‘Swati Narayan’s fine book shows us that India’s multiple layers of

inequalities—social, economic, gender and more—have not only

enabled the growing capture of its economy by billionaires (169 by
last count on the Forbes list), but also has us trailing even those
neighbours our elite so love to despise, Bangladesh and Nepal, on
important indicators. Our entire policy direction of the past few
decades has not only introduced new inequalities but further
entrenched many old and existing ones. Narayan correctly sees that
the pandemic further deepened these stark inequalities—that it just
had to. The health mega crisis it thrust on us saw India notch up the
highest number of COVID-19 excess deaths in the world. It also saw
India’s billionaire numbers move from ninety-eight to 160—and
health sector billionaires (thirty-two) outnumber those from any other
sector. Narayan explores the complex layers of our inequalities and
also, at some levels, the moral economy of our elite.’
– P. Sainath, Founder Editor of The People’s Archive of Rural India
(PARI) and Author of Everyone Loves A Good Drought and The Last
Heroes
‘This immensely readable book invites India’s smug elite to a journey
to truth. The journey begins by confronting an inconvenient fact:
Nepal and Bangladesh have long overtaken India in many key
indicators of human development. Swati Narayan’s relentless pursuit
of a bold question—what can we learn from our ‘poor little
neighbours’?—turns this book into a travelogue in more senses than
one. In a refreshing departure from the dull academic prose, she
recounts anecdotes of her travels to the eighty randomly selected
villages in Nepal, Bangladesh and Bihar. She does not lose sight of her
questions as she travels across geographies, time periods and academic
disciplines, as she reads economic data with the lens of developmental
economics, historical sociology and political economy. The reader also
travels across different genres—a lucid mix of travelogue,
ethnographic stories, reporting of field surveys and data analysis. This
journey finally takes us to the sober truth that India’s massive and
growing inequalities in class, caste and gender terms are at the heart of
this collective failure. This travelogue for our times invites us to
undertake a political journey to mobilize the bottom of India’s social
and economic pyramid.’
– Yogendra Yadav, political activist and Author of Making Sense of
Indian Democracy
‘For a change, Swati Narayan’s travelogue does not compare India to
China or Brazil, but to neighbouring countries with similar history
and social structure, to show that India is lagging behind many of
them in terms of development. Why? Because of “layers of multiple
inequalities compound”, because no country can develop if it remains
that badly affected by all kinds of hierarchy. Narayan’s argument is
very powerful and suggests that India will not be a great power till
this societal issue is taken seriously.’
– Christophe Jaffrelot, Professor at King’s College London, Researcher
at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS and Author of India’s Silent
Revolution and Modi’s India
‘Fascinating account of how reducing inequalities—especially of
gender—has been key to social development in South Asia. Essential
reading for policy makers in India and everywhere.’
– Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts
Amherst, USA
‘Swati Narayan takes us on a fascinating journey through the villages
of India and her neighbouring countries, unearthing many sources of
deep-rooted inequalities that still undermine the nutrition, health,
education and livelihoods of the nation’s poorest families today. Deftly
combining statistical analysis with first-hand research and vivid
storytelling, she highlights myriad policies, initiatives and practices
that can transform the lives of children, women, families and
communities. These are rich insights, for India and far beyond, on
what it takes to turn economic resources into flourishing lives for all.’
– Kate Raworth, Senior Associate at Oxford University and Author of
Doughnut Economics
‘In this eminently readable book, Swati Narayan shows how
combating class, caste and gender inequities is essential to ensure
general economic progress translates into human development
outcomes. Gender equality in particular, but also investments in
schools and hospitals, should not be seen as the end prize of economic
growth: they should be treated as essential ingredients of growth, if it
is to make a difference in people’s lives. This is comparative social
science at its best.’
– Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and
Human Rights

‘One of the most extraordinary, yet often ignored, stories of

international development is how India has been steadily overtaken by
its neighbours in crucial areas such as education, health and human
rights. In this brilliant comparative analysis, Swati Narayan shows
how that has happened, and what India can learn from its more
successful neighbours.’
– Duncan Green, Professor in Practice in International Development at
the London School of Economics and Political Science and Author of
How Change Happens
‘This book blew my mind as well as confirmed my belief and
understanding. It is an inspiring book with live case studies, first-hand
data evidence, analysis and practical tips; a true roadmap to
enlightenment with equality, justice and freedom. Swati Narayan also
challenges the normative economic paradigms here by presenting
evidence of India in comparison with its poorer neighbours and how
linear macroeconomic indicators of growth can be misleading in terms
of socioeconomic development. The wisdom expressed here is
presented with clarity and impeccability on what it means for men and
women to live as peaceful warriors in the modern world. This is one
of the most insightful books I have seen in ages, so a must-read one!’
– Saloni P. Singh, Economist and Member, National Planning
Commission, Government of Nepal

‘With this remarkable blend of scholarship and reportage from India’s

borders, Swati Narayan shows us the consequences of Indian
policymaking on the lives of its citizens. This is the book on the ways
South Asian neighbours are pulling ahead.’
– Rahul Bhatia, Journalist

‘Swati Narayan’s book is a gripping tale of transformational South

Asia. It beautifully crafts why some nations in the region are able to
move faster than others in this race, based on the author’s own
intensive village-based research in Bangladesh, India and Nepal. A
must-read for people interested in the future of South Asia.’
– Ahmed Mushtaque Raza Chowdhury, Professor at the Mailman
School of Public Health, Columbia University, former Vice-Chair
BRAC and Co-author of Bangladesh at 50: Advances in Health
First published by Context, an imprint of Westland Books, a division of Nasadiya
Technologies Private Limited, in 2023

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Copyright © Swati Narayan, 2023

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ISBN: 9789357769983

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For my grandmothers
‘Courage calls to courage everywhere, and its voice cannot be denied’
– Millicent Fawcett (1847–1929), suffragette, artist and writer
 CONTENTS

Foreword by Jean Drèze

1. A Human Development Puzzle
2. India Trumped?
3. Eastern Neighbours: Ear to the Ground
4. Bangladesh
5. Nepal
6. Bihar
7. Southern Supermodels: Sri Lanka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu
8. The Price of Inequality

Appendices
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
 Foreword

F EW OBSERVERS ANTICIPATED, in the early 1990s, that Bangladesh

would have a lower child mortality rate than India ten years down the
line. At that time, India’s per-capita GDP was not only much higher
but also growing faster than that of Bangladesh. Child mortality was
lower in India and it looked like the gap was all set to widen in India’s
favour. Yet the opposite happened: India was neatly leap-frogged.
When evidence of this emerged, about twenty years ago, it looked
like a temporary anomaly. India, with its higher per-capita GDP, faster
growth rate, higher social spending and robust democratic institutions
seemed bound to take the lead again sooner or later. Instead, more
evidence kept emerging that Bangladesh was overtaking India in
critical aspects of human development: not only child mortality but
also child development generally as well as life expectancy, fertility,
sanitation, school participation, gender equity and more. In some
respects, the gap looked truly embarrassing for India. Sanitation is a
prime example: by 2011, open defecation had virtually disappeared in
Bangladesh, but it was still rampant in India.
The plot thickened when it turned out, about ten years ago, that
Nepal too was rapidly catching up with India and even overtaking it
in some of these critical fields. That, again, looked like a temporary
anomaly, but it is yet to go away. There is something truly puzzling
here, considering Nepal’s minuscule per-capita GDP.
Efforts to understand these patterns have tended to focus on what is
happening in Bangladesh or Nepal. For instance, Bangladesh has won
much appreciation for its low-cost public-health interventions, from
oral rehydration therapy to universal child vaccination. This is surely
one part of the story. But what if the main clue lies in India more than
in Bangladesh or Nepal?
When the attention turns to India, an elephant quickly enters the
room: social inequality. India is mired in a unique morass of
interdependent inequalities, starting with its pernicious caste system.
Inequality, of course, permeates South Asia and not India alone, but
India seems to be the champion. Can this explain why the progress of
social development in India is so slow despite economic growth being
so fast? It seems to help, at the very least. As recent research has
shown, for instance, India’s continued failure to eliminate open
defecation has something to do with the difficulties of turning
sanitation into a widely-shared social responsibility in a country where
disposing of shit was traditionally considered to be the job of specific,
despised castes. Similarly, the poor nutrition of Indian children clearly
has a lot to do with the extreme disempowerment of young women in
Indian society.
There are other adverse connections between social inequality and
human development. For instance, we can think of human
development as an outcome of various forms of social cooperation.
And social cooperation can be quite difficult when the society is not
only divided but also stratified in multiple ways. Just to mention one
simple example, think of what India would be like if parents, teachers
and administrators cooperated to ensure the best possible education
for all the country’s children. Our schools would be transformed.
Given the wide-ranging personal and social roles of elementary
education, this would also change the country and people’s lives. The
atmosphere of India’s schooling system, however, is anything but
cooperative. The system, curriculum included, is designed to pick and
help the winners—the small minority of privileged children who are
being prepared for India’s elite institutions of higher education. Upper-
caste teachers are not always convinced that education is important
for underprivileged children. And the wide social distance between
teachers and poor parents, especially mothers, also makes it difficult
to foster active parent-teacher associations or school management
committees. In that environment, it is perhaps not surprising that
India is making slow progress towards universal quality education.
Swati Narayan has been exploring some of these connections for
many years, based on careful research as well as intensive fieldwork in
India, Bangladesh and Nepal. In this book, she presents a lively
account of her findings, addressed to a wide audience. Her work sheds
light on the price of inequality in South Asia, and India in particular,
but it also points to the possibility of change: from Kerala to Nepal,
struggles against social inequality have often proved rewarding.
Understanding comparative experiences of human development and
their social context is not an easy task. Some pieces of the puzzle are
bound to abscond, and there are many ways of arranging the rest.
Still, the stifling effects of inequality on India’s social achievements are
hard to miss. Swati Narayan’s book exposes this basic connection
from many different angles. If you are hungry for ‘causal evidence’,
your stomach may not be full by the end of it. But if you are after
food for thought, this book is for you.
Jean Drèze
Visiting Professor, Department of Economics, Ranchi University
 1
A HUMAN DEVELOPMENT PUZZLE

There is no man here poor and abject

Nor is there any, full of riches and money
Here some do not eat cast off rice-sweepings
And some all the cream and honey
– ‘Shamyo’ (Equality), Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), Bangladeshi Poet

O NE SUMMER AFTERNOON, we carefully crossed the mud ledge around

picturesque, water-soaked Bangladeshi paddy fields. We headed
towards the international border. After some time, a knot of curious
local villagers in colourful lungis began to tail us. To break the ice, I
casually asked them if they had ever noticed any interesting contrasts
through the border fence between their Bangladeshi side and the
Indian side. They burst out laughing. ‘Every morning, we still see
Indians take a dump in the open fields’.1
This bonhomie with absolute strangers was wholly unexpected. As
an Indian doctoral student, I was travelling in the remote Panchagarh
district of Bangladesh.2 My Bengali translator Safiq (pronounced Sho-
phe-kh) was from Dhaka University.3
One of the remote villages we had moved into was so close to the
Indian border that my Airtel mobile phone had suddenly beeped and
come back to life. Still, initially, we had received a hostile reception
there. No family was willing to host us, which was puzzling, as we
had always been able to find friendly homes in other villages. Then the
mystery unravelled. Local elections were a few days away and the
villagers had heard through the grapevine that we were spies—that is,
election observers. Still, I was determined to find a way to stay on.
Public transport was patchy and our options few. The village had been
selected at random from census records for my survey, so it had to be
this one. Safiq and I just sat in the bazaar patiently with all our bags
and waited for the tide to turn.
A hearty roadside meal of coarse rice, mosur dal (lentils) and aloo
bhorta (spicy mashed potatoes) fuelled our spirits. A few hours later, a
cyclist arrived with the good news that a widow was willing to host us
in her spare room. From her home, in the clear night sky, we could see
the flickering floodlights from the border watch towers.
Oddly, in this particular stretch, the international border fence had
been built 50 metres inside Bangladesh. So, every morning, the Indian
Border Security Force (BSF) guards would open the fence gates and let
in a few Bangladeshi farmers whose fields fell on the Indian side.
Every evening, after another headcount and thorough check at the
gate, these farmers would return to their homes in Bangladesh.
Many villagers told us that they sorely missed an era when the
border was fully open. The elder folk had cherished memories of
crossing over to meet their relatives in nearby Siliguri city and
Darjeeling hill station.
Now, at any border village that we were surveying from our list,
when people learnt that I was an Indian, they immediately threatened
to call the police. This was a common joke till I reassured them that I
had a passport and visa and did not jump the fence illegally. Safiq was
quite scared of going anywhere near the border. He kept quoting the
poignant line from the popular Bollywood film Bajrangi Bhaijan
starring actor Salman Khan, ‘Pehle woh shoot karenge aur phir aatma
ko poochhenge kaun se side se aaye thhe’ (first they [the border
guards] will shoot and then ask the departed soul which side of the
border it hailed from).
The contrasts between the two sides are visible in so many ways.
However, Indians seem to have a deeply outdated and distorted idea
about the achievements of our next-door neighbour because of these
travel restrictions across borders.
 Two-thirds of Indians and Bangladeshis live in villages. Unlike
India, though, most Bangladeshi villages we saw in Panchagarh
district usually had some agro-processing industries.4 The last village
we’d surveyed had a dusty jute mill, a smelly fertiliser factory and a
production unit for organic manure. The village we were currently
staying in had a poultry unit for eggs and chicken and another
manufacturing plant with assembly lines to process tea. Unlike India,
where tea is mostly cultivated in large estates, individual Bangladeshi
farmers in this area grew tea in their small chai bagans (tea gardens).
The driver of the ‘van’ (battery-operated cycle cart), who had driven
us that morning to the processing unit, too had his own tea field. He
was really happy with the money he had earned for the leaves he had
sold the previous day. We also saw a stream of local farmers driving
into the production unit in small trucks brimming with tea leaves.
Two women immediately piled these fresh leaves into large coolers for
preservation till the factory reopened in the peak season. As we
entered the premises, the intoxicating aroma of tea enveloped us.
Another striking contrast, to my Indian eyes, was sanitation. Even
the humblest of homes we stayed in had squeaky-clean toilets.
Purchasing the cheapest toilets in Bangladesh costs even less than
Chinese mobile phones. Local entrepreneurs have designed them to be
odour-free, with simple mechanical trapdoors to seal the plastic pans
from buzzing flies.5 Most of these rural toilets do not have doors.
Instead, lungis hang as curtains to reduce costs. The Bangladeshi local
government also distributes free cement rings to build toilets, unlike
India which gives modest and often insufficient cash grants. So, even
poor Bangladeshi families are keen to build low-cost, hygienic toilets.6
Thus, a decade before prime minister Narendra Modi launched his
2014 Swachh Bharat Abhiyan7 (SBA, or the Clean India Campaign),
defecating in the open was largely a forgotten memory in Bangladesh.8
On the other hand, in the twenty-first century, even with India’s
missions to the moon and superpower ambitions, the ground reality is
that one in every four rural homes has no toilet.9
Since economic liberalisation in the 1990s, Indians have, on
average, grown much richer than their Bangladeshi and Nepali
neighbours in terms of purchasing power.10 The Indian home minister
has threatened that ‘Not even a bird will be allowed from across the
border’.11 Puzzlingly then, in recent years, many poorer neighbours
have quietly overtaken India on several social development indicators.
Until the 1980s, for example, Indian women on average lived longer
than most of their South Asian sisters across borders. But, in the last
twenty-five years, the tables have turned. By 2021, women in almost
every country in South Asia—Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Maldives
and even Bhutan—were expected to live longer than Indian women.12
This is an unexpected reversal of fortunes. Almost fifty years ago,
most of these countries, except Sri Lanka, were worse off than India.
Now, most neighbours have overtaken India in life spans and many
other social indicators. For example, in every single South Asian
country, except Pakistan, fewer children are too thin or too short for
their age than in India.13 Similarly, now more Bangladeshis are literate
than Indians. A greater share of girls are also in secondary schools.
Even Afghanistan, before the takeover by the Taliban, had a larger
share of women in the workforce than India.14 From healthcare to
education and nutrition to gender equality, most Indian neighbours
are sprinting ahead in social development, at least in their rapid speed
of improvement.

