The rising intolerance in India. Recent events have raised several questions about the manner in which the Indian legal system works. The debate on the effectiveness of hanging itself has begun afresh. Should India abolish the death penalty?
There has been a heated debate on how the political structure could possibly impact and influence our courts. The hanging of Yaqub Menon has been scrutinised severely and a variety of opinions have been expressed. The Supreme Court, to its credit, did everything that was required, including an unprecedented hearing at 2 am.
The President was beseeched twice, and each time he rejected the mercy petition The Home ministry deliberated on the issue and gave its unequivocal advice that the convict must hang. The President, as in the case of Afzal Guru earlier, agreed with the government. Ironically a former President died the same day as the mercy petition was filed. President Abdul Kalam had expressed his clear dislike for hanging and in his time had rejected one and accepted one mercy petition.
The question therefore that is being asked is if the fate of the hanging would have been different if there was another President. Someone like Kalam would quite likely have gone against the Home Ministry’s opinion. After all, and this was for some of us his biggest achievement, President Kalam defied the Prime Minister of the day and visited Gujarat after the Godhra massacre. The attention that this visit focused on Gujarat definitely would have nudged the local administration to act and bring the mayhem to an end.
Beyond all these issues that will be discussed and debated now, there is a more fundamental issue that needs attention. Why does India, the world’s largest democracy, continue to be a society ridden with discrimination and segregation? Why do we always fail the test of inclusiveness and have large sections of our society living in marginalised conditions? A country that has seen and is targeting fast paced economic development lags behind on almost all development parameters. And even more disturbingly, provides unequal access to public facilities for different groups of people.
The first indicator that comes to mind today is on how intolerant we are as a country that otherwise boasts of treating guests as Gods. India in several studies comes across as one of the most segregated societies. In one large survey spread across three decades, The Washington Post carried results from a World Value Survey. This study measured the social attitudes of people in different countries after asking individuals about the types of people they would refuse to live next to. Societies where more people do not want neighbours from other races are obviously considered racially intolerant.
In this study the two countries that came at the very bottom were India and Jordan. These two countries had a majority of the population saying they would not like to stay with neighbours from different communities and races. Similar studies done domestically have shown how religious groups are ghettoised and how even our modern urban neighbourhoods practice the worst kind of discrimination based on caste, religion and food practices. Certainly not what makes a country developed and progressive. Emerging economies like Brazil, Argentina, Mexico etc are all very tolerant of heterogeneity.
The same is the problem with gender. India treats its women very badly, reflecting our prejudices against minorities even more blatantly. In the UNDP’s gender inequality index, India comes at the 132nd rank among 148 countries. The World Economic Forum puts India at a lowly 101 of 136 countries on its Gender Gap index. Prevalence of anaemia in India is among the highest in the world with anemia being higher among pregnant women and preschool children. Even among higher income educated segments of population about 50 per cent of children, adolescent girls and pregnant women are anaemic. There is really no economically advanced country that is so lowly ranked, and it is obvious that no nation can progress beyond a point when it treats its women so badly.
This week the Newsweek carried a lengthy analysis of caste and social inequalities in Modi’s India. The article questions the Prime Minister’s focus on economic growth and asks if this would imply that India’s social problems—caste, poverty, illiteracy, religious violence, sexual violence—will again be neglected? It is sceptical of economic prosperity providing an opening for more robust campaigns for social reform and wonders if PM Modi’s Hindu nationalism will resurface at the expense of the lower castes. And by extension the minorities and the women.
The article laments that political institutions and social reality in India are at variance and this is one of the defining features of contemporary India. There is constitutional and legal equality but in real terms there is tremendous de facto inequality. “Equality of status and of opportunity” is enshrined in the constitution of India. However, despite India’s liberal political foundations and the reservation led representation of lower-caste groups in government, Indian society remains rigorously hierarchical and unequal. The elite in the country, even those who ally politically with lower-caste leaders, never consider their political colleagues social equals, nor allow their children to marry out of caste.
These are questions that the new economic paradigm must answer. It would be extremely dangerous for the country, if discontent spreads. Some analysts have warned that the hanging this week, despite its legal solidity and procedural completeness, could add to this simmering discontent. In a country with a short attention span and where headlines keep jumping from one sensation to another, it is quite likely that this too shall pass. And the popular imagination will get carried away by the next scandal or scam. But if this feeling of segregation, deprivation and discrimination gets exaggerated, it cannot do good for an economy struggling to reach high growth rates.
The government also should be careful. There will be many within the corridors of power who will lay the blame elsewhere. The scapegoat is often the media. These days the favourite whipping boys are the NGOs and civil society leaders.
Academics, even if they have won Nobel Prizes, are derisively named anti national if they don’t toe the party line. However, what politically savvy leaders must realise is that hurtling down a divisive path could only harm them. The rest of us don’t have to fight elections.