Author: akshay

In the article titled Johann Gregor Mendel: the victory of statistics over human imagination, the authors argue that big data analysis using machine learning, deep learning, et al can identify patterns that human beings can’t and hence these become “an important tool for developing more effective therapeutic strategies for complex diseases”.

Let us examine whether the claim that data driven science is going to take center stage is true. Let us also examine whether it is worth the hype.

How the nature of science changes with technological advancements

M D Madhusudan once narrated to me the evolution of how wildlife conservation is practiced.

When he was entering the field, people would travel to forests, look at paw marks, note them down in notebooks, and do analysis with pen and paper.

A little while later, camera traps and spreadsheet software entered the scene. The number of data points generated increased, and the kind of analysis that could be performed using GIS software and the like increased too.

Today drone photography and image recognition generates millions of data points, and much of the analysis is through modeling, machine learning, and deep learning.

It would be inappropriate to not use technology that’s available to us to generate more rigorous science.

The limits of resolution

Understanding problems with very high precision need not give us ways to solve them. This is why the victory of statistics ends often in diagnosis.

For example, take sickle cell disease. We know the exact mutation that causes it since 1956 (70 years ago). But severe anemia due to sickle cell disease and related morbidity and mortality is routine.

While the precision that’s enabled by data analysis is real, it is not always important.

It’s like having bigger and bigger microscopes. Yes, that allows us to see more and more clearly. But the benefits plateau after a while.

It is also important to remember the garbage-in garbage-out principle in any kind of machine learning. It is human imagination that allows non-garbage data to be collected and fed into models. The wishful thinking that it is possible to collect all kinds of data and have unsupervised machine learning automatically solve all diseases is impractical. Even if it is made practical, it need not directly translate to alleviation of suffering from those diseases.

All of what the authors write is true — except for the optimism.

Thanks:

• MK Shahzad who shared the article (without comments) in Swades🇮🇳 WhatsApp group
• MD Madhusudan for the insight from long career

Spoiler alert: This is an interpretation of the 2025 movie Sinners which includes descriptions that reveal the plot of the movie. So, if you still haven’t watched the movie, you come back and read this later.

This movie gets described as “musical horror” by many Western reviewers. While it certainly is a musical treat, the idea of calling it horror is a disservice. It is explained best in u/intro_spec’s words:

But Sinners makes the very valid argument that it’s not. It’s more a historical social commentary that happens to have vampires in the second half– it’s not just a vampire movie. To describe it in that way is a huge disservice to the richness of the genres it blends. Hence the one drop comparison. If anything, it’s a masterpiece of horror noir, the overlooked and underloved subgenre where the reality of Black life is the horror.

The critique of racism that Sinners is, must be visible to most viewers, even to those who hold an aesthetic that doesn’t allow them to enjoy it. But it would be useful to point out that there is an element of savarna behaviour which the movie accurately portrays which the savarna ‘progressive liberals’ should not miss out on.

The juke joint is a space for collective liberation that is built by and for the black community. The vampires present themselves as harmless people who could add to the joy. While their true intention is to infiltrate and destroy the space for their own gain. When things move further they’re more open in stating their intentions, and go on to even state that the people inside can find “fellowship and love” only if they join the vampires, and that resistance is futile. They do manage to infiltrate the space, turn people in it against each other, and eventually destroy the space.

When Mozilla used to have women’s gatherings (as part of their old diversity and inclusion efforts), women-only events, one of the comments by men used to be “what’s the harm in letting good men in?” The communities have learnt the hard way that it is always harmful to let members from the dominant group into exclusive spaces. For example, if you go to Bahujan Economists’ “Join Us” section you’ll see this:

Bahujans can sign up for one or both groups—Collaborators and Support Providers. We request non-Bahujans to sign up as a Support Provider only. Thank you! 🙂

Fellowship and Love

A special shout-out to the promise of “fellowship and love” that the vampires keep sending to people in the juke joint. It is what the savarnas entrenched within the system offer those who are finding ways to resist the colonizing/problematic/patriarchal/brahminical gaze and methods of the system — “fellowship and love”. The fellowship is always conditional. It requires those who are marginalized to give up on who they are and join the clan of the oppressive. When you join them, you get to live a comfortable life, “heaven on earth”. Once people turn over to the other side, they get irreversibly lost in the logic of the system. They can’t be spoken sense into. And they’ll keep gaslighting people who are resisting. Only the sunlight of knowledge (or socio-cultural revolution?) can get rid of them.

In this post, I’ll describe how caste and capitalism exist as closely related structures that reinforce each other in modern India. I begin by defining caste and capitalism. Then I describe how caste forms the bedrock for capitalism in India. And finally I talk about ways that capitalism reinforces caste, completing the loop that forms the nexus.

