A horrendous massacre in Tamil Nadu, 1968

A recurring theme in Understanding Society for the past several years is the occurrence of unfathomable atrocity in the twentieth century. Many of the examples considered occurred in Europe. But atrocities have occurred in many countries and civilizations. A horrific example occurred in Tamil Nadu, India, in 1968. In the small rural village of Keezhvenmani, some 44 dalit people, mostly women and children, were gathered into a hut by the strongmen of local landlords, the hut was set afire, and all 44 innocent dalit people died a horrifying, torturous death. The exact number of victims is uncertain.    

The term "dalit" refers to the lowest caste of people in the Indian caste system, now officially designated as "Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe", and the massacre at Keezhvenmani was only one of a number of mass murders of dalits in Tamil Nadu since independence. (Here is a detailed report by Human Rights Watch on violence against dalit women in India (link). A central finding of the report: "The lack of law enforcement leaves many Dalit women unable to approach the legal system to seek redress. Women are often also unaware of the laws; their ignorance is exploited by their opponents, by the police, and, as illustrated by the cases below, by the judiciary. Even when cases are registered, the lack of appropriate investigation, or the judge’s own caste and gender biases, can lead to acquittal, regardless of the availability of evidence or witnesses. The failure to successfully prosecute cases of rape also allows for crimes against women to continue unabated, and in the caste context, encourages the use of rape as a tool to punish and silence Dalit communities.")

The young scholar Nithila Kanagasabai (herself a resident of Tamil Nadu) attempted to provide an evidence-based reconstruction of the Keezhvenmani massacre in "The Din of Silence: Reconstructing the Keezhvenmani Dalit Massacre of 1968" (link). 

The background of the 1968 killings was the conflict between landlords who owned or controlled the rice paddy of the region (mirasdar) and the landless workers (often formerly bonded laborers) who were the primary workforce. These agricultural workers were dalits and they were extremely poor. When these workers and families began to support the mobilizing efforts of the increasingly active presence of several Communist parties in the region, the landlords began to use violence against these workers and families. A number of murders occurred in the months preceding the December 1968 massacre at Keezhvenmani. Here is Kanagasabai's description of the December 25 massacre:

According to eye witness accounts, on 25th December 1968, at around 10 p.m., the mirasdars and their henchmen came in police lorries and surrounded the cheri (hutments), cutting off all routes of escape. They shot at the labourers and their families who could only throw stones to protect themselves or flee from the spot. They also started burning the huts in the vicinity. Many of the women and children, and some old men, sought protection in a hut that was 8 ft x 9 ft. The hut was burnt down, and the people with it. Both the sessions court and the high court that later heard the case, held that those who committed the arson were not aware of the presence of people in that particular hut (Krishnakumar, 2005). But eye witness accounts by the survivors point to an altogether different truth. (111)

The accused perpetrators of this atrocity were charged, tried, and convicted, but their convictions were set aside by the Madras High Court. "The evidence did not enable Their Lordships to identify and punish the guilty” (114).

This event illustrates the workings of oppression involving both caste and class. The landless workers were predominantly dalit -- the lowest caste. And they were the poorest of the poor, with very little power to assert a fair share of the harvest. Land owners were in a position to resist increases in wages (the primary demand of the workers in this dispute), both through their structural advantage within the property system (land ownership) and their coercive power (through their ability to call upon armed thugs to carry out their violence against the dalit protests). A solution for the property disadvantage for the dalit workers is land reform, and during the years following the Keezhvenmani massacre there was a reasonably strong organization dedicated to land reform and dalit land ownership, the Land for Tillers Freedom (LAFTI). However, land reform based on NGO activism is likely to remain small-scale, in comparison to state-wide land reform programs.

Kanagasabai quotes V Geetha and Kalpana Karunakaran in the introduction to Mythily Sivaraman's Haunted by Fire (2013):

That episode and visit brought home to Mythily the starkness of life in this grain rich part of Tamil Nadu... She realised that the price for dignity, for daring to declare oneself a communist was very high in these parts – many had paid with their lives... Unsurprisingly, in her subsequent reflections, she refused to concede that the monstrous incident at Kilvenmani was only a wage dispute gone wrong, and argued passionately for it to be recognised for what it was: class struggle in the countryside. (Geetha & Karunakaran, 2013)

Class struggle in the countryside, indeed -- landlords exercising horrendous violence against landless workers.

Decline of democracy in India

The entrenched rule of the BJP and its leader, Narendra Modi, has led to a truly alarming degradation in India's democratic institutions (link). Hindu nationalism and the degradation of citizenship rights for Muslims and other non-Hindus; the rise of paramilitary violence in cities; the repression of non-compliant students and academics through violence and the threat of violence; the systematic undermining of judicial institutions -- India is fast becoming an "illiberal democracy" (link) in which single-party rule and an autocratic leader systematically erode the principles of equal citizenship, freedom of speech and association, and the integrity and independence of other constitutional mechanisms. 

The well-respected Freedom House index of freedom documents the decline of democratic freedoms in India (link). Here is a summary of the 2021 Freedom House assessment:

India’s status declined from Free to Partly Free due to a multiyear pattern in which the Hindu nationalist government and its allies have presided over rising violence and discriminatory policies affecting the Muslim population and pursued a crackdown on expressions of dissent by the media, academics, civil society groups, and protesters.

Overview

While India is a multiparty democracy, the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has presided over discriminatory policies and increased violence affecting the Muslim population. The constitution guarantees civil liberties including freedom of expression and freedom of religion, but harassment of journalists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and other government critics has increased significantly under Modi. Muslims, scheduled castes (Dalits), and scheduled tribes (Adivasis) remain economically and socially marginalized. (link)

Here is a sober account of Hindu nationalist violence, organized by RSS groups, against students and faculty in February 2020 at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi (link). 

The group, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidya Parishad (ABVP), is the youth wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Founded 94 years ago by men who were besotted with Mussolini’s fascists, the RSS is the holding company of Hindu supremacism: of Hindutva, as it’s called. Given its role and its size, it is difficult to find an analogue for the RSS anywhere in the world. In nearly every faith, the source of conservative theology is its hierarchical, centrally organised clergy; that theology is recast into a project of religious statecraft elsewhere, by other parties. Hinduism, though, has no principal church, no single pontiff, nobody to ordain or rule. The RSS has appointed itself as both the arbiter of theological meaning and the architect of a Hindu nation-state. It has at least 4 million volunteers, who swear oaths of allegiance and take part in quasi-military drills. (link)

The violence was organized and brutal, and eye witness reports assert that the police stood by without intervening.

The police were called, but they didn’t move to stop the violence. Instead, a posse of policemen installed itself at JNU’s gate, allowing no one in. Yogendra Yadav, a political activist, arrived at the gate at 9pm. Ninety minutes later, the attackers emerged, still masked and armed. Even then, the police detained no one. Instead, they were permitted to walk away as if nothing had happened. When Yadav’s colleague took photos, Yadav was set upon by a knot of men, knocked down and kicked in the face. The police did nothing. Later, from a video, Yadav identified a local ABVP official among those who had hit him. In a statement, the ABVP blamed the attacks on “leftist goons,” but on television members admitted that the masked, armed men and women on campus were part of the ABVP. Still, the Delhi police pressed no charges. “The police gave the goons cover, gave them free rein on campus,” Yadav said. A JNU professor went further, claiming that: “The police are complicit.”

This is fascism -- and the history of the RSS goes back directly to its admiration for Mussolini's fascist movement in the 1920s. Paramilitary violence is a horrific step forward in the decline of democracy.

