Poverty is a derivative of inequality and the gravest challenge that faces the world today. Contrary to what could be expected in modern societies, inequality has increased significantly across the globe in the 21st century.
This is despite the immense amount of research and investigation by international organisations and research institutions as well as by country authorities and individual researchers. Poorer countries are especially affected by the rise in poverty and inequality that pushes them back from the small advances they are able to make in their socioeconomic development that are buttressed by various types of redistributive programmes. Such programmes have comprised transfers of food and enhancement of nutrition and, very occasionally, financial and non-financial assets such as cheap loans and milch cows.
The question that has to be explored is why the phenomenon of poverty has persisted despite global and individual country attempts to eradicate it and alleviate inequality.
Social scientists in their respective streams have, in general, confined their analyses to a description of specific human conditions that have tended to exacerbate poverty. Economists highlight the insufficiency of transfers through a government’s fiscal budget or the lack of entitlement to various types of rights that humans could possess. Statisticians have demonstrated the trends of how these phenomena have moved, even improving their techniques of estimation over time. Sociologists have observed the ways in which the poor suffer and the manifestation of suffering through actual behaviour. Others have preferred arguments of how the poor, or sub-alterns, are robbed of self-expression thus leading to obfuscation of what they really need.
By and large, these approaches to investigation are post-facto or forward-stepping. Thus, though perhaps analysed with clarity and leading to helpful findings, they are limited in their policy prescriptions to the extent that they tend to begin with the observation of poverty and then, reflecting secular trends, focus mainly on redistributive programmes. Such programmes are inadequate and result in the alleviation rather than the eradication of the condition.
What should be helpful would be to take a step back and ask the question, what is the genesis or fountainhead of poverty and inequality? Only if the fountainhead is correctly identified can the corrective policies be commensurate with the eradication of poverty. For success, various social science fields including anthropology, history, sociology, economics and statistics should be combined, analysis carried out and policies designed. I have found that the required policies, domestic and international, comprise radical measures – what I would term human radicalism.
Poverty and inequality are products of historical experiences – the creation of poverty by one section of society that can exercise power over another. This was pervasive in history and continues to this day. As is said, history repeats itself. For such power to be exercised by any group, the other has to be identified or defined prior to its subjugation, either by means of a racially identifiable difference or, in the absence of clear markers, the invention of one.
The three-way slave trade between Europe, Africa and the Americas had no challenge with such identification due to the distinct physical features of Africans who were subjected to abduction before being sold into slavery after miserable transatlantic transportation. Once they became the property of their owners, they were excluded, isolated and dominated and their labour extracted. By definition, they could own nothing. This led to an instantaneous transit to a life of poverty. Their story is well known but the variegation has receded into dusty files on library shelves. Poverty was created for, and imposed on, them. And even where they were able to create an oasis of financial and institutional success, they were ruthlessly massacred, one example being the Tulsa Massacre of 1921. Tulsa, Oklahoma, a small neighbourhood created by successful Black people, experienced slaughter after which financial and political appearance by Black people vanished from the American South. An enquiry commission to investigate the massacre was set up only a century later with a report issued in 2021.
Colonialism practised over many centuries by Portugal, Spain, France, Britain, Belgium, Denmark and other European powers – and even by Japan in Asia –was another source of poverty creation. During colonialism, Europeans tended to depend on a presumption of racial superiority based on bogus justification through eugenics, which they invoked to justify diabolical acts on a global scale. It allowed plunder and booty on an unprecedented scale and reduced previously prosperous states such as India to a condition of poverty from which it has not yet emerged. Thus the per capita GDP of India was lower near the end of two-century-long British rule than in the middle of Mughal rule three centuries earlier.
It is no wonder that such created poverty cannot be overcome without adequately designed international reparations from the North to the South in the prevailing era.
Another instance of the creation of poverty and inequality is the continuing practice of caste in India. There is ample evidence that, by 600 AD, caste practices were well established in India. This again was a phenomenon imposed by conquerors on the conquered, followed by the creation of untouchability of those who consumed beef. They were basically the abject poor who were relegated to menial work such as removing night soil and dead animals and had to live outside the village boundaries. This was done in order to safeguard Hinduism from Buddhism which allowed meat consumption and despite evidence from early Hindu texts that demonstrated the existence of the consumption of beef even by Brahmins, the uppermost caste. It was thus the diktat by Brahmins to switch and thus create poverty among an identified class of low castes. Given its extent and depth in India today, no amount of assets and income transfers can cure this disease or pull the representative Indian out of poverty or growing inequality. Radical policies, based on humanism, are essential.
What would these radical domestic and international policies look like? Domestically, caste names and surnames should be abolished, since an Indian’s name identifies caste. Women, especially low-caste women, suffer terribly from social opprobrium and discrimination. Their condition together with that of children must be radically improved. Indian youth at the departure point from school and university should be compulsorily recruited to serve in social programmes for a year without exception. After all, there is no military draft in India.
Internationally, the United Nations have held seminars on reparations to ex-colonised countries. This matter must be pushed forward despite a glaring lack of cooperation by perpetrator countries. Statistical evidence justifies massive transfers and perhaps even overcompensation reflecting the scale of both pecuniary and non-pecuniary injustices and their ramifications in the long run. Without such policies, global poverty and poverty in India specifically can never be eradicated.
Parthasarathi Shome is Visiting Senior Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute of the London School of Economics.
The Creation of Poverty and Inequality in India by Parthasarathi Shome is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £85.00.
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