Some caveats

Firstly, it is important to note that any social theory has limitations. The society is vastly more complex than any single theory can explain. But individual theories are still useful as they explain some parts of the society, and can be combined with other theories to form a more comprehensive worldview. Therefore, while critically reading this post, try to think about the potential for it to explain and predict social phenomenon, and about the events or situations it cannot explain or will fail to predict, rather than trying to say how this is all stupid because something else can explain all of this. (I’m especially worried about you Marxists)

Secondly, the definitions used in this post are going to be entirely mine. Of course there’s no original idea and everything that I write will have been influenced by other people and their works (which I’ll try to quote wherever I remember exactly where I got an idea from). But, more importantly, there is a good chance these definitions are flawed and therefore do not really define the concepts that I am discussing. Accordingly, please apply your discretion when drawing conclusions.

Thirdly, my lived experiences are that of a very privileged person. This can often be seen as a hindrance to understand a topic like caste. But in this post I will try to rely majorly on my own insights from having lived inside savarna ecosystem, thereby not having to rely much on second hand lived experience. This is a valid approach that can be categorized under “critical savarna studies” as described by Ravikant Kisana.

Fourthly, please have patience with me as I go through thought exercises. Mine is a method that tries to arrive at the truth through generating multiple hypotheses and being very much unafraid of being judged for such hypotheses. It can be triggering to people on either side of the anti-caste — casteist spectrum.

Defining caste

Most savarna people deny caste by defining caste as “(merely a) category for the job you’re doing”. As per their definition someone who does knowledge work is a brahmin (and so on…), and it has nothing to do with birth. But this is not the reality of how caste is practiced and if you need explanation for how there is no flexibility in caste assignment and how it is entirely based on birth, this post is not for you.

Many definitions of caste among sane people then describe how caste looks externally. For example:

• caste is a fixed social hierarchy in which membership is through birth and birth alone
• the essence of caste is endogamy
• caste is a division of laborers, not a division of labor

The last one specifically is a response to people who claim that a society will need to have different people doing different jobs and that it is inevitable that there is a hierarchy and stratification like that based on job (division of labor). The division in reality is not that of labor, but that of who can do what labor. Certain sections of people are restricted to doing certain jobs — and this assignment is based on their birth — and that permanent assignment is what is called as caste.

I was in the Scouts program in school. When we do a camp, we are divided into groups of 8 called a patrol. There are several roles in a patrol — leader, assistant leader, treasurer, cook, equipments handler, tent handler, and so on. The roles keep rotating every day in an elaborate ceremony. Imagine if a kid was forever stuck in a role like cook, they would never be able to go around and do the fun things in the camp. Every kid can understand how it is only the right thing to do to rotate the roles. While there is division of labor, there is no division of laborers in the scout patrol. Everyone gets to do every role. Nobody is forced to be stuck in any role. The caste system ensures that people are forever stuck in roles — whether they like it or not, whether they’re qualified for it or not. And that’s why it is a division of laborers, and not a division of labor.

The savarna defense at this point is to claim that nobody forces anyone to do any job, at least in 2025. That there is upward mobility that has been made possible by capitalism and disappearance of caste. These are not true as we discuss later in this post. But the existence of this defense makes it important to define caste in a different way. And that is where I come up with an operational definition of caste which will both explain how caste continues to exist and also make it easier to understand the connection with capitalism.

I define caste as a person considering another person as a lesser human based on their (caste) identity. Unlike the earlier definitions, this definition is based on introspection of what goes inside a savarna person’s mind when they are being casteist. The parentheses around “caste” makes this definition have two forms. In the narrow form, caste is defined as: a person considering another person as a lesser human based on their caste identity, and in the broad form caste is defined as: a person considering another person as a lesser human based on their identity. In the broader definition of caste, therefore, it is possible to include gender, appearance, race, tribe, and several other forms of identity. We will try to use the broader definition sparingly.

It is important to be very critical about this definition before we proceed. Let us first see how we can practically apply this definition.

A very common form of caste discrimination is focused on what people eat. You see brahmins on social media calling people “rakshas” (demon) for eating meat. This demonization of people is built over a hierarchy applied to food, where certain food are considered the best and certain other food are considered the worst. And then this hierarchy is applied to the humans who eat those food too. And that’s used as an excuse not to be near those humans.

So, how does our definition hold against this? There is a person seeing another person as less human (as a demon). But is it based on caste identity? The savarna person reading this will be like “no it is not based on caste identity, it is based on the food they consume”.

But here’s where we need to distinguish between rationalizations and reasons. When a person says they’re discriminating against someone not based on what their caste is, but based on what they eat, they’re rationalizing. What is actually happening is that this person is discriminating based on caste identity. And then they retrofit the rationalization that it is based on food choices.

If the discrimination was indeed based on food choices, and not based on caste identity, then the brahmins would have to check lunch boxes before they discriminate. On the days a dalit person has fruits and nuts in their lunch box, the brahmin would have to embrace them. On the days a brahmin friend of his brings chicken, the brahmin would have to stay away from him. Even if the latter happens, the former doesn’t happen. Those who claim that they discriminate based on food choices, actually don’t check food choice every day. They just assign general food choices based on caste identity and follow the pattern of discrimination.

