We need a reformation: Caste salience must fall for India’s social capital to rise
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Over the past year, I have devoted several columns to drawing attention to how inadequate social capital in our hyper-diverse society is a fundamental cause of many of our socioeconomic problems. Our public places deteriorate over time because in the absence of a sense of common community, individuals maximize private gains over public interest.
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
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