable land are further
enriched by its acquisition, while small farmers in poorer states—who also have less ability to bargain —get a poorer deal. The conflict over land today is not so much about redistribution as about whether
the value of land can be used as an asset for participation in the wider economy, and those areas
where valuations are low see greater conflicts over acquisition; dispossession, therefore, is also
unequal in its effects. Third, while land acquisition often involves the promise of jobs in addition to
monetary compensation, this too has done nothing to diminish inequality. In most areas, there has
been insufficient investment in providing skills to the dispossessed that would enable them to get
meaningful jobs. Even when companies do hire local labour to perform menial work, this does nothing
to shift the long-term trajectory of the affected communities. For all these reasons, land acquisition is
often an occasion for reproducing existing inequalities rather than closing the gap.
IF THE POLITICS OVER LAND have taken a new turn, the politics of taxation and welfare, as currently
conceived, have also produced their own new pathologies. In some ways, these pathologies have to be
understood against the backdrop of past failures in India. This is not the occasion to debate the merits
of the Nehruvian developmental model, and its interpretation by his successors. But it left a lasting
institutional legacy that still marks the politics of equality. To put it somewhat simplistically, the
Nehruvian social democratic imagination had three components: high taxation, heavy state regulation
of private enterprise, and centralisation of power on the pretext of producing equality. Each of these
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components produced their own pathologies. The result of irrational levels of taxation was not
redistribution, but instead the creation of a black economy and a culture of avoidance that became
second nature to Indian economic activity. Partly as a backlash, there has been a greater
rationalisation of the tax system during the past two decades. But it still rests largely on indirect rather
than direct taxes, and it would stretch the imagination to argue that tax policy is now considered a
locus of promoting equality.
State control over private enterprise has, to a certain degree, been liberalised. But in crucial areas like
labour laws, these controls still remain. How much of a fetter these are on growth, productivity andemployment generation is a debatable matter; in many states, as is so often the case in India, there is a
considerable gap between the law and actual practices. But these labour laws did have the unintended
effect of fragmenting the power of labour. Insofar as they produced incentives for outsourcing, smaller
units, and greater use of informal workers, they prevented the emergence of a full-blown labour
movement. Judged solely by the ratio between lockouts and strikes, the bargaining position of labour
has progressively weakened over the past two decades. Many would argue that weakening the power
of labour has been good for growth; others would point out that in an age of mobile global capital,
labour’s bargaining hand has been everywhere seriously weakened. But whatever the case, these
developments have radically diminished the significance of the workplace as a site for the politics of
equality.
The effects of centralisation have been more complex and subtle. In some ways, the need to tackle
inequality provided a justification for the centralisation of the state; the idea was that if matters were
left to local authorities, local elites in any given area would simply use state power to reinforce their
existing control. This concern was at the heart of Nehru and Ambedkar’s scepticism of
decentralisation. But in reality, the opposite happened: the central state was not strong enough to
break the power of local elites; indeed, it relied on co-opting them. At the same time, the excessive
centralisation of decision-making—which meant even minor decisions like teacher appointments or
welfare distribution were not under local control—deprived ordinary citizens of a sense of agency,
limiting their avenues for meaningful political participation. In recent years, there has been more of an
appetite for strengthening local self-government, but the entrenched weight of the old system still
militates against public participation in decisions that affect people’s lives. Participation of this sort is a
key medium for the production of social equality, but even today the state consistently abridges these
possibilities.
THIS PARTICULAR MOMENT is a propitious one for rethinking the politics of social democracy.
Whatever its other limitations, high growth provides an opportunity to build a state. The terms of our
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new social contract were supposed to be simple: private enterprise would deliver high growth; this
high growth would translate into increased government revenue; this revenue would be deployed to
create more equal opportunity. To a limited extent, this promise has been fulfilled in the past decade:
high growth did boost government revenues, which funded one of the most ambitious expansions of
state spending in Indian history, visible in schemes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee,
Indira Awas Yojana and Right to Education. There has also been a massive expansion in the provision
of access to infrastructure like rural roads and telecommunications, a key component of increased
inclusion. In short, we have the financial and technological means to achieve greater inclusion;
financing a modicum of social democracy has become possible. But it is important that these resourcesbe applied to building the elements of genuine social democracy, rather than frittered away on
populism.
But this historical opportunity is being threatened on all sides. There is still a great deal of ideological
resistance to recognising the potentially liberating effect of growth, and the real opportunities it
affords even to the poor. It is fashionable to assert that there are two Indias, one on the fast track of
growth, and the other still mired in stagnation. Certainly, looking at India’s rising Gini coefficients
might give this impression, and India’s growth spurt has indeed been associated with rising inequality.
But what this “two Indias” story misses is the fact that the two Indias are closely linked: while
inequality on some measures has increased, growth has also lifted people out of poverty and createdunprecedented opportunities for mobility. Indeed, much of our politics now centres on a new clamour
for participation in the growth story—evident, to take just one example, in the exposition in demand
for education at all levels.