And so, seeing the other person as less human is actually based on caste identity.

And the proof of this is what happens when it comes to marriage. When it is time for a brahmin person to get an arranged marriage, the family will start looking at a matrimony website dedicated to their caste. Why? Some people will openly state that they’re casteist and that they will only approve marriages within their caste. But some others will mask their casteism in explanations like “see, people of other castes will have different culture and we can’t adjust to those. They will eat meat, for example”. But matrimony websites are not based on diet or culture. They’re based on caste. So, any explanation other than caste that they give is actually just a rationalization of their caste based choice.

Another advantage of defining caste this way is that it can be used to identify casteism on a day-to-day basis. A savarna-passing dalit (a dalit person who can speak like and mingle with the savarna crowd and can appear to a savarna person as another savarna person) will suddenly start getting discriminated against when the people they work with recognize they are dalit. This is why there is a concept of closeted dalit, and “coming out as dalit”. While everything else — job, location, name, appearance — remains the same, someone coming out as dalit, and consequently facing discrimination can be identified as caste through our definition.

The need for the broader definition

While the narrow definition works, why do we still need the broader definition? How is it that sometimes caste is not based on caste identity?

This is where things become a bit messy. Have you heard the story of the cat to be tied before pooja?

There was a cat that lived in a temple. It used to run around a lot and eat the pooja items. Tired of this the poojari started tying the cat to a pole before starting pooja. He would do this every day. After a couple of years the poojari became sick and started having his son poojari as assistant. Since he couldn’t run behind the cat, he would ask his son to catch the cat and tie it to the pole. The son would do it every time before pooja. After a few months, the older poojari retired and the son took over as the main poojari. Every day poojari junior would come, tie the cat to the pole and do pooja. All was going well till one day when he was on the way to do the pooja, he found the cat dead. Without wasting time he caught another cat from the neighborhood, took it to the temple, and tied it to the pole before starting pooja.

The story of the cat tied to the pole might seem like it is about the stupidity of rituals or brahmins. But it is a problem that all humans face. They do not operate objectively. They are slaves of habit.

The human brain isn’t rational. We have the ability to reason, but the reasons come after we have already made the choice. And the choices are made by using shorter circuits in our brain — habit, stereotypes, and patterns.

Even when being casteist, human beings sometimes stop using the “logic” of caste identity, and fall back to proxy indicators — appearance, language, attitude, etc. Even though the rational thing (for casteist people) is to think of another person as a lesser human based on their caste identity, sometimes people can use other identifying factors to base this on.

In other words, for someone to be casteist, they don’t need a birth certificate of the other person’s caste, and they don’t even need a self-declaration of their caste, but mere markers of caste background is enough.

“While it may be possible for an educated, middle-class Dalit to pass for upper caste, it is never easy. If someone is curious about your caste, they can sniff you out in a thousand ways—your name, manners, dress, diet, family customs, ritual practices. The very fact this person is curious means they have some doubt.”

~ Sujatha Gidla

If we take that argument another step forward, we could also question whether caste identity is really relevant in being casteist. We could wonder whether caste is at its core about treating some people (any people) as inferior and thinking of oneself belonging to a superior group. We could argue that as long as people get a target to feel superior over, it doesn’t matter to them what identity they use to ascertain that superiority. We could even say that this is the basis of competition between castes among brahmins themselves, for example.

But I do not want to make such an extreme analysis as it doesn’t really contribute to our discussion. Also, it could be easily seen as erasure of caste, and equation of caste with other forms of discrimination like gender, and so on. It is sufficient for me to demonstrate that the broader definition of caste as treating another person as a lesser human based on their identity is useful to explain some forms of casteism where caste might not directly be obvious. And with that we can end this section.

Defining capitalism

Most definitions of capitalism operate around private property and profit. If you get the drift of this post, you should be expecting me to define it in my own way. And I will. After all, as I quoted from NCERT textbook in my last post, defining things for ourselves is a very important aspect of critical thinking.

Unfortunately, a lot of people use this freedom unconsciously and define capitalism in strange ways. To them I would suggest that sometimes it is useful to read social science textbooks to learn about a topic too.

Many, for example, see capitalism as equivalent to industries (big machines in factories and the like). They equate capitalism with economic growth. Subconsciously they’re operating on something they’ve heard in their childhood as “socialism = bad, capitalism = good”. In discussions when someone blames capitalism for something, they jump to its defense saying “had it not been for capitalism, you would all be so poor now”.

The problem is not just that they see capitalism as the right answer, it is also that they define capitalism in a way where there’s no space for anything else to even be competing. They define capitalism as everything good, and they define everything else as everything bad. So, even before I define capitalism myself, I’m forced to create room for alternatives.