1.1: Number of years a newborn girl can expect to

live15

Source: World Development Indicators, 30 June 2023

version
 Economist Jean Drèze, my doctoral co-guide, had spotted early
signs of this puzzle nearly twenty years ago. In 2004, he wrote, ‘India
has been neatly leap-frogged, that too during a period when economic
growth was much faster in India than in Bangladesh’.16 With
characteristic humour, his long-time co-author Amartya Sen even
quipped that ‘self-assured commentators who saw Bangladesh as a
“basket case” not many years ago could not have expected that the
country would jump out of the basket and start sprinting ahead’.17
This unique puzzle of India’s poorer neighbours racing ahead in
different aspects of human development is also a worldwide
exception. Typically, for example, citizens in richer countries live
longer.18 But, both Nepalis and Bangladeshis, despite being poorer, do
far better than expected. Even life spans in some regions of the United
States with large African-American populations, such as the
Mississippi Delta, is lower than in Bangladesh or Nepal.19 In fact,
Bangladesh has nearly doubled the average life expectancy of women
in less than fifty years. To put this in context, England only achieved
this feat at a glacial pace over the course of a century.20
Seventy-eight-year-old grandmother Haseena Khatun21 has reaped
the fruits of these sweeping changes. She was born in the Bengal
province of British India. After the 1947 Partition, she told me that
her village became part of East Pakistan. At the end of the bloody
1971 Liberation War, she became a citizen of the new country
Bangladesh. Haseena also remembers the traumatic 1974 famine when
her family survived only on gumar-bhat, or rice gruel. In her eventful
life, Haseena gave birth to eleven children at home. In recent years,
she believes, Bangladeshi healthcare has progressed by leaps and
bounds. ‘Earlier health facilities were so far. Now they are very close,’
she believes.
In India, on the other hand, extreme contradictions flourish. Tall
skyscrapers of opulent prosperity and dark rural hovels with intense
poverty coexist. A newborn girl in the southern state of Kerala in
2018 could expect, like Haseena, to live to the ripe age of seventy-
eight years—two years more than American men.22 At the same time,
girls born in the north Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are
likely to survive an entire decade less.
The pandemic has also deepened these stark inequalities within and
across the borders. Even as most of the world shut down, Bangladesh
ran its factories in shifts to record positive economic growth. The
Nepali Supreme Court ordered all COVID-19 treatments to be free to
protect the right to health.23 Bhutan, of course, was a role model. The
prime minister, a surgeon, ensured that there were only twenty-one
pandemic deaths with one of the fastest vaccination drives in the
world.24
In contrast, India is estimated to have had the largest number of
COVID-19 excess deaths in the world.25 The second wave, in
particular, was catastrophic, with crematoriums in New Delhi running
out of space and abandoned bodies floating on the Ganges. For those
on the margins, the pandemic has been a tsunami that has battered
both lives and livelihoods. With schools closed and hospitals
overstretched,26 the contagion has also single-handedly wiped away
years of progress against poverty and turned back the clock on human
development.27
The microscopic virus has also unmasked previously cloaked
inequalities within India.28 After the prime minister announced the
abrupt lockdown, the upper and middle classes banged pots and pans
in their high-rise balconies in appreciation. Still, the desperate exodus
of millions of working-class migrants— stranded in cities without
food, shelter and emotional solace— back to their villages on foot,
cycle, buses and trains in appalling conditions, haunted even their
conscience.
Natural calamities are typical stress tests that challenge the strength
and soul of nations. Isn’t it odd then that there was no panic-induced
migrant crisis in any other country apart from India anywhere else in
the world? So, the crux of the South Asian puzzle is: why have some
countries lagged behind severely in human development while others
have unexpectedly forged ahead? Could the historical burden of thick
layers of inequalities cemented across generations be the reason for
India’s slow and lopsided social development?
EXTREME INEQUALITIES
Her sleeveless dress and quiet confidence were a breath of fresh air in
the dusty, ramshackle home. Most of the other women in this family,
from the Dom caste, were dressed in crumpled saris. Renu’s husband,
Jitu, too, in his smart shorts, looked completely out of place in this
remote Bihari village.29 After we struck up a conversation, I realised
that the young couple had just crossed the open border, less than a
kilometre away, from Nepal to Bihar on a day trip to visit their family.
The contrasts between these relatives who lived on different sides of
the international border could not have been starker. In Kathmandu,
Renu worked in a private canteen, while Jitu was a mechanic. The
young couple were upwardly mobile and in good health and spirits.
As a Nepali, Renu’s education in government schools had been free
until grade eight. Every time her nine-month-old infant fell ill, she
confidently took her to a nearby government health post for free
treatment. The brimming self-assurance of this bright, young Dalit
couple was not an exception. Since the return of democracy in 2006,
as my research even a decade later showed, Nepal has witnessed an
unmistakeable improvement in caste and gender equations.30
Their Indian relatives, on the other hand, were struggling to eke out
a living. Renu’s sister-in-law Malati, who was born in Nepal and had
shifted to India two decades ago after marriage, complained about the
caste discrimination that her children faced in school. She also
confided that she was petrified of her family falling ill. In this Bihari
hinterland, there were no health centres nearby, nor were free
medicines available. In fact, the larger family had gathered to mourn
the death of her brother-in-law, who had died of liver cirrhosis.
Though alcohol was banned in the state, spurious liquor flowed freely.
In 2022, journalist M.N. Parth wrote about families in Uttar Pradesh
who routinely cross the border to go to Nepal, as healthcare was
cheaper and better there.31 For these Indian families, the closure of the
international border due to COVID-19 proved tragic.
This uneven progress in the quality of healthcare, education and life
chances in India compared to its poorer neighbours like Nepal and
Bangladesh was precisely the puzzle my five-year doctoral research
aimed to probe. If the lowest tier of Dalits living in India’s
neighbouring countries were so clearly able to lead a healthier, more
educated, better life, how had this historic transformation unfolded?
Why had this progress not been replicated across India? Why do
Bihari Dalits, especially most Doms and Musahars, at the bottom of
the ladder, live in such grinding poverty?
I delved deeper into this question, with extensive fieldwork across
India’s borders. In time, it became obvious that the main culprits in
India were the multiple layers of severe inequalities that aggravate one
another. This book focuses on only three of the most extreme axes of
these inequalities—class, caste and gender—to understand why India
lags behind.
Wealth inequality in India is now, without a doubt, among the
worst in the world.32 The rich and the poor live in completely different
Indias, and the twain rarely meet except, perhaps, at the traffic signal.
Since 2016, when wealth tax was abolished, India has created more
billionaires than France, Switzerland and Sweden combined. Despite
the pandemic, Gautam Adani’s—the richest Asian and Indian—
fortune skyrocketed more than twelve times from $9 billion in 2020
to $120 billion in 2022. In these two years, his companies won
handsome government contracts for mines, electricity, airports,
expressways and ports. In 2022, Forbes and Bloomberg even crowned
him the third richest person in the world ahead of Bill Gates and Jeff
Bezos.33 But, in early 2023, after serious allegations of financial fraud,
the stock prices of Adani’s companies tumbled.34
In this time, under one of the strictest lockdowns in the world,35 up
to 200 million Indians sank below the poverty line.36 Eighty-four per
cent of Indian families also saw a fall in their income.37 In this ‘other’
India, a few years ago, eleven-year-old Santoshi died of starvation in
Jharkhand, begging for ‘bhat-bhat’ (rice, rice) from her helpless
mother, who could only offer her warm water with a few tea leaves.38
Harrowing starvation deaths are reported with regular frequency in
the Indian media. In 2018, a village I visited was still in mourning.
Most of the neighbours, who also lived in straw huts covered with
dried leaves and bits of plastic, were themselves on the brink of
survival.39 Inequality is now so skewed that the bottom half of India’s
population has to survive on only 6 per cent of the nation’s wealth.40
For generations, the caste system has also magnified these extreme
economic inequalities. At least 41 per cent of India’s wealth is now in
the hands of the forward castes, double their population share.41 On
the other hand, is it a coincidence that Santoshi’s family is Dalit, with
only a few doors to knock on for help?42
When a family belonging to a marginalised caste tries to live with
dignity and manages to prosper, the backlash is swift and brutal. In
Rajasthan, nine-year-old Indra Kumar Meghwal was recently beaten
to death by his teacher for drinking water from an earthen pot
reserved for upper castes.43 A few months earlier, upper caste villagers
had stabbed to death a Dalit health worker Jitendra Meghwal, only
because they envied his stylish handlebar moustache and secure
government job.44 As Babasaheb Ambedkar, the architect of India’s
constitution, made clear, the caste system openly justifies this
‘suppression of one class by another’.45 Poverty in India largely
remains hereditary along caste and religious fault lines, with limited
social mobility.46 The discrimination is so insidious that Dalits and
Adivasis have also lived shorter lives, according to data for the last
two decades (although this is perhaps true for centuries).47
Finally, and most crucially, there is extreme gender inequality. India
is among the most unequal countries in the world for women.48 Grisly
murders and gruesome rapes dominate news headlines month after
month. Patriarchy is so acute that gender discrimination begins even
before birth. Forty-six million women are ‘missing’ from India’s
population, especially due to the sex-selective abortion of female
foetuses in the last four decades and the neglect of girls as infants.49
Since the turn of the millennium, low child sex ratios have also spread
to the prosperous regions of western and southern India.50 Even as
adults, one of every four women in India cannot read and three do not
earn an income. Their dependency on men is so extreme that few rural
women get a chance to flourish outside the confines of the four walls
of their kitchens or homes.51
 This book argues that the main reason why India lags behind its
neighbours is the vice-like grip of systemic and, at times, barbaric
inequalities, which are now on the rise.52 The differences in the life
chances of the rich and the poor, men and women, Brahmins and
Doms and, for that matter, Keralites and Biharis, Hindus and Muslims
across India are so sharp that, until these inequalities are bridged, it is
impossible for the nation as a whole to prosper, let alone be a world
leader. Worse, these overlapping layers of multiple inequalities
compound one another. For example, Dalit women in northern India
face the most atrocities, with the highest incidence of rape.53
Of course, a few exceptions do break through the shackles. Of
India’s 166 billionaires, one is a Dalit.54 Since the affirmative action of
the 1990s, there has also been a ‘silent revolution’ of upward mobility
among the educated backward classes.55 But, structurally, the claws of
casteism, patriarchy and feudalism have gripped India with such
ferocity over generations that the majority of the population remains
subjugated in one form or another.
In contrast, even South Asian neighbours that are poorer than India,
such as Bangladesh and Nepal, have lower income inequalities.56
Nepal has only one billionaire and Bangladesh none. In the last few
decades, most of India’s neighbours have also sped ahead in improving
the lives of the majority of their citizens, particularly the poor. These
relative successes have been achieved largely due to their ability to
curb inequalities.

THE RIGHT TO EQUALITY

Among developed countries, citizens of more equal societies tend to
have better rates of health, education and child development. The
Scandinavian countries, such as Norway, Sweden, Finland and
Denmark, not only have the least income inequalities but also score
higher on human development.57 On the other hand, highly unequal
countries, such as the United States, tend to grapple with more social
challenges—from homelessness and obesity to gun violence.58 So high
inequality often leads to low human development.59 Inequality also
undermines democracy in multiple ways. For example, 21 million
largely illiterate, impoverished women are missing from India’s
electoral roles.60 On the other hand, 90 per cent of Indian
parliamentarians are millionaires. Forty-three per cent even face
criminal charges.61
Babasaheb Ambedkar had warned that ‘democracy is not a plant
which grows everywhere’.62 He believed that democracies, by
definition, should promote equality through ‘a form and a method of
government whereby revolutionary changes in the economic and
social life of the people are brought about without bloodshed’.
But have democratic governments in South Asia been able to
transform deeply entrenched caste, class and gender inequalities? The
main argument of this book is that frontrunner regions in the
neighbourhood, especially Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, have
been able to gradually, over centuries, dilute such inequalities. Three
catalysts have fuelled their progressive transformations—public
services, social movements and women’s agency.
Bangladesh has been a trailblazer in the doorstep delivery of welfare
services, from healthcare to micro-credit (see chapter 4). Nepal has
also slowly built its welfare state since the return of democracy in the
1990s (see chapter 5). Sri Lanka (see chapter 7), too, has long
provided free healthcare. Education from schools to universities is also
entirely free.63
For generations, radical social movements in South Asia have acted
as catalysts to usher in greater social equality. This book also
examines how three unique historical waves of elite displacement in
Bangladesh have substantially reduced class inequalities. Nepal is also
in the midst of transformative social change, especially after the
Maoist People’s War. In Sri Lanka, over a century from 1820 to 1920,
left-wing trade union and religious reform movements have been
influential agents of change.
Women are supposed to ‘hold up half the sky’.64 In modern
Bangladesh, there has, without a doubt, been a distinct change in
gender relations.65 In Nepal, too, especially after the Maoist guerrilla
army began to recruit women, traditional gender stereotypes have
been quietly abandoned across the board.66 Sri Lanka has had a rich
history of gender transformations too. After all, Sri Lankan women
were the first in Asia to earn the right to vote.67
India, on the other hand, is a land of extreme contrasts. In southern
India, over the course of the century, a series of radical, anti-caste
movements have been at the heart of Kerala and Tamil Nadu’s
transformation to reduce the ‘elite bias’.68 Women’s movements have
also been at the forefront of social change.
At the other extreme, backward states such as Bihar lie at the nadir
of social spending.69 As my travels confirmed at every bumpy turn,
government schools, hospitals and public transport suffer from sore
neglect.70 Northern India also boils with caste discrimination. For
generations, the forward castes have monopolised education and
lucrative occupations.71 Despite peasant movements, land reforms
have been largely inadequate. The feudal hegemony of the elite classes
remains unshaken, especially in the Gangetic plain, with its grinding
poverty. Patriarchy dominates every sphere of life.
On an average, therefore, even after decades of a booming Indian
economy, one out of every three preschool children is stunted in
height,72 more than 50 million students cannot read their school
textbooks73 and more than 250 million adults are illiterate.74

DECODING THE PUZZLE

In 1905, the visionary Bangladeshi feminist writer, Begum Rokeya
Sakhawat Hossain, wrote Sultana’s Dream. This futuristic short story
is set in an imaginary ‘Ladyland’ where only women rule, and create
fantastical inventions like solar ovens, while men care for the children
at home.75 Modern Bangladesh does not exactly mirror Sultana’s
dream. But India’s poorer neighbours are quietly leading the way in
bridging inequalities of class, caste and gender. Bangladeshi and
Nepali women, for example, are more likely to work outside the home
and hold seats in Parliament.76 Their children are also less likely to be
underweight and are expected to spend more years in school.77
There is much for India to learn from its poorer South Asian
neighbours.
 2
INDIA TRUMPED?

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,

Where wealth accumulates and men decay:
– The Deserted Village, Oliver Goldsmith1

T HE HEALTH CENTRE was a joke. The only living beings on the

premises were grazing in the courtyard. ‘The sacred cows are the
doctors,’ laughed my research coordinator, Ismael. The entire building
was dilapidated—floors broken, walls collapsing, paint peeling and
weeds growing in the rooms and roof. In the village we were visiting,
this was the only health centre within a kilometre radius.2 The doctors
and health workers had obviously abandoned this workplace despite
continuing to draw a hefty government salary. The only other health
facility was more than 14 kilometres away.3 Bihar does have better
health centres. But in the Muslim-majority Kishanganj district, most
government services we saw were similarly in shambles.
We also went to the homes of two accredited social health activists
(ASHAs) who worked in the village as doorstep health workers.
Neither of them had received any medicines for two years and we
heard a litany of complaints. Their kits only had old oral rehydration
salt (ORS) packets and a few government brands of condoms and
contraceptive pills.
I was even more shocked when I walked up to a neighbouring house.
Peeping through the window, I saw a severely disabled boy huddled
inside a dark room. I was heartbroken to find that he had been kept
hidden away like this. His mother, with teary eyes, asked us if we could
help in any way. Unfortunately, I had to tell her that neither of us were
medical practitioners but that we would love to speak to her son.
When Bhim was brought to the courtyard, he flashed an unforgettable
smile. I impressed upon his mother that, ideally, he should be exposed
to some sunlight daily.
Bhim’s unspeakably poor parents were at their wit’s end. There was
no healthcare facility in the vicinity. They loved their son, but simply
did not know what to do for him. I felt just as helpless. On the spur of
the moment, I asked them to stand together for family photo. Later, I
was able to print the grainy image along with a disability pension form
to hand over to Bhim’s mother. But I knew fully well that, at best, these
were only symbolic gestures of comfort.
This was just one home. During our survey in Bihar, we met many
families in similar or even worse predicaments, struggling with chronic
ailments. They wage a daily battle against the criminal neglect of
public healthcare in India. The poorest families pay the indescribably
heaviest price.
To reach this distant village, we had crossed a river on a precarious
boat that two men somehow rowed using only bamboo poles. The
narrow deck of the dinghy had been packed with fifteen-odd bicycles
and a few motorcycles (including our own). A bevy of weary villagers
with their jute sacks, chickens and household wares had jostled for
space. It was a miracle we hadn’t toppled over. In the midst of the
monsoon, such rickety boats were the primary means of transport
across the flooded plains of Bihar.
Travelling in the hilly regions of Nepal was equally tricky. One of the
randomly selected villages for my survey was said to be three hours
away from the district headquarters. But the journey ultimately took
seven hours. After two hours on the rickety bus, we came across the
raging Kamlamai river, which had flooded due to the rains. The veteran
driver calmly stopped the bus midstream. Two conductors stepped out
and, walking with meditative steps in the rushing current, surveyed the
riverbed. After three hours of these rudimentary explorations, the
driver finally figured out the best route to navigate the bus across the
river. As passengers stuck inside, we had our stomachs in knots.
Finally, when the bus reached the shore, all of us broke into a
spontaneous round of claps.
 Despite the perilous terrain, this far-removed Nepali village had
relatively good healthcare, in contrast to Bihar next door. When I
suffered a sudden bout of severe vertigo, my Nepali translator Bijeta
literally saved my life. The private pharmacy she took me to was a
blessing, even with its limited stock of medicines. The shop even had
beds in a room at the back to administer saline drips to patients. Later,
when we finally reached the well-stocked government clinic an hour
away, we met the health worker Gopal. Though he was not a doctor,
he had seventeen years of experience under his belt. Gopal used his
stethoscope and blood pressure instrument to check my extremely low
BP. Both his medical skills and endearing pidgin English lifted our
spirits instantly.
Many health posts in Nepal are also managed by junior doctors.
Unlike India, the Nepali government insists that all private medical
colleges offer some students free education with full scholarship. After
completion of their degrees, these young doctors have to serve in rural
areas as a part of their two-year mandatory government service bond.4
Equally impressive were the government ‘birthing centres’, which
were open round the clock. At one centre, we met two midwives, Anita
Dahal and Sujata Adhikari, each with an impressive twenty-two years
of experience. As we sat there, I watched Anita give a contraceptive
injection to a village woman. The centre had all the essential medical
equipment on my checklist, except for oxygen supply. For the last two
decades, this birthing centre had also been distributing free medicines.
As I began to inspect their capsule strips, I realised that many of them
had been made in India. Ironically, I had rarely seen these medicines in
Bihari health centres only a few kilometres away across the border. As
we were preparing to leave, Anita said something which also caught
me completely off-guard. She reminded me that, as midwives, they
were dedicated lifesavers, who had been gravely affected by the 2015
economic blockade of Nepal along the Indian border.5 The stoppage of
transport had crippled the Nepali economy for six months, disrupted
the supply of medicines, affected 90 per cent of families with fuel
shortages and severely endangered lives.
Her censure was true on so many levels. It often seems obvious that
India has increasingly lost the plot, both across borders and within the
country. Until the 1990s, fewer newborn children in India died as
compared to its South Asian neighbours, except for Sri Lanka. Since
then, the tide has turned. Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Maldives
have raced ahead. Birthing centres are only one of the many practical,
low-cost strategies that India’s neighbours have invested in to save
precious infant lives. These rapid improvements also clearly show that,
even without fast economic growth, it is possible for poor countries to
transform the quality of life of their citizens.6
But India’s focus in the last few decades has largely been only on
rapid—and, unfortunately, skewed—economic growth. Thirty years
ago, an average Indian earned at least 40 per cent more than a Nepali
in purchasing power terms. By 2020, this had soared to almost double.
Similarly, as per the Maddison Database, as early as 2008, an average
Indian had the kind of real incomes that ordinary Bangladeshis could
earn only in 2018.7 Still, both these poorer countries, Nepal and
Bangladesh, have surpassed India on several social indicators.
To make matters worse, recently, the Indian government seems to
have plunged into a habit of knee-jerk denial.8 They invariably criticise
every international scorecard that paints India in a poor light. The
government has rejected the Global Hunger Index as ‘an attempt to
tarnish the image of the country,’9 and rubbished the World Health
Organisation’s estimate of excess deaths due to the pandemic.10 They
have questioned the motives of even the most reputed United Nations
agencies.11 Unless the doctor admits that the patient is sick, there is no
hope of finding a cure. Still, the government has flatly refused to
believe the clearly mounting international statistical evidence on the
superior performance of India’s neighbours on social development.
Some economists have even dismissed the acceleration of India’s South
Asian neighbours on social development indicators as ‘plain wrong’.12
But their counter-claims that ‘Indians and Bangladeshis enjoy the same
life expectancy at birth’ are absolutely factually incorrect. On the
contrary, the World Development Indicators database clearly shows
that, in every single year since 1988, both Bangladeshi men and women
were expected to live longer than their Indian neighbours.13
SO CLOSE YET SO DIFFERENT
The South Asian enigma thus remains—why does India lag behind her
neighbours on many social development indicators? Why has the
Bangladeshi government consistently invested in healthcare? How have
Nepali women in the Himalayan country raced ahead of Indian women
in education and employment?
Political sociologist Theda Skocpol emphasises the timing and
sequence of landmark historical events that usually usher in social
changes. Violent conflicts, regime changes, social movements and even
humanitarian disasters, such as famines and pandemics, often mark
turning points that could unexpectedly promote social equality.14 So,
my research maps the evolution of these types of social changes in
India’s neighbours over long historical stretches of time.15
For cross-country comparisons, the Mill’s Method of Logic16 helps to
easily spot differences in comparable cases. For example, economists
Acemoglu and Robinson, in the chapter ‘So Close and Yet So Different’
of their book Why Nations Fail, compared two cities—Nogales in
America and its namesake Nogales in Mexico on the other side of the
international border. They aimed to understand ‘how could the two
halves of what is essentially the same city be so different?’17
My analysis is similarly divided into two geographic comparisons of
contiguous regions in specific time periods.18 I have named them
‘Eastern Neighbours’ and ‘Southern Supermodels’.
The differences between India and its Eastern Neighbours form the
core analysis of this book.19 The Indian state of Bihar shares
similarities in history, geography and culture with next-door
neighbours Nepal and Bangladesh.20 Yet these neighbours have
outperformed Bihar in the last half a century and raced ahead on
several human development indicators. I travelled across these three
neighbouring regions to conduct a one-of-a-kind primary survey of
eighty villages. Apart from my translators, I also trained and
supervised forty local women who spoke regional dialects to conduct
the survey across these three countries.
However, northern and southern India are often poles apart.
 2.1: Eastern Neighbours and Southern Supermodels

So, in the case of the Southern Supermodels, the comparison focuses

on the ‘similarities in similar cases’ across borders.21 The nagging
question I was trying to answer was, historically how did these
neighbouring regions of Sri Lanka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu progress
nearly simultaneously in social achievements despite being part of
entirely separate political regions?22 This analysis compares Tamil
Nadu (1916 to present), Kerala (1820–1975) and Sri Lanka (1830–
1977), in the heydays of their human development acceleration, when
this progress was most visible. For this largely historical research
spanning two centuries, I pored over archives, old colonial reports and
books in dusty libraries.
India and its Neighbours
At nearly every conference, I am asked how individual states within
India can be compared with its neighbouring countries.
My response is simple. India is usually compared with China, as
both these Asian giants have more than a billion citizens. Within South
Asia, on the other hand, India’s population is eight times greater than
Bangladesh and forty-seven times greater than Nepal. So, comparing
India as a whole with these smaller South Asian countries is like
comparing watermelons with grapes. Hence, analysing individual states
within India with neighbouring countries of similar size, geography,
demography and culture, makes more logical sense.
So, the Eastern Neighbours research appropriately clubs together
three geographically contiguous regions—Bihar, Bangladesh and Nepal
—which share similar levels of average incomes. Bangladesh, like Bihar,
also has one of the highest population densities in the world with
families living cheek by jowl. Similar to Nepal, nearly 80 per cent of
Biharis also live in rural villages.23
Historically, these neighbouring regions have also had porous
borders. The Indo–Nepal Peace and Friendship Treaty signed in 1950
and the Nepalese Citizenship Act enacted in 1952 opened the doors for
large-scale migration from India. Since then, hundreds of Bihari
families have migrated, settled and acquired citizenship in the Nepali
Terai region and are now called Madhesis. These border areas are so
similar that my field notes from Nepal are filled with descriptions such
as ‘our hosts are Mahatos and they speak Maithili. It feels like we are
in Bihar.’
Similarly, in the analysis of the Southern Supermodels, the regions of
Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka have ‘entangled histories’. For
example, the Malabar district which is now in Kerala, was once a part
of the British colonial Madras province. The rest of the province was
absorbed into Tamil Nadu.
Political scientist Yogendra Yadav and his colleagues have aptly
described India as a ‘state-nation’.24 The Indian nation is, after all, a
collection of diverse states with different languages, ethnicities and
cultures.25 Academic Prerna Singh also argues that Indian states with
stronger regional solidarity and pride tend to have better human
development.26 Hence, comparing different Indian states with
neighbouring countries makes much sense.