The attack on intellectuals and the attack on the independence of the judiciary come together in the increasingly aggressive efforts made by the BJP and Modi to silence their critics. Consider for example the legal assault on Anand Teltumbde (link). "Teltumbde, an advocate for India’s most disadvantaged communities, including Dalits, once called 'untouchables,' has been swept up in a broad crackdown against lawyers, activists and dissent in general." And he has been treated in a very prejudicial manner by the courts in India: "Teltumbde’s unfair treatment by our judiciary underscores the loss of independence by India’s institutions. The refusal by the Supreme Court to grant him bail came soon before a former chief justice, Ranjan Gogoi, joined Parliament after being nominated by Modi government.... It’s clear India’s Supreme Court has been politicized and has become pliant toward the current administration. Recently, Justice Arun Mishra, who has also ruled in favor of Modi, hailed the prime minister as a versatile genius, an internationally acclaimed visionary who thought globally and acted locally" (link).

A third dimension of the decline of democracy under Hindu nationalist rule is the effort to redefine citizenship to disadvantage Muslim immigrants. The Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) passed in 2019 was plainly designed for the purpose of reducing the rights of citizenship of immigrant Muslims in comparison to other religious minorities:

Now there will be an exception for members of six religious minority communities -- Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian -- if they can prove that they are from Pakistan, Afghanistan or Bangladesh. They will only have to live or work in India for six years to be eligible for citizenship by naturalisation, the process by which a non-citizen acquires the citizenship or nationality of that country. (link)

The Citizenship Amendment Bill has provoked extensive protest because of its plain purpose of placing burdens and disadvantages on Muslim residents of India. It should be recalled that Prime Minister Modi was partially responsible for anti-Muslim violence in 2002 in Gujarat while he was Chief Minister of Gujarat (link), and was denied a visa by the US State Department on the basis of evidence in support of this finding (link). Narendra Modi is now the apparently unshakeable chief executive of India's democracy of 1.4 billion people.

The Kerala dialogue on COVID-19

The Indian state of Kerala has taken an especially active approach to responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Kerala, a state of more than 33 million people, is governed by the Left Democratic Front, having won state elections in 2016. LDF is a coalition of left-leaning parties, led by the Communist Party of India-Marxist and the Communist Party of India. The Kerala government has been consistently focused on equity and progress for the poorest sectors of Kerala society. Significantly, the government's efforts in response to the COVID-19 crisis have fallen into the arenas of both public health and social wellbeing. The government quickly implemented public health strategies recommended by the WHO for responding -- test, trace, quarantine -- very early in the pandemic in Kerala, more quickly and consistently than the national government. Here is a nice summary by Sonia Faleiro in MIT Technology Review (link). 

In Kerala, a different style of leadership was on display. With 15 cases now confirmed across the state, Pinarayi Vijayan, the chief minister, ordered a lockdown, shutting schools, banning large gatherings, and advising against visiting places of worship. He held daily media briefings, got internet service providers to boost capacity to meet the demands of those now working from home, stepped up production of hand sanitizer and face masks, had food delivered to schoolchildren reliant on free meals, and set up a mental health help line. His actions assuaged the public’s fears and built trust.

Kerala's experience with the pandemic has been much better than other states in India. Here is a comparison table with four other states in India as of June 30, 2020, normalized to cases and deaths per million. The comparison is striking. Kerala has less than one death per million, compared to 67 deaths per million in Maharashtra (the state in which Mumbai is located), and 141 per million in Delhi.

A crucial part of the success in Kerala in limiting the impact of the pandemic was the government's early recognition that the pandemic would have disastrous consequences for poor people in the state. The government implemented emergency programs of food and stipends to offset the economic disruptions created by the epidemic. Faleiro describes the social sustenance program implemented in Kerala in these terms:

Vijayan, the state’s chief minister, was the first in the country to announce a relief package. He declared a community kitchen scheme to feed the public, and free provisions including rice, oil, and spices. He even moved up the date of state pension payments. (link)

Earlier this month the government of Kerala hosted a dialogue on the COVID-19 crisis involving extensive discussions with Noam Chomsky Amartya Sen, and Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, Chief Scientist of the World Health Organization. V.K. Ramachandran, vice-chairman of the Kerala State Planning Board, conducted fascinating conversations with Chomsky and Sen, and distinguished journalist N. Ram conducted an excellent conversation with Dr. Swaminathan. Links to the dialogues are provided below, and they are all worth viewing. A very good summary of the dialogues is provided in The Hindu here.

Here are a few highlights. Dr. Swaminathan provides a clear, scientifically precise summary of current knowledge about the virus and the best advice available for public health measures to contain its spread. Chomsky points out the connections he sees between the ideological and material commitments of neoliberal governments to corporate profits and their failure to respond adequately to the crisis. The United States government's actions during this crisis are especially egregious -- virtually no effective national policy, on the one hand, and a rush to loosen a raft of environmental regulations during the crisis, on the other. Chomsky underlines the magnifying effects that racial and economic inequalities have had on the distribution of cases and deaths across the population in the United States. He reminds viewers that, terrible as the immediate consequences of the COVID crisis are, the effects of global climate change will be immeasurably worse. Amartya Sen applauds the Kerala government's consistent attention to the immediate welfare and nutrition crisis threatened by the COVID pandemic, and notes how crucial it is for government policy to be attuned to hunger and entitlement shortfall for vulnerable populations. In this respect the COVID crisis has a lot in common with the Bengal famine of 1943, when a sudden collapse of entitlements for poor people led to massive deprivation and eventually starvation (Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation).

Sen and Chomsky have devoted their careers to offering analysis and critique of government policy, and it is very interesting to see how they both respond to the largest public health crisis that we have seen in a century. What is especially important from the Kerala experience, it seems, is that the policy values that a government implements have enormous consequences for the wellbeing, health, and safety of the populations that they serve (or fail to serve). Chomsky's basic view of most liberal democracies is that their policy values are chiefly oriented to the needs of big business, and that this leads to huge inequalities in normal times and in pandemic crisis. Sen has made the case throughout his career that governments should choose policies based on their impact on broad social welfare, not GDP or the stock market. And Kerala presents a fantastic test case: the LDF is a government that is distinctly not beholden to large corporations, it is committed to the welfare of the broad population, and its policies have been highly successful during this crisis in ways that benefit the whole of Kerala society.

Here are the videos.

The Kerala Dialogue on Covid-19

1. Introduction and excerpts from Swaminathan, Chomsky, Sen conversations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK3HqHvhJk4&t=180s

2. First conversation
N. Ram interviews Dr Soumya Swaminathan, Chief Scientist of the World Health Organization.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwFGgrHYF4w

3. Second conversation
Dr V K Ramachandran interviews Professor Noam Chomsky, laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgQKOUqwAZU

4. Third conversation
Dr V K Ramachandran interviews Professor Amartya Sen, Thomas W. Lamont University Professor of Economics and Philosophy, at Harvard University.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynrTz-aYcfs

Professor V. K. Ramachadran, the vice-chairman of the Kerala State Planning Board, conducted the interviews with Chomsky and Sen. His work as a development economist at the Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore is discussed here, here, and here.

N. Ram, a distinguished journalist whose work is discussed here, conducts the interview with Dr Soumya Swaminathan, Chief Scientist of the World Health Organization. 

Brass on anti-Muslim violence in India

The occurrence of anti-Muslim violence, arson, and murder in New Delhi last month is sometimes looked at a simply an unpredictable episode provoked by protest against the citizenship legislation enacted by the BJP and Prime Minister Modi. (See Jeffrey Gettleman and Maria Abi-Habib's New York Times article for a thoughtful and detailed account of the riots in New Delhi; link.) However, Paul Brass demonstrated several decades ago in The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India, that riots and violent episodes like this have a much deeper explanation in Indian politics. His view is that the political ideology of Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) is used by BJP and other extremist parties to advance its own political fortunes. This ideology (and the political program it is designed to support) is a prime cause of continuing violence by Hindu extremists against Muslims and other non-Hindu minorities in India.