Firstly, consider whether there are different flavors of state control of the market possible. The answer is yes. It is possible for the state to have a low touch (less regulations), or a high touch approach (lots of regulations). And before anyone says “oh, in true capitalism the market decides everything”, I’ll say without the state’s role in mediating there wouldn’t be any capitalism. The state ensures, at a minimum, law & order situations that allow the “free market” to start operating. If finance wasn’t so tightly regulated an industry, it would be impossible to operate any capitalistic system. Whether the state should tightly regulate prices and get embroiled in external trade using things like tariff (reference indeed to what’s happening in the capital of capitalism right now) is of course “optional” add-on. Whether high or low, there is always the state’s involvement in the so-called “free” market.

Secondly, consider whether innovation has anything to do with private ownership and profit. Do human beings innovate only when the incentive is money in their bank account? Is there any role for incentives like fame, love, belonging, companionship, purpose, or joy in human desire for innovation?

Thirdly, be conscious of the truism that human beings are selfish. Selfishness is a necessary element of capitalism and since capitalism is everywhere it’s been hammered into our minds that human beings are, by nature, selfish. Question this earnestly. Think about how much altruism could also be part of human nature. Think also about the conditions which will make people act selfish or altruistic.

Hopefully now, you can begin to at least see capitalism as a spectrum, if not see alternatives to capitalism. And in that spectrum, I have the space to define the ugly version of capitalism that is all around us. I define that capitalism as a system in which “my profit” is considered a justifiable reason for doing whatever the fuck.

Here are some things that capitalists do without any worry to protect or increase their profit:

• destroy the planet
• destroy the planet and claim that they’re going green
• destroy democracies
• kill competition
• bribe decision makers to get decisions in their favor
• forge accounts
• hire people and exploit them, fire people whenever
• set different salaries for different workers doing the same job
• pay people as low as one can get away with
• lie, mislead, and manipulate
• not care about equity or justice (unless it is profitable to do so)
• grab power and abuse power
• intimidate, threaten, and kill people
• abuse law to silence people

While this list can go on and on, there are two patterns to recognize. One, that profit is the only value in capitalism and no other values exist. Two, that a lot of people in the society believe that capitalists are justified in prioritizing only profit and that there is nothing wrong with it.

And with that let us get back to caste and look at what it does in the society such that it prepares a fertile soil for capitalism.

Caste and its manifestations

When savarna people try to erase caste, they restrict caste to physically violent forms of caste-based discrimination. They say things like “oh, but it is only in rural India that caste exists”, “oh, but among the educated there is no caste”.

Their imagination of caste is exemplified by Bollywood movies portraying caste as the dalit family in a village facing ostracization and violence. Bollywood hasn’t shown caste as vegetarianism, as anti-reservation sentiments, or as various forms of sophisticated favoritism. In the limited savarna imagination, caste can exist only if there is a well and some people are prevented from taking water out of it.

So much so that when literally that shit happens within their households they don’t see it as casteism. Domestic workers not being allowed to use glass or toilet. Workers being forced to use different lift in apartments. Not shaking hands with or sitting next to certain colleagues. Literally untouchability.

I’ll repeat. Untouchability exists today. In various ways and forms. In the most elite places.

If you follow any social media accounts of anti-caste people, you will also know that caste-based violence is a day to day reality for many people too. Rape, murder, dishonor killings. I will not document a lot of that in this post because the savarna urge would be to define caste as just all of the gruesome things that caste does and to shut their mind.

What I’m interested in this section is to discuss the indirect manifestations of caste in our lives — the casteist assumptions that guide elite decision making that perpetuate systems of injustice.

Let us start with education.

Caste makes teachers treat students differently. Caste creates in teachers a judgement of how much one can learn, and they calibrate their effort accordingly. Their patience and their love is rationed and those at the lower end of caste hierarchy receive less affection and attention from teachers.

This starts at very young ages. And kids grow up internalizing what they’ve been told they can and cannot do. Some are given wings. Others get their dreams killed.

The higher in education you go, the gap widens considerably. Especially when the opportunities for education start becoming competitive.

Notice that I haven’t mentioned anything about the compounding effects of overlapping issues above. For example, generations of caste based marginalization lead to many students being the first generation of learners in their family. This means they wouldn’t have had their parents schooling them at home. And this makes it extra difficult for them in the classroom. Similarly, wealth differences correlated with caste makes it difficult for students to get access to various things that help in learning — including even the prohibitive cost of applying for various competitive exams.

The reason I mention compounding effects in a separate paragraph is to be clear that “oh, but this is not actually caste, it is class” is a false argument. It is caste compounded by class, gender, and other factors. And often the class difference is the result of caste.

Now, let us look at opportunities.

How are opportunities distributed in our society? Take job opportunities. Most jobs are fulfilled through personal networks. Even when there is a job advertisement, it is circulated through WhatsApp channels that mirror personal networks. Take funding opportunities. The call for a grant or scholarship might be on a public website. But the URL to that is distributed through email groups and twitter channels that are all again mirrors of personal networks. My point is that most opportunities in our society are distributed through personal networks. There is no central notice board where all opportunities are equally accessible to everyone.

