Annihilation of caste: How capitalism could achieve it

The dominant progressive argument in India calls for dismantling of caste through radical redistribution by means of land reforms, state intervention or revolutionary social restructuring.

- AMAR PATNAIK & ANSHUMAN SHARMA

The argument is that the entrenched inequality of India’s caste system must be annihilated through political and economic levelling. However, this framework misses a counter-intuitive argument. What if the faster path to annihilating caste is through capital?

A growing body of thought suggests that markets, entrepreneurship and access to capital can dissolve social hierarchies more effectively than centralized redistribution.

Caste as a system of power asymmetry:

A helpful framework for understanding the system's multi-nodal hold on structural inequality could be the ‘power asymmetry octagon’ outlined by one of this oped’s authors in his work, Institutional Change and Power Asymmetry in the Context of Rural India (Patnaik, 2018). This approach argues that inequality in India arises from eight overlapping asymmetries of power: economic power, political power, social status, cultural legitimacy, access to information, skills and technology, opportunity and capability.

‘A caste hierarchy has concentrated privilege across land and capital (economic power), social prestige (social power), cultural legitimacy (ritual authority), political influence and access to education and information. Meanwhile, marginalized communities are excluded across almost every side of the octagon. This multidimensional asymmetrical power structure makes the caste system extremely resilient.

Interventions aimed at reducing asymmetries often address only one dimension—say, through redistribution policies—and leave the broader structure intact.