Few are those with patience enough to read my write-ups. One such gentleman shared with me a paper of immense interest. It presents an alternate view consistently ignored by ‘caste scholars’ and birds of that feather. Quoting therefrom:

According to the NCRB annual crime reports, the total number of criminal “Incidence against Scheduled Castes [SCs]” in India during 2011 was 33719. It is important to realise that such figures can be stated in many different ways. One may choose the route of making it appear sensational: “As per Crime Statistics of India, every 18 minutes a crime is committed against SCs; every day 27 atrocities against them (3 rapes, 11 assaults, and 13 murders); every week 5 of their homes or possessions burnt and 6 persons kidnapped or abducted.” “As per the 2005 Report (Crime in India) of NCRB, every 20 minutes a crime against Dalits is reported in the Police Station across the country.” Or one may attempt to analyse the significance of this data for the claim that it is used to support. In order to do so, one has to juxtapose the 33719 cases of incidence against SCs, with the following two figures that the NCRB reports provide:

  • A total of 6252729 cognizable crimes were reported for the year 2011 in India. This means, the total number of reported crimes against the Scheduled Castes in 2011 was about 0.53 per cent of the total reported crimes in India in 2011.
  • As per the 2011 national census of India, the SCs comprise about 16.6 per cent of the total population of India. If 16.6% of the population faces 0.53% of the total criminal incidents in India, the remaining 83.4% faces 99.47 % of the rest of the criminal incidence. That means that on average, every per cent of non-SC population faces roughly 1.19 % of the incidence of crime, which is more than double that of the SC population.

What does one make of this statistic? If measuring crime against a group is a reliable measure for atrocities against the group, then we are forced to conclude that SCs face fewer atrocities than the rest of the population. If crime against a group is not a reliable measure for atrocities, we cannot admit the NCRB data of total incidence of crime against SCs into a debate on caste atrocities. But what other data is there, besides an accumulation of anecdotes and stories?

Tellingly:

At this point, we have entered a forbidden realm in Indian social commentary. But, sooner or later, such topics are fated to emerge.

The authors note in the paper that the caste of the perpetrator is never mentioned in the data about general crime against SCs and STs, such as is filed under general penal law (the erstwhile Indian Penal Code).

Furthermore, given the nature of the data we have, to make any significant claim about caste violence one must at least be in a position to show that crime against other castes or communities is significantly less than that faced by the SCs. Yet, there is no data available today from which one can see which caste bears the brunt of crimes in India. The NCRB reports provide separate data only about the SC and ST communities and no other caste communities.

The authors clarify that it is not their purpose to deem crimes against SCs statistically insignificant and therefore not meriting attention. They have merely cast a shade on the canons of caste atrocities that are taken for granted.

Nor is it a flawless claim that caste atrocities go underreported. For, as the authors note, crime in general is underreported for various reasons. There is tenuous reason to claim that this applies with especial greatness to caste atrocities.

Blemishing the data are also instances of government compensation under PoA acting as an incentive to lodge complaints on non-serious grounds.

If the conviction that caste violence must be high does not relate to data generated about caste violence, it can only be understood as an a priori claim, not a conclusion derived from empirical investigation. If it is not derived from empirical evidence, it can only be understood as one of the elements of an inherited narrative about the caste system (Balagangadhara 1994; 2012).

The authors also criticize overreliance of many studies on anecdotal evidence. “Providing discrete micro instances (individual instances of violence reported by victims and their relatives and friends) as evidence for an abstract macro claim (about the age-old caste system and the atrocities it generates would be considered a fallacy in any other field,” they rightly note. “In caste studies, however, this has been the dominant way of making the argument.”

Another enormous problem with ‘caste studies’ is as follows:

Instead of relying on the study of crimes against SCs as the basis for their analysis of caste violence, writers have included a wide array of ‘social disabilities’ in the list of ‘caste violence’. Consider some of the disabilities mentioned earlier: access to education, public health facilities, patterns of land distribution, labour remuneration irregularities, kinds of work offered to SCs etc. Since studies and reports on caste atrocities resort to collection of anecdotes, all kinds of the problems that an individual faces and/or relates, becomes evidence for the existence of caste violence in society. That is, what these studies do is document the occurrence of particular kinds of problems that large (if not all) sections of human beings across the world have been facing (which they pre-define as being ‘social disabilities’) within samples of the SC and OBC (Other Backward Castes) population group. This makes for a staggering number of social problems being attributed to a single cause: namely, caste discrimination. Surprisingly, not a single one of these studies or reports makes even a perfunctory attempt to prove that it is in fact the so-called caste system that causes these ‘social disabilities’. This is an assumption that guides their data collection, not a hypothesis that they take up for investigation. Therefore, they cannot claim to either prove or disprove it.

Mainstream commentary prefers that we ignore all such nuances and abide by a unidimensional view. The quote by Thomas Sowell, with which this post begins, therefore, assumes relevance. Mainstream studies of caste have no raison d’être other than propping up politics based on caste and politicians for whom caste is the be-all and end-all of politics. The patterns of thinking to which scholars thereof are accustomed can be seen even in media. News organizations, without ruth or qualm, report blaringly the caste of an unhappy victim of crime should he be SC or ST. Not always is caste a thought in the perpetrator’s mind, and yet, subconsciously, a casteist sensibility is ascribed. The same treatment is not to be seen if the victim should be a Brahmin, though he might suffer owing to a false case under the SC/ST Act.

“Civilization begins in a peasant’s hut, but it comes to flower only in the cities,” wrote Will Durant. If we hope to soar as a civilization, we cannot escape the truth that the politics of caste in India is petty feudalism carried over into cities. Little has it proven a force of good; it has rather added to social animosity, bitterness, and resentment. It is a politics of competitive victimhood and violence. It disregards national consciousness and is opposed to all good change, lest its rapacious groove be dealt a mortal blow.

In this Republic, all too plainly, some groups are deemed perennially oppressed, and others the perennial oppressors against whom any injustice can be brooked, even justified. When such injustice betides, the pulpits of jurisprudence fall silent. The gaze of a judge speaking to law students on highbrow subjects never turns thither. Students of an activist temper, whose passion for justice reeks of evangelical zeal, sit in silence and studied indifference despite such stark departure, aided by the law, from constitutional principles. Politicians who swear publicly by Hindutva feel no need to guide society, with a temperate hand, away from such reverse casteism. The voiceless and unheard languish.

Shall these chains be broken? Shall this legal blot ever be erased?

I encourage readers to read the linked paper in its entirety.

DISCLAIMER: The author is solely responsible for the views expressed in this article. The author carries the responsibility for citing and/or licensing of images utilized within the text.