The Brahmin, with his upper caste collaborators, doesn’t just control the state and the corridors of power, but also exercises monopolistic clout over the flow of capital in the country. As members in the boardrooms, along with the Banias, they direct over 90% of India’s capital.
The key players in the nationalist project, the landowning castes and the mercantile castes from various nations now submerged in India, along with the Brahmins have expanded their economic power several times since independence.
The key source of accumulation and power in rural India, land, still remains majorly in the control of a handful of castes in each region. Sometimes, as much as 85% of agricultural land is owned by one caste in a particular state.
Recent global studies of wealth inequality have pointed out that over 95% of wealth in India is owned by a mere 10% of the population. Who else but the Brahmins and the upper castes own this wealth?
You could say the Brahmin is both the head and the belly of the Indian economy, in a manner of speaking. He decides what India produces, because he controls the organized sector which in turn colonizes the unorganized sector.
He also decides what it consumes, because he leads India’s middle class which is barely one-fifth of the population and should rightly be called upper class because of all the power it wields, socially and politically, composed as it is of the traditional aristocracy
like the Brahmins and other savarnas, and the handful of ‘shudra’ dominant castes in each state who had benefitted immensely from the colonial apportioning of the largest, the most productive chunks of land to them.
This was borne out by the situation that unfolded after the ‘demonetisation’ event two years ago: I had done some rough calculations based on the SECC 2011 (Socio-Economic Caste Census-2011) consumption figures, and the Rangarajan and Tendulkar Committee estimates of the poverty
line, and concluded that all the Bahujans in India spend around 6 times less than what the Brahmins and upper castes spend. In other words, every Brahmin-upper caste individual spends around 20 times more than every Bahujan individual every day.
These are at best guesstimates, severely hampered by the lack of caste-wise data, but they do give you a picture of the larger Indian reality. ~ roundtableindia.co.in
Loading suggestions...