Brass asks a handful of crucial and fundamental questions: Do riots serve a function in Indian politics? What are the political interests that are served by intensifying mistrust, fear, and hatred of Muslims by ordinary Hindu workers, farmers, and shopkeepers? How does a framework of divisive discourse contribute to inter-group hatred and conflict? “I intend to show also that a hegemonic discourse exists in Indian society, which I call the communal discourse, which provides a framework for explaining riotous violence.” (24). Throughout Brass keeps the actors in mind -- including leaders, organizers, and participants: “It is one of the principal arguments of this book that we cannot understand what happens in riots until we examine in detail the multiplicity of roles and persons involved in them”. (29) Here are the central themes of the book:

The whole political order in post-Independence north India and many, if not most of its leading as well as local actors—more markedly so since the death of Nehru—have become implicated in the persistence of Hindu-Muslim riots. These riots have had concrete benefits for particular political organizations as well as larger political uses. (6)

The maintenance of communal tensions, accompanied from time to time by lethal rioting at specific sites, is essential for the maintenance of militant Hindu nationalism, but also has uses for other political parties, organizations, and even the state and central governments. (9)

Brass documents his interpretation through meticulous empirical research, including a review of the demographic and political history of regions of India, a careful timeline of anti-Muslim riots and pogroms since Independence, and extensive interviews with participants, officials, and onlookers in one particularly important city, Aligarh, in Uttar Pradesh (northern India). Brass gives substantial attention to the discourse chosen by Hindu nationalist parties and leaders, and he argues that violent attacks are deliberately encouraged and planned.

Most commonly, the rhetoric is laced with words that encourage its members not to put up any longer with the attacks of the other but to retaliate against their aggression. There are also specific forms of action that are designed to provoke the other community into aggressive action, which is then met with a stronger retaliatory response. (24)

Brass asks the fundamental question:

What interests are served and what power relations are maintained as a consequence of the wide acceptance of the reality of popular communal antagonisms and the inevitability of communal violence? (11)

(We can ask the same question about the rise of nationalist and racist discourse in the United States in the past fifteen years: what interests are served by according legitimacy to the language of white supremacy and racism in our politics?)

Brass rejects the common view that riots in India are “spontaneous” or "responsive to provocation"; instead, he argues that communal Hindu-nationalist riots are systemic and strategic. Violence derives from a discourse of Hindu-Muslim hostility and the legitimization of violence. Given this view that riots and anti-Muslim violence are deliberate political acts in India, Brass offers an analysis of what goes into "making of a riot". He argues that there are three analytically separable phases: preparation / rehearsal; activation / enactment; and explanation / interpretation (15). This view amounts to an interpretation of the politics of Hindu nationalism as an "institutionalized riot system" (15).

When one examines the actual dynamics of riots, one discovers that there are active, knowing subjects and organizations at work engaged in a continuous tending of the fires of communal divisions and animosities, who exercise by a combination of subtle means and confrontational tactics a form of control over the incidence and timing of riots.” (31)

This deliberate provocation of violence was evident in the riots in Gujarat in 2002, according to Dexter Filkins in a brilliant piece of journalism on these issues in the New Yorker (link):

The most sinister aspect of the riots was that they appeared to have been largely planned and directed by the R.S.S. Teams of men, armed with clubs, guns, and swords, fanned out across the state’s Muslim enclaves, often carrying voter rolls and other official documents that led them to Muslim homes and shops.

Especially important in the question of civil strife and ethnic conflict in any country is the behavior and effectiveness of the police. Do the police work in an even-handed way to suppress violent acts and protect all parties neutrally? And does the justice system investigate and punish the perpetrators of violence? In India the track record is very poor, including in the riots in the early 1990s in Mumbai and in 2002 in Gujarat. Brass writes:

The government of India and the state governments do virtually nothing after a riot to prosecute and convict persons suspected of promoting or participating in riots. Occasionally, but less frequently in recent years, commissions of inquiry are appointed. If the final reports are not too damaging to the government of the day or to the political supporters of that government in the Hindu or Muslim communities, the report may be published More often than not, there is a significant delay before publication. Some reports are never made public. (65)

This pattern was repeated in Delhi during the most recent period of anti-Muslim pogrom. The police stand by while Hindutva thugs attack Muslims, burn homes and shops, and murder the innocent. Conversely, when the police function as representatives of the whole of civil society rather than supporters of a party, they are able to damp down inter-religious killing quickly (as Brass documents in his examination of the period of relative peace in Aligarh between 1978-80 to 1988-90).

Brass is especially rigorous in his development of the case for the deliberate and strategic nature of anti-Muslim bigotry within the politics of Hindu nationalism and its current government. But other experts agree. For example, Ashutosh Varshney described the dynamics of religious conflict in India in very similar terms to those offered by Brass (link):

Organized civic networks, when intercommunal, not only do a better job of withstanding the exogenous communal shocks—like partitions, civil wars, and desecration of holy places; they also constrain local politicians in their strategic behavior. Politicians who seek to polarize Hindu and Muslims for the sake of electoral advantage can tear at the fabric of everyday engagement through the organized might of criminals and gangs. All violent cities in the project showed evidence of a nexus of politicians and criminals. Organized gangs readily disturbed neighborhood peace, often causing migration from communally heterogeneous to communally homogenous neighborhoods, as people moved away in search of physical safety. Without the involvement of organized gangs, large-scale rioting and tens and hundreds of killings are most unlikely, and without the protection afforded by politicians, such criminals cannot escape the clutches of law. Brass has rightly called this arrangement an institutionalized riot system. (378)

Varshney treats these issues in greater detail in his 2002 book, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India.

The greatest impetus to the political use of the politics of hate and the program of Hindu nationalism was the campaign to destroy the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, UP, in 1992. For an informative and factual account of the Babri Mosque episode and its role within the current phase of Hindu nationalism in India, see Abdul Majid, "The Babri Mosque and Hindu Extremists Movements"; link.

Guest post: VK Ramachandran on details of life as a day laborer in India

[V. K. Ramachandran was a Professor of Economics at the Indian Statistical Institute, and is at present vice chairman of the State Planning Board of the state of Kerala. He is the author of Wage Labour and Unfreedom in Agriculture: An Indian Case Study. Previous discussions of Ramachandran's work in Understanding Society can be found here (link, link, link, link), and here is an interview I conducted with VK in 2008; link.]

[Acknowledgement: Extracted from Ramachandran, V. K., and Madhura Swaminathan, (eds.) (2018), Telling the Truth, Taking Sides: Essays for N. Ram, Tulika Books, New Delhi. This is a set of essays dedicated to the impact and progressive legacy of N Ram, journalist, writer, and important voice of the Left in India.]

"Gabriel Selvam: A Biography of Work"

V. K. Ramachandran

Among the many the many things in which N. Ram was an early instructor (and I not good enough a learner) was on how to interview, take notes, edit copy, and present the results from conversation and observation.

NR was the first among us to meet Gabriel Selvam, and the description “upstanding young agricultural labourer” is his.

An Interview in Two Parts, 1977 and 2017

1977: Young Bonded Worker

G. Selvam (35) is an upstanding young agricultural labourer who has bonded himself as a pannaiyal (permanent farm servant) out of economic necessity. Selvam’s family is of the Parayar scheduled caste.

