‘Unequal’ offers enlightening glimpses of inequity in India, but the truth is more complex

In 2023, numerous outstanding books appeared on Dr BR Ambedkar’s life and India’s caste-based inequalities. All of them are written by upper-caste authors and scholars, highlighting the urgent need for Dalit-Adivasi voices in the intellectual mainstream. Otherwise we will perpetuate an upper-caste echo chamber where it’s hard to distinguish between oppressors, virtue signallers, those advancing their careers through token activism, and those genuinely seeking redress.

That said, among the three Ambedkar biographies published this year, written by Shashi Tharoor, Aakash Singh Rathore, and Ashok Gopal, respectively, Gopal’s A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of BR Ambedkar, elegantly produced by Navayana, stands out for its sincerity, objectivity and erudition. Caste Pride by Manoj Mitta is a significant record of legal battles surrounding caste atrocities against Dalits and the struggle for justice and equality from the British Raj to the present day.

Swati Narayan’s Unequal: Why India Lags Behind Its Neighbours gives the finishing touch to the impressive collection of books on such themes published in 2023. It’s densely researched, peppered with astonishing statistics and bristling observations, weaving a travelogue-style narrative and generosity of spirit for the marginalised in light-footed prose.

Bihar’s corrosive caste prejudice

The book is the fruit of Narayan’s doctoral research and fieldwork. Her overarching thesis is that socio-economic inequality, dismal human development indicators, and a near collapse of public and health services in the region of Bihar result from the corrosive caste prejudice and patriarchy, driven chiefly by upper-caste feudal men.

India’s triumphalist, wealthy elite fails to realise that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Despite India’s rapid capitalist growth, women’s workforce participation has fallen below Saudi Arabia’s. Narayan writes, as the number of Indian billionaires increases, “the bottom half of India’s population has to survive on only 6 per cent of the nation’s wealth.”

Meanwhile, India’s poorer neighbours, Nepal and Bangladesh, have surpassed it as inclusive welfare states. The details about Bihar’s poverty, unsanitary conditions, open defecation, stunted and malnourished women and children, caste-based prejudice and atrocities such as the Laxmanpur Bathe massacre get overwhelming. Within this dystopia, the upper caste minority, backed by star news anchors and newspaper columnists, decry educational and job reservations as the death of merit. On the other hand, many dominant-caste teachers actively sabotage Dalit education to maintain their disempowerment.

There is hardly a ray of hope in Narayan’s North Indian accounts except for some Indians visiting Nepal as desperate medical tourists to access better health services. The rare positive example of one of India’s 166 billionaires being a Dalit doesn’t inspire confidence. After all, the Dalit billionaire, Rajesh Saraiya, achieved this distinction after leaving India and continues to reside abroad.

Though Bihar is chosen as a grim case study, India as a whole barely shines, where 21 million poor women are “missing from the electoral roles [sic]”, 90 per cent of parliamentarians are millionaires, and 43 per cent face criminal charges. If that’s public knowledge, then one shudders to think what’s hidden.

One feels relief when Narayan travels out of Bihar’s oppressive milieu into Bangladesh and Nepal and notices the marginalised, especially Dalits and women, experience a much better quality of life. Government schools deploy innovative methods, like painting the walls with arithmetic tables, maps and alphabets, to promote learning. Surprisingly, in Muslim-majority Bangladesh, girls and women fare better than their counterparts in Hindu-majority Bihar. It’s not religion, but socio-cultural factors that uphold patriarchy.

At times, the book’s generalisations scuttle nuanced thinking. It’s puzzling why several NGOs serve Bangladesh’s welfare state so well. Why can’t the same model work in India? Narayan states that the catastrophes of the 1971 war and the 1974 famine alerted Bangladesh’s political elite to the welfare of ordinary people. However, India has experienced its share of tragedies and upheavals. Why hasn’t the Indian elite woken up?