Bihar or West Bengal?

Another question that I am always asked is why do I compare the
Eastern Neighbours with Bihar and not West Bengal. The main reason
is that in 2014 (when this research started), Bihar’s average income was
similar to Bangladesh and Nepal, though slightly lower.27 However, in
terms of purchasing power parity, West Bengalis were, on average,
nearly twice as rich as Nepalis and two-thirds as wealthy as
Bangladeshis.
During my travels, I also saw these huge economic contrasts
firsthand. In the middle of my travels in Bangladesh, I ran out of
money and had to make a day trip to India to withdraw cash from an
ATM. Starting from one of my survey villages, I changed three vehicles
—a cycle cart, bus and electric rickshaw—and eventually crossed the
new Banglabandha border at Zero Point on foot. It was a surreal
experience, as that particular day also turned out to be the festival of
Holi. On the Indian side, in the highly developed tourist city of Siliguri
in West Bengal, even the border guards had colour on their faces and
most tourists on the streets were drunk.28 Apart from the differences in
clothes, religions and festivities, the most striking contrast lay in West
Bengal’s economic prosperity. Shops, bank ATMs and even malls
mushroomed in Siliguri. Cars, rickshaws and motorcycles were
everywhere. In comparison, the rural landscape that I had left half an
hour away in Bangladesh was immensely modest. West Bengal, after
more than three decades of communist governments, is also an
anomaly in the region, with distinctly better social indicators. On the
other hand, Bihar is more comparable to both the Eastern Neighbours
and similar to the Indian heartland BIMARU states.29
Also, though Bangladesh and West Bengal share a common language
and history, Nepali culture in the Terai region is similar to the flat
plains of Bihar. Nepal’s international border with Bihar is also ‘open’ at
numerous places, through which Indians like me can easily cross to
either side without visas, on foot, rickshaws and horse carts—a
priceless advantage for my research.

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT TO HAPPINESS

For starters, before I delve further into my travel adventures across
borders, I will systematically analyse with hard facts whether India’s
neighbours indeed perform better. Do Nepal, Bangladesh and other
South Asian neighbours overtake India on some or all indicators? Is
their advantage absolute or only in terms of the speed of change? Also,
do they surpass only some backward regions of India or the country as
a whole? Equally importantly, is there lesser inequality in the quality of
life of Bangladeshi and Nepali citizens?
First, let us examine a range of international statistical indicators to
measure social well-being in India and its neighbours (table 2.2). But in
this dusty terrain, as Albert Einstein observed, ‘not everything that
counts can be counted.’
Officially, on the United Nations’ popular Human Development
Index (HDI), there is little difference across South Asia.30 Predictably,
the beautiful island tourist havens, Sri Lanka31 and the Maldives, are
considerably more affluent and also have the highest scores, while
Pakistan ranks at the bottom. Nepal is still slightly behind India. But
this is only because the HDI combines income and non-income
measures. So, India scores well only due to its soaring economic
growth rates since the economic liberalisation of 1991. But, due to the
twin shocks of demonetisation32 and the pandemic, in 2021,
Bangladesh overtook India on both economic growth and HDI scores.
Also, since the 1990s, Nepal and Bangladesh’s HDI scores have
improved faster than India’s. Poorer neighbours are, without a doubt,
very quickly catching up.

2.2: South Asian Rank and Scores of Countries on

Selected Indices
 Within India, the southern states perform better on the sub-national
HDI. Kerala, for example, ranks the highest and can be compared to
Thailand and Brazil.33 On the other hand, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and
Jharkhand, with the lowest scores, are similar to Zimbabwe, Angola
and Congo in sub-Saharan Africa.34 Clearly, India is a republic of
extreme inequalities.
It is no surprise then that India has the world’s largest multi-
dimensionally poor citizens. The Multidimensional Poverty Index
(MPI) measures a country’s population that has been deprived on three
parameters—poverty, education and essential services. In the global
MPI index released in 2021, both Bangladesh and Nepal did better
than India. But in the 2022 and 2023 versions, India had higher scores
due to updated demographic data which was not made available by
our neighbours.35 Still, between 2006 to 2016, India was able to halve
its MPI score. The poorest communities by geography, caste, religion
and age saw the fastest improvement in the intensity of their poverty.36
This was the result of progressive civil society movements that had
pushed for a range of human rights-based laws to reduce deprivation.
The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005,37 the Right to
Education Act 2009 and the National Food Security Act 201338 were
pioneering statutes, which have had long-term impacts.
Within India, though, there remains a wide disparity in MPI scores.
In the last two decades, less than 1 per cent of the population of Kerala
and 4 per cent of the population of Tamil Nadu were multi-
dimensionally poor, compared to 35 per cent of the population of
Bihar. ‘Graded inequality’ due to caste also affects access to welfare
services across India.39 The most poignant examples are of those on the
hunger frontlines. Consistently, for the last two decades, children from
Adivasi, Dalit and Other Backward Class (OBC) families have been
more likely to be stunted in height.40 My preliminary analysis also
indicates that in the 2015–18 period, three of every four victims of
starvation deaths were Dalits, Adivasis or Muslims.41 In Jharkhand, the
daughter of one of the families I visited with fellow activists from the
Right to Food Campaign told us, ‘My mother had not eaten anything
for three days before her death; she had nothing to eat and starved in
the piercing cold.’42 The family belonged to the Birijiya tribe, which has
officially been recognised as a ‘Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group’.
They were automatically eligible and should have been the first to
receive an ‘Antyodaya Anna Yojana’ food grain ration card meant for
the ‘poorest of the poor’. But starvation deaths are only the tip of the
iceberg. Scores of Indians with the greatest need are unable to demand
their most basic rights to welfare lifelines for survival, due to extreme
social inequalities. Even after decades of a booming Indian economy,
for example, nearly forty per cent of eligible children, pregnant women
and breastfeeding mothers do not receive any food from anganwadis
(childcare centres).43 Now, to obscure these inequalities, the Indian
government has created its own national MPI, with new indicators,
which are estimated to undercount around thirty-seven million poor
people.44 The ground reality, however, is that 74 per cent of Indians
cannot afford a healthy diet.45
Ironically, despite being poorer, Nepalis, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis
are also happier than Indians on the latest World Happiness Index,46
released in the midst of the pandemic. Worryingly, since 2015, India
has joined the club of the fifteen most unhappy countries in the world.
On the other hand, after the end of the guerrilla war, Nepal has been
among the top twenty countries worldwide which have seen the largest
increase in the level of happiness.
Most of all, India is one of the countries that are the most unequal
for women. In India, discrimination begins at the stage of the embryo.
Because of sex-selective abortion of female foetuses, millions of women
are ‘missing’ from India’s population.47 Since the turn of the
millennium, India has also been one of the few developing countries
where the percentage of working women has plummeted. In the 1990s,
30 per cent of Indian women earned an income, a figure that plunged
to 19 per cent in 2021. Adult women are disappearing from the
workforce in factories, offices and malls. Now, there are fewer working
Indian women than even Saudi Arabia.48 The #MeToo movement has
also bared the pervasiveness of sexual harassment, from Haryana
sports stadiums to Bollywood. The 2023 Global Gender Gap Index
released by the World Economic Forum places India twentieth from the
bottom, with Afghanistan being the lowest. The glass ceiling is also so
rigid that women occupy only 17 per cent of seats in Indian
boardrooms compared to 40 per cent in France.49 On the other hand,
the East Asian growth ‘miracle’ has been associated with large
increases in the number of working women.
So, across the board, on thematic indicators from the Gender
Development Index (GDI) to the Global Hunger Index (GHI) and the
Healthcare Access and Quality Index (HAQ), India is a laggard—not a
frontrunner in South Asia and far from being a world leader. There is
no doubt that, despite all its wealth, India mostly performs far worse
than its poorer neighbours.
It is true that each of these fancy measures is designed subjectively.
But all of these long-established international indices could not have
been deliberately created only to downscale India. The cold reality is
that except for the MPI, India trails Bangladesh, Nepal, or both, on
most of these indices.
Sri Lanka,50 Maldives and Bhutan, also surpass India on several
counts. Their citizens are also wealthier, on average. On the other
hand, while Pakistan performs worse than India, most of its citizens
are also poorer. So, the constant comparison of India with Pakistan in
the media is a meaningless distraction. Instead, comparing India with
its poorer Eastern Neighbours—Nepal and Bangladesh—would better
capture the essence of the South Asian human development puzzle.
Despite low incomes, the achievements of these Indian neighbours have
been truly exceptional.

MILLENNIALS TO GENERATION Z
Our breathtaking morning walk was across valleys, mountain springs
and rickety bridges under a gorgeous sky. With the bright, local village
girl Rushilla as our guide, Bijeta and I reached the community-
managed Nepali school perched on top of a hill. Many of the teachers
and students we met there lived in the nearby Manjhi (Janajati
indigenous community) hamlet. So, we walked to their homes to
continue our survey. When we reached the hamlet, unlike with the
other villages we had visited, we were taken aback. Many men, women
and children were wearing torn, unwashed clothes. They had little
access to water as the river nearby had run dry and the public tap often
did not work. These families were visibly poor, living in tightly
clustered houses. A villager showed us how she brewed liquor from
rice and sold it in large vats kept outside her home. Even before noon,
we’d met many local men who were already drunk on this cheap
alcohol.
However, when we went door-to-door to conduct our survey, we
were in for a pleasant surprise. Though extremely poor, all the families
in this village had excellent access to essential services. Their children
studied at the nearby community school and every house had a toilet.
Innovatively, many of these toilets also produced biogas from human
and animal waste to be used as cooking fuel—one of the most
sustainable and cheap sources of energy. A local non-governmental
organisation (NGO) had given them subsidised materials and helped
them to construct these low-cost dual sanitation-and-fuel solutions. I
remembered having seen this ingenious biogas experiment in my
childhood at a science exhibition. This was the first time that I was
seeing this concept actually being used in a village. I wonder why
India’s Swachh Bharat Abhiyan for sanitation and the Ujjwala Yojana
for clean fuel have missed this golden opportunity to similarly hit two
birds with one stone.
Even as they answered our survey questions, two mothers sitting
outside their homes continued to breastfeed their children, oblivious to
the presence of men. Many women also confirmed that Sudha Ma
Tamang, the village health volunteer (swasthya sevika), unfailingly
visited their impoverished hamlet every single month. Sudha had earlier
told us that she deliberately prioritised the most disadvantaged homes
due to their greater need, even if they were located farther away. The
villagers also confirmed that she gave pregnant women iron tablets
each month and diligently distributed contraceptives and medicines.
With this assured access to a variety of essential services—education,
healthcare, sanitation and clean fuel—at their very doorstep, it is no
wonder that Nepalis, despite their poverty, are racing ahead in human
development.
Still, to double-check the success of Nepal and Bangladesh’s human
development compared to India’s, here is a quick glance at national
statistics on four thematic areas.
First, the differences between neighbours are most visible in access to
education.
There is not much difference between teenage girls of Generation Z
in India, Nepal and Bangladesh. In this age group, all three countries
have roughly 88–89 per cent literacy. Similarly, millennial women in
their twenties also have similar levels of literacy: 68–74 per cent. Only
Indian women above the age of thirty are substantially more literate
than their Nepali and Bangladeshi sisters. Those in their fifties and
sixties, in particular, are twice as likely to be literate.

2.3: Literacy of women at different ages, 2011

 Source: India, Bangladesh and Nepal: Censuses, 2011

This graph can also be read in the reverse direction, from right to
left.51 So, five decades ago, in the 1970s, when actor Amitabh
Bachchan was still an ‘angry young man’ in his films, Indian teenagers
were almost twice as literate as their neighbours. Bangladesh was a
young country then, and Nepal was still a monarchy. Since then,
Bangladeshi and Nepali women have quickly bridged the literacy gap
with their wealthier neighbour. Education of children and adolescents
has increased rapidly. Generation Z in these poorer South Asian
countries has now quickly caught up with their Indian cousins.
I saw this thirst for education first-hand in rural Bangladesh. In every
village home we walked into, invariably, there were children with their
heads buried in textbooks, diligently learning their lessons. In the home
of one of my hosts, Hillal bhai, every morning, his eight-year-old son
Hasan, studying in the second grade, would wake me up from inside
my comfortable mosquito net by reading aloud in his bellowing voice.
Listening to him, I realised the depth of the scar that the 1971
Bangladeshi Liberation War had left. Hasan read from his history book
about the brave battles of the thousands of Mukti Bahini freedom
fighters who were martyred before the country finally won its
independence. Since its birth fifty years ago, Bangladesh, as a proud,
independent nation, has made undeniable progress. Hasan’s reading
skill was but one testament to this fact.52
On the other hand, the quality of Indian education is now so poor
that, even before the pandemic, only 27 per cent of rural children of
Hasan’s age in grade three could read a simple paragraph of the level of
grade two in their local language.53 While in recent decades more
children have enrolled in schools, there also remain vast educational
inequalities between rich and poor families.54
The quality of learning in rural India is abysmal, even at the best of
times.55 On a rainy afternoon in a remote village of Bihar, a wizened
grandfather sitting in the narrow porch of his mud house drove home
this point to me simply. First, he asked his daughter-in-law, who had
studied only till primary school, to read a paragraph, which she did
fluently. Then, he asked his grandson, who was in grade 5, to read. The
boy stumbled over the words, barely forming sentences, let alone
grasping their meaning. Especially after one of the world’s longest
school closures of two years due to the pandemic, India has now
plunged into a mass learning crisis.56 The latest Annual Status of
Education Report (ASER) based on a survey conducted by the non-
profit Pratham confirms that, after the pandemic, more than half the
rural students enrolled in grade 5 and a third in grade 8 aren’t even
able to read a grade 2 level basic paragraph.
Second, on the health front too, India’s neighbours perform better.
Of every 1,000 children born in Nepal and Bangladesh, around
twenty-nine died before their fifth birthday.57 In India, the number of
deaths was thirty-three. Extraordinarily, since the 1990s, Nepal has
been amongst the fastest countries of the developing world to reduce
child deaths—even in the thick of a guerrilla war. Nepal and
Bangladesh have also been more successful than India in bridging the
gap between the rich and the poor in terms of infant mortality. Still,
one area where India performs better is in the fewer number of deaths
of mothers in childbirth. Since the government introduced cash
incentives nearly two decades ago, Indian mothers are more likely to
give birth in hospitals or health facilities.58
 Third, the mysterious ‘enigma’ of high child malnutrition persists
across South Asia.59 Even Sri Lanka has more underweight children
than sub-Saharan Africa. Still, India fares worse than most of its
neighbours. Before their sixth birthday, 32 per cent of children in India
were found to be too thin for their age as compared to only 22 per cent
in Bangladesh and 27 per cent in Nepal.60 Within India, too, there is
extreme inequality in malnutrition. In the poorest families, 43 per cent
of children are underweight, more than double than in the case of the
richest.61
Malnutrition in India often begins even before birth since most
Indian women are anaemic. After delivery, many Indian mothers also
feed their infants inappropriately. In Bihar, for example, some families
we spoke to told us that they give newborn babies cow’s or goat’s milk
for the first three days after birth, due to age-old customs.
The Indian ‘Mother’s Absolute Affection (MAA)s’ coy media
campaign to promote breastfeeding, with actor Madhuri Dikshit as the
brand ambassador, is a whimper compared to the campaigns across the
border.
Bangladesh ran a five-year ‘Doctor Apa’ (Doctor Elder Sister) mass
media campaign that provided information through infomercials on
television and radio, loudspeakers, posters and wall paintings. The
focus was to educate, especially mothers and mothers-in-law, on
breastfeeding. As I saw in most villages, now it is culturally normal for
multi-tasking Bangladeshi mothers to breastfeed their infants in public.
In addition, a decade ago, in collaboration with some NGOs, the
government had hired a temporary cadre of ‘poushti apas’ (literally,
nutrition sisters), who had gone door-to-door to teach mothers how to
feed their young children. Mahmuda Begum, one of my hosts, admitted
that she, too, used to feed her first child suji (semolina) and maida
(refined wheat flour) with honey. But now she knows that breastmilk
alone is the best for the first six months. We also saw her feeding
mashed food from small bowls to her two-and-a-half-year-old son. She
explained, ‘The government madam came when I was pregnant to
teach us how to take care of and feed our children. We have also seen
programmes on television that have educated us on how to feed
children nutritious food.’ When I asked why she had listened to their
advice, she looked genuinely puzzled, ‘Shouldn’t we listen to the
government health workers? The old traditions were not working—
there were more deaths of mothers and infants. The children catch a
cold if we follow our mother-in-law’s wisdom. So, we started to listen
to the health workers instead. They also gave us injections.’ These
poushti apas had taught mothers about the importance of
breastfeeding. They had also demonstrated how to feed older children
home-cooked complementary foods, that included mashed fish and
eggs.
Fourth, rural Indians continue to use the great outdoors for
defecation.62 Women suffer the most from this indignity. The SBA had
initially committed that India would be open defecation–free by
2018.63 However, the government’s latest National Family Health
Survey (NFHS) conducted in 2019–21 exposes this false optimism,
because despite cash grants, half of rural Indians in the northern
heartland states of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar
Pradesh still continue to defecate in the open.64 The SBA’s intimidation
techniques have also been utterly insensitive.65 In Madhya Pradesh, two
Dalit children were beaten to death because they did not have a toilet
at home and had, instead, gone into the bushes to defecate.66 Notably,
the SBA has been largely silent on the immense contribution of Dalits
to sanitation work for generations.67 In the last five years alone, 347
sanitation workers have died horrifically in sewers that they’ve had to
plunge into to clean, without any protective gear. The Safai
Karmachari Andolan (SKA) has launched a powerful nationwide ‘Stop
Killing Us’ campaign.68
In contrast, in the last three decades, toilets have more than tripled
in Bangladesh, including those in the poorest homes. Open defecation
and foul disease environments, are known to reduce the absorption of
nutrients in the human body and stunt growth in children.69 So, despite
similar genetic potential, in families with the same level of income,
Indian children in West Bengal are shorter than Bangladeshi children
due to poor sanitation.70 In the last decade, Nepal, too, has had a quiet
sanitation revolution.71 By 2016, 85 per cent of homes had already
built an improved toilet. To achieve this, the Nepali government had
provided ceramic pans, cement bags, asbestos roofs and other materials
to eligible poor and Dalit families. Initially, some families did not use
the materials to build toilets, so the government had cracked the whip.
In one village, I discovered that the local ward office had even started
issuing ‘toilet cards’ to families who had functioning toilets at home.
Without these draconian cards, no family could obtain any services
from the local government—be it certificates for marriage or for birth
or death.
Thus, while India’s poorer neighbours are not paradises, they are
clearly forging ahead if the statistical evidence on education,
healthcare, nutrition and sanitation is anything to go by. Nepal and
Bangladesh are performing better in female literacy, life expectancy,
infant and child mortality, malnutrition as well as sanitation.

FOLLOW THE BREADCRUMBS

Still, while statistics confirm that many of India’s neighbours have a
clear edge, what do the realities on the ground reveal? This book
investigates the Eastern Neighbours and the Southern Supermodels to
make sense of this puzzle.
For starters, let us follow the trail of breadcrumbs in Bihar, Nepal
and Bangladesh.
 3
EASTERN NEIGHBOURS: EAR TO THE
GROUND

The stars in the sky, they only

seem stars there
The eyes that see far,
Failed to see the Stars around them,
The Stars of this Earth
– ‘Akash Ka Tara Ke Tara’, Hari Bhakta Katuwal (1935–1980), Indian–Nepali
Poet and Lyricist1

O NE COLD AFTERNOON, as I was sipping sugary tea, sitting in the civil

surgeon’s office in a mofussil town of Bangladesh, Md Riauddin
walked in with an air of purpose. I was really intrigued by his unusual
job title, ‘Health Education (In-charge)’. So, on a hunch, I tagged
along with him on his motorbike to learn more about his work. This
insightful trip was worth every minute.
Riauddin’s first stop was the local primary school. The affable head
teacher, Abdul Aziz, schooled me on the interlinked merits of human
development. ‘If a man has good education but no health, he cannot
use his skills. Education and health are the real assets of both a person
and a nation.’ This salt-of-the-earth wisdom is not uncommon in a
country with a long history of catastrophes.
The other school teachers, all women clad in burkhas, were equally
enthusiastic. They invited me to witness the ‘Little Doctors’ initiative
—a health education programme held twice a year in primary schools
across Bangladesh. Abdul himself got down on his knees and helped
some students button their sparkling white lab coats to dress up as
‘Little Doctors’. The rest of the students stood in queues at a distance
from an eye chart stuck on a wall. One by one, each child came
forward, closed one eye and slowly read the alphabets. Their ‘Little
Doctor’ classmates wrote out their prescriptions. This exercise in peer
education and quick, large-scale health monitoring is genuinely
innovative, not to mention adorable to watch. Children learn to
conduct simple health check-ups on each other like testing eyesight
and measuring height and weight. The Bangladeshi government has
apparently learnt this technique from Japanese donors and schools.
This is such an invaluable intervention. I have had to wear
spectacles since the tenth grade, and have often wondered how many
children drop out of school simply because of their failing eyesight.
Perhaps this is also one of the many reasons rural children in India
struggle to read. Nowadays, in urban private schools, numerous
children can be seen wearing spectacles, possibly due to excessive
screen time. But in rural areas, access to an ophthalmologist or even
an optician is a luxury.
The adoption of low-cost, novel ideas such as ‘Little Doctors’ in
Bangladeshi public policy is a typical trait of high achievers in human
development. They pay close attention to the little details.2 To explore
similar insights, my Eastern Neighbours research systematically
compared the Indian state of Bihar with Bangladesh and Nepal across
the border.
The economist Ha-Joon Chang has said with much angst, ‘… since
the 1980s … a sea of ink was spilled in order to “prove” empirically
that countries which had followed neoliberal policies did well.’3 This
book swims against that tide and also tries to move beyond dry
statistics.

