When History Fell In India

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While on the topic of why India didn’t liberalize sooner, an article posted to the SM’s News column points at one important factor. In his “Letter from India” column in the NYT, Akash Kapur reflects on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall the impact it had on India –

Most of the media coverage has, quite understandably, focused on Europe. But the tremors from Communism’s collapse were felt far beyond the immediate battlegrounds of the Cold War. The breakup of the Soviet Union had a profound impact on India. In many ways, it paved the way for a reinvention of the country

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Akash Kapur

While an important socio-political milestone, Kapur notes the equally important intellectual milestone – an event Francis Fukuyama memorably christened The End of History. History in this sense didn’t mean an “end to events” but rather, the (potential) end of a type of dialectical debate about political systems.

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p>It’s tough to remember now, BUT, prior to the fall of the wall, there were many serious scholars who seriously argued that not only would communist / socialist systems deliver greater equality than capitalism but also greater wealth . Their economic promise went a l’il sumthin like this – under capitalism the steel industry, for ex., might currently consist of 10 small, competing companies which are constantly hunting for cheaper labor to exploit, can’t all run their plants at max efficiency b/c of inter-firm supply/demand flux, and ignore other, more important social goals.

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p>“I remember, from my childhood, the Soviet engineers and scientists who filled the bars in Pondicherry, seeking respite from the rigors of the power plant they were building up the road. I remember the dusty bookstores that stocked cheap Russian classics and the bottles of sparkling Russian wine my father used to buy from visiting sailors.”Instead, why not gather some scholars & start with a top-down, national plan for how much steel “we” need? Then, build 1 big steel factory, have some PhDs calc how to run it at maximum efficient scale, eliminate “wasteful” expenditures like marketing budgets, commissions for sales forces and particularly those evil profits & exec-bonuses. And “we” can achieve important Social Ends like hitting female/minority employment targets, insulating employees from the vagaries of the employment market, sourcing coal from underserved regions of the country and making sure no one makes more than 2x the lowest paid employee’s salary. Lather, rinse, repeat for all other parts of the economy and poof! we’d all theoretically be better off.*

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p>Of course, the fact that we (well, most of us) now get a hardy laugh out of the idea that the Soviet system could somehow lead to greater wealth is indicative of the degree to which History, in Fukuyama’s dialectical sense, has ended. We instead generally accept that the troika of Liberalism, Democracy, and Capitalism (LD & C) are the right big picture features of a socio-politico-economic system and most debate is instead about comparatively fine grained variations of the theme. Simply put, workers in the first and developing worlds aren’t quite circling the capitol in tractors with raised pitchforks like they did back in the day.

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p>Meanwhile, in India, Nehru/Gandhi did OK on L+D but were pretty actively opposed to C…Kapur’s piece provides some great examples – big & small – of how, despite official pronouncements of non-alignment, India truly was on the wrong side of this History –

India was never a Communist country. But it was far closer to the Soviet Union than to the United States throughout the Cold War, buying weapons on concessional terms, doing barter trade with the Eastern Bloc and receiving financial and technical aid for industrial and infrastructure projects.

I remember, from my childhood, the Soviet engineers and scientists who filled the bars in Pondicherry, seeking respite from the rigors of the power plant they were building up the road. I remember the dusty bookstores that stocked cheap Russian classics and the bottles of sparkling Russian wine my father used to buy from visiting sailors.

It Brought Down Mental Walls Too…

There were many reasons for the closeness between India and the Soviet Union, not least of which was a U.S. foreign policy that tilted decisively toward Pakistan. But the closeness was born, too, of genuine ideological affinity.

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p>At about the same time the balance of payments crisis was prompting India’s 1991 economic reforms, the Soviet Union was collapsing. While many of the reforms were arguably inevitable (the Indian state was truly running out of other people’s money), the fall of the Wall provided the important intellectual “cover” for enthusiastically pursuing reforms –

It’s possible that all of this would have happened anyway, with or without the dissolution of the Soviet Union…Most important, the death of Communism had a psychological and intellectual impact that paved the way for India’s transformation. As the economist T.N. Srinivasan (among others) has argued, it provided an opening for would-be reformers, who had already recognized the need for some form of liberalization but who had run up against ideological resistance.

