BR Ambedkar described villages as cesspools of degradation, and chastised intellectuals for romanticising the Indian village. Seventy years after Independence, villages still live out Ambedkar’s characterisation, as also the Gandhian assertion that India lives in its villages. Both must change, if we are to be spared reports such as a villager in Nalanda, Bihar being forced to lick up his own spit from the ground as punishment for the crime of entering a caste superior’s house without permission.

Just weeks ago, some young Dalits were thrashed in Gujarat, fatally, in one case, for offences ranging from watching a garba to growing a moustache. How does watching a ritual dance or growing hair above one’s own upper lip become an offence? Because it shows disrespect for the caste hierarchy and a claim to equality by those tradition had deemed untouchable.

Oppression of those at the bottom rungs of the caste hierarchy is not always by those on top. The man in the Nalanda village who was made to lick the ground was from a backward caste ritually above Dalits and those who decided to mete out this punishment were themselves from backward castes, albeit placed above that of the victim of such ersatz punishment.

It is not so much castes that oppress other castes as the ideology of Brahminism that oppresses all castes other than that of the Brahmin, whom the Manusmriti declares to be the lord of all creation. The challenge is to eradicate the ideology of Brahminism. The principal means employed to weaken, if not remove, caste inequality has been to pursue reservations in government jobs and in access to educational opportunities. This has brought redemption to individual members of oppressed castes, without doing much to alter perceptions of inferiority about the oppressed castes themselves.

Ambedkar tried moving out of the Hindu fold to escape the Brahminical tradition and the oppressive social hierarchy that flows from it. It did not help. Those who converted to Buddhism are treated on par with scheduled castes. Nor did conversion to Christianity or Islam remove the stigma of low-caste origins, although these faiths have no place for caste in their theological framework.

Kerala’s foremost social reformer, Sri Narayana Guru, tried a different tack — using the philosophy of Advaita, which sees everything as some manifestation or the other of the self-same Atman, to argue that caste distinctions are delusion. His own castemen converted him into a yet another member of the pantheon to be worshipped, relegated his philosophy to books and practised caste superiority vis-à-vis castes traditionally deemed lower down on the hierarchy.

Yet, the only place where caste has weakened and where studies have shown Dalits to be the least oppressed is Kerala. That is due to relative advance in democratising society, resulting in political empowerment of all sections. Education and healthcare have improved as a direct consequence of the resultant acquisition of agency by even the subaltern groups of the state.

Yet caste has only weakened, not disappeared in Kerala. Caste being a pan-India ideology, it cannot disappear in just one corner of the country. Further, in Kerala, the structural diversification of the economy needed to create new kinds of jobs into which people from subaltern groups can move has remained stunted. Conceptually, it is not difficult to see that the material basis of caste is the correlation between caste and occupation.

That can break only when new kinds of jobs open up in large numbers, people from all sections of society are educated enough to take up these jobs and capability to execute the job rather than the caste into which a person was born determines access to the job. Clearly, continued growth of industry and new, organised services is the key to creating non-traditional jobs. Industry and services do not grow on the farm. They call for an urban environment. Urbanisation, thus, is a key element of breaking up the material basis of caste. The few Dalit millionaires that India now has have come up in towns, naturally, not in the villages that remain cesspools of degradation.

Globalised growth is the key to sustained structural diversification of the economy. Opportunities for new jobs open up on a global scale. The key to taking up these opportunities is education, good health, governance, infrastructure. Dalits and other backward castes have to stop prioritising reservations over everything else and demand governance, education, healthcare, good infrastructure and faster, globalised growth as the route to emancipation.