TRAVELLING ACROSS BORDERS

In the initial stages, I along with my doctoral co-guide, based on a
comparable shortlist4 from national censuses, selected the Muslim-
dominated Kishanganj district in Bihar to compare with the
Panchagarh district in Bangladesh, barely 50 kilometres apart as the
crow flies.5 Similarly, we chose the Hindu-majority Muzaffarpur
district in Bihar to compare with Nepal’s Sindhuli, which lies between
the Terai plains and the Himalayan mountains. In each district, I
hand-picked translators and an energetic team of ten women
researchers who spoke the local dialects.
Across eighty villages in four districts in three countries, my various
teams and I interviewed 1,600 village women,6 especially mothers,7 in
three languages—Hindi, Bengali and Nepali.8 To cross-check their
responses, we also interviewed hundreds of health workers and
teachers. For the first time, we also tested the reading and
mathematics skills of many school-going children across borders.
With this wealth of data, we created four composite indices.9 First,
a unique ‘Human Development’ index.10 The other three indices11
—‘Schools and Health Facilities’, ‘Social Equity’ and ‘Women’s
Empowerment’—are together called enabling factors or explanatory
indices and they are expected to impact the outcome indicator of the
Human Development Index. Also, as a standard disclaimer, I must
mention that this data is representative of only individual districts,
and not necessarily the region or country as a whole. The overall
trends were unmistakable, though.
Apart from the door-to-door survey, I also conducted interviews
with key policy shapers, largely in the capital cities of Dhaka,
Kathmandu and Patna.12 In Nepal, for example, I was able to
interview both ex-Maoist rebels and government bureaucrats. But
perhaps the most immersive process in my fieldwork was living in
rural villages across borders with more than fifteen families of
different castes, communities, classes, cultures, cuisines, nationalities,
religions and languages.13 I had my ears firmly to the ground.
Crossing international borders on a shoestring budget is as thrilling
as it is gruelling. My modest doctoral travel grant ensured that largely
I could not afford to take any luxurious shortcuts like flights, private
taxis or cars. In the previous decade, working with non-profits, I had
often visited countries across South Asia from Bangladesh to
Afghanistan. Then, my stay had invariably been confined to hotel
rooms and any insights were drawn only from the stale air of air-
conditioned conference room echo chambers. For this doctoral
research, though, I lived largely in the homes of villagers, crossed long
distances and international borders on sleeper buses, overnight trains,
rickety cycle rickshaws, public boats, horse carriages and on foot, and
ate the most soul-satisfying street food. These were deeply enriching,
immersive and eye-opening years, but they were not without their
share of hiccups.
Especially in Bangladesh, during my fieldwork in 2016, there was a
growing wave of violence by fringe elements rumoured to be from the
Islamic State (IS). There was a spate of targeted killings of academics,
students, secular bloggers, foreign aid workers and gay rights activists.
In the first week of my fieldwork in Panchagarh district, we heard that
a Hindu priest had been murdered in a nearby town. As an Indian
with a Hindu name and with my academic and activist background, I
could have been a target.
The night we heard this news, we were scheduled to stay in the
home-cum-office of a tiny grassroots civil society organisation run by
an old friend of mine, Farooq bhai. I had known him for a decade
from my previous visits to Bangladesh. But, in the palpable air of
tension and fear, his wife became extremely tense. That night she
insisted that we all huddle together and sleep on the floor in the same
room to protect one another. The next morning, wisely and politely,
she also asked us to leave quickly for the next village as she did not
want to invite trouble from the prashasan (officialdom) if anything
happened to me. After Safiq and I left for the next village, at every
turn, Farooq Bhai, with his large circle of friends, continued to open
numerous doors for me.
A few months after I had left Bangladesh, a series of terrorist
attacks terminated in the horrific Holey Artisan Bakery hostage
shootout of twenty foreigners in the cosmopolitan Gulshan area of
Dhaka, where I had briefly stayed with a Dutch host in an Airbnb.
Thanks to my team of dynamic, local women researchers, despite all
the trepidation, the survey progressed well for more than a month
without any mishaps whatsoever.
As an Indian, near the border areas, I often had to register with the
local police station and the government detective branch. Some even
offered me female bodyguards and police protection. But Safiq and I
knew that we would be far safer working quietly on our own. I had
unshakeable faith that the local villagers would protect us. Apart from
a rudimentary hijab created from a folded dupatta, to blend in, I also
had a local tailor stitch some kurtas for me with cloth bought from a
village shop.14
Unlike other districts of Bangladesh, student researchers and
foreigners were a rarity in Panchagarh. Every evening, as I diligently
wrote the day’s notes on my computer, at least twenty to thirty visitors
would show up at the homes we were staying in, just to see the
‘madam from India’. It was overwhelmingly beautiful. One of the
most moving gestures of affection, however, was from our elderly host
Ruhanuma Apa. When we returned home one evening after
completing our door-to-door survey in the village, we discovered that
she had washed Safiq’s clothes which he had left in the room—she
explained simply that it was what she did for her son, a garment
factory worker, whenever he came home from Dhaka. Her hospitality
melted our hearts.
In Nepal, too, every trip turned into a feast of momos, dahi chiura
(sweet curd with flattened rice) and noodles. But this changed
dramatically. I usually stayed at a family-run guest house in a town
called Sindhuli Madi, the capital of Sindhuli district, before travelling
to the villages. But when I returned in late 2016, I sensed that my
hosts were being unusually cold towards me. As they began to
haltingly speak, I realised that the 2015 Indian economic blockade
had led to grave food and fuel shortages across Nepal. Once the ice
was broken, my hosts realised that, like me, most Indians were largely
clueless about the extent of their hardship due to limited media
coverage and that we, too, would not be in favour of the crippling
economic sanctions. That afternoon, eating tasty chowmein noodles
and watching a mind-numbing Hindi soap opera together on
television, we silently bonded again.
 In India, however, my concerns were of an entirely different nature.
One of my fieldwork districts in Bihar, for example, was infested with
dacoits, kidnappers and criminal gangs. At one juncture, my research
coordinator and I had no choice but to cross a shallow river on a
scooter, with me clutching at the handrails for dear life. The doctoral
plan was to survey forty villages across two Bihar districts, twice as
many as in Nepal and Bangladesh. But finding local women who had
passed the tenth grade to conduct the survey was proving to be
extremely difficult.
This difference in women’s education and employment was perhaps
the most telling contrast across borders. In one Bihar district, the
women who eventually joined my team after much coaxing were all
married. They had to juggle multiple responsibilities and return home
early each day before sundown or face the wrath of their mothers-in-
law. In the other district, we did finally manage to find unmarried
female students to join the team at modest wages. But their parents
were livid when they realised that the survey had questions on
contraception and family planning.
In contrast, in Nepal, our team of young local researchers, who had
recently graduated from high school, were not only more competent
but also familiar with sex education.

HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
Bangladeshi preschool teacher Shaheen was only twenty-six, but she
was a dynamo, brimming with energy. Married at the age of fifteen,
despite all odds, she’d completed her studies. Her preschool students
were able to read better than even second-grade students we had met
in nearby schools. Shaheen employed a range of innovative teaching
aids, including picture cards and abacuses. She showed her students
multiple picture cards and combined different words phonetically
making it easier for them to grasp. Most importantly, her students
understood the meaning of every word they read, not only in Bengali
but in English too. She was using a learning method called the Kajoli
Early Childhood Education Model.15
This asbestos-roofed classroom with bamboo walls, virtually no
ventilation and little sunlight, was buzzing with activity and joy. In
Bangladesh, the government does not run pre-primary schools. Across
the country, there are numerous such learning centres operated largely
by NGOs, including BRAC (earlier called the Bangladesh
Rehabilitation Assistance Committee). Most of them use different
techniques of joyful learning. The Kajoli model is based on play and
peer learning.
Shaheen’s inspiring early childhood education centre was financed
collectively. The mothers’ committee of the village pooled money to
pay her a modest honorarium. The school ran for only three hours a
day, and the mothers brought ‘khichuri’ (a mixture of rice and lentils
cooked together, often called ‘hotchpotch’ in Dhaka) by rotation for
all the children to eat together.
The young teacher was ambitious about the future of her young
students: ‘You can’t expect all five fingers of the hand to be the same.
But I do hope that for some children who are intelligent, I am able to
show them the right way. And for those who are laggards, it is my job
to bring them ahead. A few days ago, I asked the children what their
aspirations were. One girl wanted to be a female police officer and did
dishum dushum [boxing moves]. Another wanted to be a doctor, the
third a teacher. My students are so smart that the primary school
teacher had to conduct a lottery to decide whom to give the most
marks to, as she was flummoxed with their calibre.’
Most people are equally astonished when they see my survey results.
Almost 90 per cent of the students in grade 5 whom we tested across
twenty villages in Panchagarh were able to read at least a grade 2 level
paragraph in Bengali. Even in Nepal, nearly two-thirds of the students
we tested in grade 5 were equally competent. But in the two Bihar
districts, less than half the students could read as fluently.16 These
results for Bihar were nearly identical to those in the Annual Status of
Education Report that the NGO Pratham has been preparing for the
last decade in India.17 For the first time, with the same ASER tools, my
survey tested children’s learning levels across borders. The results were
crystal clear—Bangladeshi children were strikingly ahead.18
In Bihar, amongst the children we tested, those from more affluent
families scored markedly better than those from poorer ones. Poorer
children had less than half the learning competencies.19 This inequality
is largely due to the additional money that wealthier families spend on
private schools and private tuition. In contrast, family income did not
influence learning levels in Nepal. Even better, the Bangladesh district
had a high progressive ratio, with pupils from the poorest families
turning out to be better learners than the wealthiest.20 Competent and
dedicated teachers trained in joyful learning techniques, timely
availability of textbooks, scholarships for poor and female students as
well as the Bengali cultural emphasis on education are all important
factors in Bangladesh’s educational successes.
In contrast, the repeated complaint of the parents we met in Bihar
was that despite good intentions, chief minister Nitish Kumar’s
‘Degree Lao, Naukri Pao’ (Get a Degree, Get a Job) scheme to recruit
local teachers en masse had boomeranged and worsened the quality of
education. Many upper caste teachers with fake degrees had usurped
these plum jobs but were obviously unable to teach in the
classrooms.21
In school after school in Bihar, we noticed clear signs of decay. In
one government school, we saw two teachers in crisp saris sitting
behind wooden desks, side-by-side, in the same classroom. They were
apparently trying to simultaneously teach two different grades of
students who sat on the floor in rows in front of them.22 In another
dimly lit classroom, possibly due to our presence, the teacher
pretended to make the children ‘read’ in the darkness. Many students
across schools also confided in us that their teachers beat them
mercilessly, even though corporal punishment is strictly against the
law.
In Bihar, we noticed that many children were officially enrolled in
government schools, but did not attend classes. A recent 2023 post-
pandemic survey by the Jan Jagran Shakti Sanghatan found that, in
government primary schools in north Bihar, ‘only 23% of children
enrolled were present’ and dismally concludes that ‘schools in Bihar
seem to be in danger of mass displacement by private coaching
centres’.23 My survey also confirmed that 82 per cent of students
enrolled in private schools and 44 per cent in government schools also
went for several hours of private tuition.24
On the other hand, in Bangladesh, on an average only 35 per cent
and, in Nepal, only 29 per cent of students paid for extra tuitions. In
fact, the draft Bangladeshi Education Act, that has been under debate
for the last decade, proposes an absolute ban on all private coaching
centres, private tuition and even on the publication of guidebooks.25
The ‘human development index’ that I created with my survey data
also measured basic knowledge of healthcare. We asked village
women simple questions26 such as whether milk was good for
pregnant women, colostrum for infants and fluids for children with
diarrhoea. On an average, 82 per cent of the women we interviewed in
Bangladesh answered correctly compared to 66 per cent in Nepal. In
Bihar, the level of awareness amongst the women we interviewed was
61 per cent, and their knowledge of ORS was the lowest.
Similarly, to indirectly measure nutrition, we asked women whether
anyone in their family had slept hungry in the last three months. In
Bangladesh and Nepal, they were truly puzzled by this question. More
than 90 per cent of women we spoke to were positive that no one in
their family had faced hunger. But in both the Bihar districts, women
hesitated while answering this question. Their downcast eyes and
silences spoke volumes of their own haunting deprivation.
We also asked women what they had eaten the previous night. They
invariably giggled as they tried to jog their memories. Using their
responses, we calculated a slightly modified version of the Women’s
Dietary Diversity Scores.27 As expected, Bangladesh scored the highest,
with almost 91 per cent of the women telling us they’d eaten animal
protein (mostly fish) the previous night. Nepal followed suit, even
though only 30 per cent of the women had eaten meat (along with 20
per cent fish and 14 per cent eggs). Expectedly, women in the Bihar
districts scored the least.28
 The availability of toilets across borders was the biggest contrast.
Almost 99 per cent of homes we visited in Bangladesh and 96 per cent
in Nepal already had a toilet that they used regularly. In Bihar, at the
time of my survey in mid-2016, only 14 per cent of households had a
latrine. Despite the hype around SBA, toilets were few and far
between.29 Often, only the homes of local politicians had toilets as this
was a mandatory eligibility criterion if they wished to stand for
elections.30 But the demand for latrines that we encountered among
women was overwhelming. Around 97 per cent of the women who
had to regularly defecate in the open complained to us of their
discomfort, especially when they were unwell or menstruating. Almost
91 per cent of these interviewees also confirmed that they would
certainly construct a toilet and regularly use it if the government
provided adequate subsidy. Tellingly, 71 per cent of women who had
used a toilet before gushed about how much they loved them. If only
more women in Bihar earned an income or had more influence in
household decisions how different the statistics would look.
Since 2008, on the other hand, Nepal has worked towards
becoming open defecation-free (ODF). Every district has chalked out
its sanitation plan. In Bangladesh, too, the levels of sanitation were
very high. Islam is highly prescriptive about toilet hygiene and has its
own set of rules known as Qadaa’ al-Haajah. Even in India, before
SBA, 65 per cent of Muslim homes had a toilet, compared to only 47
per cent of Hindu homes.31
But the real puzzle that foxed me for weeks was why so many
toilets in Bangladesh had toilet rolls, like in Western countries.32 Every
small village corner shop sold these locally manufactured, extremely
cheap toilet rolls for as little as Tk 15 (about Rs 11). One roll even
had the brand name ‘Bangla’ with a bar code. I wondered who bought
these rolls in remote villages.
I had been chewing on this mundane puzzle for weeks, when
Rehnuma, a local villager, helped me solve this mystery. She had her
hands full, taking care of her infant twins, as we asked her a routine
survey question about sanitation. Rehnuma suddenly beamed with
pride and blurted out, ‘I am a good Muslim mother as I wipe my
children’s bottom thrice with tissue paper and then use water as
mandated by Islam.’ Only then did I become aware that the Quran
instructs utmost hygiene after ‘relieving yourselves’, and if ‘you can
find no water, take some sand and rub your faces and hands with it’.33
One day, our bus stopped at an unplanned open-air pitstop in the
rural countryside. I was astonished when I saw from a quick sideways
glance outside the window that the men were squatting to urinate. I
nudged Safiq and asked him what was going on. He nonchalantly
explained that this was recommended in the scriptures.34 He said that
his father would even get annoyed when he had to use western-style
men’s urinals. The specific Hadith on toilet hygiene also emphasised
privacy. So, clean toilets dotted the landscape across rural Bangladesh.
Thus, across education, healthcare, nutrition and sanitation, my
primary survey showed that Panchagarh district in Bangladesh had the
best human development scores.35 Both the Bihar districts lagged
behind substantially.36 Since there were minimal differences between
the Hindu-dominated and Muslim-majority Bihari districts, I
combined their scores. Obviously, in Bihar, state- and national-level
public policies, rather than religious differences, were the main factors
in determining social achievements.

SCHOOLS AND HEALTH CENTRES37

Classrooms need inspiring teachers. More than two-thirds of the
mothers we met in the districts of Nepal and Bangladesh said that they
were satisfied with the teachers who taught their youngest school-
going child. In sharp contrast, only a third of mothers in Bihar held
the same view.
Teachers often do not even show up in schools in Bihar. Teacher
absenteeism or ‘ghost teachers’ are a chronic menace.38 The 2006
policy of mass recruitment of local teachers also seems to have made
no dent. Almost 75 per cent of the teachers we met confirmed that
they lived in the same village.39 But on the day of our unannounced
visit, 41 per cent were absent from schools for one reason or another.
In Nepal, on the day of our visit, 32 per cent of teachers were MIA
(missing in action).40 In contrast, in Bangladesh, only 18 per cent were
away from duty.
Caste plays an important role in Bihar, both in the school
attendance of teachers as well as students. In one village, when we
entered a Musahar tola (hamlet), in the late morning hours, my jaw
dropped. Barely clothed children were playing and running around
everywhere when they should have been in school. We peeped inside
the first mud house, which barely had a roof over it, and saw three
children huddled in a corner. As we began our survey, a crowd of
mostly women and children of all ages quickly surrounded us.
These families had been displaced by a flood that had washed away
their homes a few months ago. As the children’s names had not been
deleted from their old school’s register, the teachers in the government
school near where they lived now had refused to enrol them. The
discrimination, unspoken of course, was because of their caste.
Musahars in Bihar are denigrated as rat-eaters, a necessary part of
their diet for generations to subsist in the face of dire poverty and
deprivation.
We asked the children to get ready so we could take them to school.
It took some persuasion, but by the time we finished our survey,
twenty-five eager youngsters were wearing their Sunday best. The
school was barely two minutes away. As the children trustingly held
hands and made a single queue to walk to school, my eyes welled up.
After an hour of cajoling, the teachers in the school finally gave the
children some plates to have the meal provided by the school. We also
sang a few songs to shore up their spirits and to help them build
bonds with their new classmates. The head teacher agreed that the
children could attend this school until their previous school issued
transfer certificates. During our fieldwork in the area, we followed up
every single day with the teachers of both schools, but we knew that
the destinies of these children from the lowest caste would continue to
be mired in red tape and unspeakable depths of prejudice.
Another troubling trend that I saw in government schools in Bihar
was that children were usually made to sit on the dusty floor of
classrooms. If they were lucky, there would be a mat. Otherwise, most
students would bring their own jute sacks from home to sit on. On the
other hand, most teachers would sit on chairs behind wooden desks.
This situation is a reflection on the low government investment in
basic infrastructure in schools. But it is also an example of the wide
physical and status gap that exists between teachers and students. In
contrast, we found that 85 per cent of students in Nepal and 66 per
cent in Bangladesh sat behind desks. Many of these desks were
painted in bright colours to make the classroom atmosphere joyful.
Another excellent initiative in Nepal was that classroom walls,
staircases and playgrounds were painted with images of alphabets,
multiplication tables, poems and various measurements. All it took
was a bucket of paint and a few brushes, and the children were
surrounded by learning material in every corner of the school. Thus,
basic concepts would visually come to be etched in their memories.
The availability of textbooks, essential to learning the curriculum,
was also another indicator we gauged. All students in government
schools in India are guaranteed free textbooks based on the
compulsory education law. Still, in two of every three Bihari schools
we visited, textbooks were inexplicably delayed for as long as three to
eight months after the start of the academic year. No wonder Bihari
students struggled to learn.
I pleasantly discovered that Bangladesh and Nepal had employed
ingenious solutions to ensure that 80 per cent of their students
received these textbooks on time.41 In Bangladesh, the new academic
year starts on the first day of January. So, New Year’s Day is also
celebrated as National Textbook Day. A schoolteacher explained to
me, ‘We have to submit photographs to the education department to
show that we are distributing textbooks to children on the 1st of
January each year. Even if it is a holiday, we have to distribute on New
Year’s Day.’42
In Bangladesh and Nepal, more than two-thirds of the schools we
went to also had good toilets. But in Bihar, more than half had no
toilets at all. This made girls, in particular, more likely to drop out. In
one school, students pulled me aside to show me the extent of the
gender bias they faced. They took us with them to see the toilets for
ourselves. Here’s what I recorded in my field notes:

The boys’ toilet is clean as, apparently, the teachers also use it.
With much difficulty, we open the girls’ toilet, and the stench
and filth are unbearable. The girl student who is showing us
around tells us that this toilet is no longer used. The children
confide to us that, worse still, only girls are made to clean the
boys’ toilet.43

Among Eastern Neighbours, only India provides free school lunches.