The collapse of the Soviet Union wasn’t just the collapse of a political and military behemoth. It was the collapse of an idea, too, and with the discrediting of Communist ideology, Indian socialism, long the guiding philosophy of statecraft and economic policy making, confronted a crisis of confidence. Ideas that had until then been anathema to the nation’s governing class — ideas about markets, about profits, about entrepreneurship — suddenly seemed, amidst the detritus of Communism, to be incontestable.

It’s hard to remember now, after the spectacular market failures of the last few years, but policy makers in 1991 were operating at “the end of history.” Capitalism wasn’t just a superior model; it was the only viable one.

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p>And so, perhaps the biggest reason India couldn’t have liberalized sooner was plain old ideological inertia. Unfortunately, the cost of waiting to abandon those socialist ideas now appears to be 14M infant deaths, 260M literate individuals, and 100M folks who missed the opportunity to rise above poverty…..

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*alas, the same sort of “the top-down plan = efficiency, lower costs + cut out middleman profits = we’re all better off” thinking underlies many of the proposals in the US healthcare reform debate… so I suppose there’s still a lot of room to debate just how closed the verdict is on History….

115 thoughts on “When History Fell In India”

  1. I’d interested to read how India’s caste system has affected it’s move towards liberalization in a way that China’s hasn’t?

    I don’t know what there is to learn from China. China has its “caste system” too, only their dominant groups simply exterminated all the other groups in what was probably the most brutal nation-building process in history. RJ Rummel supplies the narrative:

    Finally, there is that democide committed by the communists. From the very first, the Chinese communists used the same kind of repression and terror employed by the Nationalists. They executed so called counterrevolutionaries, Nationalist sympathizers, and other political opponents. The Communist Party itself and their army were systematically purged and rectified several times, one purge alone involving 10,000 executions.7 But unlike the warlords and Nationalists, the communists also murdered as part of, or a spill over from, trying to “reform” or radically change the countryside and its power structure. This was ideologically driven. Landlords, rich peasants, the gentry, and the bourgeoisie were the enemies, to be exterminated or won over; but in any case, their land and riches were to be distributed among the poor peasants. In the beginning the emphasis was largely on rent reduction and some power redistribution; but during the Sino-Japanese War and especially the Civil War, radical land reform–the seizure of all “excess” land and its redistribution, the rough equalization of wealth, and the punishment, often execution, of “bad” landlords, “bullies” and former officials became general operating procedure. In this the communists developed and honed the procedures they would apply throughout the whole country once they were victorious. Up to October 1, 1949, when Mao Tse-tung officially proclaimed the Peoples Republic of China, the communists killed from 1,838,000 to 11,692,000 people, most likely some 3,466,000. This is about one-third the democide of the Nationalists. The communists usually controlled a much smaller population. But also, they treated their soldiers much better, the process of conscription was not a death trap, and officials and officers were far less corrupt and undisciplined. Thus, the population was less subject to the arbitrary killing by the communists; what killing did take place was often part of a program or campaign mapped out in advance. Even in newly conquered areas, when peasants spontaneously would take matters into their own hands, round up some hated local bullies or former officials and beat them to death, it generally was within the communist scheme. Otherwise, the party’s Central Committee would have made reference to communist goals while instructing cadre to prevent such “anti-social action.” Once control over all of China was won and consolidated, and the proper party machinery and instruments of control were generally in place, the communists launched numerous movements to systematically destroy the traditional Chinese social and political system and replace it with a totally socialist, top to bottom “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In the beginning their model was Stalin’s Soviet Union; Soviet advisors even helping to construct their own Gulag. Their principles were derived from Marxism-Leninism, as largely interpreted by Mao Tse-tung; their goals were to thoroughly transform China into a communist society. In this they were consistent with their beginnings, but they now had a whole country to work with, without the need to give tactical and strategic consideration to another force–the Nationalists or Japanese–seeking and capable of destroying them. Now, beginning in 1950, carefully and nationally organized movement after movement rapidly followed each other: Land Reform, Suppressing Anti-communist Guerrillas, New Marriage system, Religious Reform, Democratic Reform, Suppressing Counterrevolutionaries, Anti-Rightist Struggle, Suppressing the “Five Black Categories,” etc. Each of these was a step towards the final communization of China; each was bloody. Self-consciously bloody. Witness what Mao himself had to say in a speech to party cadre in 1958: What’s so unusual about Emperor Shih Huang of the Chin Dynasty? He had buried alive 460 scholars only, but we have buried alive 46,000 scholars. In the course of our repression of counter-revolutionary elements, haven’t we put to death a number of the counter-revolutionary scholars? I had an argument with the democratic personages. They say we are behaving worse than Emperor Shih Huang of the Chin Dynasty. That’s definitely not correct. We are 100 times ahead of Emperor Shih of the Chin Dynasty in repression of counter-revolutionary scholars.8 Only when these movements and especially the final, total collectivization of the peasants and “Great Leap Forward” destroyed the agricultural system, causing the world’s greatest recorded famine–27,000,000 starved too death9–did the communist begin to draw back from or slacken their drives. Shortly after this famine, in the mid-1960s, an intra-party civil war erupted between Mao Tse-tung and his followers, who wanted to continue the mass-based revolution, and a more moderate, pragmatically oriented faction. This “cultural revolution” probably cost 1,613,000 lives. Mao won, but only temporarily. With his death soon after, the pragmatists and “capitalist roaders” regained power and launched China in a more open, economically experimental direction; even, until the Tianamen Square demonstrations and subsequent massacres of 1989, on a more liberal path. Clearly, there is much about all of this that needs elaboration here and this is done in Part II or this book, which begins with a much more detailed summary of the relevant PRC history. Finally controlling a unified China, finally able to put into effect for the whole nation their principles and plans, finally able to discard any tactical considerations about public opinion, peasant support, or encouraging volunteers for the militia and army, the communists could create their utopia. In this they utterly failed, as did the communists in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. But the people paid the price for these greatest of social experiments. Since 1949 the Chinese communists killed from 5,999,000 to 102,671,000 people; a prudent estimate is 35,236,000. When added to the number they murdered in previous years, the communists likely killed 38,702,000 Chinese, Tibetans, and other minorities.

