A sample survey on India's human development status carried out in 2011-12 by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and the University of Maryland, US, suggests that one in four Indians practices untouchability in some form or the other.
The highlights of the survey, based on a sample of 42,000 households andpublished by The Indian Expresstoday (29 November) are that 52 percent of Brahmins admitted to practising untouchability in some form or the other, with the percentages for non-Brahmin forward castes being 24, for OBCs 33, and 15 and 22 for the scheduled castes (SCs) and scheduled tribes (STs). Apart from Hindus (35 percent), Muslims and Sikhs also had a large proportion practicing untouchability (18 percent and 23 percent respectively. Only Christians had a relatively low 5 percent.
These results are not surprising, and will surely give endless joy to Brahmin- and Hinduism-bashers - who will carefully exclude the Muslim and Sikh practice of untouchability from censure. Moreover, there is the danger is deciding the glass is half-empty when it is half-full. If 73 percent of Indians do not overtly practice untouchability (we can never know about hidden attitudes), that is a gain from the near-100 percent who did a century ago. It is not a reason for self-flagellation.
But that need not detain us here. While detailed conclusions can be arrived at only when we get more details about the methodology used and more finer data-points, some broad conclusions seem worth elaborating on. In fact, the real message of the survey is in its outlier data - not the ones that conform to our stereotypes.
#1: Brahmins and caste: The high percentage of Brahmins in the untouchability blacklist is believable for Brahmins have historically been the most obsessed about ritual purity and formed the priestly class. The positive thing to note from this distressingly high level of untouchability practised by Brahmins is that it is mostly confined to the Hindi heartland. Education seems to be a driver of progressive attitudes, not wealth.
A counter-point: My own belief is that changes in caste attitudes may have less to do with even education and more with urbanisation and the meritocracy brought in by a market-based economy. There might be a mine of information in the urban-rural data on untouchability in the NCAER survey (remember Ambedkar asked Dalits to move out of villages for precisely that reason). It's a pity we don't have time series comparisons with attitudes, say, before 1991 and now. Future surveys should track these things or else we will have no points of reference.
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