Social system: It's time for alternative theories

With regards to the article 'Rapes show double struggle of low-caste women in India' (Oct 9), rape is indeed the worst possible crime deserving the highest form of punishment as human exploitation based on social hierarchies. However, in India, a huge distortive discourse by the social sciences and humanities over decades dominated by a single ideology has caused huge damage at a national and international level. We failed to develop alternative theories on our social systems. 'Colonial consciousness', a continuing intellectual violence by the colonised minds in a different period, refuses to remove the western lenses to understand ourselves. The dated narratives try to fit every social problem into the Marxist paradigm of the exploiter and the exploited.

Rape is a neither a generalised phenomenon nor India the rape capital of the world. Assuming a uniform meaning to the word despite varying definitions, in fact, rapes in India is much lower as compared to other countries. The incidence of rape in India in 2010 stood at 1.8 per 100,000. The comparative figures were 27.3 for USA, 28.8 for UK, 65.3 for Sweden, and an overwhelming 120 per 100,000 for South Africa. Regarding the oft-repeated 'underreporting' criticism, even if we assume ten times under-reporting in India and absolutely no underreporting in the Western countries, we still have a hard time catching up. The under-reporting must be thirty-six times before it reaches levels in Sweden. Rape is a distinct phenomenon with biological roots. Attaching it to traditions, religions, cultures, or even education, it is a classical bad statistical practice of conflating causation to correlation. Sweden has one of the highest number of atheists and the highest literacy rates in the world. Would that be an argument to show that either a lack of belief in god and/or good education is responsible for high rapes?

The so-called caste-system, the biggest punching bag for intellectuals, remains a continuing and colossal semantic trap for the whole country. No equivalent to the word 'caste' exists in any of our scriptures. A Portuguese word 'casta' applied to groups of people (New Christians and the Old Christians) in the Iberian Peninsula when the Portuguese landed on the shores of Goa became an internal story of India amazingly. If horror stories of 'caste discrimination'; the social humiliation of groups, poverty, and so on are evidences of the existence of 'the caste system', then the latter is present everywhere in the world. Discrimination, poverty, and social humiliation of groups are in slavery, in the feudal societies of Europe, in the capitalist societies of today, and so on. These are compatible with multiple social structures.

Our lived reality is the four varnas and the thousands of jatis. The varnas are normative, categorical classification to which attached a hierarchical ordering by the colonials by a very selective reading of our scriptures. Jatis evolving and dissolving, going up and down the social-political-economic scale with their own rules of marriage, food and customs have been the only social reality. One of the most impossible and futile exercises in social theorising has been to correlate the varnas to the jatis. Force-fitting continues to persist despite problems.

Amazingly, by constant decrees, legislation, and politics, a diverse population, numbering 64.5 million at the last census, born into one thousand two hundred communities, each with its own identity has become a single category of 'scheduled castes'. The single criteria for this grouping, a political and legal creation rather than a social reality, is 'untouchability'- an extremely tenuous idea. Importantly, the data for caste atrocities simply does not exist. The definitions have been narrow; discriminations studied only in isolated groups; and the whole narrative of 'caste discrimination' finally is a case of data manipulation, statistical cherry-picking, and making macro claims based on micro evidence.

The same hard data from the National Crime Records Bureau which helps in giving us a terrible international reputation shows, for example, on an average, every percentage of the non-SC population faces roughly 1.19% of the incidences of crime, while every percentage of the SC population faces about 0.04% (30 times less) of the crime. The ambit of soft data remains wide with ad hoc explanations and even more manipulations.

Successive governments, by creating categories like forward caste, backward caste (with further sub-categories like A, B, C, D), and scheduled castes, have happily promoted the racial categories we detest so much and instilling false notions of superiority, inferiority, guilt, anger, and shame in various proportions in society while wanting ironically to create an equal society.

The colonials had a purpose to break our society, but why did our own politicians and intellectuals fail us after independence? Our natural sciences declare boldly that all humans share 99.99% of genes; any slightest notion of race or inherent superiority or inferiority of a group of people is wrong. Yet, our intellectuals keep hitting at India to be the worst place in the world for a woman or a Dalit. We absorbed and assimilated every culture from across the world for thousands of years, and yet we are in the dock for the 'ugly caste-system', 'patriarchy', a rape culture'. It is time for us to dissipate unfortunate angers and start fresher narratives.

-Dr Pingali Gopal, Warangal