    Needless to say, Kabir/Prema’s narrative of China doing a”FAR better job feeding, housing and educating its citizens” than India is completely ahistorical. I suppose, India could try ot follow China model, and since both countries are already liberalizing economically, that would mean India should just exterminate its Muslim population, any language groups that prove problematic to a unified Indian Identity, and while we’re at it might as well get rid of poverty by killing all the Dalits and OBCs.

    So much for the chinese model.

  2. nm

    The short answer, is, yes, the caste system has hampered the creation of a meritocracy in india. I think your comparison with china is a poor one, as china hasn’t hesitated to use extreme violence to crush traditional values and dissent. Any comparison with china would require us to take into account the 10s of million dead chinese in the last 50 years. In fact, this brutality towards their own people raises a very serious question about how china will deal with its neighbors and others. A person who beats their children regularly will also be violent in other interactions.

    A better comparison for india would be societies like Malaysia and Indonesia. Both are multi-ethnic societies with some problems, but I think both have created a more egalitarian setup with less extreme poverty because of a lack of a indian-style caste system.

  3. Al Beruni:

    Thanks for that answer, but how will India ever get rid of it’s caste system? And are there cases of Dalits or untouchables who have moved into the middle-classes in present day India?

    Africa has been mentioned above, but in regards to the issue of malnutrition and since I am from there, I will offer my perspective on the issue of food security in Africa. Much of Africa has yet to achieve food security and the reduced deaths from hunger have largely been the result of massive food aid infusions from the World Food Program (it has not come from increased agricultural productivity on that continent). Kenya is currently experiencing a drought and almost 30% of the country is facing serious starvation issues (without food aid, the situation would have spiraled out of control).

    Back to India: I have always wondered how Indian democracy has managed to survive in the face of such poverty and inequality. My experiences in Africa have shown me that in many instances, democracy (which is largely reduced to voting) does not create stability unless it’s accompanied by economic changes in the poverty numbers.

    So, for example, Kenya has “democracy” in the sense that people can vote & we have a free press, but the high poverty rates mean that it can descend (at any minute) into a bowl of violence and even civil war. Democracy has not brought the rule of law or even produced a fairer, more equitable society. In this respect, it has been a failure.

  4. Thanks for that answer, but how will India ever get rid of it’s caste system?

    That question makes about as much sense as asking how Europe and America will ever get rid of their “race systems.” It’s the discrimination we’re worried about, not the ways people go about identifying themselves. If you want to get rid of the “caste system” all you need to do is to stop talking about it, stop dispensing benefits based on it, and stop politically organizing around it. As long as the “cure” to the caste system is to reinforce caste-based forms of self-identification it’s not going to go away.

