Suman Palit bemoans the Indianization of America via multiculturalism and its handmaid affirmative action. As Suman points out the Indian government has been attempting to erase the social and historical reality of caste by government fiat for three generations. It has done this with blatant affirmative action that has slowly been devalued as more castes attempt to qualify as “backward.” India’s anti-caste policies in fact have almost certainly crystallized the socio-cultural structure of 1947 as now there is an incentive for the lower-castes to cling to that status while higher caste groups develop a resentment and no doubt emphasize their own purity to compensate for perceived slights at the hands of the government [1].
But one needs to extend this further and apply Amy Chua’s thesis in World On Fire-a globalized India will need affirmative action to maintain some level of social stability. Groups like the Marwaris, Parsis and Banias will take advantage of the world capital markets and leverage their international connections in the Diaspora to attain even higher levels of entrepenurial success. Additionally, other groups, like the Brahmins of southern India, will achieve success by the novel mode of professional advancement through the offshore service sector (from highly paid programmers to more modest jobs such as customer service). To redress the market induced imbalance the Indian government will almost certainly have to placate the lower caste groups with even more government jobs & programs. In the long term one could imagine mobile groups like the Marwaris and Brahmins migrating from Mother India to the West or more pliable Third World nations, sapping South Asia of the productive economic classes that have long given it a modicum of civilization despite its ubiquitous squalor.
Finally there is another option to ease tension between the castes-find a scapegoat. The killings of Muslims in Gujarat are perhaps a prelude to this-for on that issue, all Hindu castes might agree, for though the Dalit is a wretched of the earth, he is still not a Muslim. A close analogy would be the intense racism that the working and lower classes of whites in the American South projected toward the blacks.
[1] The elite is of course always has overseas university slots for its children, those who take the brunt of affirmative action programs are the traditionally less well connected and suffering “middle classes,” though these now form the heart of BJP electorate.
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