THE DOCTOR AND THE SAINT

This tension between the community that binds and the community that bullies is of course age old and universal. And it translates into the tension between a state that protects the individual and a state that undermines the community, which is at the heart of a battle ongoing in countries as diverse as Pakistan and the United States.

In the Indian national movement, Gandhi famously represented the view that the new Indian nation should be based on decentralized self-reliant villages, havens of peace and fellow-feeling. “The future of India lies in its villages,” he wrote. His most remarkable opponent in the movement was Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the man who would eventually draft the Indian constitution. Born into the very lowest caste, not allowed to enter the classroom in the local school, he was so brilliant that he nevertheless ended up with two PhDs and a law degree. He famously described the Indian village as “a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism.”¹³ For him, the law, the state as its enforcer, and the constitution from which it derived its force, were the best guarantors of the rights of the underprivileged against the tyranny of the locally powerful against the community.

The history of independent India has been a reasonable success in terms of integrating the castes. For example, the wage gap between the traditionally disadvantaged castes (SC/STs) and others dropped from 35 percent in 1983 to 29 percent in 2004.¹⁴ This does not look so spectacular, but is more than the improvement in the wage gap between blacks and whites in the United States over a similar time period.

This is not to say the problem of caste has been solved. At the local level, caste prejudice is alive and well. A study of 565 villages in eleven Indian states found that despite legal bans, some form of untouchability continued to be practiced in almost 80 percent of the villages. In almost half of the villages, Dalits (members of the lower castes) could not sell milk. In about a third of them, they could not sell any goods on the local market, they had to use separate utensils in restaurants, and access to water for irrigating their fields was restricted.¹⁵ Furthermore, while traditional forms of discrimination are weakening, upper castes also react with violence to the perceived threat of the economic progress of lower castes. In March 2018, a young Dalit man in the state of Gujarat was killed for owning and riding a horse, something apparently only upper castes are allowed to do.

To complicate matters, a newer pattern of conflict is emerging; caste groups now see each other as closer to equals but also as potential rivals for power and resources.¹⁶ In politics, there is increasing caste polarization in voting; an increasing fraction of the votes of the upper castes go to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the one party not committed to affirmative action.¹⁷ Other parties have emerged to cater specifically to different caste groups.

At the same time, the importance given to caste loyalty also allows the community to exercise control over its members, often in clear violation of the law of the land. For example, the caste panchayats (essentially local caste associations) have actively resisted the state’s writ on sex and marriage in the name of tradition. In a grotesque incident in the state of Chhattisgarh, a fourteen-year-old girl who had been raped by a sixty-five-year-old man was advised by the local caste panchayat not to go to the police about it. When she persisted, she was thrashed by some of the elders of the community, both male and female. A strong community can oppress its weakest members (the Dalits yesterday, today the young woman), and the state is largely powerless to stop it, in part because a majority of community members find it in their interest to uphold community control. As long as they conform, the caste collective offers members access to a web of support and comfort in time of need, and while its brutal underside might bother them from time to time, it takes a brave man or woman to take on the entire community.