  5. Yoga Fire:

    Well, given that America now has it’s first black president, I would say that they have come a long way in terms of addressing their race problems. It began with the civil rights movement in the sixties, then they introduced civil rights laws to protect minorities and so on and so forth.

    And I wouldn’t say that Americans have deep cultural restrictions about who they can marry or date or anything like that. Meaning, over time, they have become more open and less racial.

    Throw in someone like Oprah who grew up black and poor in the deep south, but was still able to rise above her circumstances and become a success.

  6. nm

    And are there cases of Dalits or untouchables who have moved into the middle-classes in present day India?

    There are literally millions of dalits who are part of the middle-class; they also a good representation at the highest level of politics. But relative to their overall numbers this is still quite a small percentage. Also, they tend to be mostly at the lower-levels of the middle-class and with many poor relatives outside the middle-class.

    In the villages and countryside, their continues to be harsh discrimination against them, refusal to allow education to their children and access to shared resources and so on. Laws have been passed to outlaw discrimination but they are poorly enforced, especially in the countryside when the land is usually owned by non-dalits and these people also control the police force.

    India and African countries such as Kenya or Nigeria do have a lot of similarities. And, yes, some of what you are describing Kenya is common in india, especially in the more backward northern part of the country.

  7. Al Beruni:

    Assuming they are free public schools in India (funded by the government) – who would stop a Dalit child from attending such a school?

    What exactly differentiates different castes? are the customs different? is the language different? what?

    Also, would you say that the creation of the state of Pakistan was the best thing that happened to India in terms of keeping it from descending into civil war? i.e. It created a country where 80% of the population were Hindu’s and it would be crazy for the Muslims (who remained) to think that they could fight such a large majority?

    Africa’s civil wars are largely created because very few countries have such a large homogeneous group. So, you end up with continuous inter-tribal warfare because you do not have a super-majority that can overwhelm any threats from a minority group.

  8. 1) what policies should Nehru have followed immediately after independence?

    There are a few stray thoughts I can come up with, which are somewhat complementary: if he were interested in a socialist path to industrialisation he should have promoted much stronger land reform and collective rights for the poor in the country rather than violently suppressing movements in that direction; he should have appreciated the congress party’s/india’s political structure and realised that it was going to be impossible to sustain the license raj without a stronger and more autonomous state because the subsidies being granted would become monopoly rents through the political process (i.e. no one could ever take them away, leading to no stick and all carrot cake); he should have understood that other people would come along who refused to acknowledge that india had a structural break in gdp (i.e. accelerated its industrialisation) in 1950 that was larger than the one in 1980, and that those people would besmirch his name, not understand the valuable function that economic nationalism and non alignment played and continues to in strictly economic terms, etc.

    however, most of this is pie in the sky – one person doesn’t make history – even someone with as much power as nehru had in 1950. i think the biggest failure of nehru was his role in contributing to Partition rather than being a bit more farsighted (even a confederal arrangement might have at least allowed a slow glide to three separate states – which is what the cabinet mission plan entailed).

    his second biggest mistake was helping to turn kashmir into a perpetual war zone and flashpoint.

    his second third biggest mistake was inadequate succession planning and institution building.

    but with all of these, you’d have to research if that would be possible. and there are broader questions that are more important – like is industrialisation worth it, or was gandhi right?

    2) What were some of the other transition points to move away from babudom/license raj before the 80s?

    1965/1966 would have been one maybe, when the Congress system (and planning, and productivity growth) collapsed. However, these things don’t happen over night. what you can say is that the trajectory, which included several wars with pakistan, a war with china, several famines, resort to food aid from the united states and forced devaluation that was politically untenable, state repression in 1971 during the emergency and at other times, infighting among the elite that spilled over, and the development of Indira Gandhi as a very shortsighted leader might have played out differently.

    but then, most people’s image of ‘babudom’ is associated with the post 1960s license raj anyway. all the ideas about stagnation and perpetual inability to solve anything and black money are generated in the 1965-1980 period. very few people look at things like the culture of a steel mill in chattisgarh and how it reduced caste-based economic and social inequalities (compared to the private sector) through an ideology of equality – jonathan parry has written about this in ‘two cheers for reservation.’ or for that matter, that the 1980s ‘take off’ couldn’t happen without the capacities that were built on the basis of the plannign period.

    anyway, i feel unmoored in this discussion so don’t take this comment to heart too much – just random stream of consciousness.

