Does the state know its limits?
What does an SC person get out of a government sponsored inter-caste
marriage? A bond forged through money will be cruel to the Dalit partner
RAVINDER KAUR
T HE Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment has announced a scheme to en
courage marriages between Scheduled and non-Scheduled Castes. There is
rarely any evaluation of several such government ‘do-good’ intentions. In
reports of central and state ministries one gets a listing of the schemes
and the amount of money spent. Beyond that, one is unable to get any idea of
whether the scheme was availed of, who availed of it and whether it was at
all successful. Big schemes, like those for poverty alleviation, are
evaluated now and then and we hear about their continued lack of success;
small schemes have a life of their own, unnoticed. The small do-gooder
programmes go on for ever, perhaps because it is easier for bureaucrats to
continue these schemes without any evaluation. They also provide easy
patronage funds for politicians.
These schemes are never examined for their potential to do harm rather than
good. Social engineering of any sort is fraught with the greatest dangers.
To attempt it in the most private spheres of human life – marriage – is
worse.
The recently announced expansion of the scheme to the entire country has a
reasonably hefty monetary incentive built into it. Already, Gujarat has been
giving the same amount to such inter-caste marriages with SCs. Tamil Nadu
provides Rs 20,000, Orissa Rs 10,000 (up recently from Rs 3000) and West
Bengal a paltry Rs 5000. The central government now proposes to give Rs
50,000 to any nonSC person marrying an SC. The central government will foot
half of this bill while the state governments will foot the other half.
Minister of social justice and empowerment, Meira Kumar, used the euphemism
‘inter-caste’ marriage to refer to her new scheme. But surely the government
has no intention of rewarding every intercaste marriage with Rs 50,000!
Given the general lack of evaluation, we only have the logical route to take
to examine the viability of any new policy or scheme – defined in the
dictionary as ‘intention to defraud’. The noble goal behind such do-gooder
policies may be to further ensure the integration of the SCs into the
‘mainstream’. What better way to do it than by encouraging the forging of
the most intimate relationship between members of the two ‘set apart’
categories? A marriage would create unbreakable bonds and the offspring
would have a mixed identity, which would even tually help break down the
rigid walls between the SCs and the general category.
But did money ever buy love or even human tolerance and affection? Marriage
is a relationship that requires a lot to sustain it. Most individuals in
India still expect marriage to last a lifetime. So people who come together
in marriage share much in common. Earlier the basis for marriage used to be
shared caste or sub-caste, locality, economic and social status and other
cultural factors. Today, the old grounds of marriage may be supplanted by
new ones, like belonging to a common profession. Yet, even here, what the
economists call ‘assortative mating’ occurs. It is rare that the fortunes of
the two partners are wildly ill-matched.
What happens in a marriage brought about by the greed for Rs 50,000 and
nothing else? The socalled ‘green card’ marriages provide clues. People
would enter into these marriages to pocket the money, split it two ways, and
then part amicably, having duped the government in its noble intentions. In
other cases, if the SC partner de cides that a Rs 50,000 marriage was for
real and that he or she did not wish to leave it, such a partner, especially
a woman, may bear a lifetime of ill-treatment (it would be interesting to
know how many nonSC women would marry an SC man; it is likely to be men who
would take ‘advantage’ of the scheme and also get a woman in the bargain).
The Indian system of marriage is hypergamous, that is, women necessarily
have to marry up, while men can marry down. Hardly any women or their
families would consent to such downward unions.
What does an SC person get out of a government sponsored intercaste
marriage? The scheme presumes that the contemporary Dalit wishes to buy
upper caste status through marriage for which the government ‘pays’ money. A
bond forged through money will be exploitative and cruel to the Dalit
partner.
Where the government can focus its attention is on ensuring that couples in
inter-caste marriages should have security of life and limb. Leave the rest
to policies of empowerment through education and health care, which will do
more to break down caste prejudices than such unviable schemes.
The writer is associate professor, IIT Delhi ravinder_iitd@yahoo.com
EMAIL
ravinder_iitd@yahoo.com
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