A loan of Rs 100 taken over six years ago from CT, a petty usurer, led directly to his present condition as farm servant. At that time, the loan was taken for subsistence needs and was perceived as a temporary expedient. On account of a 120 percent interest rate, the loan of Rs 100 became a liability of Rs 220 over a year. The usurer pressed Selvam, then 31 years old, to sell his house in order to repay the loan. Selvam, refusing to abandon the family house site, went around asking for a way to work off his debt. The opportunity presented itself in the form of the landlord SCC. This landlord, who was looking for a young and strong farm servant, was willing to advance the money to clear the debt, provided Selvam attached himself as a farm servant for a remuneration of Rs 65 per month plus one sheet and a dhoti, a shirt, and a towel-cloth (thundu) a year.

Selvam took an advance of Rs 100 for going to work as a farm servant, and used that to clear just under half his debt. Then, after the first month of work, he took a loan of Rs 120 to clear the debt.

Since then, that is, for six years, Selvam has been working for well over 13 hours a day. He worked at the salary of Rs 65 a month for four years. Two years ago, when paddy prices soared to nearly Rs 150 per 58-kilogram bag, the farm servants in the village asked their employers for a raise. Selvam was given a wage rise that was long overdue: in 1977 he was paid Rs 110 a month.

SCC, like some other big landlords in the village, has found it much to his advantage to hire a farm servant in this way. He has advanced small sums of money to Selvam over the years, sums always taken “temporarily,” but with no real chance of the debtor repaying the debt and getting out of his present condition. Selvam makes it clear that he is not paid anything near the remuneration he should be getting for this work. “There is no choice,” he says, “I can’t leave my mudalali (employer, landlord) unless I can clear my debt of Rs 300. I would certainly like to leave.”

In his childhood, Selvam was not as badly off as he is today. His father, Gabriel, was a poor or lower-middle peasant, cultivating surface-irrigated land that had been leased in from landlords of the village. His mother worked as a hired labourer.

His father sent Selvam to school. Selvam studied in the Mission School in Gokilapuram, down the road from where he lives today, up to the fifth class. He completed the sixth class at the NMR School in Gokilapuram. Selvam was a good student and his father sent him to Vatthalakundu, where Selvam studied in the seventh and eighth classes, finishing when he was 16 years old. He stayed at a hostel at Vatthalakundu, and his father sent him Rs 20 a month. Selvam returned to the village after finishing the eighth class. He can read and write Tamil and can still read some English.

Selvam’s father tilled 6 kuzhi (3.6 acres) of surface-irrigated land belonging to landlord ST on kuthagai (fixed rent) for 20 years. He also worked 1.5 acres of groundwater-irrigated land belonging to SP, a landlord of Uthamapalayam. Selvam also worked on the land leased in by the family. Selvam married when he was 20 years old. His wife, Alphonse, is from a family of tenant cultivators from Pudupatti in Uthamapalayam taluk.

In about 1967, there was a sharp decline in the agriculture conducted by the family. The surface-irrigated land had poor soil and bad drainage, and standing water after the rain affected the crop. The land was manured only for one crop, one of the reasons for the yield being poor. The groundwater-irrigated land had a well with plenty of water and had a pulley and rope to draw water with. But household cultivation was in decline, the family began to incur debt, and the age-old symbol of a peasant family heading towards destitution became apparent: the cattle owned by the family became thin and weak.

About the same time, eviction took place on a large scale in the village. Earlier, the paddy crops were the traditional parunnel and samba varieties; later, with the introduction of new seeds, yields were higher, and agriculture became more profitable for the landlords. There was also fear among them, Selvam said, that the tenants would assert their right to cultivate the land. Landlords brought pressure on the tenants to leave the land. Rents were raised, rack-rents were imposed on tenants. In some cases, landlords brought great pressure on tenants to leave, offering them small amounts of money to do so. The peasants were disunited, Selvam said, and, out of fear, accepted the money and left the land.

Agricultural Wage Work

Selvam made it clear that the big landlords can always bring pressure on agricultural labourers; as for agricultural labourers, there is little scope for their advance today. Opportunities for employment in some tasks have gone down since the arrival of tractors, Selvam pointed out. The tractor has robbed those with ploughs and bullocks of ploughing work, and those with carts and bullocks of work in basal manuring. Even during threshing, the tractor has deprived agricultural labourers of employment. While earlier, there would be four days’ work at the threshing-floor and four bullocks would be needed to trample the grain for the second threshing, now the tractor can be driven over the sheaves to complete the task in less than an hour.

Unemployment is high and wages are poor, and women’s wages have actually been brought down, from Rs 3 per day to Rs 2.50 per day. There was agitation by Communists five years ago in southern villages of the Valley, Selvam recalls, when men workers won an increase in their grain wages, from 4 measures per day to 5 measures, and women an increase to 3 measures for threshing.

While wages in the village do not vary directly with the caste of the worker, discrimination against the scheduled castes, the overwhelming majority of whom are landless labourers, is deeply entrenched. Most of the farm servants in the village are Dalit.

Selvam has an extremely busy working year. During the 1976-7 agricultural year, he worked on both crops of paddy on surface-irrigated land, in different operations in the cultivation of irrigated sorghum (cholam), finger millet (ragi), tomato, and banana on groundwater-irrigated land, and in little millet (samai) on unirrigated land. In addition to agricultural work every day, he did domestic tasks at the landlord’s house. Selvam’s wife Alphonse laboured at agricultural operations for 57 days in 1976-7, and earned Rs 158.70 as wages. She seeded and cleaned tamarind for 3 days, for which she earned Rs 7.50.

Selvam’s wage is lower than other farm servants in the village, some of whom are paid Rs 130 and Rs 140 by their landlord employers. But when Selvam asks for a wage increase, the landlord arrogantly insists: “I have already increased your wages. You used to get Rs 65, now you get 110.” The standard that SCC uses, Selvam says, is not the wage paid to other farm servants in the village, but the Rs 65 pittance that Selvam himself used to receive before he was paid Rs 110 a month.

When Selvam is unwell, the landlord may give Selvam a small amount of money to buy medicine, but he will not pay for treatment for Alphonse or the children when they fall ill.

As for his home, Selvam cannot afford to erect a complete hut. When he gets a small amount of money, he adds a row of bricks to the hut. Some months ago, he bought a door-frame. Now there is a door-frame, fixed with mud into a few rows of country-made brick, with no wall around it or roof above. The single room in the hut is 8 feet by 6 feet. “We do not know when this hut will be built,” Alphonse said. “We lay a few bricks, and it may be a few months before we can add more bricks. It may take years to complete the hut in this manner.”

With all this, Selvam must also face rudeness and shouts from the landlord, the loud arrogance of SCC as taskmaster of “his” farm servant.

“Life is difficult for me,” Selvam said. He sees his children at 5 a.m. (when he leaves the house), when the older children may be just beginning to wake up. It is seldom, and only in the slack season, that he comes home before they are asleep for the night. And the hours in between are filled with arduous, back-breaking labour that covers every task that an agricultural labourer in the village can perform.

I have seen Selvam, early in the morning, heaving farmyard manure on to a cart and driving the cart to the paddy-fields, unloading it in neat piles across the field. I have seen him, bare-chested, barefoot, and dressed in an old and torn lungi, with a soiled cloth on his head to protect him from the sun, walking with a hoe across his shoulder over the ridge east of the village on the road leading to SCC’s groundwater-irrigated field in neighbouring Anamalaiyanpatti. I have seen him at the field, cutting and clearing water channels before the electricity comes on and irrigation water rushes up; and in the banana field, hacking at the tough young shoots that grow by the banana trees, cutting dry and withered leaves off the tree, and straightening tree trunks with wooden props that have been chopped and shaped by him. I have seen him, in the evenings, working in SCC’s house, watering, feeding, and washing the cattle or chopping a tree trunk for firewood for SCC’s kitchen. I have seen him at the bus-stop in Uthamapalayam, straining to lift a motor pump, newly repaired, on to the carrier of a Gokilapuram-bound bus. Standing under a bus-shelter in Gokilapuram after 11 o’clock at night, I have heard the sound of a cart coming down the road from Anamalaiyanpatti. It is Selvam, urging the bullocks through pouring rain back to the house of SCC. I have seen him after 11.30 at night, rain smudging the red mud that clings to his face and body, entering his hut and eating gruel and pickle by the weak light of an oil lamp, and preparing to catch some sleep before the next day of labour begins.