  9. Well, given that America now has it’s first black president, I would say that they have come a long way in terms of addressing their race problems. It began with the civil rights movement in the sixties, then they introduced civil rights laws to protect minorities and so on and so forth.

    The fact that we still refer to him as a “Black President” might suggest that we still have a “race system” doesn’t it? People identify themselves by race/ethnicity here. It’s part of our culture. The issue is discrimination based on that which needs to be tackled.

    Assuming they are free public schools in India (funded by the government) – who would stop a Dalit child from attending such a school?

    If they are bullied or teased in school they will be less likely to go. Small communities can also impose upon the teacher to not admit them. The bigger problem, of course, is simply the lack of public schools. With tuition and limited seats for programs people are going to compete for whatever is left. If you make a point of not mentioning or specifying someone’s caste in a classroom though, the kids will end up playing together. If you want to reform a society that really is the best step.

    What exactly differentiates different castes? are the customs different? is the language different? what?

    Caste (varna) was never really put into place in India (at least as far as we have records). It was more of a normative idea about how society ought to be structured. Different rulers tried to arrange society in accordance with the system and some came closer than others, but like the “Pirate’s Code” the idea of splitting society off into 4 mutually exclusive groupings was a rough set of guidelines about how society should be structured. In reality a commercial economy and the kinds of limited governments we deal with in ancient India would have precluded any kind of large-scale enforcement of rules. It was just an informal idea that some people are roughly in the business of state/administration, scholastics/religion, farming and trading, or doing odd jobs.

    What people usually talk about when referring to social issues is caste (jati). An individual caste is a “lineage group,” somewhat analogous to a “clan” or “tribe” in other societies. There are differences in norms, customs, interpretations on religious beliefs, and so on that can range from subtle to extreme. Some might be patrilineal and others matrilineal even though they live in the same village, for example. It is an idea rooted in specifics of Indian history. Indian society was (and is) made up of migrants and the integration of numerous tribes around the subcontinent under a larger religious/cultural identity. The system that came up was a way of maintaining a lot of that diversity of customs that came with wave after wave after wave of migration over the past several thousand years while still being able to interact and trade with each other without fighting too often. Every time another big group of people moved in it was like splashing on yet another splotch of paint onto a Jackson Pollock. All the shapes and colors work together, but they were also distinct in themselves, and the end result ends up being a mind-blowingly complicated and unGodly mess. These individual jatis get roughly mapped onto some slot among the varnas, but historically there were always instances of various castes moving up and down the prestige chain as well as moving into and out of different lines of work.

    A few hundred years in the modern world, though, and a lot of the differences slowly melt away. Some of them went away by fiat. A matrilineal clan, for example, could no longer be matrilineal since the British administration allowed descent and property to be passed down the paternal line only. Other stuff changed just because it wasn’t relevant anymore as the economy became more commercialized and later on industrialized. People still hold the last names and the knowledge of lines of descent and there are still some vagaries as to what specific variations of myths and stories they tell and what kinds of jobs they do. For the most part though, the only real difference at this point is the money and contacts people have.

    Some priestly families also start teaching kids the Vedas at a very young age, which makes sense because that kind of huge info-dump only really works when your mind is young and malleable. But for the most part people do whatever job they can get. My family never thought me how to raise crops and the only martial skills I have are from Brazilian jiu-jitsu. So much for my half-vaishya/half-kshatriya parentage. The discrimination is pretty much just people using whatever leverage they can to get goddies for themselves while beggaring their neighbors.

  10. Suresh, #97

    If I were a British gentleman Governer who only wanted to fleece India why would I bother with stopping Sati or increasing the marriagable age for girls after incidents of injury of teenage girls during sex. Why would I care for those brown native girls? Why would I bother setting up experimrntal dairy farms like the Imperial Dairy Farm at Bangalore where research was conducted to increase milk production by Indian farmers? Why would I bother (at times against bitter religious opposition), setting up partial sewage system and water pipe-lines into Indian cities? Why would I bother setting up Hospitals and send English doctors to villages? Nor would I care about the exploitation of the lower castes. Why should I? I say just loot and leave. Why set up schools and universities? There are many such cases which escape me now. But if they never had a civilising mission, all this would not have taken place.