These midday school meals are meant to enable malnourished children
to catch-up in growth.44 Sadly, in Bihar, though eggs are on the menu
once a week, we rarely found them in the meals that the schools
served.
We also measured access to healthcare in the three districts across
borders.45 More than half the homes confirmed that their nearest
health facility was within 3 kilometres. Since 2009, in Bangladesh, the
Awami League government’s flagship initiative has been to construct
Community Clinics ‘to extend primary healthcare at the doorsteps of
the villagers all over the country’.46 Similarly, in Nepal, we found
‘health posts’ near most villages, and 85 per cent of them were open
when we arrived. In contrast, in the far-flung Kishanganj district of
Bihar, only nine of the twenty villages we visited had a health facility
nearby, and we found that most were shut.
Free medicines are also the cornerstone of a well-functioning public
health facility. Around 80 per cent of the health centres in Nepal and
65 per cent in Bangladesh had in stock at least half of the thirteen
basic medicines on our survey checklist.47 Bangladesh also has a
thriving pharmaceutical industry for generic drugs that supplies most
medicines on the Essential Drugs List (EDL).48 At one Community
Clinic, we saw that the local family welfare assistant Madina Begum’s
bag was brimming with contraceptive pills, condoms and injections.
As we spoke, a village woman in her nightdress and without slippers
walked up to Madina and casually asked for free, contraceptive ‘sukhi
bori’ (happiness pills). In contrast in Bihar, 60 per cent of the health
facilities we visited did not have even half of these basic medicines.
Both the districts in Bangladesh and Nepal emerged as frontrunners,
based on the combined scores on the quality of schools and health
centres. Bihar, though, was acutely deprived. In Kishanganj district,
public services were so appalling that local villagers used the
distraction created by our survey to heckle a corrupt anganwadi
(government pre-school) teacher.49 Yet, the most common refrain from
both Muslim and Hindu villagers we met, and especially from the
Musahars and Doms at the bottom of the caste ladder, was, ‘Hum
aage badhenge jab log hamare saath badhenge. Teen log aage. Dus log
peeche. Lekin koi saath mein nahi hai. Koi judna nahi chahate.’ (We
will protest when other people unite with us. Three people in front.
Ten behind. But nobody is with us. Nobody wants to join hands
together).50 Tellingly, the ability to demand better public services
seemed to be stifled by a lack of social unity and solidarity.

SOCIAL EQUITY
Economists Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze, in their book India:
Development and Participation, insightfully describe the impact of
social distances:

The problem of social distance arises from the fact that,

compared with the pupils and their parents, teachers in
government schools often come from relatively privileged social
backgrounds in terms of caste, class and gender.51

Teachers are less likely to talk down to their students and their
guardians if they belong to the same caste. Healthcare workers are
also likely to be more caring towards their patients if they hail from
the same social class or community.52 When social distances are
diluted, often there is better access to public services. This is
particularly important in an India riven by caste and communal
brutality and discrimination. A few years ago, in Uttar Pradesh, a
Dalit student was beaten to death by his teacher for writing the wrong
answers in the examinations.53 In the same district, another Dalit
student was beaten ‘for not bringing a plate for food from home’.54
More recently, in a viral video, one can see an upper caste teacher
asking students to slap a Muslim boy repeatedly.55 Though both
corporal punishment and caste atrocities are legally banned, these
violent malignancies continue to plague India. In our survey we tried
various indirect measures to capture these social distances.
More than half the mothers we met in the chosen districts of
Bangladesh and Nepal, for example, confirmed that they had spoken
at least once to a teacher who taught their youngest school-going child
in the previous academic year. In Bangladesh, if a child was absent for
more than three days, the teacher had to visit their home and then,
submit an ‘absenteeism form’, containing detailed explanations, to
higher authorities.56 In contrast, less than a third of mothers we met in
Bihar had the same level of interactions with teachers.
Mothers’ education is often an important factor in how confident
they are in their interaction with teachers. In the Bangladesh district,
four out of every five mothers and in Nepal, more than half of the
mothers we met were literate. In Bihar, less than half the mothers we
met could even read the alphabet. Understandably, they were more
diffident when speaking with teachers. This social distance was
particularly acute in Musahar hamlets. Teachers in Bihar were also
particularly dismissive of illiterate parents. One teacher in half-baked
English mouthed the typical barb, ‘Guardians tight nahin hote hai.
Bacchon ko tayyar nahin karte hain’ (Parents don’t impart discipline.
They do not prepare their children for school), even as Musahar
families agonised about the open discrimination their children face
within and outside the classroom.57
On the health front, more than two-thirds of the women we
interviewed in Bangladesh and Nepal had met a health worker in the
previous three months, compared to only half in Bihar. We also asked
villagers how long they usually had to wait in a health facility before a
doctor or a nurse attended to them. Nepal’s health posts were the
quickest. An important reason was that many of them were not
managed by doctors but by well-trained ‘health assistants’ with long
years of medical experience. In Bangladesh and Nepal, almost half the
teachers and health workers we met also confirmed that at least one of
the students they had taught or patients they had treated in the
previous year was related to them. So, with emotional distance
bridged by kinship bonds, these workers were likely to be more
committed. In Nepal, in particular, 97 per cent of the swasthya sevikas
we interviewed had treated their own relatives at some point or the
other. Even though they did not receive a salary, swasthya sevikas
were deeply respected as ‘the backbone of society’.58 In Bihar, too,
more than two-thirds of the ASHA doorstep health workers routinely
treated their own relatives who lived in the same village. On the other
hand, doctors, nurses and other health workers, despite their hefty
salaries, did not share the same bond with their patients. So, across
the three countries, we found that most villagers were not comfortable
visiting the homes of these senior healthcare workers for
consultations.
Lastly, we found that teachers and health workers were usually
amongst the few government employees in rural villages with steady
incomes. Villagers often turned to them for loans. Predictably, almost
half the teachers and health workers we spoke to in Bangladesh
confirmed that they had, at some point or the other, lent money to
someone in the village where they worked. Villagers in the remote
Muslim-dominated Kishanganj district of Bihar were also more
indebted to these welfare workers than in urbanised Muzaffarpur. But
Nepali teachers and health workers were, by far, the most generous.
Sixty-four per cent of Nepali teachers and half the health workers had
lent money.
These unique responses were compressed into a ‘social equality
index’. The Bihar districts displayed the greatest social distance
between teachers and health workers and the villagers they served.
Bangladesh and Nepal clearly had greater social equality.

WOMEN’S FREEDOMS
Women’s freedoms often hinge on education. In the past four decades,
female education in Bangladesh has expanded to such an extent that,
across classrooms, we found more girls than boys.59 When I asked a
bright fifteen-year-old boy whose mother was a school teacher what
he thought about this trend, he solemnly quoted Napoleon Bonaparte,
‘Give me an educated mother, I shall promise you [the birth of] a
civilized, educated nation.’60

3.1: Wives who are educated for the same or more

years than their spouses (%)

Source: Author’s Household Survey, 2016

Surprisingly, 67 per cent of Bangladeshi women we met said that

they had spent as many or more years in school than their husbands.
Though, on average, these women had received only six years of
education, even that was often more than their husbands. The 2006
World Bank Survey on Gender Norms in Bangladesh first detected this
unique trend of ‘educational hypogamy’.61 This was contrary to the
traditional South Asian aspiration for women to ‘marry up’ the social
ladder. In Bihar and Nepal, for instance, more than two-thirds of the
women we met were less educated than their husbands.62
Since childhood, I have watched women burdened with the primary
responsibility to prepare food and feed their families every day in both
rural and urban homes. Mothers, grandmothers, daughters-in-laws
and aunts in India invariably slave away in the kitchen, cooking nearly
every meal from scratch. The recent Malayalam film, The Great
Indian Kitchen, touches a raw nerve on this subject. On top of that, in
more than half the rural homes in northern India, women typically eat
last after serving everyone else in the family.63 So, in poor homes,
women also often eat the least, as little food may be left for them after
everyone else has eaten.
In Bihar, 58 per cent of women we met said that they ate only after
other family members had eaten. In the home of one of my
researchers, I saw this discrimination first hand and recounted it in my
field notes with anguish:

It is around 10 p.m. and finally, dinner is served. The father

asks me to go to the next room to eat separately, but I will have
none of it. He tells me that there is a parampara (tradition) that
women must eat only after men. But since I am not budging, a
plate of roti is kept in front of me as we sit on the floor to eat.
But the women of the house are not yet being served. As soon
as the men and the children finish their meal and the moment
her husband gets up, the elderly mother hungrily drags his half-
eaten plate of rice that he has left behind, and starts eating
from it in a hurry. The daughter-in-law bustles around cleaning,
bent low. She has prepared all the food but is not allowed to
eat until her father-in-law, husband, children and then mother-
in-law finish. She will be the last to eat, sitting in a corner on
the floor. I can also see from the corner of my eye my
researcher’s sister, who is studying in the tenth standard, sitting
on a chair in the other room, seething with rage that I was
offered food with the men simply because I am from the shehar
(city). She is starving, has school tomorrow, but is still not
 permitted to eat. The men in the house are all rotund, while the
women are weak and frail. Any guesses why? My blood boils.64

To my absolute surprise, I discovered that this cultural norm that I

grew up with in India was uncommon in Bangladesh. Only 11 per
cent of Bangladeshi women we interviewed said they ate after their
husbands. In fact, 23 per cent, especially those with infant children,
said that the previous night they had eaten even before their husbands
had returned home. Throughout my fieldwork, across many host
families too, we all ate our dinner together on the floor of the ranna
ghar (kitchen) or in the courtyard. In the most unforgettable iftar
meals that I have had in the humblest of homes, during the holy
month of Ramzan, we would all sit together to eat muri and fruits,
and drink glucose water when we broke our fast in the evening. Even
for sehri, the morning meal before dawn, we would all sit together on
a mat on the floor and gobble up our food with sleepy eyes. The world
over, in Muslim families, commensality or eating together, sometimes
from the same plate, is culturally cherished. In the Hadith, on the
‘Etiquette of Eating’, the Prophet urges, ‘Eat together and mention the
Name of Allah over your food. It will be blessed for you.’65
Even in Nepal, despite it being a largely Hindu society, 92 per cent
of women said that they ate together as a family. In upper caste
homes, there even appeared to be a range of strict eating customs. One
day, as we sat together in the home of our Bahun (Brahmin) hosts, I
tried to scoop some rice onto my elderly host Ram Bua’s plate. I was
promptly reprimanded by my Newari translator Bijeta: ‘Only someone
who has finished eating is allowed to serve someone who is still
eating.’66 These norms ensured that everyone served themselves;
shared meals were encouraged. Bijeta told me that she had been
trained in these customs since her childhood and practiced them
strictly.
We also asked women if, based on traditional cultural practices,
they wore a ghoonghat (veil), face scarf, sari pallu (sari end), hijab or
burkha when stepping outside the home,67 or going in front of elders.
Expectedly, 88 per cent of Bangladeshi women said that they covered
their heads with their saris or wore burkhas. In both Hindu and
Muslim-dominated districts of Bihar, more than 70 per cent of women
also had the same response. In Nepal, which has never encountered
Muslim rule, the practice of purdah or even ghoonghat was virtually
non-existent. Only 21 per cent of women we met, largely those who
lived in the Terai areas bordering India, covered their heads.
Even my Nepali researchers ‘look[ed] like fashion models’ in chic,
well-cut Western clothes. My translator, Bijeta, walked with ease in
the villages in shorts and a T-shirt, and no one blinked an eye. Even in
the market squares, it was not unusual to see grandmothers wearing
traditional Nepali saris, sitting on their haunches and casually
smoking bidis with their heads immersed in a cloud of smoke.
Thus, the Nepal district had the highest levels of women’s freedom,
followed by Bangladesh. The Bihar districts were at the bottom, with
the most stifling gender inequities.

THE COST OF INEQUALITY

Finally, for each of the eighty villages, we combined the information
from both households and welfare workers. Expectedly, villages that
scored well on the ‘human development index’ created specially for
my research were also more likely to have good quality schools and
health facilities as well as better women’s empowerment. Social
equality, too, had a positive correlation, though that was slightly
weaker. Overall, 56 per cent of the variation in human development
could be explained with statistical significance by the three indices.68
Sindhuli district in Nepal and Panchagarh in Bangladesh also clearly
had better scores across the board than the two Bihari districts.

3.2: Wealth inequalities in human development

and women’s empowerment
 I also divided the families into five quintiles based on their
possession of simple assets—from beds and fans to pressure cookers
and mobile phones. In the districts of Bangladesh and Nepal, human
development scores were fairly evenly distributed across families.
Women’s empowerment scores displayed an even more progressive
trend. Women from the poorest families in both countries had higher
scores than richer families. On the other hand, in Bihar, there was
clearly a regressive trend. The poorest households not only had the
lowest human development scores but also fared the worst in women’s
freedom. Predictably, in Bihar, more affluent families were better off
on all counts.
The inequalities between communities also cast an interesting
picture.69 In Bangladesh, minority Hindu families in my sample had
higher human development scores than Muslim ones. The reverse was
true for women’s empowerment in the two communities. In Nepal,
human development scores were fairly evenly distributed among
different castes. Predictably, in the Bihar districts, Dalits recorded the
lowest human development scores, while forward castes had the
highest. But Dalit and Muslim women had higher empowerment
scores.

NEIGHBOURS SHINE
All forty villages in Bihar trailed those in Nepal and Bangladesh on all
parameters.
But this statistical analysis does not explain the underlying reasons
for these differences across borders. Why, for instance, are social
distances more compressed in Nepal than in Bihar? How has
Panchagarh district in Bangladesh leapfrogged Kishanganj in Bihar,
even though it is just a stone’s throw away across the border? Why are
women in Nepal more empowered than those in Bangladesh and
Bihar? Why have the governments of Bangladesh and Nepal bothered
to invest more in schools and health centres?
The key to success for India’s poorer neighbours seems to clearly lie
in their ability to dilute inequalities of wealth, caste and gender. So, I
dug deeper to analyse how these social inequalities have gradually
dissolved, over decades and centuries, across India’s borders.
Even Rome was not built in a day.
 4
BANGLADESH

Last year I was a Jolāhā (weaver), now I am a Sheikh,

and next year, if the prices rise, I shall become a Saiyid.
– Late nineteenth-century proverb
The Imperial Gazetteer of India, 18811

T HE BUZZ WAS electric. In only twelve days, voters would choose their
candidate for the local government. As we entered the local market
square, a loudspeaker blared, ‘Vote for the autorickshaw.’ Predictably,
the two main candidates in these elections were from the biggest
national parties—Awami League (AL) and Bangladesh National Party
(BNP). The rest of the dozen-odd candidates were independents. Their
election symbols were unique to the rural countryside, from a
loudspeaker to a sheaf of wheat and a humble autorickshaw.
One difference stood out. In every village, we saw women
candidates, usually burkha-clad, going door-to-door asking for votes,
even in the afternoon heat. But we rarely found men similarly on their
feet. Instead, male candidates usually organised rickshaw or cycle
rallies with boisterous slogan-shouting by tens of supporters on
blaring loudspeakers. Veteran feminist Meghna Guhathakurta, whom
I later met in Dhaka, confirmed that this was indeed a distinct trend.2
One-third of the seats in the local government are reserved for
women, the same as in India. But Bangladesh has an unusual indirect
gender quota system.3 Each voter has to vote for two candidates. A
regular contestant of any gender in their constituency and a woman
candidate who represents three constituencies. So, women from
reserved seats had to seek votes from an electorate that was three
times larger. However, money and muscle power were monopolised by
men. Thus, women candidates, with fewer resources, usually had to
walk long distances and ask for votes door-to-door.4
The bazaars, too, were caught up in the heady atmosphere. Men
spent all night plotting election strategies over endless cups of lal cha
(tea without milk). Even late into the evenings, we would hear vans
driving down the highways and village bylanes, loudly appealing for
votes on loudspeakers, announcing the names of their candidates and
their unusual symbols.
On election day, our host, a widow, woke up early. For the first
time, we saw her leave home wearing a full-length burkha. She had
been chosen by one of the candidates as a representative. Her job was
simple—to sign as a witness after the counting of the ballots. Of
course, her main motivation was the modest honorarium that would
follow.
The entire road leading up to the election booth in the local school
was decorated with paper flags depicting election symbols. Voters
wore their Sunday best. Near the polling booth, men and women
stood in separate, solemn queues. Outside the school, it was a
carnival. Vendors sold candy floss and peanuts in paper cones, while
children played on the streets. This was indeed a festival of democracy.
The whole village seemed to have poured out of their homes into
the bylanes around the school. We kept bumping into friends from the
various homes we had surveyed. There was not a single vehicle on the
streets, except that of an election observer who drove past with an
officious siren on his car. We saw him enter the school to inspect the
polling station. Later, as Safiq and I stood on the main highway trying
to find some public transport, the officer kindly stopped his car and
offered to give us a lift to the nearest town.
We gratefully entered the air-conditioned comfort of his official
vehicle. Safiq was particularly thrilled. Like many of his classmates at
Dhaka University, he dreamt of joining the government service, with
all its pomp and prestige. But as we accompanied the officer on his
tour of duty, the façade of this festive election melted away. At the
next polling booth, rumours were rife that one of the main candidates
had laid out a free banquet for the voters. Everywhere we heard
murmurs of gifts and different inducements.
When the results were out, it was obvious that, across the district,
wealthy candidates had won their seats hands down. After all,
Bangladesh is amongst the most corrupt countries in South Asia and
the world.5
In our village, there was a massive gaffe. The losing candidate’s
supporters thought that he had won based on a hand gesture by an
official inside the counting hall. They had started celebrating. Then the
election official declared that he had lost by a razor-thin margin. This
miscommunication created a ruckus, which could have easily turned
into a brawl. But the losing candidate beseeched his supporters to
remain calm and avoid violence. The next day, we bumped into this
gracious gentleman in the village street, but all he could give us was a
dazed grin.
Elections seem to be hardwired into the Bangladeshi national
consciousness. It is a hard-won symbol of democracy in a country that
has a long history of military dictators, coups, murders and intrigue.
Even government primary schools conduct annual student elections
using ballot papers. Every school I visited had a board with photos of
elected student council members.
Yet, the 2018 general elections were marred by severe allegations of
vote rigging and violence. The previous elections in 2014 had been
boycotted by the BNP, the main opposition alliance. Democracy in
Bangladesh remains fragile. The 2022 Varieties of Democracy (V-
Dem) Liberal Democracy Index (LDI), which measures how liberal a
democracy is, ranks Bangladesh as one of the lowest in South Asia,
lower than India.6 Both countries along with Pakistan are now
classified as ‘electoral autocracies’. The 2024 Bangladeshi elections
also promises to be marred by controversies.
Despite this turbulent polity, as evident from my on-the-ground
survey, the commitment of all Bangladeshi political leaders to social
welfare is exceptionally high. The key question that emerges is: why
do even autocratic regimes bother to placate citizens with welfare?
What forces have shaped this unique social contract between the
citizens of Bangladesh and their ruling elites?

MONOPOLISTIC PARTYARCHY7
Sitting in an autorickshaw in rural Bangladesh, we passed by a
hoarding that showed a smiling Prime Minister Begum Sheikh Hasina
talking animatedly into her mobile phone. In the backdrop were
women who seemed to be eager to enter a picket-fenced Community
Clinic. I was so intrigued by this poster that I stopped the vehicle,
took a photograph and had Safiq translate it for me later. The slogan
proclaimed, ‘Community Clinics are one of the best efforts to ensure
healthcare, which makes Bangladesh the role model for the world.’
There was even a chronology of events on the hoarding to support this
claim:
1998: Sheikh Hasina established 10,600 Community Clinics to
ensure health facilities for every person.

2001: Community Clinics were closed by the Bangladesh

Nationalist Party.

2009: After 8 years, Sheikh Hasina has reopened Community

Clinics.

2014: 12,815 Community Clinics have been opened, 900

Community Clinics conduct normal deliveries, 30 types of
medicines are distributed and in tune with the slogan of
‘Digital Bangladesh’ laptops have been provided to every
clinic.