Selvam states clearly that it is not “loyalty” that keeps him with the landlord. It is his debt and the difficulty of finding alternative employment if he were to leave. “I have heard of the union of agricultural labourers in East Thanjavur. A union is needed, unity of agricultural labourers is needed. If there were a union in Gokilapuram, I would join it.”

May 1977

2017: A Working Life

Selvam worked for a total of 13 years with SCC. When he left, he was paid a mere Rs 400 a month. Selvam said that about 4000 rupees were due to him and unpaid when he left SCC’s employment.

Selvam worked 15 years as a daily worker after he left the employment of SCC. Three years after he left, Selvam’s son Arokiyasami was married. Over the three years, Selvam spent one year as a worker in a cardamom estate in Parathodu in Kerala, owned by Shanmughavel of Pannaipuram.

Alphonse worked as a wage labourer all her working life, that is, until four years ago.

Ten years ago, Selvam began to work for Venkatesan, a retired college teacher. Selvam was hired at a wage of Rs 2000 a month. Venkatesan owns 10.8 acres of thottam land and 1.8 acres of nanjai land in the north of the village, on the banks of the Thamaraikulam irrigation tank, where he grows nendran banana and coconut.

Selvam comes to the field at 7 am every day, takes a break from about 11:00 to 2:30, and works again at the field till 6 pm. He takes care of the field, clears the channels for irrigation, works the locks of the pipes for drip irrigation, supervises and works with other wage workers at some operations (planting and harvest), and weeds and cleans the fields. He also keeps the main trunks of the banana trees free of unwanted side-shoots, and applies fertilizer and undertakes all other plant protection tasks.

After three years with the landlord, Selvam asked for a raise. His new wage was fixed at Rs 4,000 a month (the worker on the neighbouring field gets Rs 6,000 a month, he told us). The landlord agreed, and said that he would henceforth account for Selvam’s withdrawals against the new wage. For Selvam is not paid his wage on a fixed day every month. He takes money for expenses from the owner “whenever I need it,” for household expenses, for festivals. The employer says he is keeping an account; Selvam trusts him and says that he, too, keeps track of how much he has taken from the landlord. He estimates that he has credit of about Rs 10,000 with the landlord. There is no formal account of Selvam’s savings with the landlord.

Four years ago, Alphonse developed a swelling on her right knee. A doctor in Uthamapalayam gave her drugs and an injection, and the swelling “sank to her foot.” Blood and pus was drained with a large syringe from the foot. Alphonse was discharged from the hospital, and was told to spread an ointment on the wound. Selvam did this every day. Alphonse began to scratch the itchy wound before it had healed completely. She eats betel leaf and nuts with lime, and the lime paste on her finger began to inflame the wound. It turned septic. Selvam took her in his son Sekhar’s autorickshaw to Cumbum, where the doctor said that she needed emergency treatment at Theni. Alphonse was taken by ambulance to the Theni Government Medical College and Hospital, where the doctors advised emergency surgery. She had a second surgery, followed by a skin graft.

In the post-operative ward, Selvam watched people on the other beds, and began to realise the importance of dressing Alphonse’s wound correctly – that it was a task that needed an expert, something he could not do himself. He hired a person to change the bandage – at Rs 50 a day – for the three months they spent in the hospital.

Alphonse is back home now. She can move a bit – to the sitting platform in front of the house, to change her clothes, to go to the bathroom; but not more than that. “We do not know how long she will survive. She has never done anyone any wrong. When she goes, it will be to heaven.”

The Children

Arokiasamy (50), the oldest child of Selvam and Alphonse, works as a mason and has a small business as a contractor for constructing small houses. His wife, Sumathi, has a tenth class school-leaving certificate, and works in the panchayat office as a data collector. They have two children, a son, Maniprathi (22), now a student at a polytechnic in Namakkal, and a daughter, Sunitha (21). Sunitha completed a B. A. degree and is now married. Her husband works on the staff of a tea estate owned by N Ramakrishnan, former MLA from Cumbum.

Arokiamary (48), the only daughter of Selvam and Alphonse, is now almost completely blind. She looks after her parents and brother, the much-loved carer in the home.

Shekhar (46) lives in Gokilapuram. He owns an autorickshaw, from which he which earns an income of Rs 500 to Rs 1000 a day. His wife, Thilakam, is a manual worker in agriculture and at non-agricultural tasks. Their children, Merlyn Marcia and Praveen, their grandparents’ joy, study in class 1 and class 2 in the English-language medium section of the Savarimuthu Udayar Memorial Higher Secondary School, a reputed school in the neighbouring village of Rayappanpatti.

Vedamuthu (44) stays at home with his parents. He is a person with intellectual disabilities, and is unable to go regularly to work.

Xavier (41), the youngest son of the family, works at loading and unloading bags of rice at the government civil supplies godown in Uthamapalayam. His wife Muthuarokiyam and he are now residents of Uthamapalayam, where his children Akhilesh, Vimalesh, and Pratibha go to school. Xavier earns 600 rupees a day, and an extra 1000 rupees a month for the manual work at the godown.

Forty Years On

Selvam and family live today in the house whose initial construction costs led him into bondage in 1977. It is completed and expanded now, a neat whitewashed structure that has the meagre furniture and appurtenances of a house that is still, after all, the house of a full-time rural manual worker. They were exploited and extremely poor – near destitute – in 1977. Today, they are still poor, Selvam’s wages are low, and he has no knowledge of how much of his earned wages are held by his employer. But he is no longer destitute, no longer in bondage, and no longer at the mercy of a harsh and cruel landlord of the old type.

They are better off now than they were in 1977 – oh yes, of course we are, Selvam says. Our house is complete, and we never go hungry, we have special things to eat: egg curry twice a week, chicken on Sundays, fish once in about twenty days. Thanks to the public system for the distribution of cereal, there is enough rice for the family. The house has been electrified (Selvam says that they received their electricity connection at the same time, conveniently, as their son Arokiasami’s wedding).

I have continued to meet Selvam over the years. I was associated with resurveys of Gokilapuram village in 1986 and 1999, and continue to be interested in changing agrarian relations in the village and region. I return to the Cumbum Valley regularly for tasks connected with the Gokilapuram Educational Trust, an organisation of which the honoree of this volume is a founder trustee. Travel to the Valley gives me an opportunity to keep in touch with Selvam; as we grow older, we grow more conscious of the value of old friendships.

Selvam asks me if I remember the little kerosene lamp (of course I do -- made of tin and with a flimsy glass chimney) that I used during our survey in 1977. I used it after dark during conversations and interviews in homes that had no electricity. You gave it to me when you left the village after the survey, he says. After electricity came to the house Selvam stored the lamp deep in a loft, where it remains today. He keeps it as a reminder of his friend -- and of the days when they had only a single lamp for light in a half-constructed house.

December 2017

Small farmers in Indian agriculture

Agriculture remains the primary source of income for India's population, and the majority of India's farmers subsist on small farms, less than two hectares (five acres). It is all but self evident that these facts imply continuing poverty and low quality of life for rural Indians. And yet the basic facts and economics of the small farm sector are poorly understood. 

