Читать книгу The Political Economy of the BRICS Countries - Группа авторов - Страница 46

Discussions on economic inequality by scholars, policymakers, and others had never attained such visibility as they have in the recent years. “It’s a golden age for studying inequality”, commented The Economist (2016). Publication of a series of important, well-researched books by reputed economists in the recent years has triggered further interest in the issue of inequality and its different aspects.¹ In spite of the renewed interest in the problem of inequality across the world, discussions on inequalities based on ethnic, racial, or caste groups have been less visible than general or interpersonal inequality. However, in contrast to this general neglect of inter-group inequality by economists in the context of the rest of the world, there has been a growing scholarly interest in assessing inequalities between the social groups (Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and others) in India in the past two decades or so.

Even though a common characteristic of all the BRICS countries now is that the degree of inequality in interpersonal income distribution is rather high, Brazil stands out as it has experienced a decline in inequality in the past two decades unlike others. In this chapter, our focus is on inequality between groups, rather than interpersonal inequality as the former is less discussed in the context of BRICS.

The complex social stratification along the lines of caste, tribe, religion, and gender has been a persistent feature of the Indian society for very long time. In the heyday of positivist thinking in social sciences, it was generally presumed that inequalities due to race, gender, and even class background were all forms of ascription that would go away with the development of impersonal market forces. The protagonists of this view shared the same belief in the rationalizing logic of modernity as propounded by the development economists of the earlier generation, even though they differed significantly on whether the market or the central planner would be the agent of modernity. The subsequent rise of neo-Marxian scholarship restored class analysis to a central position. It was then assumed that class-based loyalties were in the end fundamental. In recent decades, however, social science disciplines have turned full circle. The class-centered approach has given way to new multi-dimensional accounts of identities that include ethnic, caste, religion, and gender categories, and thus social identities seem to have come to the centre-stage. In India, popular discourses show an overwhelming presence of issues around identities. However, on the changing salience of caste-based differences in the Indian context, there is a counter-position as well. Beteille (2012), for example, criticizes the ‘pre-occupation’ with caste that he observes among the experts who express opinions in the media on Indian affairs. He has argued that “rapid economic growth and the expansion of middle class are accompanied by new opportunities for individual mobility which further loosens the association between caste and occupation”. In other words, Beteille questions the material basis of the presumed persistence of caste-based differences in a rapidly changing Indian economy. Some of the recent studies have documented how the role of caste has been weaker than before in shaping economic well-being. Migration, expansion of lower and middle castes in non-traditional occupations, changes in agriculture, and most importantly affirmative action have all led to improvement in the relative position of the Scheduled Castes in India (Kapur et al., 2010). Yet, the political salience of the caste issue has hardly weakened. In the context of limited opportunities, overall and growing aspirations for upward mobility, competitively assertive caste identities for distributional gains continue to dominate the political discourse in India, the connection of which with the so-called material basis has been changing as a consequence.

Given the diversity of opinions regarding the importance of caste and other social groupings in Indian society, the question still remains what exactly has been happening to the distributional outcomes across social groups as a result of economic progress. Beteille (1983) made a useful distinction between two aspects of inequality — the relational and the distributional aspects. While sociologists and political scientists are mostly concerned with the first kind, economists are generally concerned with the second. In the first case, inequalities are seen as built into the social structure in the form of relations of super-ordination and sub-ordination, i.e. the patterns of privileges, rights, and obligations. An economist, on the other hand, sees inequality in the distribution of wealth or income, or, as Sen (1980) has proposed, in the distribution of human “functionings’ such as health or educational status. Why has the economist been rather less concerned about inequality across racial, ethnic, or caste groups? The answer probably lies in the methodological preference of the economist for a depersonalized agent as the unit of analysis. The agent acts independently to choose the best course of action given the opportunities. This way of thinking has definitely been fruitful in illuminating a variety of problems. It cannot, however, fully capture the ways inter-group inequality persists over time. There is no point in denying that one’s location within the network of social affiliations substantially affects one’s access to resources.

While the inter-relationship between economic development and economic inequality has long been explored by economists, and the earlier belief in an inverted U-shape between the two has been questioned in the light of extensive cross-country data for longer periods, there is very little analytical exploration into what might happen to inter-group inequality in course of rapid economic development. In this chapter, we first assess changes in measured inequalities between social groups in India in both income and non-income dimensions. In the process, we re-examine some of the issues in measurement of inter-group inequality, which would help us relook at inter-group disparities in other countries as well. Finally, we try to relate changing interpersonal and inter-group inequality to the fact that although some of the countries, such as Brazil, have not grown as fast as the Indian economy has grown, their record of reduction in inter-group inequality has surpassed India’s by a wide margin.