Manoj Mitta’s Caste Pride reveals how the caste hatred and misogyny – such as the forcible burning alive of upper-caste widows and denying Travancore’s low-caste women the right to cover their breasts – in Indian culture has its origins in orthodox Hindu theology and literature such as the Manusmriti. A similar theme emerges briefly in Narayan’s book, noting that in 1854, Nepal’s ruling elite codified state institutions based on the Laws of Manu.

If modern Nepal can swiftly discard regressive Hinduism, how can India do the same? The incredibly diverse India would require multiple approaches. For one, we can tap into the reformist and inclusive tendencies of Hindu-Buddhist philosophies while, as Narayan suggests, remaining open to global progressive movements.

After encountering India’s nightmarish sanitation issues, we read about the abundance of clean toilets in Bangladesh and Nepal. Why the dramatic contrast? The author indicates that Islam emphasises cleanliness, and Nepal’s reformist government is almost bullish in encouraging its citizens to build subsidised toilets. Such factors have done wonders for the people in these countries, but the Swacch Bharat campaign has failed India’s poorest and the outcastes.

Occasionally, the author’s research and conclusions may appear deliberate, especially for those who are fans of Prime Minister Modi and Hindu exceptionalism. Some might perceive her account as foregrounding India’s laments, in stark contrast to the upbeat stories emerging from Bangladesh and Nepal.

Narayan explains her decision not to compare West Bengal with Bangladesh due to the former’s greater financial prosperity. That doesn’t stop her from recording how Bangladeshis ridicule their West Bengali brethren across the border, relieving themselves in the open without access to toilets. If West Bengal is progressive and wealthier, what explains its lack of toilets compared to Bangladesh? Critics of the book would argue that it has a “leftist” agenda to disparage Hindu India.

Is communism the answer?

When Narayan’s focus shifts to exemplary Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Sri Lanka, sanitation and toilets are never discussed. I was eager for insights into how these regions compared to the experiences of Bangladesh and Nepal. Did caste determine who was made to deal with waste disposal? In the last five years, Tamil Nadu has registered the highest number of deaths of sanitation workers operating in hazardous conditions. Adding a few pages on the current state of Dalits in South India would have been helpful.

One more quibble. Narayan betrays a fascination or romantic bias for communist governments and leftist insurgencies. She implies that West Bengal’s better human development indicators are owed to its long-term communist government rule. Why not mention the Nandigram massacre? Why did the communists fail to get back into power after losing it?

Likewise, she claims, with some good evidence, that Nepal’s ten-year armed Maoist struggle has considerably improved the living conditions for Dalits, women, and other marginalised groups. Kerala’s communist rule is also cited as a catalyst for progress and equality. However, she has to admit that Tamil Nadu’s non-Brahmin majoritarian politics achieved the good things without relying on communist ideology. In Bihar, she observes that Naxalite movements were brutally crushed by upper-caste militia such as the Ranvir Sena before the comrades could bring egalitarian fruits like those in Nepal.

This overall binary between orthodox, unjust upper-caste Hindus and egalitarian Maoists and communists doesn’t quite work. In Tamil Nadu and elsewhere, the backward-caste resurgence has resulted in dispossession and atrocities against Dalits and poor Muslims.

On the other hand, the best positions in Kerala and West Bengal’s communist regimes were monopolised by Brahmins, manifested by the monarch-like reigns of EMS Namboodiripad and Jyoti Basu. In a vast country like India, the truth is too complex and unsettling to capture in a short book.

These caveats aside, Narayan’s work is eminently readable and enlightening. It is a perfect coda to the other splendid books on similar themes published this year. I particularly enjoyed the author recounting the intellectual leadership and political assertion of Dalit leaders such as C Iyothee Thass, MC Rajah and Dr Ambedkar.

Having read Unequal, every Indian, including politicians and policymakers, should emulate our egalitarian neighbours. If not, we should fear, as VS Naipaul put it, a million mutinies now.

Rajiv Thind is a literary scholar, fiction writer, and visiting academic at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch.

Unequal: Why India Lags Behind Its Neighbours, Swati Narayan, Context/Westland.