And how are personal networks formed? For a lot of savarna people I’ve seen this starts with family circles. “Oh, I found this chartered accountant through my uncle and he helped me with formation of my company when I was 22”, “Oh, so <famous person XYZ> is my aunt”. Some savarna folks recognize this as a nepotism allegation and claim that there is nothing they can do about it. But most of them are blind to such privileges. To them it feels natural to have a chacha who’s helping them get their break.

Even when people don’t rely on their family circles for growing their personal networks, their caste identity helps them. It is easier for a savarna person to strike up a conversation and build a relationship with a random savarna person. Sometimes they bond over their shared caste identity. Regardless, they find it easier to trust each other and open doors for each other.

And remember how it is not always the literal caste identity. Often it is about proxy markers like appearance, confidence, accent, or relatable cultural references. Many people don’t realize how they’re judging some people as more capable merely by how they present themselves.

That brings us to wealth.

If you limit someone’s education and opportunities, can you expect them to grow wealthy? No.

But even in isolation wealth has a compounding effect by itself. Rich becomes richer. That also means that those who start with assets will find it easier to grow wealthy.

My parents are both alive and in government service in Kerala. They both make lots of money for themselves and savings and investments. I stopped taking money from them about 10 years ago when I finished MBBS. But, I’ve never had to worry too much about making money. I could take risks because I know that if something goes horribly wrong, I will likely get help from my parents. Also I could save whatever I earned. I didn’t have to send it anywhere. I also had financial literacy. And all of this financial freedom allowed me to have an unconventional career that allowed me to become a programmer, a public health activist, and so on. That unlocked many revenue streams for me. In turn, I become even more free to take even bigger risks.

Many savarna folks start businesses by getting investment from family & friends. This investment can even come in forms of people working for free, because their needs are met in other ways. And once things get going, you can erase all the investments and attribute everything to your hard work. The same is true for folks in academia, or non-profits.

All of this is why it is said ad nauseum by anti-caste folks that savarnas have social capital and that is the biggest form of caste privilege.

Aside: At this point it would be unfair for me to not calm the agitated savarna reader who’s going “Hey, but I grew up in poverty and nobody helped me become who I am.” Yes, buddy, I hear you. You are totally aathmanirbhar self-made. This post doesn’t apply to you.

The problem isn’t social capital per se. The problem is that there is no acknowledgement of social capital. Those with social capital go about their lives and build concepts of what is “just” without the acknowledgement of how privilege is distributed in the society.

They therefore find it completely acceptable that there is piss-poor standards in most schools, colleges, and training centers across India. There is no push for better education. They find it simply alright to have very few elite institutions that provide reasonable quality of education. They consider it fair that the opportunity to reach these are gatekept by entrance examinations. They don’t even see a connection between these entrance examinations and the worsening quality of education that prioritizes examination focused rote learning.

When it comes to reservation they oppose it tooth and nail. One of their arguments is “well, instead of having reservation in higher education there should be universal schooling that creates a level playing ground”. Yes, savarna folks care about universal education exactly for the five seconds it takes them to say that sentence.

If only they cared for it a few minutes more, they would have begun to realize the enormity of the task that lies ahead of us in creating a level playing ground, or even a fighting chance for millions of Indians.

And that’s the finest of savarna qualities. They talk about huge problems with a graceful smile. They speak about things with a calmness that can only be achieved by someone whose ass is permanently placed in comfort. They do not ever see the need for radical change. If you speak to them about radical change they will gaslight you into thinking that you’re an impractical and arrogant activist who’s not interested in change. They will convince you that incremental, slow change as part of the status quo is the only way to do anything. And then they will continue to do nothing.

And in that inaction, they enable the perpetuation of a harmful and violent status quo. They normalize all of the violence, all of the discrimination, and all of the resistance to change. They empower the mindset that there are lesser humans and their lives don’t matter, at least not in this generation. They delay change long enough for this generation to disappear and another generation to start fighting the same battles.

What caste, therefore, creates is not just a hierarchy, but also a resistance to change. Caste through its intricate string-pulling ensures that the hierarchy is seen as acceptable and inevitable. It legitimizes suffering and gives people an excuse to be violent.

And that is where it meets its closest friend.

Capitalism cements all injustice in place

To undo violent hierarchies in the society, we have to actively intervene with humanity and humane values. Capitalism through its single-mindedness on profit leaves no space for values. Therefore, capitalism acts as a cement that solidifies hierarchies in place leaving no wiggle room.

This could be surprising. The promise was that capitalism doesn’t care about your caste, and therefore anyone can rise up in class through capitalism. The promise was that of upward mobility. But here I am, claiming that capitalism does the exact opposite.

