The readings assigned to my group were from Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen’s “An Uncertain Glory” where they highlight how deeply entrenched inequalities are in India and the failure of democracy to address them.

Inequalities of various kinds exist all over the world, but India has extreme inequalities of many types including economic, health, education, political power, gender, and caste which reinforce each other. This makes inequality an “intersectional” and “intergenerational” phenomenon. In terms of income inequality, India is comparable to South Africa and Brazil, both high-inequality countries. The Indian caste system, in particular, which has persisted into the modern age despite legislature banning caste-based discrimination, sets it apart from other countries battling inequalities. Caste stratifications reinforce class inequalities and are resistant to change.

At the beginning of the century, in British India, literacy rates among Brahmin men were already high (for example, 73% in Baroda state and 68% in Mysore compared to 1.2% and 0.9% for Dalit men in both states respectively). For Dalit women, however, literacy rates were absolutely zero in most states. This is a classic example of how mutual inequalities (in this case, gender and caste) reinforce each other. Although this data is from 1901 and caste and gender gaps in literacy rates have reduced as the country approaches universal literacy for younger age groups, these historical inequalities still persist.

Data collected from Allahabad shows that 75% to 100% of all jobs in public and civil society institutions including the press club, university faculty, the bar association, and upper echelons of the police force are held by individuals belonging to high caste despite them making up only 20% of the population. Compared to this, Dalits have negligible representation in any of the institutions except for university faculty due to quotas. Although Allahabad is just one city, the caste gaps are similar or worse across the country. Interestingly, the authors argue that one of the barriers to addressing caste-based discrimination is that caste has become “unmentionable” in polite society because any kind of caste consciousness is considered “retrograde”. However, this superficial practice does not prevent caste-based social norms from prevailing.

Gender inequality, too, continues in India. For example, despite women’s education and empowerment, sex-selective abortion of female fetuses is widespread leading to a child sex ratio of 800 girls to 1000 boys in some of the worst affected regions such as in Haryana and Punjab. Between 1980 and 2010, there were approximately 4 to 12 million sex-selective abortions.

In the next chapter, the authors present these inequalities as a failure of the Indian democratic state. While democracy in India has succeeded in some respects such as holding regular elections and protecting civil liberties, it has nearly failed in reducing inequality and increasing representation of marginalized groups. New inequalities are emerging due to the growing corporate influence on public policy.

The media which can be used to challenge public policy and shape social values has a strong pro-affluent bias due to its reliance on corporate sponsors and the privileged background of media professionals. In another chapter, the authors cited that a survey of 315 editors of print and digital media in Delhi showed that not one belonged to a scheduled caste. In fact, 85% belonged to upper castes which represent only 16% of the Indian population. This monopolization of the media and policy discussions by a small elite has enabled the rich to create a separate social universe detached from the everyday realities of the poorer majority. This asymmetry of voice also leads to biases in public spending. The state spends more on subsidies and concessions for business elites than on welfare schemes for the poor, and the failure of Indian democracy is manifested in the neglect of malnutrition, education, and healthcare.

This paves the way for Gupta’s argument in Red Tape that poverty may be understood as a form of “structural violence” perpetrated by the state. It causes premature, unnecessary, and avoidable deaths of poor people on a massive scale. In Chapter 1, Gupta estimates that there are 140 million “excess deaths” in India. These deaths are preventable through state intervention and welfare schemes but are not prevented or seen as a crisis.

Ironically, the poor are not excluded from democratic processes – and if we are to recall Banerjee – are quite instrumental for democratic processes such as voting, and yet they have been taken out of public discussions. The state does have the resources and capacity to intervene more urgently to save lives as it does in the case of natural disasters or economic crises. However, widespread deaths of the poor from malnutrition, food insecurity, and lack of healthcare is not considered to be a crisis or disaster. Perhaps this is because certain classes actually benefit from poverty and inequality and state structures further maintain the status quo. Hence, by allowing so many preventable deaths of the poor through inaction and indifference, the state perpetuates a form of violence that is “structural” because it’s built into the social system.