The hoarding ended on a high note: ‘The Awami League government

ensures that Community Clinics, which provide health facilities for
every person, fulfil the vision of Bangabandhu [i.e., Sheikh Mujibur
Rehman] and Sheikh Hasina to make this dream come true.’
 Well-functioning Community Clinics are indeed a sight to behold.
We reached one at 10 a.m.8 The health centre had not yet opened, but
a group of men and several women carrying children were already
waiting there to be immunised. The previous day, families had been
informed on their mobile phones about their children’s vaccination
appointments. We waited outside the centre for a few minutes, when
the sari and hijab-clad health assistant (HA) arrived in a sweat with a
helper who was carrying the vaccines in an ice box. She opened the
door of the clinic, and in a matter of minutes, about ten mothers and
fathers swarmed around her with their infants and their vaccination
cards. I clicked several photos and realised that there was absolutely
no space or time to interview the HA. An excellent sign—nothing
better than busy welfare workers who don’t have time to chat.
Unfortunately, Community Clinics remain only a political project.
Despite intense competition between the two main parties, as of 2016,
Community Clinics had not been enacted as a legal right. So, HAs like
the one we met did not have secure, permanent jobs on par with other
government employees. They had launched a nationwide andolan a
few months ago. Due to these protests, in another clinic we visited the
supply of medicines had been temporarily stopped. Many families we
met were angry as they had returned from the clinic disappointed and
did not know where to lodge their complaints. These patients were
also victims of this unsteady system.
Bangladesh’s development has, without a doubt, happened in fits
and starts. The country has been plagued by chronic corruption,
unstable governance, simmering communalism and political instability
in the last five decades.9 Since the brutal assassination, in 1975, of the
first prime minister, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, Bangladesh has had ten
heads of government.10 Till the 1990s, power had been firmly held by
a nexus of politicians, military officers and bureaucrats—the most
powerful elites in the country. After democracy returned in 1991, a
new form of patronage politics seems to have emerged.11 Competition
between the two main political parties has fuelled a race for populist
welfare policies, such as Community Clinics.
 Overt political support for education has led to the rapid expansion
in the number of school enrolments.12 In the 1980s, even General
Ershad (1982–91), to gain popular support for his feeble military
dictatorship, made primary education legally compulsory and
introduced free tuition for girls in secondary grades. This right was
enshrined in law in Bangladesh nearly two decades before India
enacted the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act
in 2009.
Political scientist Mirza Hassan has rightly described Bangladesh as
a ‘monopolistic partyarchy’ with a ‘winner takes all’ ethos.13
Whenever a particular political party is in power, it controls and
politicises trade unions, professional associations and civil society,
based on party affiliation, through its nominees. One of my
Bangladeshi surveyors told me that a close friend of hers was
imprisoned only because the family were long-time loyalists of the
opposition party. But despite their ideological and political differences,
heart-warmingly the personal friendship between my surveyor and her
close friend remained strong.

4.1: Primary and secondary enrolments by political

regime in Bangladesh
 Source: Adapted from (Naomi Hossain and Naila Kabeer,
‘Achieving Universal Primary Education and Eliminating
Gender Disparity’) with the latest data available from the
UNESCO Institute of Statistics.
Note: AL = Awami League, BNP = Bangladesh National
Party, CG = Caretaker Government, FSSP = Female
Secondary Stipend Programme, PESP = Primary
Education Stipend Programme

Despite the turbulence of alternating episodes of authoritarian and

democratic regimes, in Bangladesh ‘a distinct and durable political
settlement has emerged’.14 The political elites expand welfare policies
to opportunistically safeguard their vote banks and gain popular
support.15 If they do not deliver, all regimes know that they can easily
be replaced.16 This is not an imaginary fear in a country that is
legendary for its gigantic street protests.17 The 2018 street protests for
road safety initiated by school children grew so widespread across
ages that they brought Dhaka to a standstill, hit international
headlines and had to be quelled with tear gas.18 The 2013 Shahbag
protests were more overtly political, as old wounds from the atrocities
committed during the 1971 Liberation War resurfaced.19 With the
2024 elections around the corner, the political atmosphere has once
again become charged.
Still, most of the political elites in Bangladesh also have a deep-
seated commitment to social welfare. As feminist economist Naila
Kabeer once vividly described, in Bangladesh even ‘the urban elite are
only one generation removed from life in the villages’.20
The foundation of this solid social commitment was laid in the
1970s. The ‘spectral wound’21 of the 1971 Liberation War and the
1970 cyclone Bhola cemented ‘a social contract between the rulers and
the ruled’.22 Political sociologist Naomi Hossain has convincingly
argued that the durable roots of this social contract became evident
only after the 1974 famine. ‘As many as 1.5 million people—2 per
cent of the total population, overwhelmingly the rural landless
proletariat—died in this catastrophe, having already been starved,
displaced, terrorized, and otherwise harmed during the liberation war
of 1971.’23 Since then, the ruling classes have always been deeply
aware that,

Their own survival depended on human development and basic

social protection. This ensured that protection against natural
disasters and food shocks was institutionalized as a state
priority, helped protect key policies to transform the population
through health and education against political competition and
corruption, brought poor rural women to the forefront of
development, and ensured the elite policed themselves to
deliver these essential public goods.24

Our host Jahirunal Apa also distinctly recalled both the Liberation
War in 1971 and the famine in 1974 as turning points in her nation’s
history. One night, in her kitchen, as she served us the most delicious
spinach-and-beetroot dish I had ever eaten, she recalled the horrors of
the Liberation War. She was unmarried then. Her father’s house was
50 kilometres from her present home and a stone’s throw away from
the Indian border. Jahirunal Apa had tried to escape to India with her
parents and siblings. But the camp was overflowing and they had to
leave the day after they arrived, she recalled bitterly. The family spent
seven long days and nights in an open field, sleeping under the stars.
She did not witness the violence herself, but her future husband told
her he had seen a decapitated body.
The 1974 famine made a more lasting impression on Jahirunal’s
memory. In that time of severe food scarcity, the Union Parishad (local
government) chairman had organised a langar (soup kitchen) in his
house. She vividly remembered how two thick rotis were all that they
received, once a day. What bothered her the most was that there was
no rice, which is what she was used to eating. She found the rotis too
hard to chew. Even to collect these rotis, Jahirunal had to leave the
house at 8 a.m. to return only by 1 p.m. She had to wait for hours in
the queue on an empty stomach. There was absolutely nothing else to
eat throughout the day. By the time the famine had occurred, she was
married and had a 3-year-old son. She said that her husband would
try to get work in the fields of wealthy landlords for a measly Taka 1.5
per day. Her son would also accompany her husband, but he was too
young and the landlords would refuse to pay the boy. The only food
she could afford to cook, on rare days at that, was an inferior variety
of wheat pounded to make gruel for the family.
When I asked her how things had changed since those dark days,
her response was precise. She said that, in the 1970s, one bigha of
land would produce, at best, five maunds (around 185 kilograms) of
harvest. But after the Green Revolution, fertilisers and pesticides
(aushad) were routinely applied to the fields. So, one bigha started
yielding twenty-five maunds (925 kilograms) of rice. Even though they
had little land, things had improved substantially for the family,
especially after her son started to work and send money from Dhaka.
Despite all the hardship that she had faced in her lifetime, Jahirunal
and her husband (whom she always referred to in the third person as
‘your chacha’, your uncle) remained ever generous with their time,
food and love.
Importantly, even at the peak of the famine, the heads of the local
governments had organised community kitchens in villages. For the
last quarter of a century, Begum Khaleda Zia and Begum Sheikh
Hasina, as prime ministers elected in rotation, have also displayed
their commitment to numerous social programmes. Apart from the
increase in crop yield during the Green Revolution, this social contract
between the ruling elite and Bangladeshi citizens has been crucial.
Still, Bangladeshi economists Wahiduddin Mahmud and Simeen
Mahmud25 have argued that Bangladesh’s development experience is
neither ‘a typical case of large public social spending on welfare-
oriented programmes nor economic growth-fuelled development’.
Instead, for them, the country has been able ‘to achieve rapid progress
in many social development indicators … by creating social awareness
and using low-cost affordable solutions’.26
Since the multiple tragedies of the 1970s, an internationally
celebrated driver of Bangladesh’s success has been non-governmental
organisations (NGOs), especially known for their culture of
innovation. After the Liberation War, though Bangladesh was labelled
a ‘basket case’,27 foreign donors generously supported pioneering,
home-grown NGOs. The breadth of their influence nationwide has
been expansive. Gonoshasthaya Kendra, for example, built the first
refugee hospital during the Liberation War. In the midst of the war, in
Bangladeshi refugee camps, researchers discovered that ORS could be
used to treat diarrhoea.28 The medical journal Lancet hailed this
solution as ‘the most important medical discovery of the 20th
century’.29 Diarrhoea remains the second leading cause of child deaths
worldwide.30 But in Bangladesh, over the decade of the 1980s, BRAC,
in a visionary initiative trained 12 million mothers, that’s nearly every
home across the country, on how to prepare ORS.31
More famously, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize-winning NGO
Grameen Bank popularised the spread of rural micro-credit.32
Economist S.R. Osmani estimates that roughly 2 per cent of these
micro-credit borrowers in rural Bangladesh escape poverty each year.33
In the 1970s, after the Liberation War and the famous ‘Concert for
Bangladesh’ at Maddison Square Garden in New York, much of the
foreign aid went to NGOs as ‘service providers’ rather than to the
newly formed Bangladeshi government with its limited capacity. Since
then, international assistance to Bangladesh has steeply fallen from 8
per cent of GDP in 1977 to only 1.4 per cent in 2020. In recent years,
many Bangladeshi NGOs have, therefore, morphed into private social
enterprises. BRAC, for example, which is one of the world’s largest
NGOs,34 has eighteen social enterprises and numerous businesses.35
These activities generate sizeable revenues which cross-subsidise their
non-profit development activities.36 Grameen Bank is another
example. It has micro-credit members spread across more than 90 per
cent of Bangladeshi villages.37 Its telecom service Grameenphone’s
annual turnover of more than $1 billion, for example, is comparable
to the box office revenues of popular Hollywood films such as Tom
Cruise’s latest Top Gun: Maverick.38
The role of NGOs in Bangladesh has also been quietly
institutionalised.39 In my fieldwork district, for example, the district
collector regularly held monthly coordination meetings with all the
civil society organisations who worked actively in his district.40
At the same time, in the ‘unwarranted air of self-congratulation in
the aid industry’,41 it is important not to over-exaggerate their
accomplishments. For example, as a frustrated government primary
school teacher complained to me, ‘NGOs do less but show more.’42 At
this group meeting of school teachers, I asked them how many of their
children studied in government schools. To my surprise, all of them
raised their hands. Even in my sample, 59 per cent of students we
tested at the primary level studied in government schools.
The international revenues of NGOs largely depend on amplifying
their achievements. An exasperated fifty-four-year-old government
health worker also lamented, ‘It is a misconception that NGOs deliver
free contraceptives door-to-door. That is what I have been doing in
villages for more than three decades. The government supplies only
one type of pills for free—sukhi bori—but NGOs have many brands.
Some women prefer to pay and buy those pills which suit them
better.’43 In Bangladesh’s highly competitive welfare delivery space,
NGOs do expand citizens’ choices. But, increasingly, Bangladeshi
NGOs are less able to deliver services to poor households.44 With the
drying up of international donors in recent years, many NGOs have
begun to change strategies. In schools, for instance, they have begun
to charge high fees.45
Since the 1980s, the Bangladeshi political elites have also co-opted
NGOs with government ‘sub-contracts’ to suppress radical social
mobilisation. Most NGOs have tamely ‘opted for service delivery and
an advocacy strategy of apolitical nature’.46 In contrast, progressive
Indian civil society movements in the last few decades have
successfully built social pressure to push political parties to enact a
series of human rights-based laws, which ensures greater
accountability.47 But in Bangladesh, ‘in the absence of any social
movement initiated by NGOs or the poor themselves … laws and
policies have evolved as part of a top-down, elite-driven strategy to
cope with poverty-related crises, rather than as outcomes of bottom-
up political pressure’.48
Bangladeshi NGOs also actively encourage their vast network of
members to vote in local elections and support chosen candidates.49 In
the 2011 Union Parishad elections, for example, 26 per cent of the
elected leaders in the seats reserved for women were Grameen Bank
members.50 Still, there are clear limits to political adventurism in
Bangladesh. Nobel laureate Mohammed Yunus faced a severe
backlash for his quickly aborted ambitions to create a new political
party and was even removed from the helm of Grameen Bank, the
organisation he founded.51 Still, due to the sheer scale of their micro-
credit programmes and impressive financial muscle, Bangladeshi
NGOs do have a limited ‘countervailing influence’. BRAC, for
example, has access to three of every four Bangladeshis as micro-
finance borrowers. Grameen Bank has an even larger base of
borrowers and 83 million Grameenphone subscribers, the largest
national mobile telecom service.52
Foreign remittances have also boosted the sustainability of these
NGOs. Before the pandemic, more than 6 million Bangladeshis
worked abroad, mainly in India and the Middle East. In 2016, foreign
remittances contributed to 5 per cent of Bangladeshi GNP.53
In sum, Bangladesh’s development is dominated by two forces—the
social contract of the State with its citizens and the apolitical NGOs.
While both these players work side-by-side, Bangladesh’s
developmental success has ‘depended more fully on the politics being
right’.54

ASHRAFISATION
As a Muslim-majority country, Bangladesh has fewer caste-style
hierarchies than Muslims in India.55 Most Muslim village women we
met in our door-to-door survey had no idea about their surnames.
When Safiq probed further about their bongsha (family) or jati (clan)
name, they still seemed clueless. In contrast, in the same villages, the
Hindu residents were quite conscious of their caste and family lineage.
One man even showed me his sacred thread and proclaimed loudly
that he was a Kshatriya. But amongst the Muslims we met, only
Jotdar (small landlord) families like Talukdars and Syeds seemed
aware of their family lineage with a hint of unconcealed pride.
This also draws attention to a historical puzzle. Why did rural
peasants in Bangladesh (previously East Bengal), oceans away from
Arabia, convert to Islam?56 Also, has religion alone shrunk social
distances in Bangladesh?
For almost a millennium, Buddhism’s ‘egalitarian and universalist
ethic’ thrived in East Bengal.57 In the third century BCE, Emperor
Ashoka sent envoys to spread Buddhism across Asia. Soon after, East
Bengal became the hub of two Buddhist empires—the Palas58 and the
Chandras. By the twelfth century, Buddhism flourished in Bengal,
while most other kingdoms in India had reverted to Hinduism and its
rigid caste hierarchies.59
Bengal’s egalitarian culture was further strengthened by the advent
of Islam. In 1204, the Turkish–Afghan military general Mohammad
Bakhtiyar60 swept into Bengal’s ‘frontier province’.61 Since then,
historians have been puzzled by the mass conversion of rural peasants
to Islam in the eastern parts of Bengal. Even British officials were
perplexed that ‘it is not in the vicinity of the great Mughal capitals
that we find the Muhhamadans most numerous’.62 While there are
many theories, historian Richard Eaton proposes that the ‘indigenous’
non-Hindu population were the main converts.63 Over time, Sufis, as
mystics from Central Asia, settled in Bengal and spread a syncretic
variant of Islam.64
East Bengal developed its own distinctive religio-cultural worship.
‘The worship of Buddha’s footprints, for example, is believed to have
been transformed into the veneration of the holy Prophet’s qadam
rasul (footprints).’65 Egalitarianism was also at the heart of Sufi
philosophy and Islam.66 In one of the Hadiths, Prophet Muhammad
declared, ‘No Arab is superior to a non-Arab, nor is a white superior
to a non-white, save through piety.’67 The Turkish variant of Sufism,
which flourished in Bengal, emphasised social mobility. The 1872
British Census administrators also found that a ‘large number of
Muhammadans … occupy the same social position as their Hindu
neighbours’,68 with fewer caste-style hierarchies.69
Sitting in the silence of the hallowed halls of London’s British
Library, while slowly tabulating columns from the Bengal Censuses of
1891 to 1931, I was struck by the fact that consistently around 85–95
per cent of Bengali Muslims considered themselves to be ‘sheikhs’.70 In
contrast, in the rest of India, only 40–50 per cent of Muslims told
census enumerators that they belonged to the same upper crust.71 This
self-perception of fluid social mobility was unique to Muslims in
eastern Bengal. Perhaps, this was a form of ‘ashrafisation’,72 similar to
‘sanskritisation’ amongst Hindus, where marginalised castes imitate
those above them in the social hierarchy.
East Bengal’s rich history of subaltern peasant movements has also
been crucial in gradually diluting class hierarchies. After the 1757
Battle of Plassey and the advent of British colonialism in India, there
was a change in East Bengal’s rural elites. By 1765, the British East
India Company had appointed agents to extract land revenues
ruthlessly from small peasants. In protest, the Sannyasi and Fakir
rebellion groups (1763–1800)73 plundered East India Company’s
property and ran a parallel government.74 Still, the exploitation of
peasants was so extreme that the 1772 Great Bengal Famine claimed
nearly 10 million lives.75
 ‘Permanent Settlement’, the new taxation system, both ‘ruined the
Muslim aristocracy in Bengal’76 and impoverished the Muslim raiyats
(peasants) who formed 70 per cent of the population.77 A new Hindu
zamindari class emerged as ‘hereditary owners’ of fertile land who
paid only a fixed annual revenue to the British.78 In the next twenty
years, Bengali peasants lost at least one-third of their land as they
were unable to repay land revenue arrears.79
This sharp social inequality also sparked four peasant movements in
East Bengal—the Faraizi movement (1818–62), the Wahhabi uprising
(1782–1931), the Santhal rebellion (1855) and the Indigo revolt
(1860). These movements tried to bridge both caste and class
hierarchies with slogans such as ‘langol zar, zamin tar’ (land to the
tiller).80 ‘One-third of the Muslim population of Dacca’ joined these
movements at one point of time or the other.81 The prime minister of
East Bengal A.K. Fazlul Huq (1937–43)82 of the Krishak Praja Party
(Peasants Party) attempted to abolish the zamindari system. But the
draft law was sabotaged83 by ‘the power of big landlords and
moneylenders’.84
Late one evening, in one of the upazilas85, Farooq Bhai invited me
to join an adda (discussion) with his friends at the newly minted
Cultural Library. His friends were local academics affiliated with the
Communist Party of Bangladesh. After many cups of lal cha, much to
my surprise, one academic recounted that Panchagarh district, too,
had been part of the 1855 Santhal rebellion. When I expressed some
scepticism, he called his Santhali neighbour on the phone. On ringing
off, he confidently asserted that, before Partition, in Panchagarh
district alone, there were 6,000 Santhalis, but now only seventeen to
twenty families remained.
Despite all these peasant movements, it was only after the departure
of the British, that the newly formed Pakistani government in East
Bengal ultimately abolished the zamindari system.86 The 1950 East
Bengal State Acquisition and Tenancy Act set a thirty-three-acre
ceiling. Many zamindars had to give up their land for redistribution to
the landless. During fieldwork, I met eight-five-year-old Khairul Alam
who recalled that ‘previously we had 500–600 bighas of land. But in
the fifties after the Pakistani government abolished zamindari, we had
to surrender 400–500 bighas. We had only 20–25 bighas left.’87 With
this effective land redistribution in East Bengal in 1963-64, 83 per
cent of cultivable land was of a size of less than 12.5 acres.88 A former
freedom fighter in the 1971 Liberation War whom I met also
emphasised that, with this redistribution, ‘feudalism disintegrated in
the areas from the British zamindari system’. This erosion of the
landed aristocracy also ‘enabled the social structure of East Bengal to
become more egalitarian’.89 The latest 2019 Agricultural Census also
confirms that only 8 per cent of rural households in Bangladesh are
landless. However, only 55 per cent of rural families cultivate their
own agricultural farms. In fact, now 22 per cent of rural Bangladeshis
are sharecroppers or tenant cultivators and 30 per cent primarily earn
their income as agricultural labourers.90
One of my hosts, Hilal bhai, was one such sharecropper who
moonlighted as a rice trader. Everyone called him ‘netaji’ as he had all
the traits of a budding politician. He explained that, despite the
Tebhaga Andolan91, sharecroppers had to hand over half the harvest
to the landlord under the borga tenancy system prevalent in his
village. But now, input costs were also shared in half. Also, after the
Green Revolution that took place in the 1960s, land productivity
increased so substantially that even tenant farmers became relatively
prosperous. The alluvial soil of the Bangladeshi riverine delta, the
world’s largest, is immensely fertile. After the Green Revolution, a
greater variety of crops could be cultivated in the district—rice, wheat,
corn, tea, peanuts and vegetables. From then on, farmers could expect
three good rice harvests: aman, boro and aush.
My research also revealed that, in the twentieth century, three
historical waves of mass migrations in East Bengal had diluted class
inequalities by displacing the traditional elites. In 1575, when
Emperor Akbar conquered Bengal, Persian was adopted as the official
court language. Two centuries later, the British imposed English as the
official language. The Hindu elite of East Bengal welcomed this
change. But the Muslim elite were hostile to English.92 So, the British
colonial administration employed very few Bengali Muslims. Instead,
Hindus, who in 1871 formed less than half the population of the
Bengal province, cornered 88 per cent of all the jobs available for
Indians.93
The bhadralok94 elite, thus, evolved as a predominantly Hindu,
upper caste, professional and landowning class of ‘gentlefolk’.
Initially, this class of landowner ‘Babus’,95 ‘saw this as the essence of
the social distance between himself and his social inferiors’.96 By the
twentieth century, as historian Joya Chatterji describes, being
bhadralok also included ‘possessing the goods of education, culture
and anglicisation’,97 with ‘one foot in the city and the other in the
countryside’.98 The East India Company was headquartered in
Calcutta, which was also the political capital of the British Empire in
India from 1757 to 1911. This Bengali Hindu bhadralok class was
therefore a uniquely colonial phenomenon. But this elite class was
expelled from East Bengal in three unique historical waves of mass
displacement—in 1905, 1947 and 1971—which diluted the class
hegemony of the bhadraloks.
First, in 1905, the British partitioned Bengal. In the aftermath of the
1857 Revolt, the British policy aimed to ‘divide and rule’ to quell
potential mutinies. Eastern Bengal had a Muslim-majority. While this
administrative partition had to be withdrawn within six years, it still
managed to dilute the authority of the traditional Hindu bhadralok
class in East Bengal to a certain extent. But Muslims still filled only 12
per cent of the appointments in Dhaka (then Dacca) in the British
colonial administration.99 By 1923, political leaders A.K. Fazlul Huq
of the Krishak Praja Party and Chittaranjan Das of the Swaraj Party,
representing their respective communities, signed the Hindu–Muslim
Bengal Pact.100 This treaty created separate Muslim electorates for the
Legislative Council and reserved 55 per cent of seats for Muslims in
government appointments.101 The 1932 MacDonald Communal
Award also shifted the political balance of power in favour of
Muslims.102
The second division of Bengal took place as a part of the larger
Partition of India at the time of Independence in 1947. With
Muhammad Ali Jinnah emerging as ‘the sole spokesman’ of the
Muslims,103 the new nation-state of Pakistan included the Muslim-
majority province of East Pakistan, i.e. East Bengal. In this bloody
partition on religious grounds, three million refugees fled to India. In
East Pakistan, earlier the majority of ‘landlords and moneylenders
were caste Hindus’. But, ‘at the time of partition most of them
migrated to India’.104 So, not only did a large majority of the Hindu
bhadralok class leave East Bengal, but the lands that they had left
behind were also confiscated.105
However, newly formed Pakistan was an unstable country. Though
Bengalis formed almost half the population, they were greatly
underrepresented in the government of undivided Pakistan. Especially
during periods of military rule in Pakistan, East Bengalis felt neglected
politically, culturally and especially in terms of socio-economic
development.106
To rub salt into their wounds, in his speech in Dhaka on 21 March
1948, Pakistani Governor-General Muhammad Ali Jinnah insisted on
‘Urdu, and Urdu alone’ being the official language across the territory
of Pakistan.107 In protest, a pro-Bengali ‘Language Movement’ erupted
in East Pakistan.108 Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, this ‘cultural
movement’109 was deeply secular and had ‘an equalizing influence
across religions’.110
With this groundswell of Bengali popular support, Sheikh Mujibur
Rehman’s Awami League Party squarely won the 1970 general
elections held in undivided Pakistan. But the Bengali leader was
arrested instead of being invited to form Pakistan’s new government.
The Pakistan Army airdropped soldiers into East Pakistan and
launched the brutal 1971 Operation Searchlight. Most Bengali-
speaking people in East Pakistan supported the Mukti Bahini
(Liberation Forces) guerrilla fighters. In this bloody nine-month
‘Liberation War’, the Indian Army extended external support to the
Bengali guerrillas.111 Hundreds of East Bengali civilians were killed in
this genocide112, and more than 200,000 women were raped.113 Nearly
10 million refugees fled to India in conditions similar to those our host
Jahirunal Apa had described. Journalist Salil Tripathi’s book The
Colonel Who Would Not Repent has one of the most bone-chilling
descriptions of the mass murder of students in the hostels of Dhaka
University.