The most recent product of the Project on Agrarian Relations in India (PARI) focuses on exactly this question (link). Madhura Swaminathan and Sandipan Baksi's recent volume, How Do Small Farmers Fare?: Evidence from Village Studies in India, attempts to provide a multidimensional appraisal of the complex realities of the small farm economy in India, including labor, crop productivity, incomes, costs, fertilizer use, credit, climate change, education, living standards, and an overall assessment of how small farmers fare. The book draws upon largescale statistical data collected by the Indian government, but the fundamental insights offered in each chapter are drawn from the intensive village studies conducted by PARI researchers over the past dozen years (link). And, as the resolution and quality of the essays in this volume attest, the PARI village studies constitute an enormously valuable source of information on the rural economy in India in spite of the small number of villages included.

T. Sivamurugan and Madhura Swaminathan provide an excellent survey of the methodology and scope of the PARI project in their chapter on this subject. Their chapter provides detailed information about the methodology pursued in designing and carrying out these village studies in a range of regions in the country.

The Project on Agrarian Relations in India (PARI) began in 2006. One of the objectives of the Project is to analyse village-level production, production systems and livelihoods, and the socio-economic characteristics of different strata of the rural population. As of 2016, 25 villages from 11 States of the country, covering a wide range of agro-ecological regions in the country, have been studied under PARI. In this volume, we have used data on 17 villages from 9 States. (25)

It is apparent that the PARI project considers only a small percentage of India’s villages and farming regions. However, the locations chosen have been selected to provide a useful indication of the economic status of villages and farm households in a variety of locations.

The summary data provided by this research are striking: 

According to the Agricultural Census of 2010–11, there were a total of 138.35 million operational holdings in India. The total area operated was 159.59 million hectares and the average size of an operational holding was 1.15 hectares. The average size of all holdings of size 2 hectares or less – which constituted small and marginal holdings as per the official definition – was 0.60 hectare. Holdings of size 2 hectares or less accounted for around 85 per cent of all holdings and 45 per cent of the total area operated. The number of persons who were part of small farmer households was close to half a billion. (2)

Almost 50% of India's total population consists of small farmers and their families, and 85% of all farms are less than two hectares. Plainly the situation of small farms is of enormous importance to the overall social wellbeing of India.

A particularly important topic in this volume is the assessment of small farmers' incomes that the studies permit. The summary conclusion is that India's hundreds of millions of small farmers earn incomes only slightly higher than subsistence. Rural manual workers earn even lower income.

The levels of income received by small farmer households were low, in both absolute and relative terms. The average incomes received by small farmers were not much higher than the minimum wages in agriculture stipulated by State governments. Minimum wage in India is defined as subsistence wage; hence incomes received by small farmer households were inadequate to meet investments or any requirements other than daily consumption needs. (162)

An important measure of quality of life of poor people is number of years of schooling. The PARI studies show that children in small farmer households have extremely low levels of schooling, and that there are significant difference between boys and girls. Chapter 11 finds similar evidence of deprivation with regard to other material features of quality of life: access to clean drinking water, toilets, electricity, and living space and housing.

Moreover, the studies demonstrate that these kinds of deprivation are further exacerbated by facts of caste and religion.

While small farmer households are the worst off among the peasantry, there exist disparities and differences within the class of small farmers on the basis of social identity. The analysis presented in this chapter shows that SC, ST, and Muslim households among small farmers are far more deprived in terms of housing and access to basic household amenities than households belonging to other social groups. This points to the fact that in Indian society, and more so in rural society, deprivation is not merely economic but social as well. Even though a uniform criterion was used to define small farmer households, we find that higher levels of deprivation among SC, ST, and Muslim households are an outcome of the historical exclusion and accumulated disadvantages faced and inherited by these social groups. Continued practices of untouchability, physical and residential segregation, and isolation shape current outcomes for these groups. (327)

It has sometimes been maintained that small farming is potentially as productive as largescale commercial farming. It is maintained that intensive family labor has the potential for producing crops as efficiently as mechanized capital intensive farming -- presumably because of the lack of efficiencies of scale in farming. The research reported here by Venkatesh Athreya and colleagues rebuts this longstanding assumption about small-scale farming:

At the core of the argument in favour of small-scale farming in terms of its efficiency is the alleged inverse relationship between land productivity and size. It states that small farms are more efficient, de ned in terms of yield per acre, than large farms. It is argued that this relationship holds true more or less universally. This assertion was also the basis of the debate in India on farm size and productivity based on findings from the Farm Management Studies. This argument, which continued through the 1960s, has seen a recent revival. Apart from the empirical challenge posed to this formulation (especially by the green revolution), it has also been theoretically rebutted by Terence Byres…. The body of empirical evidence from FAS surveys too does not support the hypothesis of an inverse relationship between farm size and output per unit of land.

One thing that is noteworthy in this collection is the significant use that the authors make of classical Marxist analysis of agricultural development and the peasantry. Unlike other national traditions in the social sciences, Indian researchers continue to find insights and valuable frameworks in the writings of Marx, Lenin, Kautsky, and other Marxist writers on these topics. And, as the many texts cited in the introductory chapter illustrate, these figures were in fact careful observers of the agrarian systems of Europe. Here is how Athreya et al summarize the Marxist perspective in the Indian context:

The attitude towards the peasantry in the context of India’s development, especially after the country won political independence, has been a matter of much discussion in Indian Marxist literature. Comprehensive land reform is essential to the completion of the democratic revolution in India. Achievement of the democratic revolution under a working class leadership in alliance with the peasantry, especially poor peasants and agricultural labourers as key rural classes in this process, is necessary for further democratic advance. Such a view envisages the continued presence of a large population of small and middle peasants for a long time. We need public policy that supports the peasantry, especially focusing on developing the productive forces among them. (14)

This volume is a very important contribution to development studies in India and other parts of South and Southeast Asia. The dynamics of agriculture remain a critical factor in the social progress of these countries, and this careful and detailed research will provide a basis for constructing more effective development policies in India and elsewhere. And the data suggest that the situation of the rural sector in India is in crisis: incomes for small farmers and landless workers are extremely low with few indications of improvement, and measures of quality of life mirror these findings.

Proliferation of hate and intolerance

Paul Brass provides a wealth of ethnographic and historical evidence on the causes of Hindu-Muslim violence in India in The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India. His analysis here centers on the city of Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh, and he believes that his findings have broad relevance in many parts of India. His key conclusion is worth quoting:

It is a principal argument of this book that the whole political order in post-Independence north India and many, if not most of its leading as well as local actors -- more markedly so since the death of Nehru -- have become implicated in the persistence of Hindu-Muslim riots. These riots have had concrete benefits for particular political organizations as well as larger political uses. Hindu-Muslim opposition, tensions, and violence have provided the principal justification and the primary source of strength for the political existence of some local political organizations in many cities and towns in north India linked to a family of militant Hindu nationalist organizations whose core is an organization founded in 1925, known as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Included in this family, generally called the Sangh Parivar, are an array of organizations devoted to different tasks: mass mobilization, political organization, recruitment of students, women, and workers, and paramilitary training. The leading political organization in this family, originally called the Jan Sangh, is now the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), currently (2001) the predominant party in India's governing coalition. All the organizations in the RSS family of militant Hindu organizations adhere to a broader ideology of Hindutva, of Hindu nationalism that theoretically exists independently of Hindu-Muslim antagonisms, but in practice has thrived only when that opposition is explicitly or implicitly present. (6-7)

Brass provides extensive evidence, that is, for the idea that a key cause and stimulant to ethnic and religious conflict derives from the political entrepreneurs and organizations who have a political interest in furthering conflict among groups.

