Is modern India reinforcing caste divides?

In other words, segregation by food preference was to be enforced because some vegetarians had complained about sharing tables with students who ate eggs, chicken or meat. This circular raised a hue and cry among alumni (who had never seen this in their time) and current students. As I write this, the word is that the directive has been withdrawn.

This dining segregation policy may be new to IIT Kharagpur, but is well trodden ground for other Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), unfortunately.

There have been reports in the last decade of similar policies of segregating vegetarian and non-vegetarian tables in the IITs at Madras, Bombay, Hyderabad and Mandi, though it is hard to tell how long the policies lasted and whether the practice continued even if there was no official policy.

Many observers have roundly condemned these actions as overtly casteist and intolerant. One could be tempted to ask the youngsters demanding food segregation whether they would or could insist on it once they graduate to corporate life, or, even better, life abroad, perhaps in the US. One could ask whether these ‘moral’ or ‘ethical’ standards are strictly situational; that is, whether ethics is simply a matter of convenience, a stick to beat those who are different?

It is not the IITs alone that are culpable (there are many stories of similar things happening in educational institutions all the way from primary schools to colleges). And food is not the only site of segregation or discrimination. Housing discrimination is widespread and well documented.

There are numerous instances of refusal to rent or sell housing to Muslims (and Dalits, non-vegetarians and single women). In some extreme cases, housing discrimination against Muslims has led to the creation of segregated ghettoes like Juhapura in Ahmedabad.

The evidence is not merely anecdotal. I was involved in a large scale social survey in Delhi and the National Capital Region in 2016-17, whose results are reported in a book titled Colossus: The Anatomy of Delhi. Among other things, we found that over 95% of the people in Delhi disapproved of inter-religious, inter-caste and even inter-language and inter-class marriages. Almost all marriages were still arranged by parents and within caste groups.

Not only are marriages communalized, so is food. Close to two-thirds of Muslims and three-quarters of Hindus had never had a meal in a non-relative’s home. The lower one’s economic standing, the higher this likelihood of segregation. Even among the most well-to-do Delhiites, less than half the city’s Hindus said they would ever think about sharing a meal with Muslims.

Similar attitudes are reported in a nationwide Pew Foundation study that shows that more than half of Hindus and about three-quarters of Jains would never eat in a house or social gathering where the rules of food preparation were from a different religion.

We are reminded of a famous disagreement between Bhimrao Ambedkar and Mohandas Gandhi about the value of urbanization. Gandhi was known for the belief that “the soul of India lives in its villages.” Ambedkar, always Gandhi’s foil, had urged Dalits to urbanize because “What is a village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and communalism?”

Ambedkar’s position was in line with what is considered a ‘stylized fact’ of modernization: that urbanization is inevitably accompanied by fundamental social change. Not only do people do different things for a living (work in factories, offices and at construction sites instead of farms and forests), they also live in different arrangements (within smaller families and in greater density), with different neighbours and various social groups they may never have encountered in village life.

The biological reproduction patterns of urbanites—such as age of marriage and number of children—are expected to change, as are their social reproduction patterns (on norms, beliefs, faith, self-identity and rationality). For the German sociologists who first wrote about this phenomenon, rural life was defined by gemeinschaft (community formation through kinship and proximity), whereas urban life was defined by gesellschaft (atomized communities characterized by individualism and impersonal interactions).

One key to these changes is secular education, which is expected to produce social tolerance, among other things.

Yet, here we are. Almost 80 years after independence, after literacy levels have climbed from the teens to nearly 80% and almost every child attends primary school, we observe spasms of discrimination and intolerance in elite institutions.

The IITs are expected to set standards of modernization and produce global citizens who are no longer bound by narrow social identities, ritualistic behaviour or discriminatory practices. We know that their faculty composition is not representative of India: in eight IITs and seven IIMs, general/upper-caste individuals make up over 80% of the professoriate; an article in Nature reports that 98% of the faculty in the top five IITs are from that group. But we also know that the student body is becoming increasingly diverse by social identity.

Is this increasing diversity precisely the reason that reports of food segregation are becoming so common? Has India’s recent political discourse—especially messaging from the hard right—hardened attitudes and boundaries between social groups and emboldened powerful groups to openly act discriminatorily?

In his 1990 book A Million Mutinies Now, V.S. Naipaul, a sharp (if acerbic) analyst of India, had approvingly seen signs of the rise and arrival of the country’s marginalized majority. If those ‘million mutinies’ created a place at the table for those who were denied it before, these segregations signal a desire to return to a pre-modern condition in which social rank determines who gets to eat with whom.

Following the position of philosophers like Karl Popper and John Rawls, we (the people who can read this newspaper) must stay united in our intolerance of intolerance.

The author is a professor of geography, environment and urban studies and director of global studies at Temple University.