India. Craig Jeffrey

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      Kannan’s conclusion, ‘It is clear that the burden of poverty is concentrated among the socially disadvantaged groups – Dalits/Adivasis and Muslims – to a very significant degree’ (2018: 35), is unquestionably correct, and reflects ‘durable inequalities’. These are illuminated by the ethnographic research, in five sites, spread across India, reported by Alpa Shah, Jens Lerche and their co-workers in the book Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste and Inequality in Twenty-First Century India (2018). The anthropologists found that the casual labour supplied especially by Dalits and adivasis, some of it by Dalits and adivasis from eastern India who have travelled across the country for work, is a significant factor in the processes of accumulation that are going on. Shah and Lerche argue that ‘the entrenchment of social difference in the expansion of capitalism takes place through at least three inter-related processes: inherited inequalities of power; super-exploitation based on casual migrant labour; and conjugated oppression (that is the intertwined multiple oppressions based on caste, tribe, class, gender, and region)’ (Shah and Lerche 2018: 2, emphasis in the original). Here they are referring to inequalities of power between people that are inherited from local caste hierarchies and from historic class differences related to landholding and occupations in the rural economy; to the kind of exploitation of migrant casual labour that is richly documented in their ethnographies, and that sees employers using a range of tactics to ensure that labour remains insecure and dependent; and to the ways in which ideologies of caste and patriarchy intersect with class exploitation to produce oppression. These three processes produce durable inequality (and see chapter 11).

The significance of these enduring inequalities, grounded in rigid social discrimination – that is to be equated with racism – is shown up, as well, in research on social and economic mobility in India. Between 2009 and 2012, Anirudh Krishna and a team of researchers interviewed more than 2,000 people who had gained admission to one of five engineering colleges, or eight business schools, or to one of three different classes of government employees. He was interested in the social backgrounds of those who are able to gain admission to the kinds of institutions from which it is possible to enter into the most sought-after careers. One conclusion was outstanding: people brought up in rural areas are at severe disadvantage in gaining entry. The chances of gaining admission for individuals who are poor, rural, Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe (75 per cent of whom in the case of SCs and more than 90 per cent in the case of STs are rural, according to any definition), and who are women, are virtually zero (although women from relatively privileged urban backgrounds are now doing quite well). Very few SCs and STs are able to gain entry, and the numbers of Muslims are less than half, in proportion to their share in the population of India. The parents of new entrants to these prestigious institutions tend to be highly educated themselves, and in professional positions. More than 90 per cent had fathers with college degrees and mothers with at least high school education – when, in 2005 (according to data from the India Human Development Survey), in only 7 per cent of rural and 15 per cent of urban СКАЧАТЬ