Barkha Dutt: belief

Transcript context

…I’ll tell you a little story about myself. When I was 18, I studied in one of India’s top liberal arts colleges. I used to be asked, “What is your caste?” I used to say, “I don’t know.” I was very proud of saying that, and I really didn’t know. My parents had never told me what my caste was, and it was their way of bringing me up to be a progressive Indian. Then a few years later, I did one of my first journalism stories in the gang rape of a Dalit woman in a village in Rajasthan. The Dalits are the people who are at the very bottom of the social hierarchy. They’re often treated as outcasts. They often do menial jobs, like cleaning toilets or handling the dead skin of cattle, which they then work into leather. They’re also — it’s shameful that this practice exists — manure scavengers, which, in other words, they literally carry the shit out of toilets that don’t have water or clean our sewers. For these reasons, they’re often treated as completely at the bottom of the caste hierarchy. The woman, Bhanwari Devi, who had been gang-raped — she had been working with a government program to stop child marriages in her village. Among the men who raped her was the father of a one-year-old child who she had been trying to stop from being married. After she complained, she was made to live on the outskirts of her village, not allowed access to the village well. When one of the courts actually acquitted the men she had accused of rape, the judge remarked that men of a higher caste would not touch a woman of a lower caste, so this rape could not have taken place. I tell you the story to say that the disavowal of caste is a privilege of sorts. I’ve had to accept the hard way that you can’t disown the reality of caste, much as I would like to. Has there been mobility out of the entrenched caste structures? There has been. In the cities, you will see less and less of this discrimination of the kind that I have just described having taken place. It was also two decades ago. You say the state does not recognize caste. In fact, the state has special affirmative action — which I support — for what are called scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, which have traditionally been discriminated against for centuries. The problem is, Tyler, that now we have everybody wanting a slice of this affirmative action, which allows you quotas in jobs and education, at least in institutes that are run and managed by government. You have something called the OBCs, the Other Backward Classes, who say, “We’re not at the bottom, but we are somewhere in the middle. From state to state, we’ve also suffered either economic or social discrimination.” You have this highly politicized conversation. You have the entrenched social tradition, even where professional practices are no longer interlinked with caste. You have just this entrenched social structure, and it will not change, in my opinion, till there is economic, professional, and social mobility. We’re seeing a lot of that, in fact. inked with caste. You have just this entrenched social structure, and it will not change, in my opinion, till there is economic, professional, and social mobility. We’re seeing a lot of that, in fact. A lot of things have changed, but not when it comes, once again, to love and marriage. I feel that that’s where the real tests are. It’s like people who say, “Some of my best friends are Black. Some of my best friends are Muslim.” Yes, but would you be comfortable with your daughter marrying one? That’s where the test is. Why is there so much talent coming out of India right now? I know you could always say, for a long time, there’s been a lot of talent coming out of India. Surely that’s true, but it does seem there’s a discrete break. If you look, say, at the number of Indian CEOs in Silicon Valley, who also have done extremely well, it seems fundamentally different from, say, 20 years ago. What accounts for that?…

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