So our cities are choked with traffic, making people angry, destroying generalized social trust and perpetuating a vicious cycle. Small enterprises remain small because they are capital-starved. We cannot solve simple environmental problems because we distrust the institutional mechanisms that are necessary to manage them.
Neither judicial diktats nor government action can lift Delhi’s smog unless Indian society builds the necessary stock of social capital.
Many readers have asked me the reasons for India’s shortfall of social capital and what we could do to address it. That is what I intend to do in this column.
The fundamental reason for India’s social capital deficit is the caste system—specifically, the segregation of people, over the past 70 generations or so, into a large number of communities (jatis) that do not inter-marry or inter-dine and tend to monopolize specific economic activities.
This means, as genomic historian David Reich puts it, that “India is an extremely large number of small populations.” There is a high level of trust within communities, but very little across. Since jatis have been around for a long time and have regained salience in social life, I never tire of recalling B.R. Ambedkar’s warning that a society divided into castes cannot genuinely be a nation.
Castes are indeed anti-national. We have found ways to map religious and ethnic diversity onto an underlying endogamous, separated but pluralistic template.
Whether we frame the challenge as one of forging an Indian nation, creating an egalitarian society or building social capital, it essentially boils down to dealing with caste-community divisions. The best solution is to reduce caste into insignificance, an enterprise that emperors and social reformers have attempted over history and generally failed.
In his final paper written at the turn of the century, sociologist M.N. Srinivas wrote about how the horizontal form of caste has made a comeback riding on democratic politics. If the prevalence of inter-caste marriages increases, the edifice of caste will become less formidable.
Yet, it would be wrong for public policy to intrude in one’s personal domain and interfere with the choice of spouse. It should be up to individuals, communities and social reformers to promote inter-caste marriages. Unfortunately, the Indian state is failing in its due role by visibly failing to protect inter-caste couples from community coercion.
Influencing marriage patterns is hard, but promoting inter-dining is a lot easier. As I wrote in a previous column, communal dining is the easiest pathway towards breaking age-old identity barriers that prevent the build-up of social capital.
“Educational institutions, factories and workplaces should have common canteens where people with different food preferences can sit together at the same table (albeit loading their plates from different stalls).
Municipal corporations could make space available for street food stalls with common seating areas, much like food courts.” Public feasts on national holidays are excellent opportunities to underline common civic identities.
I also wrote about how technology in the form of digital payments and particularly the open credit enablement network (OCEN) can chip away at the economic walls of caste.
Recent research in cognitive psychology offers new directions for public policy. Studies show that early childhood experiences have a major effect on identity, equity and bias. Infants begin to differentiate among people according to social categories in their very first year of life.
They can distinguish race, gender and language and tend to prefer people who have the same characteristics that they do. By the time they are six years old, children perceive themselves as group members and prefer in-group members over out-group members even when the groups are arbitrary. The die is cast that early.
Psychologists Marjorie Rhodes and Andrew Baron have found that infants raised in diverse, multicultural settings tend to develop a more balanced recognition and comfort with faces from various racial and ethnic backgrounds.
This suggests universal public schooling, especially at kindergarten and primary levels, might be a trick that India is missing. A country where everyone goes to the same public schools is likely to instill egalitarianism in the citizens’ psyche.
Of course, it’s not only about exposure to diversity. Children pick up the norms, values, attitudes and prejudices that they observe in adults around them. So parenting plays a very important role in identity and attitudes.
This brings us to what I call the ‘endogeneity problem’: Can a society reform itself? Can caste-conscious families raise caste-agnostic children? Can caste-conscious citizens create an egalitarian society? Or, to put it in an optimistic way: What is the critical mass required for a chain reaction? The only way to find out is by doing.
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