The danger here is that while there is a great deal of rhetorical handwringing over the growth of
inequality, we are misunderstanding the nature of the challenge it poses. Much of our current debate is
focused on the state’s failure to deliver public goods like health and education—which is indeed one
source of persistent inequality. But this approach links the politics of equality irrevocably to the
politics of accountability. The state has the resources; if only we could make it more accountable, the
building blocks of equality will be put in place. But the politics of accountability is a weak substitute for
a politics of equality, in part because it fails to acknowledge how and why the capacity of the state has
already been diminished. India’s elites, both the cause and the victims of state failure, responded by
essentially seceding from the state: they provide their own private goods, from security to health. The
elite’s exit from the provision of public goods has in some respects exacerbated a sense of inequality,
condemning most citizens to a second-rate state. Worse, this tendency may be self-reinforcing: more
elites will exit because state credibility is low, and state credibility will therefore fall even lower.
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B h b i l bl i h h li i f bili i h i li l i
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But the more substantial problem with the politics of accountability is that it pays little attention to
what the state delivers. From the perspective of equality, the state’s long-term priority should be to
equip citizens with the ability to participate in a growing economy—to make people more capable and
productive, or provide them the means to become so. The most serious question for the future is about
the dimensions of participation: not simply political participation, but the capacity of individuals to
make occupational transitions and participate in wider economic changes. This depends on several
factors that have already been discussed: education, infrastructure, health, access to credit, and so on.
But the most important burden faced by the poor is often not resource deprivation. It is that the state
actively prevents their participation in a wider economy: it does not let them set up businesses; itmakes entry barriers to cities enormously high; it excludes them under the pretext of regulating them.
On the ground, the simple truth is this: the license-permit raj has been dismantled only for the
privileged—the brunt of the state’s licensing mentality is borne by small businesses, hawkers, small
traders, artisans, and even labour. The irony of our current politics of equality is that while it has
focused on the distribution of state resources, the state has been actively preventing citizens from
becoming more productive participants in economic growth.
The next generation of conflicts will be less about distributive issues, defined along traditional class
lines. They will be more about tearing down these barriers to participation. We have fragmented and
dominated the rural poor through our welfare schemes; and we confine the urban poor to the marginsof participation by making their very presence hover between legality and illegality. The brunt of this
statism is often not borne by the rich, who can exit, but by the ordinary migrant looking to participate
in a growing economy. The next generation of conflict will come precisely from these citizens, who are
trying to wrest their rights of participation from a recalcitrant state. The central question in an
economy is the production of good jobs, and it is far from clear that India is on the kind of growth
trajectory that could absorb its increasingly aspirational and educated workforce. This mismatch has
not yet had immediate political effects, in part because longer schooling has slowed the rate of
workforce expansion. But when India’s demographic dividend hits the market, so to speak, a different
kind of politics of inequality will be unleashed.
India’s pattern of growth certainly needs to be interrogated. But at this point, there is a real danger that
the association of growth with corruption will delegitimise the former, and a politics of virtue will
replace intelligent thinking about how to tackle India’s economic challenges. The link between growth
and corruption also has a direct bearing on the politics of equality: first, the most visible markers of
inequality have come from the interaction between state and capital in sectors like mining,
infrastructure and land, where it is not free enterprise but the pattern of corrupt state-business
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l ti th t h t b t d i lit Th bl ith I di ’ t f f it li i
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relations that has most exacerbated inequality. The problem with India’s present form of capitalism is
not that it has produced inequality, it is that it has eroded the legitimacy of politics: when the economic
dominance of a small number of players threatens to destroy the credibility of the entire political
process, a society is in deep trouble.
Second, it is now becoming clearer that much of what we call liberalisation was directed towards the
interests of big business, which got preference in everything from cheap credit to captive power.
Access to credit is one key component of building a more egalitarian business environment, but state
complicity ensured that big business mopped up most of that credit, often at the cost of smallenterprise. A development model that inhibits the creation of small- and medium-sized firms is a
recipe for exacerbating inequality; the same is true for a model of capitalism that delivers excessive
rewards to those who can manipulate the state rather than those who can productively compete.
THE POLITICS OF EQUALITY is at an impasse. The main ideological idioms in which it was conducted
have been exhausted. And we are barely beginning to come to terms with the complexity of material
conditions that affect equality. It is perhaps not an accident that whatever energy is left in our politics
of equality takes two forms: from the top, a push to induce the state to spend more on welfare; and
from the bottom, greater pressure to promote accountability. The politics of equality is now being
aligned largely with a new idiom, that of accountability—which may be necessary to fix at least onepiece of the equality problem, the misallocation of state resources in the name of promoting equality.
This could perhaps be one reason for some cautious optimism.
Another reason to be optimistic is that growth, for all its limitations, has produced an immense
churning. The only serious studies of intergenerational mobility in India have shown grounds for some
hope: a recent paper by three economists, Viktoria Hnatkovska, Amartya Lahiri and Sourabh Paul,
suggests that intergenerational educational and income mobility among Dalits is increasing at a rate
faster than for non-Dalits; Dalits are now also switching occupations at a rate equal to the rest of the
population, which means the caste barriers to occupational mobility are declining. Similarly, statistics
on enrolment in urban secondary and higher education show that women’s enrolment is nowmatching, if not exceeding, that of men—a sign that there is good reason to believe economic
prosperity is changing perceptions about the benefits of education, which also provides the necessary
conditions for mobility. Under these circumstances, the old politics of economic equality—fixated on
keeping rural India in its place, protecting small sections of labour rather than creating new
opportunities, and focusing solely on welfare rather than the means of participation—will no longer be
tenable.
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Equality is forged in the crucible of politics; it would be presumptuous to prescribe solutions But the
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