The claim that capitalism doesn’t care about caste comes from the idea that everyone in the capitalistic system is paid based on market value. And therefore if a dalit can gain enough skills they will be well paid and can rise up in class. The if in that sentence needs a big stress. We already saw above how caste creates systemic barriers for people to gain education and opportunities. The market does not see those barriers. The market only sees how much profit the person in front of you can generate. Therefore, the capitalist indirectly uses caste based logic to hire.

It is not just indifference. Caste-based hiring allows the capitalist to make more profit than what caste-blind hiring allows him to do. You can exploit someone more if they are already seen by the society as less of a human! You can pay them lesser than other humans. You can make them work extra hours. And you can make them do jobs that other humans would refuse to do.

Vice versa, you hire charming savarnas for the good jobs. Regardless of how mediocre they’re in their work, they can operate smoothly in the system. They are low-risk hires because they are allowed by everyone to make unlimited mistakes.

Capitalism’s far greater contribution towards caste is in building and maintaining larger structures that perpetuate caste.

The biggest of such structures is the state. Capitalism operates governments. The most recent example is Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Every politician in power is a representative of capitalism. Narendra Modi is himself a capitalist who operates through a puppet named Adani. Everyone bows to the pressure of money that capitalism puts on them.

The influence is not just on political leaders at the top. It falls on all leaders at all levels, and bureaucrats too. Through such tight control of the state, capitalism then determines what gets state’s assent and what gets state’s dissent.

The state in turn allocates less budget to education, health, livelihood, etc, and makes that money available for the capitalistic needs. With lesser budget to those sectors, there’s further degradation of schools, hospitals, and jobs. People become even more poorly skilled, sicker, and get trapped in jobs that barely allow them to survive.

Capitalism also silences the civil society, including academicians and non-profits. It does this in two ways. Firstly, it makes invalid all logic other than economic logic. Any research has to be centered around economic growth. All NGOs have to work towards scalable, sustainable models. Secondly, it puts people in dilemmas where they have to choose to retain their income or give it up to pursue relevant problems. It does this by controlling how activities are funded. Civil society is funded eventually by capitalists directly or by capitalistic logic operating through state or citizens. Therefore, these people are always held accountable by the capitalistic system to itself. And capitalism doesn’t like to fund trouble makers.

One might say, but it is not all about money, the civil society can decide to operate without money. Yes, but capitalism is making it increasingly impossible to do that. It makes more and more people think about work and life only in terms of transactions. It destroys safety nets like free healthcare and that in turn puts the fear of death in activists. These days capitalism also tightly controls everyone’s attention, thereby depriving activists and civil society ways to organize effectively.

Q: How do you kill the most radical organization? A: You fund it. You can easily destroy an organization by putting money into it. When money flows into an organization everyone’s thinking gets distorted. All radicalism gets defused into market logic. The latter part of the organization’s life will revolve around how to keep money coming in. People will start distrusting each other. Work will start getting quantified and values will vanish. It will very rapidly adopt capitalistic thinking and become part of the status quo.

Capitalism puts every person in a hamster wheel where they are constantly running without reaching anywhere. While caste normalizes social hierarchies, capitalism gives people a permanent distraction, a permanent excuse to not care about social hierarchies.

Conclusion

Caste and capitalism are intricately tied with each other, especially in 21st century. Seeing them together can give us deeper insights into both of them.

Democracy is a word that’s vague and has multiple meanings. It is often used as an excuse for not doing anything. The use of the word should raise suspicion about the intentions of the speaker.

Most people when explaining democracy start with an even worse definition of the word: “government of the people, by the people, for the people“. This was uttered by an American politician in 1863. Like most political speeches, it is designed to sound profound but leaves enough room to play soccer within that definition, let alone misinterpret it according to convenience.

The clearest word in that sentence is “government”. Democracy is seen there as a system on how to operate an extremely large group of people (known as a “country” or a “nation”). But the 4 remaining words — “of”, “by”, “for”, and “the people” — give us very little information about what democracy is.

The words of the people can either mean it is a system of governing the people, which would make it redundant considering that there’s already government before it which means the same, or it could mean it is a system which is composed of people, which would make it mean the same as by the people.

When it comes to by the people, we have to think about the history of when this was being used. It was used at a time when some people were considered royal, or of a different class, and these people were operating the government. In that context by refers to redistribution of power.

For the people can also be understood in the same context as having a direction and purpose which is in the benefit of the people as opposed to only benefiting the royal class.

By far the most disturbing word there is the people. It was 57 years later in 1920 that women could vote in national elections in the United States of America. So when Abraham Lincoln said “of the people, by the people, and for the people” it didn’t include women. And that’s the only definition of democracy that most of us can recite.

To be fair, today’s NCERT textbook seems to be really trying to make us think past that useless definition. Quoting Ribiang and Lyngdoh Madam from it:

Ribiang: But why do we need to work on a definition? The other day you quoted Abraham Lincoln to us: “Democracy is government of the people, by the people and for the people”. We in Meghalaya always ruled ourselves. That is accepted by everyone. Why do we need to change that?