Eyewitnesses who survived have testified that on the day the

troops took over the campus, soldiers went from bed to bed
beating up students, killing most of them. The next day,
Pakistani soldiers asked students to move the bodies of dead
students, which many of them did for fear of being killed.
Resistance would have been futile, but removing the bodies did
not help them either. A grainy video smuggled out of Pakistan
shows several students lined up to be shot. One of them,
dressed in black, falls to his knees pleading for mercy. The
pitiless soldiers shoot all of them.114

The Shaheed Minars (martyrs’ memorials) constructed in many

schools that now dot the rural Bangladeshi landscape are a constant
reminder of the many lives lost during the Language Movement. In
1971, Bangladesh was born as a new country.
This turbulent civil war triggered the third wave of elite
displacement. After the war, an estimated 1.5 million Bengali-speaking
Hindu refugees, including those from erstwhile zamindari families,
permanently stayed back in India, especially in the neighbouring
Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura and Assam. On the other hand,
most of the remaining wealthy Urdu-speaking Muslims migrated to
West Pakistan.115
The new nation was born into tumult. Three years later, in a severe
famine, 1.5 million Bangladeshis died due to starvation. Eight-five-
year-old Khairul Alam told me, ‘During the famine, there was
hoarding of foodgrains by businessmen for profit. Some people did
not have any food for ten–fifteen days. The government gave cooked
food in langars [soup kitchens]. During the famine, many people
perished on this Panchagarh road.’116 Bangladesh’s success today
probably owes much to this painful birth. The devastation of the early
1970s was a turning point in the social transformation of the new
country.
 The elite displacement due to these three partitions and the
devastation wrecked by the famine have inadvertently resulted in a
high degree of social homogenisation, especially in rural areas.
But some social divisions continue to fester here as much as
anywhere else. Today, Hindus form roughly 9 per cent of Bangladesh’s
population. Of them, a fifth are Dalits, who face double
discrimination as marginalised minorities.117 For example, in Dinajpur
city, Dalits are so socially excluded that they are still not allowed to
enter restaurants or barber shops.118 Some occupations, too, continue
to be dominated by oppressed-caste Hindus. In northern Bangladesh,
for example, we discovered that Dalits were still hired to empty
sanitation pits. Even in our survey, in Panchagarh district, half the
homes confirmed that when a latrine pit filled up, in 94 per cent of the
cases, they would hire Dalit cleaners, mostly Methors or Doms, to
clean it up. Across borders, caste prejudices seem the hardest to sweep
away.

SULTANA’S DREAM
Four of my surveyors in Panchagarh, who also worked with a local
NGO, had planned a massive celebration to mark 8 March,
International Women’s Day. The chief guests they had invited were
two senior district officials, ironically both men. The official from the
police department delivered a patronising spiel on women’s
empowerment, but at least he ended on a high note by praising his
wife, a gynaecologist who was professionally more qualified than him.
The schoolgirls in the audience clapped uproariously.
The other invited speakers were a female freedom fighter, a female
union nirbahi officer and the head of the local Women’s Commission.
The main event was a cycle rally by schoolgirls—quite appropriate as
Panchagarh was the only district in Bangladesh where we saw
schoolgirls routinely cycling to school, a rare sight in other districts.119
My primary survey also confirmed the unusual Bangladeshi trend of
educational hypogamy: two of every three married women we spoke
to were equally or more educated than their husbands. Feminist
economist Naila Kabeer argues that, in recent years, there has been a
rise of the ‘daughter-in-law phenomenon’. The increase in female
education, employment opportunities and women’s empowerment has
clearly improved the perception of the worthiness of young women in
the eyes of their mothers-in-law. Within Bangladeshi homes, this has
spurred an inter-generational shift in traditional power dynamics.120
But how has this country, with its turbulent history, renegotiated
gender norms? Bangladeshi activists chronicle their women’s
movements in three distinct phases.
First, in the pre-Partition phase (1820–1947), the women’s
movement in East Bengal protested against the extreme forms of
purdah, which literally caged women inside their homes and restricted
their mobility. Bhadramahila—largely upper-class Muslim women
along with some Hindus—lived in seclusion in the andarmahal (inner
house) and were only permitted to travel in palanquins.121 Sociologist
Dagmar Engels has argued that this extreme sexual control of women
increased their absolute dependence on men. Begum Rokeya launched
a scathing attack on this barbaric seclusion,122 justified by the
symbolic ‘veneration of women’.123 By the late nineteenth century,
with the advent of British ‘Westernisation’ and the influence of the
Brahmo Samaj,124 bhadramahila began to discard purdah norms.125 By
1826, Christian missionaries had started schools exclusively for
girls.126 Within a century, women’s empowerment and mobility
increased to such an extent that in East Bengal they were in the
frontlines of Mahatma Gandhi’s 1920–21 Non-Cooperation
Movement and the 1931 Civil Disobedience Movement against the
British Empire.127 Immediately before Independence, rural women,
with great ‘intensity of commitment’, also joined the Tebhaga
Andolan.128 Ila Mitra, a fiery, communist leader,129 led 50,000 women
in the Nachnol revolt and is still considered a legend among the
Santhals of East Bengal. But she was brutally tortured in police
custody, and the movement was crushed.130
The second phase is the Pakistani period (1947–1971). In the heady
1960s, Bengali women joined with fervour the secular movement
against the imposition of Urdu. On 21 February 1952, female students
were the first protestors to defy the curfew at Dhaka University, which
sparked the Language Movement.131 For two decades after that,
women regularly organised large numbers of university and school
students to participate in protest marches.132 At that time, simple
freedoms, such as wearing a sari publicly, performing traditional
cultural dances and publicly celebrating Pahela Baisakh (Bengali
harvest festival) became potent symbols of rebellion.133 Bengali
women also challenged the Pakistani government’s imposition of
headscarves on them and the ban on Rabindra Sangeet on
television.134 By 1971, women had also taken up combat roles in the
Mukti Bahini liberation force.135 The Mukti Bahini even had a
separate female battalion, the gun-carrying ‘Naari Muktijoddhas’
(female freedom fighters). These important contributions of women to
the Language Movement, however, have been historically sidelined.
The nine-month Liberation War marked a turning point in
Bangladeshi history and altered gender relations. As the veteran
feminist Raunaq Jahan described to me, ‘The war of independence
was a shock to the social system of a non-violent rural society.’136 The
Pakistani army employed mass rapes as a weapon of war. This was
one of the darkest chapters in the history of the conflict, and the new
nation carried the trauma of the 200,000–300,000 birangana (war
heroines)137 and their unwanted pregnancies. Many of these ‘war
babies’ were aborted or later given up for international adoption. On
one of the many eye-opening days that I spent doing research at the
Nehru Memorial Museum & Library in New Delhi, I chanced upon
Nayanika Mookherjee’s book The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence,
Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971 and Yasmin
Sakia’s Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering
1971.138 These books describe the horrors of these rape camps in
military barracks, where hundreds of women were held captive and
tortured. Instead of glorifying the ‘faceless, essentialised’ biranganas,
these books give voice and agency to the women to narrate their own
experiences in searing detail.
 I saw many girls in the bunker. There were 50 or 60 of us. My
sister-in-law was there also, but she died. She died in the
bunker. She died because of torture; three women died there. I
don’t know till today how many women died after they were
rescued.139

These books also empathetically chronicle the futures that these

survivors have laboured to build in the five decades after the war.
The third phase started after Bangladesh’s independence from
Pakistan. In the new nation-state, women’s empowerment became a
national focus. The impact of these multiple social tragedies led to ‘the
beginnings of a feminist consciousness in the country’.140 Raunaq
Jahan described to me how the genocide and mass rape ‘shifted the
power structure and women’s social status’. It ‘unhinged women’s role
from being necessarily protected by men, to go out to earn an income’.
The famine in 1974 marked another turning point. This period
dismantled the shadow of the purdah. Women renegotiated the old
‘patriarchal bargain’, which ‘relinquished control of their mobility,
assets and earning potential in return for male protection and
provision’.141 In the aftermath of the famine, ‘NGO movements
mushroomed and social change was in the air’.142
After the creation of Bangladesh, with the support of numerous
NGOs, millions of women participated in micro-credit143 schemes to
expand their incomes. Also, in the quest for survival, scores of poor
women broke purdah and searched for employment.144 Thousands of
women joined both NGOs and government organisations as
developmental foot-soldiers, as teachers, health workers and social
workers.
Since the turn of the millennium, 90 per cent of the workers
recruited in the readymade garment sector (RMGS) sweatshops have
also been women. Across the rural landscape, thousands of village
women also toil in agro-processing industries, from jute mills to dairy
units. Every morning, on any Bangladeshi rural highway, streams of
women in cotton saris can be seen walking purposefully towards these
factories with steel dabba lunch boxes in their hands. These economic
opportunities have also helped women to renegotiate their control
over public spaces.
One night after dinner at the factory canteen near our village, I
quickly jotted my observations in my field notes:

Outside the jute factory, on either side of the road, there was a
line of teashops (arranged like American bars—with stools)
with the owner (bartender) in the centre of a square
arrangement of four tables and the customers on benches
around him. The first thing that struck me was the number of
women in saris, with their hair covered with the thin cotton
pallu, who were busy sipping tea and eating shingaras
(samosas) and cake. Most of them worked in the jute factory,
often in night shifts. One woman wrapped a small muffin in a
newspaper to carry home for her child. Partaking in these
simple pleasures seems to be an early sign of empowerment,
unthinkable across the border in rural Bihar.

Of course, women who work for wages also bear the double burden
of housework. Worse, the conditions in the Bangladeshi factories and
sweatshops are often appalling, as I saw first-hand during the night
shifts. In 2013, the entire Rana Plaza factory building, which did not
conform to safety norms, collapsed and made international headlines.
The precarious employment and low wages of Bangladeshi women
at the bottom of the capitalist hierarchy is a double-edged sword: they
reflect extreme exploitation, but the opportunity to work outside the
home does offer a degree of economic security, mobility and
empowerment.

SHONAR BANGLADESH
Thus, Bangladesh’s development is a picture of contradictions. The
warp and weft of its turbulent history has created Bangladesh’s
distinctive weave as a country with fewer social inequalities.
 5
NEPAL

We have carried bags in our laps in place of baby,

We have carried gun in our hands in place of sickle.
– Women Fighters, Sudin,
Maoist song of the Tharu ethnic tribe1

A FTER TWO HOURS on a very rickety road with our heads frequently
bumping into the ceiling of the small bus, my translator Bijeta and I
finally reached our destination. The picturesque village on the hills was
worth the rough ride. A resourceful friend had arranged for us to live
in a farmer’s house.
This Nepali village in the foothills of the Himalayas was lush with
greenery and numerous streams. A hanging bridge across a small river
was so pretty, I could scarcely believe my luck. My urban lungs were
on a picnic. The skies were clear blue, and the air pure and clean. Our
hosts ate only the rice and vegetables they grew in their own fields.
They drank milk from the cows and buffaloes in their backyard. Little
was wasted. Every morsel of grain, even from plates set out for
washing was eaten by animals—chickens, goats, cows and buffaloes—
grazing around the house.
But beneath the tranquil surface lurked a darker truth. Walking
through the village, we realised that the habitation was clearly
segregated on caste lines. The Bahuns and Chhetris (Brahmins and
Kshatriyas in Nepal), as the upper castes, lived near the road, owned
fertile land, ran the village shops and possessed bullocks. The Janajatis
and Dalits invariably lived in houses in remote hamlets on the upper
reaches of the hillocks. Their homes were difficult to reach. Especially
during the rains, I found myself on all fours, trying to climb up the
steep dirt track. Because marginalised castes lived on the steepest
slopes, their access to water was also minimal. Women spent gruelling
hours fetching water in pots precariously balanced inside bamboo
baskets which they carried on their backs.
The houses in the village looked nearly identical. They were two-
storied wooden structures, designed for greater protection against
floods and earthquakes. The ground floor usually had a kitchen with
walls plastered with mud or thatch and a separate shed for animals.
Most of the floors above, with tiled roofs, had bedrooms and rustic,
wooden, open-air sit-outs.
The local schools were the real hubs of activity. Government schools
usually began at 6 a.m. and closed by noon. For two months in the
winter, the timings shifted to 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The first school we
visited had a simple wooden structure. The children sat on benches and
desks, and the walls were covered with colourful drawings made by the
students. Like Bangladesh, the teachers’ room had many helpful flex
posters describing human body parts, the national animal, Nepali
leaders and multiplication tables. An NGO had provided some of these
posters and the school had purchased the rest with its maintenance
funds. Another NGO had donated a collection of toys. In the half-hour
recess, we saw the students play football, ludo, snakes and ladders and
jigsaw puzzles. The teachers themselves were engrossed in a game of
chess. The children were all smiles when they saw our camera, and ran
around excitedly, posing for pictures.
Peeping into the classroom and later cross-checking with the teacher,
we realised that the seating arrangements did not reflect any bias based
on caste or religion. But girls and boys sat on separate benches. Their
parents had purchased the smart uniforms they were wearing. The
government school did not charge any fees, except for a modest
examination fee. All girls and Dalit children also received annual
scholarships.
However, the students did not seem to understand the meaning of
most of the words that they were reading in English in a singsong
manner. Their English teacher did not seem to comprehend my spoken
English either. But the English textbook was well-designed to reflect
Nepali culture. For example, there were many simple stories of animals
from the Jataka Tales, that is, the previous births of the Buddha, who
was born in Lumbini in Nepal. There were also descriptions of Nepali
Hindu festivals and even a vignette on the travails of street children.
The forty-five-year-old head teacher, Hari Paudel, was a serious, soft-
spoken and warm-hearted person. Hari Sir, as the villagers called him,
was a Chhetri and had lived and taught in that village for twelve years.
He had cleared the Lok Seva exam and joined Nepal’s exclusive
teaching cadre. His youngest son had studied only in government
schools and was now in the tenth standard. Hari complained that his
salary was not enough. Later, we visited his home and met his wife, son
and parents. Apart from an electric kettle, their mud home was bare of
luxuries. Hari owned no vehicle and usually walked twenty minutes to
the school. One day we even saw him awkwardly take a lift atop a
local tractor on his way back home. His family owned seven kathas of
land, which his wife and parents cultivated. They ate whatever they
grew and did not need to buy rice from the market.
Hari informed us that, despite all the political turmoil in Nepal in
the last two decades, school textbooks always arrived on time, at the
start of each academic year. He had to go to the district headquarters
to collect them, however.
At first, while testing the fifth-grade students, I was disappointed
that they could not solve a simple carry-over subtraction problem.
With twigs and Bijeta’s assistance, I tried in vain to explain the method
to them. Then Hari walked into the classroom and showed us the value
of his sixteen years of experience. He used a simple visual technique, of
adding a line above the numerals on the blackboard, parking the carry-
over adjustments on this ‘roof’. Everyone grasped the explanation in a
jiffy. Hari told us that he had already taught them carry-over
subtraction, but they had probably forgotten. The children currently in
the third grade, whom we had tested earlier, could not do the
calculation as they had just started the school year and this topic had
not been covered.
Since Hari was also an elected ward member, his time was precious.
The previous month, nearly 200 people had visited his home for help
in filling out forms for registration of marriages, citizenship certificates,
birth certificates as well as applications for government programmes.
He met parents almost every day to discuss their children’s
performance. As expected, he had also lent money to many of them.
Later, we bumped into him at a roadside meeting, and realised that he
had also organised an enterprising local savings group.
We also learnt from the villagers that Hari Sir was a local leader of
the Maoist Party. So, the next time we met him, we asked him a few
questions about his political journey. Hari had joined the party in its
founding years in 1994 as a student. During the long years of the
People’s War, he had to keep his affiliation a secret. Prachanda, the
Maoist armed rebel leader who, in December 2022, became Nepal’s
prime minister once again, had also started his career as a village
schoolteacher. Hari told us that his life had been threatened a few
times. In fact, Sindhuli district had been a hotbed of Maoist activities
in the early days. But he had never been imprisoned since he was a
government servant.
The main question on which I wanted clarity from him was whether
the Maoist People’s War had, in any way, played a role in reducing
caste inequality in Nepal. Hari gave me a vivid description of the
contrast before and after the civil war. With a glint of rage in his
otherwise calm demeanour, he said:

Previously, the open discrimination against Dalits was so acute

that they would not be allowed to sit in the same room as the
upper castes. Later, even if Dalits were allowed to sit in the same
room, once they left, the upper castes would symbolically purify
the area with cow urine.

