India Growth: The untold story -- Caste as social capital

by Rishi Mon Sep 02, 2013 11:46 am

http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.com/2012/10/india-growth-untold-story-caste-as.html

The metropolitan elite and rootless experts have concluded that caste is bad. They have made it into a “four letter” word and so every Indian is expected to feel guilty whenever caste is mentioned and talked about. In international forums caste is used as a stick to beat anything connected to Indian religions, customs, and culture. In other words slowly caste has been made to be for Indians what is “holocaust” for Germans and Austrians.

We have an uncanny ability to self-abuse ourselves in a masochistic way. But more tragic is our enthusiasm to convert all our strengths to weaknesses since some white men started abusing Indians for having caste system. We fail to recognize that it is a valuable social capital, which provide cushion for individuals and families in dealing with society at large, and more particularly the State. The Anglo-Saxon model of atomizing every individual to a single element in a right-based system and forcing him to have a direct link with the State has produced disastrous effects in the west wherein families have been destroyed and communities have been forgotten. Every person is standing alone in a sense stark naked with only rights as his imaginary clothes to deal directly with the State. The State also does not have the benefit of concentric circles of cushions to deal with individuals. The State has taken over the role of father and mother as well as spouse in terms of social security, old age homes and rights of children to sue and divorce parents!

Caste has been made a curse by the intellectuals based on the half-baked knowledge and acceptance of the Euro Centric model of individual, which is right based rather than duty, based system. Hence one way to overcome it is to have reservations since the euro centric model suggests that. If you decide to carry the cross or burden which others impose then you begin to impose the solution provided by them. In a sense the debate does not distinguish between caste discrimination and caste as a social capital. The cry to abolish caste is to “Semitise” or “homogenize” Indian society which has been attempted by many “reformers” but has not been successful.

Caste has played an important role in the consolidation of business and entrepreneurship in India particularly in the last fifty or so years. The economic development has taken place in the “India Uninc” or the partnership/proprietorship activities financed by domestic savings and facilitated by clusters and caste/community networks. Actually caste has been a major social capital in our growth process and it has not been adequately recognized. This paper explores the economic growth constituents and catalytic components. It also identifies the role of caste in the growth process among the emerging entrepreneurial groups.

We need to recollect the important observation made by Swami Vivekananda in one of his famous lectures in response to the welcome address of Hindus of Jaffna in 1897. He says “The older I grow, the better I seem to think of these [caste and such other] time-honored institutions of India. There was a time when I used to think that many of them were useless and worthless, but the older I grow, the more I seem to feel a diffidence in cursing any one of them, for each one of them is the embodiment of the experience of centuries.”