Lyngdoh Madam: I am not saying we need to change it. I too find this definition very beautiful. But we don’t know if this is the best way of defining unless we think about it ourselves. We must not accept something just because it is famous, just because everyone accepts it.

Such a fascinating call for critical thinking in Class IX social science textbook! The rest of the chapter is fantastic too and it talks about free & fair elections and constitutional rights. It ends by saying that there is an expanded notion of what’s democracy when people say sentences like: “We are a very democratic family. Whenever a decision has to be taken, we all sit down and arrive at a consensus. My opinion matters as much as my father’s.“

When I say democracy is a useless word, I’m mostly concerned about this expanded scope of the word which is applied not at nation-state levels, but at smaller levels like organizations and groups. In discussing that, we will look at the meaning of the word in its form-of-government sense too.

What people mean by democracy

A large number of people mean “majority rule” when they say democracy. This is where you have fascists destroying institutions and putting political opponents behind bars. In smaller groups, this attitude translates to “let us put this to vote”. If a “democratic” organization makes decisions based on what wins a majority vote, it is a majoritarian organization.

Some others explicitly call this out as majoritarianism and consider a democracy as one where the rights of the minority are upheld. There is greater emphasis on a previously agreed set of rights and protection of these rights. In smaller groups this operates as a “consensus-based decision making”. Every individual will have the right to veto a decision and there will be an attempt to form a consensus.

We can already see how complicated the latter would be. Regardless of how much emphasis there is on consensus, it is easy for a dedicated individual to prevent consensus formation. Consensus formation requires a shared desire to reach consensus. And this becomes disproportionately more difficult in larger groups.

There’s another reason why consensus is difficult.

“Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realise that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic.”

~Dr B. R. Ambedkar

If democracy is a decision making process, and it is a consensus based decision making process and not majoritarianism, then there’s a value system that’s required to be shared by everyone such that there is consensus. That value system is called constitutional morality.

Constitutional morality is composed of values like liberty, equality, and fraternity. Non-majoritarian democracy can exist only when these values exist.

Can non-majoritarian democracies exist?

At the scale of a nation state, it is impossible to have a non-majoritarian democracy. Let’s take India even before Narendra Modi. The Aadhaar project, for example, came up in that India. It was vocally vetoed by several thousands of people. Even the Supreme Court eventually declared it unconstitutional. Yet, Aadhaar was made a reality by a government that wasn’t even called fascist.

It is with that realization that the constitution of India goes to great detail about fundamental rights and how to protect them. While the decision making shall always be majoritarian, the fundamental rights and institutions like judiciary leave a loophole through which those left behind can negotiate.

And as long as the majority has not gone fascist, these loopholes allow enough space for those others to live peacefully. And vice versa, the moment majority turns fascist, these other things crumple and the majoritarianism shows its true colors.

In other words, a non-majoritarian democracy is a make-believe game played by a majoritarian democracy when there’s no crisis. The moment there’s a crisis, those who hold power will come out and sort things out in ways they want.

At the scale of nation-states this happens through raw physical power, through police, army, gun, and machines. People are physically put in jail, or murdered. Some of this power is now operational through virtual spaces and can manifest as blocking website, taking down channel, and so on. But even these blocks are enforced through physical network infrastructure that’s operated by human beings.

It is also interesting to note what happens when there is a military coup in a “democratic” nation. The constitution, the election, the institutions, the people, they’re all the same. But the guy with the gun is now ruling the country. How’s that possible?

It is possible, because at its core, there’s nothing called a democratic government. There is raw physical power, and in a complicated series of social role-plays, this is often held by a power center which also happens to be elected by a majority. If the social role-plays are gone, then the whole thing collapses into its true form.

Surely these don’t apply to small groups, right?

One could be mistaken that smaller groups — like an online discussion group, or an NGO — do not have such central power. After all, how many times have we heard “this is a democratic space” being used in these contexts?

Look at how decisions are made and enforced in these spaces, and you’ll see the same pattern as in nation-states. There is a complicated social role-play. But eventually the decision making power is vested with whoever legally controls the NGO, or whoever is the administrator of the group. If you can kick someone out, you hold the ultimate power in that space.

So, all of the consensus process and “democratic decision-making” in these spaces are actually power delegated by the ultimate authority.

For a thought-exercise, let us imagine that there is an online group, and through some technical glitch nobody can get kicked out of it. Isn’t that the ideal democratic group?

As long as there are no decisions to make, this works out. And in a large number of online groups which are merely spaces for people to spend time talking to each other, there are no decisions to be made. And therefore this works out.

But if there is the tiniest decision to be made, it no longer will work. Say someone says “let us change the group name”. Suddenly there’s the need for a decision making process. And till that is established first, the name will likely remain the same.

Democracy is biased towards the status quo

Akshay

Let us do say the group is really interested in this problem. There are several possibilities.

