What Dalit intellectuals? What Nobel laureates?

Its indeed amazing that what kind of Dalit intellectuals get the status of experts. Even more amazing they should be relied upon by Nobel laureates themselves to form some impression of a territory they are not familiar with.

My attention was drawn to a blog by Gary Becker, a Nobel-prize-winning economist.

He waxes eloquent on the benefits of globalization for the oppressed Indian castes.

But for a Nobelite he doesn’t seem to have made much of a groundwork.

Witness this: The Indian government early after it became independent in 1947 officially abolished the caste system, and especially the horrible position of the 160 million untouchables.

Abolished the caste system? Sorry Professor, the Indian constitution does talk of abolishing untouchability, but not of the “caste system,” even assuming anyone can abolish such things.

Becker also goes on to say, “An employer discriminates against untouchables, women, or other minority members when he refuses to hire them even though they are cheaper relative to their productivity than the persons he does hire. Discrimination in this way raises his costs and lowers his profits. This puts him at a competitive disadvantage relative to employers who maximize their profits, and hire only on the basis of productivity per dollar of cost. Strongly discriminating employers, therefore, tend to lose out to other employers in competitive industries that have easy entry of new firms.”
Do Indian employers decide against discrimination on such grounds? Sounds more like wishful thinking than any observation based on a hard look at the Indian scene.

And pray what has the wonderful economist gone by while finding the Indian scene validates his own theory on competition and discrimination?
Hear him - "An eye-opening article in the New York Times on August 29th discusses the effects of India's economic reforms and subsequent economic growth on the poverty and progress of the untouchables. This is India's lowest and poorest caste whose members have been shunned by the other castes for centuries. They have been confined to the dirtiest and least desirables jobs. The article is built around the views of a successful untouchable, Chandra Bhan Prasad, a former Maoist revolutionary who is married to another untouchable. His observations and interpretation of the effects of India's economic liberalization that started in 1991 on progress of some untouchables converted him to the belief that competitive and open markets is the only hope for his caste."

Interestingly while the economist himself could scarcely contain his enthusiasm over the redemptive power of globalization, the not-so-knolwedgeable New York Times correspondent is a bit skeptical.

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here is the problem with Mr. Prasad’s survey. Even if it chronicles progress, the survey cannot tie it to any one cause, least of all economic changes. In fact, other empirical studies in this budding area of inquiry show that in parts of India where economic liberalization has had the greatest impact, neither rural poverty nor the plight of Dalits has consistently improved.

Abhijit Banerjee, an economist at M.I.T. who studies poverty in India, says that the reform years coincide with the rise of Dalit politicians, and that both factors may have contributed to a rise in confidence among Dalits.
Moreover, Old India’s caste prohibitions have made sure that some can prosper more easily than others. India’s new knowledge-based economy rewards the well-educated and highly skilled, and education for centuries was the preserve of the upper castes.
Today, discrimination continues, with some studies suggesting that those with familiar lower-caste names fare worse in job interviews, even with similar qualifications. The Indian elite, whether corporate heads, filmmakers, even journalists, is still dominated by the upper castes.
From across India still come reports of brutality against untouchables trying to transcend their destiny.
It is a measure of the hardships of rural India that so many Dalits in recent years are migrating to cities for back-breaking, often unregulated jobs, and that those who remain in their villages consider sharecropping a step up from day labor.
But more than the starry-eyed professor, it is Chandrabhan our own native intellectual am exercised about.
Mr. Prasad was born into the Pasi community, once considered untouchable on the ancient Hindu caste order. Today, a chain-smoking, irrepressible didact, he is the rare outcaste columnist in the English language press and a professional provocateur. His latest crusade is to argue that India’s economic liberalization is about to do the unthinkable: destroy the caste system. The last 17 years of new capitalism have already allowed his people, or Dalits, as they call themselves, to “escape hunger and humiliation,” he says, if not residual prejudice.
At a time of tremendous upheaval in India, Mr. Prasad is a lightning rod for one of the country’s most wrenching debates: Has India’s embrace of economic reforms really uplifted those who were consigned for centuries to the bottom of the social ladder? Mr. Prasad, who guesses himself to be in his late 40s because his birthday was never recorded, is an anomaly, often the lone Dalit in Delhi gatherings of high-born intelligentsia.
He has the zeal of an ideological convert: he used to be a Maoist revolutionary who, by his own admission, dressed badly, carried a pistol and recruited his people to kill their upper-caste landlords. He claims to have failed in that mission.
Mr. Prasad is a contrarian. He calls government welfare programs patronizing. He dismisses the countryside as a cesspool. Affirmative action is fine, in his view, but only to advance a small slice into the middle class, who can then act as role models. He calls English “the Dalit goddess,” able to liberate Dalits.
Along with India’s economic policies, once grounded in socialist ideals, Mr. Prasad has moved to the right. He is openly and mischievously contemptuous of leftists. “They have a hatred for those who are happy,” he said.
This kind of a fraudulent or self-serving arguments, when even NYT reporters find difficult to buy, we don’t have to break our heads on that.
Only two things. Karl Marx himself did talk of breaking a congealed Oriental society through external intervention.
Certainly but for the colonial intervention India might have remained frozen in some forlorn past.
But having said that should not any honest assessment take into account the cost of it all. If India lost its famed handloom thanks to the brutal British, the benefits of globalization have spread very unevenly.
Jobless growth, the explosive expansion of the IT sector and the like are clichés. The cultural aspect of globalization, what does it do to the relatively more social eastern psyche, these we shall go into another time.
Here the likes of Prasad who bask in the role of agent provocateurs are more dangerous Mayavatis or Paswans who mislead the innocent Dalit masses.
As I have always said the treachery of the educated is the greatest sin and shouldn’t be forgiven.
Become pretty longish. Shall pick up the theme another time.