    Probably as a gentleman, you want to attribute higher motive to what you are doing. Maybe guilt. My point is not to criticize what was done. What was done in the past was in the past and I do not want to indulge in lynching the dead. But, atleast be clear on the history and not build false hagiographies.

  11. Also, would you say that the creation of the state of Pakistan was the best thing that happened to India in terms of keeping it from descending into civil war? i.e. It created a country where 80% of the population were Hindu’s and it would be crazy for the Muslims (who remained) to think that they could fight such a large majority?

    Actually I’d argue part of the reason for India’s (relative) institutional stability has been it’s large amount of diversity. Reflecting on Federalist #10 would suggest that a large, diverse republic will be better at protecting its minorities than one with a clear and dominant powerful class. To have a civil war you need a set of clear cleavages to fight based on. But in India where you have people who can identify by non-mutually exclusive categories like language, caste, class, religion, political ideology, and so on, what you end up with are a whole bunch of groups who are too small to dominate, but too big to trample. Of course, you also end up with endless patronage politics, corruption, and slapshot implementation of policies. Things that are certainly not helped along by political parties that make a point of expanding the role of the state in acting as social engineer.

  12. @nm “Assuming they are free public schools in India (funded by the government) – who would stop a Dalit child from attending such a school?”

    nm, many people…. Having lived in Bihar for a time, where the caste system is still very deeply entrenched, and mix that with poverty for most people (regardless of caste) and there are many situations were just trying to help a Dalit child can be dangerous to your life– the place I volunteered at had two well-qualified Indian women teachers come from outside the area to teach the Dalit children, and they were brutually attacked and raped to drive them away– upper caste people in that area do NOT want the dalits to get an education– because the small level of power they hold over them is tenuious and could easily disapear with a little education– they don’t want to have to compete with jobs, and also lose the uneducated poverty-sticken dalits who make up their work force in the fields.

    Bihar is an extreme, of course, and does not represent all of India, but there are certainly cases all over the country were Dalit children have not been allowed into school- govt school or not– to make sure education is available in all communites for all people, the police force and school faculty would have to strongly believe in allowed ALL children in the school, otherwise pressure from locals to keep Dalits away from school can easily suceed.

    When desegregation of scholls occurred in the U.S. the police force and military had to be employed to protect the children and allow them in the schools.

  13. Back to India: I have always wondered how Indian democracy has managed to survive in the face of such poverty and inequality. My experiences in Africa have shown me that in many instances, democracy (which is largely reduced to voting) does not create stability unless it’s accompanied by economic changes in the poverty numbers.

    Things may be bad have been getting progressively better since independence,so even people in poverty have a stake in the country. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_India Poverty wise the post liberalization phase has been a golden age, with huge decreases. The problem is the growth may not be enough to meet the new aspirations of the people.

    Thanks for that answer, but how will India ever get rid of it’s caste system? And are there cases of Dalits or untouchables who have moved into the middle-classes in present day India?

    A caste in India is basically a community. India has a first past the post electoral system, so that further increases the power of communities. There are limited economic resources there are strong incentives for communities to undercut each other. That said communities do change, and dissolve and as communities die out, the caste system weakens. Of course, if pure self interest takes over instead, what replaces the caste system will probably be worse.

    what policies should Nehru have followed immediately after independence?

    Immediately after independence? Russian roulette for himself instead of Russian economic policies for India :-).

  14. Yoga Fire:

    But in India where you have people who can identify by non-mutually exclusive categories like language, caste, class, religion, political ideology, and so on, what you end up with are a whole bunch of groups who are too small to dominate.

    If the main cause of sectarian violence in India is religion (i.e. the Hindu/Muslim divide) wouldn’t you say that Hindu’s as a group represent this large dominant group?

    So, if I look at the bloody riots in Gujarat against Muslims, was the violence perpetrated by one caste of Hindu’s living in that state or did various Hindu groups (regardless of caste) band together to commit the violence?

  15. milieu “But, atleast be clear on the history and not build false hagiographies.”

    What I said was neither false neither a hagiography. It is just a balanced look. And besides history is very subjective and is prone to propaganda.