If everyone in the group likes a new name, the problem vanishes. The name gets changed. This is perfect consensus. But this rarely happens. This is easier to happen in very small groups. This is easier when the group is largely comprised of people thinking similarly or like each other.

If a large number of people like a new name, but a few like the old name, the problem takes on a new dimension.

• Those who are in the minority could face social pressure and agree to go with the new name — consensus through social pressure — and the name gets changed.
• The group might decide that till everyone agrees on the name, it won’t be changed, and the name will remain the same.
• The group might just decide that the majority vote will decide the new name — majoritarian democracy.

Did you notice how I sneaked in “group might decide”. How will the group decide how to decide this problem? How will the group know whether to go with a majoritarian vote or a consensus process?

This is where no group is void of power hierarchies.

Even in a group where everyone is an administrator, those who joined first or those who are more senior in real world could hold more power. If, say, this is Beast Games and a hundred people were randomly picked into a group at once, there would still be differences in physical attributes that give some people more “power”. Someone might look more intimidating, someone might speak more persuasively. These “natural” leaders tend to gain power.

The other possibility is that there are two or more leaders who emerge and they have different ideas as to what should happen. In this situation, if the stakes are high, the group will split into factions.

But often what happens is that there is no high stakes, there’s not much to gain by splitting the group, and things will just continue based on the energy of the most vocal person/group. Those who disagree might either live with the choice, or just leave the group.

Over time this will lead to the group degrading in what it seeks to achieve by retaining the energy and enthusiasm of a very small “core” active group. And they become the power center, and the group now has a power hierarchy.

Let’s do a different thought experiment. What happens if one member of the group just unilaterally decides to change the name? Social norms prevent this from happening usually, but there can still be people who violate this. The following could happen:

• The action can get reverted by someone else
• The group just discusses it for a while and moves on (with the name remaining changed)

What if the name change is indeed reverted, and the deviant person changes the name again?

These might seem esoteric situations, but a lot of “norms” are violated consistently in various groups. And whether these are problematized depends on the people in the group. And whether these are addressed depends on the power hierarchies in the group.

And remember we are operating in the ridiculous constraints of our thought experiment. In most groups, there’s real power that’s obvious and straightforward to see. And all decisions ultimately are enforced through these power structures. And the decision making process is consequently determined by these power structures.

Just think about the work of Women in Cinema Collective in Kerala film industry. Most woman were facing harassment from men. This could be considered “violation of social norm”. And after a lot of hard work and deep politics things perhaps changed a tiny bit. WCC problematized the issue. But who can “address” it? Problematizing helps and is only the first step. But enforcement of justice is left to those who wield real power, which in case of Malayalam film industry is those who hold the money (or those who hold the guns).

Democratic groups are groups playing social role-play under benevolence of power

As in the nation-state, a group which describes itself as “democratic” is just a group which plays the social game of democracy under the supervision of benevolent power structures. The rules of the game are often ad-hoc, made by and imposed by the power structures.

We might consider that human beings are social animals, and such social constructs are how we always operate. But in this essay what I’m trying to argue is that this fact — that a democracy is just a game of entertaining participants under the supervision of a kind dictator — is often not realized by the participants themselves. And that has to do with the vagueness and uselessness of the word democracy.

Nobody is allowed to question what a democracy means. It falls like a command that stops all further discussions.

• Does it mean that everyone will agree with everyone else?
• If there are disagreements, how will those be resolved?
• Are there some basic rules everyone is expected to follow?
• If so, are these rules themselves amenable to change?

What use is this analysis?

You might see groups that don’t have answers to these questions that still exist. And then you might show that as examples of why these questions are irrelevant.

And I will agree with you when it comes to certain groups.

There are groups whose purpose is to be a space where a large number of people will put their attention. The idea is to just be a notice board where things can move. A ‘digital town square’ or a ‘digital public square’, an example of which is the now defunct Twitter.

For such a space decision making is unnecessary. Anyone can post anything. Free speech is the only right to protect.

But if any group claims to be anything more, like:

• Pro-people, pro-poor
• Action group
• Movement group
• For a fairer world
• Safe space
• Caring space

If anything more than “a public square” is in the group’s description, then the use of the word “democracy” is a red flag.

If you are pro-people or pro-poor, you have to do things and change things for people. You have to necessarily be an action group. And an action group needs to have clear decision making structures.

If you are a safe space, you have to ensure that there’s psychological safety for everyone involved. And that requires very strict ground rules, quickly enforced, about how one can speak and what one can say.

When people do not have the energy or commitment to make a space pro-people, or make it a caring safe space, they hide behind words like democracy. And this leads to the group becoming just a public square.

A public square is not bad in itself. But being a good public square requires its own commitment. Again, if you lack energy for that commitment, just hide behind the word “democracy”.

Democracy in that sense is a very useful word. It helps people avoid spending energy. When you’re confused about what to do with a group, just call it a democracy and be done with it.