False Economy - Alan Beattie [143]
But Indian politics, if anything, has gone the opposite way from the process of modernization in most democracies. The typical pattern, as happened with the spoils system in nineteenth-century America that we encountered above, in the chapter on corruption, is to start off with clientelism: "What will you give me for my vote?" Next comes ideology: "Who will make the country better off, especially for people like me?" Finally, it appears, we get to managerialism: "Who will most competently, and with the most winning smile and plausible manner, implement the set of policies on which all mainstream parties broadly agree, even if none of them will publicly admit it?"
Far from being dominated by ideology, still less by management, Indian politics has become ever more dominated by competing crowds of interest groups grabbing for the spoils of government jobs and public money. Recently, the number of such parties representing social castes has exploded. This is less a matter of left versus right—or even, as we will see, rich versus poor—than a matter of every caste for itself. And meanwhile, this squabble over the spoils has helped dim the prospects for more economic liberalization, which most economists would agree has helped to put India on a path to greater prosperity. How did India get here?
Tempting though it is, not least because it would allow us to take one final swing at the East India Company, we can't quite blame the British for India's politics in the same way we can blame the Mongols for Russia's. The British empire intensified and formalized the fissiparous malignity of caste divisions that scars Indian society and retards its economic development, but it did not create it.
Caste is a vastly complex subject, not least because it has a variety of dimensions, including the religious, social, ethnic, historical, and occupational. The word itself is a foreign import to India: casta had been used in sixteenth-century Spain and Portugal in discussions of botany and animal husbandry to denote species or breed. The term was carried to India by traders and became a loose expression that could refer to community, bloodline, birth group, or religion.
The system of caste owes a great deal to Hinduism, which divided society into four categories, or varnas. But, as we saw in the chapter on religion, modern caste divisions are not a straight reflection of Hindu teaching. As well as the broad varna classifications of Brahmin (priest and scholar), Kshatriya (warrior), Vaishya (merchant and artisan), and Sudra (manual worker), there are hundreds subgroups, called jatis. Sometimes, but not always, they are based on or associated with a particular occupation. One jati might traditionally be goatherding, for example, and have certain respected rights and privileges as such. While varna is more a spiritual identity, jati corresponds more closely to the actual concrete experience of life: the community you are born into; the job you are likely to end up doing; the background of the person you are supposed to marry.
We also saw in the religion chapter how self-interest managed to spread caste division throughout Indian society, taking it beyond its Hindu roots. Hinduism has at least four major rival religions on the subcontinent—Sikhism, Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism. It is remarkable how the jati subdivisions, which are supposedly ultimately derived from Hindu teachings, have managed to penetrate all of them.
Sikhism, for example, was founded relatively recently, at the end of the fifteenth century. The founding Gurus of the religion rejected the authority of certain of the Hindu texts and defiantly wove an explicit rejection of caste Hinduism into its practices. In place of the name that