Let's think about the mechanics of the spread of attitudes of intolerance, distrust, and hate throughout a population. What kinds of factors and interactions lead individuals to increase the intensity of their negative beliefs and attitudes towards other groups? What drives the spread of hate and intolerance through a population? (Donatella della Porta, Manuela Caiani and Claudius Wagemann's Mobilizing on the Extreme Right: Germany, Italy, and the United States is a valuable recent effort at formulating a political sociology of right-wing extremism in Italy, Germany, and the United States. Here is an earlier post that also considers this topic; link.)

Here are several mechanisms that recur in many instances of extremist mobilization.

Exposure to inciting media. Since the Rwandan genocide the role of radio, television, and now the internet has been recognized in the proliferation and intensification of hate. The use of fake news, incendiary language, and unfounded conspiracy theories seems to have accelerated the formation of constituencies for the beliefs and attitudes of hate. Breitbart News is a powerful example of a media channel specifically organized around conveying suspicion, mistrust, disrespect, and alienation among groups. ("Propaganda and conflict: Evidence from the Rwandan genocide" is a finegrained study of Rwandan villages that attempts to estimate the impact of a radio station on violent participation by villagers; link.)

Incidents. People who have studied the occurrence of ethnic violence in India have emphasized the role played by various incidents, real or fictitious, that have elevated emotions and antagonisms in one community or another. An assault or a rape, a house or shop being burned, even an auto accident can lead to a cascade of heightened emotions and blame within a community, communicated by news media and word of mouth. These sorts of incidents play an important role in many of the conflicts Brass describes.

Organizations and leaders. Organizations like white supremacist clubs and their leaders make deliberate attempts to persuade outsiders to join their beliefs. Leaders make concerted and intelligent attempts to craft messages that will appeal to potential followers, deliberately cultivating the themes of hate and racism that they advocate. Young people are recruited at the street level into groups and clubs that convey hateful symbols and rhetoric. Political entrepreneurs take advantage of the persuasive power of mobilization efforts based on divisiveness and intolerance. In Brass's account of Hindu-Muslim conflict, that role is played by RSS, BJP, and many local organizations motivated by this ideology.

Music, comics, and video games. Anti-hate organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center have documented the role played by racist and anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim themes in popular music and other forms of entertainment (link). These creations help to create a sense of shared identity among members as they enjoy the music or immerse themselves in the comics and games. Blee and Creasap emphasize the importance of the use of popular culture forms in mobilization strategies of the extreme right in "Conservative and right-wing movements"; link.

The presence of a small number of "hot connectors". It appears to be the case that attitudes of intolerance are infectious to some degree. So the presence of a few outspoken bigots in a small community may spread their attitudes to others, and the density of local social networks appears to be an important factor in the spread of hateful attitudes. The broader the social network of these individuals, the more potent the infective effects of their behavior are likely to be. (Here is a recent post on social-network effects on mobilization; link.)

There is a substantial degree of orchestration in most of these mechanisms -- deliberate efforts by organizations and political entrepreneurs to incite and channel the emotions of fear, hostility, and hate among their followers and potential followers. Strategies of recruitment for extremist and hate-based parties deliberately cultivate the mindset of hate among young people and disaffected older people (link). And the motivations seem to be a mix of ideological commitment to a worldview of hate and more prosaic self-interest -- power, income, resources, publicity, and influence. 

But the hard questions remaining are these: how does intolerance become mainstream? Is this a "tipping point" phenomenon? And what mechanisms and forces exist to act as counter-pressures against these mechanisms, and promulgate attitudes of mutual respect and tolerance as affirmative social values?

*          *          *

Here is a nice graphic from Arcand and Chakraborty, "What Explains Ethnic Violence? Evidence from Hindu-Muslim Riots in India"; link. Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh show the largest concentration of riots over the period 1960-1995. There appears to be no correlation by time in the occurrence of riots in the three states.

And here is a 1996 report on the incidence of religious violence in India by Human Rights Watch; link. 

Social progress in India?

A few days in Bangalore, Kerala, and Mumbai have been very interesting, from a social-change point of view. There is an election cycle underway, with prospects for a strong showing for the secular Left in several states. There is a resurgence of bigotry of various forms, including both anti-Muslim activism and violence against student activists, cattle herders, and Dalit teenagers. There is the deplorable fact that BJP leadership and Prime Minister Modi are not owning up to their own role in encouraging these forms of inter-group hatred, and certainly are not taking the leadership role that is the responsibility of a governing party to denounce hatred and violence. And there are mounting problems of vehicular traffic, road accidents, drought remediation, garbage removal, and sanitation that absolutely must be solved if ordinary Indians are to have reasonable levels of health, safety, and comfort. It is very interesting to me that the leading appeals coming from Left politicians and candidates in Kerala are for rejecting bigotry and encouraging scientific composting of household trash. These may seem to lie at opposite ends of the spectrum, but they reflect some of India's most pressing challenges today. 

At the same time there are encouraging signs of progress on almost all these issues. For example, the Center for Inclusion and Inclusive Policy at the National Law School University of India in Bangalore brings together a strong cadre of activist scholars committed to ending the persistent low status and opportunity of Dalits. One project in particular is impactful -- bringing the writings of BR Ambedkar, author of Annihilation of Caste, to pre-university students through mobile classes for high school students. More than 50,000 students have been exposed to this course already in Karnataka. Another scholar at the law school has spent his career addressing the continuing problem of bonded labor in India. It is not a problem of the past. He spoke powerfully of the difficulty of suppressing this practice through legislation, given the social power of the landlords and business owners who circumvent these laws. The Center has been at work for about 13 years and provides focus nationally for these important social issues.

The Center for Agrarian Research at the Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore is another good example of an intellectual force for positive change in rural India (link). Under the leadership of VK Ramachandran and Madhura Swaminathan, the Center organizes a group of young researchers to conduct village-level studies in various parts of India. The scientific directors of the Center work closely with grassroots rural organizations (for example, the All India Agricultural Workers Union and the All India Women's Democratic Organization), to ensure that the focus of the research aligns as well as possible with the knowledge needs of rural people in their struggles for social progress. The journal, Review of Agrarian Studies, is now open-access online, and it is worthwhile for readers of Understanding Society to become frequent visitors. The Center has also published a toolbox presenting the methods of survey and analysis that guides their work, and it has published a valuable series of books and monographs as well. This work serves to highlight features of local village life that are overlooked in national surveys. One important point their work documents is the importance of measuring income directly rather than estimating income through consumption. The range of inequalities in rural society turns out to be much higher than national and international estimates would indicate when this measure is evaluated with precision. 

India is hungry for change. And there is an appetite for large theoretical frameworks that can be used to guide that change. For the right and much of the business leadership of the country the preferred theory is a form of neo-liberalism -- a preference for low state regulation, laissez-faire markets, and unbounded entrepreneurship. The BJP embraces this ideology and adds in a virulent form of Hindu nationalism into the mix. For the left, classical Marxism and an admiration of the progress of China since its revolution are dominant ideas. Many conversations come back to the question of social ownership of the means of production. But perhaps India needs a program for change which is less polarized and less ideological. The political economy of social democracy seems to fit the bill better than either Smith or Marx, USA or China. 

Three points seem apparent. First, social progress in India simply mandates overturning the many forms of inequality and deprivation that exist for many groups in India -- Dalits and the rural poor in particular, but also the tens of millions of migrants who barely survive in India's largest cities. And there are structures of power and privilege that support the current status quo. So a powerful political movement will be required that expresses a strong and realistic program of change when it comes to poverty and systemic discrimination. The Dalit problem is crucial. 

