Five Acres in Lieu of Citizenship: Parsing the Ayodhya Verdict

The Muslims of India approached the Supreme Court for affirmation of their citizenship.  Instead, they were given five acres of land.

In their verdict on the Ayodhya dispute, the bench recognised “it is necessary to provide restitution to the Muslim community for the unlawful destruction of their place of worship.” But in sharp contrast to their lengthy exegesis on other issues – like the indubitability of faith, the archaeological evidence for a temple below the mosque, the way that historical texts must be read – there is absolutely no discussion of what ‘restitution’ means, and more importantly, what it might involve in this specific context.

Will counting caste help to reduce inequality?

More thought needs to be given to the kind of data generated and its practical implications

Yesterday when the census enumerator visited, I asked him how he felt about the current debate on counting caste in the census: “Not comfortable at all”, he said, “I don’t even like asking whether someone is SC/ST or Other, leave alone what their caste is”. But, he added, “caste is an inescapable reality of Indian society.”

The debate on counting caste in the census has not moved on from 2001, when opinion was equally divided. Supporters of caste enumeration argue that census categories merely reflect existing classifications, and that only the census can provide the figures necessary to map inequality by caste. Opponents argue that the census does not mirror but actively produces social classifications and ways of thinking.  They point to the history of mobilisation around caste in the census and the consequent dangers of both distorted data and increased social tensions. In neither case has much thought been given to how the data might be used, the different kinds of figures needed for different purposes, or alternative ways of collecting the required data.

Lingering Inequalities

Lingering inequalities

The Hindu, 24 January 2010

Our weaker sections are weak in more ways than one and that is a powerful indictment of our democracy…

The innocent phrase we use in India to describe the poor and the marginalised — the ‘weaker sections' — hides a literal, anthropometric truth about our Republic that our leaders are too guilty to speak about. The weakness that unifies dalits, adivasis, women, urban and landless workers and small landholders is not just social. For, these groups are also physically weaker than those more privileged, as reflected in their stunted growth, aging faces, and shorter lives, lived at the edge of destitution.

There is, of course, nothing uniquely Indian about these disparities. In his book, Durable Inequalities, the sociologist Charles Tilly describes how attributes we take as natural markers of difference like height, for example, are deeply imbued with inequality. At the start of the 19th century in London, poor teenaged boys were a good foot shorter than aristocrats and gentry of the same age. In India, at the start of the 21st century, this difference is visible around us, most clearly in the rural poor in the resource rich regions of India, but also in the populations that throng the bus-stands, the urban slums, and all the spaces that the indigent inhabit. A country of short people, some might say. A country of the chronically undernourished would be more accurate.