Second, India needs strong institutions at every level of government, from the municipality to state to the national government. Laissez-faire theories of the self-regulating virtues of the market and private activity will simply not solve the problems that exist, from persistent discrimination and violence to environmental pollution to unlicensed development to garbage disposal to traffic safety. Strong and effective regulation of private activity by persons and corporations will be needed or India will be overwhelmed by exploitation, pollution, and inequality. 

Third, these processes of change must move forward through democratic practice. The progressive left must find ways to make its program appealing to the masses of Indian citizens who currently support more conservative approaches to government and greater quiescence about India's underlying structures of oppression. Markets and private ownership of land are not inherently inimical to progress. But they require regulation, and the fruits of economic success need to be shared in an equitable way. Redistributive taxation is morally and socially mandatory -- exactly as it is, in varying degrees, in every democracy in Europe and North America. This means a substantial use of the power of taxation to provide for crucial social services -- health, education, nutrition, housing -- at levels that permit all Indians, rich and poor, to have reasonable chances of success in the resulting economy. Or in other words, India needs a strong welfare state with effective market regulation and voice for the poor and dispossessed. 

Where is Nordic socialism when India most needs it (link)?

The status of women in India

Sociologists are often interested in making sense of processes of change that radiate along the axes of the great tectonics of social life, including class, race, and gender. These features of social life are particularly fundamental because they denote powerful determinants of opportunity, life-course, and personal outcomes for all of us. The positions into which individuals are born within the property system have great influence on the ways their lives unfold. The social filigree of race and ethnicity, and the ways in which these categories are socially constructed and projected, likewise creates determinative pathways of development and action for individuals in many social settings. And the social freight of gender and family creates opportunities and obstacles, expectations and stereotypes, for boys and girls, women and men. There are other large dimensions of social embeddedness that might be brought forward as well -- religion, culture, normative communities, power and authority, for example. But class, race, and gender are especially profound. And each has given rise to movements of emancipation in reaction to the oppressions that they represent for specific groups in society.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen and Anne Waldrop have assembled an excellent volume on the status of women in contemporary India in their recent book Women, Gender, and Everyday Social Transformation in India. The collection brings together contributors who approach the topic using the tools of ethnographic research to better understand the everyday realities of experience of women in India today. The volume focuses on three large areas of life in contemporary India -- technology and work, political institutions, and feminist activism. There is a valuable effort to attempt to understand the current upsurge of public violence and rape against women in terms of the social changes that are occurring in these areas.

The editors introduce the focus of the volume in these words:

The pace of socioeconomic transformation in India over the past two and a half decades has been formidable. In this volume we are concerned with examining how these transformations have played out at the level of everyday life to influence the lives of Indian women, and gender relations more broadly."

Readers of Understanding Society will find the volume especially interesting because it approaches the realities of gender, class, and caste in a micro- and meso-level way, looking at specific individuals and groups of women within the concrete social relations within which they find themselves. A rich understanding of the socially constituted realities of "agency" and "structure" plays an important role in the approaches these investigators bring to their research. 

People can never act outside of the multiplicity of social relations in which they are enmeshed; ... the exercise of individual agency aiming for change is thus always conditioned, and human agency is both enabled and limited by those social structures within which change is sought. (7)

Several chapters are especially interesting.

Kenneth Nielsen's contribution on the Singur movement in West Bengal against the proposed Tata factory favored by the ruling CP/M government of the state is very interesting. He illustrates how the status rise of a caste group (Chasi Kaibartta in transition to Mahishya) also reflected a fairly deliberate effort to redefine and control the role of women. "Notably, the Mahishya caste movement for higher status entailed an appropriation of upper-caste norms and values including the Hindu elite male concern for harnessing female sexuality" (207). This account suggests a Bourdieu-like struggle within a "field", making strategic adjustments so as to gain advantage over time. Intra- and inter-caste struggles played out into a redefinition of the nature and role of women in village society. Nielsen's central interest is the micro-processes through which women in these villages made the transition from their traditional roles to the role of part-time activist. This is a familiar question from social movements research. (Here is a causal diagram representing the recruitment process taken from Doug McAdam, "Beyond Structural Analysis" (link).)

But Nielsen's treatment is not theoretical; it is ethnographic, attempting to discover through interviews and participant-observation the concrete steps that occurred from household to street demonstration for some of these women.

Another interesting observation Nielsen offers concerns the question of “issue escalation”. It is often observed in the study of contentious politics that a movement around a specific issue often broadens its focus to include a more comprehensive set of issues. In this instance the natural progression would be from the specific issue of land confiscation to a broader concern for gender equity in rural society. But this escalation did not occur in the case of the West Bengal/Singur movement.

In contrast [to movements in Karnataka and Maharashtra], the Singur movement did not spawn reflections on the gendered nature of landownership and inheritance, even though inheritance patterns in Singur followed the broader West Bengal pattern where land is fragmented and customarily inherited through the line of male descendants. (215)

And Nielsen seems to have uncovered the root of an explanation for why this escalation did not occur: the involvement of women in the Singur movement was actually quite consistent with the patriarchal values governing women's roles that were current in rural society in West Bengal. "The mobilization of women into the Singur movement was facilitated by the fact that it was successfully embedded in a gendered discourse and imagery in which Shantipara's Mahishya women appeared as defenders of the common good of the family and the village" (215). (Kimberly Springer describes the complicated relationship between feminist activism and the US civil rights movement in Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980.)

Turn now to another contribution that also focuses on West Bengal, Sirpa Tenhunen's "Gender, Intersectionality and Smartphones in Rural West Bengal." Tenhunen's question is how this innovative communication technology affected the opportunities and agency of women in this region. (One thing I appreciate about the volume as a whole is the care that the researchers take to make it clear that their findings do not represent "India" as a whole.)

I argue that to understand how mobile phone use is shaped by and reshapes gender, it is necessary to explore how the physical properties of phones determine technical affordances -- that is, the possibilities for action -- according to the users' gender, but also such parameters of identity as class and education. (33)

Tenhunen's ethnography focuses on women's use of the technology -- the conversations they conduct in specific times and places. She had observed this village in 1999 (before the cell network had been built out), and again in 2005, 2007-08, 2010, and 2012-13. So her observations permitted her to have a perspective on the socially constructed ways in which adoption of telephony was carried out. One of her most basic observations is that the adoption of telephony initially followed caste lines (37), with upper castes adopting cell phones earlier than other caste groups. She also finds that cell phone ownership tended to be concentrated among male villagers in the early period, and that diffusion to women was often the consequence of marriage relationships. "Fathers and brothers gave phones to ensure that women could stay in touch after marriage" (37). And she finds that women's calling patterns are different from male users in the village. Here is a table of calling patterns based on call diaries from 2008.

This is interesting material, and could be interpreted as a map of the patriarchal and domestic orbits of women and men in the village. Tenhunen argues that cell phones facilitated a broadening of social contacts that had favorable effects on gender opportunities for women in the village.

In rural India, the introduction of phones offered rural women a new, unobstrusive avenue to extend their contacts and space without moving out of their neighbourhood. Women's increased contact with their natal village and female relatives in other villages forms part of the broader changes evident in the village's gender relationships. The most pronounced of these changes are the increase in education for females, women becoming visible in formal politics, and a few high-caste women taking up white-collar jobs. (41-42)

What is particularly interesting about this research is the strength of the case Tenhunen establishes for the differential adoption and consequences of the new cellular technology. "Technology is gendered" -- this is a slogan in the sociology of technology, but it is a simple and important reality in this study.

These are only two of the fifteen chapters of Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India (Anthem South Asian Studies). But every chapter is worth reading, and the book represents an important contribution to understanding the dynamics under way in India today for half of its population.