I distinctly remember that my Nepali colleague from the NGO Oxfam

had given me an identical description nearly a decade ago. Hearing this
again from Hari seemed to confirm that casteism and open
discrimination in Nepal had indeed been far more widespread before
the People’s War than even in parts of northern India. In fact, until
1962, the Muluki Ain (Legal Code) of the Hindu kingdom of Nepal
had even legalised and institutionalised casteism. Different
punishments and fines were earmarked for the same crimes based on
the caste of the perpetrator and the victim. For example, a Brahmin
found guilty of premeditated murder would only have his property
confiscated and might be publicly shamed, but all the other castes
would face capital punishment.2
Hari stressed that caste equations had changed considerably. ‘Now
Nepal has passed a law against untouchability and discrimination. The
People’s War had certainly played a role in reducing social barriers. But
some discrimination still exists.’ In his soft voice, he explained the
transformation. ‘Because of the War, people are more aware of their
rights and are willing to fight for them.’ But it took me many more
conversations with villagers to truly understand how the guerrilla
rebels had made a dent in age-old caste dynamics.
Just as we were leaving the meeting, Hari asked me if I was still
associated with an NGO. He wanted help with improving the quality
of education and creating employment opportunities in his village. I
was struck by this request from such a reticent man. But being realistic
about the limited time and resources at my disposal, I asked if
procuring books for the school library would be sufficient. Hari
jumped at the suggestion. Later, in Kathmandu, I met two owners of a
chain of independent and second-hand bookshops that catered to
foreign tourists. They readily agreed to donate many cartons of excess
books in English, Nepali and Hindi to Hari’s government school. Ever
efficient, Bijeta even figured out a way to coordinate with a few bus
conductors to transport these books to Hari’s village for free. This
exercise was, by far, the most joyous part of my Nepali fieldwork.
But it left me with a lingering question—why are even strangers in
Nepal so willing to help one another? Why does the government invest
so consistently in schools, textbooks and teachers? And as Hari had
suggested, did the Maoist People’s War really reduce caste inequalities?
Was this the key to Nepal’s human development successes?

NAYA NEPAL
The Maoist rebels and successive democratic governments have indeed
built on the collective dream of ‘Naya Nepal’ (New Nepal)—a slogan
that became popular towards the end of the People’s War (1996–2006).
The larger aim of the war had been to abolish the monarchy, dilute the
dominance of elites and advocate for marginalised communities. With
this vision, Nepal’s new 2015 Constitution has made a solid
commitment towards protecting human rights.
The post-war return to democracy, however, has not been smooth. In
the past sixty years, Nepal has had fifty prime ministers3. The country
has also had a long history of rebellions, palace intrigues and frictional
alliances. Despite this turbulent polity, the developmental state has
slowly managed to take root. My research shows that three factors
have played an important role: the electoral successes of left-wing
parties, traditional community organisations and foreign remittances to
aid welfare investments.
First, let us consider the legacy of the Maoist People’s War and
successive post-democratic left-leaning governments. The main aim of
the decade-long guerrilla rebellion in the last Hindu kingdom in the
world was to topple the monarchy, end feudalism and restore
democracy.4 The rebels also tried to challenge social exclusion based on
caste and ethnicity. But the war also extracted an incalculable toll.
Within a decade, 13,000 Nepalis died, 200,000 were internally
displaced, thousands migrated abroad and the economy lost an
estimated US$ 315 million.5 Yet, astonishingly, despite the intense
conflict, Nepal’s official HDI scores increased and the country moved
from a low to a medium level of human development.6 In this decade,
poverty also fell from 42 per cent in 1995-96 to 31 per cent in 2003-4.7
By 2010, even income inequality, which had increased initially,8 fell to
less than the pre-conflict levels.9
Post-conflict, too, the Nepali developmental state has been deeply
influenced by left-wing parties, which have been in power for roughly
ten of the fifteen democratic years in three distinct phases (2008–13,
2015–17, 2018–21) and again from year-end 2022. But the transition
to a federal democratic republic has been somewhat rocky. More than
ten prime ministers have taken oath in the last decade alone. Nepal’s
economic growth, too, has been slow. However, the frequent return to
power of the left-wing parties has resulted in a firm commitment to
social protection. The drafting of a new constitution has also cemented
‘a set of defined rights which have had a strongly universal character’.10
The budgets for social assistance and social pensions alone, for
example, rose from 0.5 per cent in 2004-5 to 2 per cent of the GDP in
2014. These commitments were the result of:

Table 5.1: Regimes in Nepal’s post-conflict political

history, 2005–21

… the expectations derived from the People’s Movement of

2006 and the Interim Constitution of 2007. There is political
pressure from the rank and file of political parties, civil society
and trade unions for the government to deliver on this vision
and meet the aspirations of the ‘new Nepal’. There is also inter-
party competition, which makes it politically attractive to opt
for progressive social policies.11

Even before the People’s War, the government of the Communist Party
of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) had introduced a pioneering
universal social pension.12 After the war, in 2008, the former Maoist
guerrilla rebels emerged as the largest political party in the Constituent
Assembly elections. They not only increased the pension but also
guaranteed universal coverage.13 Nepal is now one of the few countries
in the developing world where 80 per cent of the elderly receive a
pension14 in cash every three months.15 In villages, we met many older
men and women who depended on this lifeline.
Similarly, in 2008, a populist programme guaranteed free outpatient
healthcare and essential medicines. In the Constituent Assembly
elections, nearly all twenty-five political parties also promised universal
healthcare as a fundamental right in their manifestos.16 Nepal’s
extensive network of well-equipped primary health posts and hospitals
are a testament to this commitment. The 2009 Aama Surakshya cash
grant has also encouraged mothers to deliver in hospitals. Nepal’s
Child Grant for children under five years has also been successful.17
The vision of left-wing Nepali governments has always been to build
an expansive welfare state. Though the two main left-wing political
parties—the Maoist and the Marxist-Leninist factions—merged in
2018,18 their union was short-lived. After the pandemic, with a new
left-wing government assuming the reins of power, the expansion of
social policies is likely to accelerate.19
The second factor is an unusual network of traditional community
organisations which provide an extra layer of peer assistance to
improve access in Nepal’s public services. The two prominent
community organisations are the Aama Samuhas (mothers’ groups)
and the community forestry groups.
The Aama Samuhas began in 1816 when the British Army began to
recruit Gurkha soldiers. Their wives and mothers, left behind in the
rural countryside, formed groups to support one another.20 With the
restoration of Nepal’s democracy in the 1990s, Aama Samuhas have
expanded nationwide. With the support of NGOs, these vibrant
women’s groups now engage in micro-credit, peace education, literacy
programmes, healthcare peer support, infrastructure maintenance,
women’s rights and other welfare activities.
One sweltering afternoon,21 Bijeta and I stumbled upon an Aama
Samuha meeting. We saw women from different castes sitting in a
circle in the cool shade of a beautiful wooden gazebo outside a health
post. When we walked in, they were exchanging recipes, gossip and
political updates. One woman complained that she had heard on
television that government servants would receive a pay hike. She
wisely argued that this could fuel inflation as sudden increases in
disposable income could create supply constraints. In another village,
an Aama Samuha we met had morphed into a micro-credit group,
primarily to support pregnant women with medical emergencies in the
rugged mountain terrain.
The revival of these Aama Samuhas is a visible fruit of Nepal’s peace
dividend. Importantly, these groups are ideal training-grounds for
women to gain experience for more prominent roles in public service.22
Similarly, community forestry groups have played a productive role.
Community forestry has a long history in Nepal.23 Many forests were
nationalised and converted into national parks in the late 1950s.24 In a
policy shift in the late 1970s, amorphous forest ‘user groups’ were
created. Still, it was only after the 1993 Community Forest Act that
village groups began to harvest forest resources systematically. These
forestry groups are often more dynamic and less politicised than local
government bodies.25 Most villages have a ‘user group’ that sells forest
produce, from timber to herbal medicines, to earn handsome incomes.
Nepal’s community forest groups make more than US$ 10 million
annually in revenues, which they usually invest back to cater to village-
level priorities.26 For example, one forestry group we met had
innovatively used its funds to hire temporary teachers for the local
school and also to light up the village with solar panels.27
The third—unexpected—pillar of Nepal’s welfare investments has
been foreign remittances. Nearly half of all Nepali homes have at least
one person working abroad. Most of these international migrants are
in India, across the open border. Before the pandemic, remittances
contributed to 27 per cent of Nepal’s GDP. In contrast, they fuelled
only 6 per cent of Bangladesh’s and 3 per cent of India’s GDP. From
1996 to 2011, 33 per cent of rural Nepali families could climb out of
poverty as remittances28 were usually spent on ‘non-food, human
development investment and health’.29 By 2017, for example, nearly
every Nepali home had a toilet, even without government subsidies.
But the post-pandemic after-shocks and its impact on international
migration have been severe.
 A remittance-fuelled economy also leads to some regressive
repercussions. ‘English medium’ private schools, for example, have
mushroomed across villages to cater to the booming demand from
remittance-earning families. Colloquially, these non-residential schools
are called ‘boarding schools’. We saw that most of the children enrolled
in these classrooms were boys.30 This gender discrimination reflects a
significant new trend in Nepali society, where remittances are
disproportionately spent on boys.31
So, an unusual combination of factors have strengthened the post-
conflict Nepali welfare state. But have social distances been bridged in
Naya Nepal?

JAN ANDOLANS
When you board a bus in Nepal, the first question often asked is,
‘What is your caste?’ Even in northern India, while people try to guess
your caste from your surname, the question is rarely this direct.
Despite this odd cultural trait, there has been a visible melting of caste
inequities in the country in the last decade.
Historically, the caste structure in Nepal, as a multi-ethnic, multi-
racial and multi-lingual country, has been quite different from India. As
a Dalit feminist Nepali activist explained to me, in India, only people
who are employed in so-called ‘unclean’ occupations are considered to
be Dalit. But in Nepal, people employed in several other occupations
can also be classified as Dalit.32 For example, in northern India,
Bishwakarmas (blacksmiths) are officially classified as OBC. But in
Nepal, Bishwakarmas are Dalit but of a higher order than Sarkis
(cobblers).33
Nepal has had an uneven history of both assimilation and
stratification. Gautama Buddha was born around the sixth century
BCE in Lumbini which is now a province of modern Nepal. In his
lifetime and for centuries later, Buddhism spread to Nepal and across
Asia. But by the third century BCE, the Lichhavi dynasty of Shaivite
Hindu rulers began the rigid process of ‘Hinduisation’. They adopted
Sanskrit as the official language.34 Then, the Malla dynasts, who ruled
for the next five centuries, classified citizens into sixty-four sub-castes.
These sub-castes with strict restrictions on social intercourse and
mobility were more complicated than India’s varna system.
In the eighteenth century, King Prithvi Narayan Shah of the Rajput
lineage unified fifty-six princely kingdoms, in a process now referred to
as ‘Nepalisation’. He dreamt of a united Nepal as the epitome of ‘asil
Hindustan’ (pure land of the Hindus).35 The Shahs also brutally
subjugated indigenous communities and worsened the stranglehold of
upper caste domination. The Rana oligarchy, which ruled for the next
century, was even more regressive. In 1854, the Ranas codified the
Muluki Ain social code, which legalised a modified version of the
Hindu Laws of Manu. The code institutionalised caste discrimination,
and legalised untouchability and caste-based social hierarchies.36 It
unified criminal law and customary law based on an edifice of caste-
based purity laws. For more than a century (1854-1963), the Muluki
Ain formally divided Nepali society into the touchable (pure) and the
untouchable (impure) castes.37
The upper castes were considered to be the superior Tagadhari
(twice-born sacred-thread-wearing) castes. The Shudra (impure but
touchable) and Achhoot (impure and untouchable) castes at the lowest
rung had strict taboos against inter-dining and inter-marriage.
Muslims, Buddhists and foreigners were considered low-caste and ‘pani
na chalne’ (water-unacceptable). Indigenous tribal Janajatis were also
divided into sub-groups as those who were ‘touchable’ or those who
could be ‘enslaved’.38
For the same crime, different castes would receive different
punishments. In case of inter-caste sexual relations with a Brahmin
woman, for example, the thread-wearing upper castes and liquor-
consuming Matwali castes would only be imprisoned for up to six
years. But the untouchable castes would be branded and all their
property confiscated, while the enslavable castes would be imprisoned
for four years and then enslaved for life.39 Even uncontrollable farts in
public elicited different fines based on the caste of the ‘offender’ and
the ‘victim’, with the largest fines imposed on untouchables.40
 For a century, the Ranas also restricted education. In 1942, only 0.7
per cent of Nepalis could read and write. The Ranas banned foreign
travel as well, isolating Nepal from the rest of the world. In 1950, a
multi-party armed revolution finally overthrew the Ranas. But after a
short period of partial democracy, in 1960, King Mahendra of the Shah
dynasty banned all political parties and introduced a regressive
Panchayat system. The new 1963 Muluki Ain, however, finally banned
untouchability. But Dalits continued to be prohibited from entering the
Pashupatinath shrine.41 The country remained acutely socially
stratified. Even by the 1980s, the literacy rate in Nepal had increased
to only 21 per cent.
Against this backdrop, my research shows that in the last four
decades, four factors have played a vital role in diluting social
inequalities: the two Jan Andolans, the Dalit movement, international
migration and the Maoist People’s War.
First, in the 1990s, thousands of citizens protested on the streets in
the multi-party Jan Andolan I (Peoples’ Movement). Eventually, the
king abolished the Panchayat system and lifted the ban on political
parties. However, in the politically tumultuous 1990s, six prime
ministers formed nine different governments. In the midst of this
turmoil, in 1996, the Maoist wing of the Communist faction launched
a rural, armed guerrilla war—the People’s War—to overthrow the
feudal monarchy. In 2001, in the middle of this intense civil conflict,
the monarch dismissed the elected government and declared a state of
emergency. A few months later, the sensational massacre of many of
the royal family members by the heir to the throne marked a turning
point in shattering royal authority.
After these dramatic events, seven political parties collectively
organised Jan Andolan II (People’s Movement II). In April 2006,
hundreds of thousands of Nepalis marched on the streets, clamouring
for democracy. Chanting slogans, they surrounded the royal palace in
Kathmandu until the monarch finally stepped down.
After the restoration of democracy in 2006, the Maoist rebels were
the ones who won the elections and had the most representatives in the
Constituent Assembly. In those stirring days, I happened to be in
Kathmandu to attend an NGO conference. I still remember seeing
trucks full of cheering Maoist supporters descending on the capital
from the rural countryside to celebrate their victory. After nine long
years of consultations in a country with sixty-five different ethnic
groups, Nepal finally adopted a new secular constitution in 2015 with
a strong emphasis on human rights.
The second factor in diluting social inequalities was Nepal’s Dalit
movement. Nepal’s 3.6 million Dalits form only 14 per cent of the
population.42 Due to extreme social and economic exclusion, 42 per
cent of Dalits live below the national poverty line,43 and their literacy
rate is 15 per cent lower than the national average.44 Historically,
Dalits have also faced severe forms of ‘socially sanctioned apartheid’.
In some regions, they continue to be denied access even to public water
taps.
The Dalit movement in Nepal emerged in the 1950s. The genesis of
it was the Samaj Sudhar Sangh’s 1952 agitation for entry into the
Pashupatinath temple. By the 1980s, Dalit activists began to demand
affirmative action, akin to that in India. The 1990 Constitution,
granted reservation quotas to fifty-nine castes and ethnic groups. In
2002, the government created the National Dalit Commission, and
finally in 2011 enacted the Caste-Based Discrimination and
Untouchability (Offence and Punishment) Act.
The 2015 Constitution also includes several specific clauses that
protect the fundamental rights of Dalits. At the lowest tier of
governance, for example, in an innovative step, a third of the budget of
every Village Development Committee (VDC) is divided among various
castes based on their numbers in the population.45 In one village, we
met the head of the Dalit committee. He informed me that they had
decided to use their share of the budget to build a well and piped
drinking water for the Dalit hamlet, along with a gravel road to the
government school.
Third, international migration has also played a valuable role in
bridging caste inequalities. Before the pandemic, remittances
contributed to a quarter of Nepal’s economy.46 During fieldwork, we
also interviewed unschooled Musahar and Dom men who had worked
as labourers in the construction industry in the Middle East and South
East Asia, and had acquired modest material prosperity. One day, in
the home of one of our hosts, we met Birbal Thapa, an immigration
agent. He said that although only 1 per cent of Nepali migrants that he
recruited for jobs abroad were fully illiterate, only 5 per cent had
completed the tenth grade. The rest had spent only a few years in
school. When we probed further, he admitted that his work was illegal.
He and his brother worked as agents for a ‘manpower company’. They
would ‘liaise’ between companies abroad and the Nepali government
to obtain visas and tickets. He charged approximately Nepali Rupees
20,000–30,000 from each labourer to help them migrate abroad.
Birbal had worked for three years in Malaysia and five years in Iraq.
He sent people primarily to Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The
primary demand he said was in the construction business, especially in
Qatar for both the 2020 Summer Olympics (which it did not ultimately
win the bid) and the now-historic 2022 FIFA World Cup in Doha that
the Argentinian team won in a cliff-hanger. Since there was no question
of local Qataris doing physical labour, recruitment from abroad was
essential to build the stadiums and world-class facilities. Birbal claimed
that the labourers largely came from Myanmar, Vietnam, Bangladesh,
Nepal and the Indian states of West Bengal, Bihar and Odisha. He
estimated that each labourer earned about 20,000 to 25,000 Indian
rupees per month, roughly Nepali Rupees 50,000, which the workers
considered a fortune. In his experience, most men travelled on two-
year visas and worked abroad for five to ten years. After that, they
saved enough to buy land in their village, build a house and sometimes
even shift to cities, especially to Kathmandu.
Birbal admitted that the working and living conditions on foreign
shores were abysmal. Many employers confiscated the passports of
migrants until the completion of work, though governments in the
region have now begun to insist that labourers be allowed to retain
their passports. Birbal felt that, despite these hardships,

‘The condition of the Musahars has improved so much in this

village. Previously, whole families were employed on other
people’s farms and received only two square meals daily as
payment. Now they own farmlands.’
He also emphasised that when migrant labourers abroad work, eat and
live together, ‘caste barriers dissolve substantially’.47 He also believed
that migration had done a lot of good, if not for the labourers, then at
least for their children and wives back home. According to Birbal, the
only migrants who suffered were those addicted to alcohol who
squandered away their savings.
Building on this newfound prosperity and social mobility, in the
small town of Sindhuli Madi—the capital of my fieldwork district—the
most expensive hotel and all the gold jewellery shops were owned by
Dalits, based on the traditional occupation of Sunars as goldsmiths.
Also, with limited land reform since the 1950s, in Nepal, 86 per cent of
all families and 60 per cent of Dalit homes possess land.
Unsurprisingly, Nepali forward castes have the largest size of holdings,
while Dalits remain the most dispossessed.48

Figure 5.1: Caste-wise households which possess

land and size of land holdings

Source: Yogendra B. Gurung et al., Nepal Social Inclusion

Survey 2012: Caste, Ethnic and Gender Dimensions of
Socio-Economic Development, Governance and Social
Solidarity
 Lastly, the decade-long People’s War has played the most critical role
in reducing social discrimination after centuries. On 13 February 1996,
inspired by the Cultural Revolution in China and the Naxalite
Movement in India, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) faction
declared a Jan Yuddha, or People’s War.49 Before the conflict began, the
rebels submitted a forty-point charter of demands to the government.
One of the important demands was that ‘the system of untouchability
must end once and for all’.50 The rebellion actually began as a class
struggle against ‘the traditionally dominant feudal class’, that is, the
Thakuri Raj.51 By 2001, across five districts, the 5,000–8,000 armed
rebels had established jan sarkars (people’s governments). In time, the
cadres had a presence in almost all of the seventy-five districts of the
rural countryside.52 At the height of the guerrilla rebellion, the Maoists
controlled over 80 per cent of the country’s rural areas.
Political sociologist Uddhab Prasad Pyakurel argues that ‘the Maoist
Movement capitalized on the agenda of socially, culturally and
economically marginalized people of Nepal especially women, the
Dalits and ethnic groups’.53 In essence, the Maoist rebellion was a caste
war as much as a political struggle.54 As the teacher Hari put it:

… before the Maoist movement, we were all fragmented and

marginalised. The People’s War united all the minorities and
raised their voice from a single platform and created awareness
about rights. We realised that we had been dominated and we
should raise our voice.55

Apart from Dalits, the Maoists also drew into their ranks hundreds of
supporters from the ‘Man-gu-ra-li’ (Magar, Gurung, Rai, Limbu) and
other indigenous tribal communities.56 Also, non-Hindu, non-Nepali
speaking Kiratis, Tharus and Dalits joined their cadres. But the Maoist
top-tier leadership was predominantly upper caste. Still, as a former
foot soldier explained to me, the lower tiers of the guerrilla army, who
came mainly from marginalised castes and tribes, cherished the fact
that often they were given command over their upper caste
colleagues.57
 In addition, the Maoists also formed the Dalit Mukti Morcha, or
Dalit Liberation Front, as a sister organisation58 to advocate for
affirmative action and compensation for historic atrocities. During the
conflict, the rebels declared several occupied zones as ‘untouchability-
free areas’.59 The guerrillas also encouraged Dalit marches into upper
caste neighbourhoods. As the rebels took over landed estates and
homes, the insurgency gradually shifted the rural balance of power.
Their populist strategy included cancelling money lender interest60 and
‘Robin Hood-style redistribution’.61
One day in the village market, Bijeta and I met a Dom family selling
beautiful bamboo baskets and mats. The Mallik family insisted that we
visit their home in the Dom tola (hamlet). On the porch, we met the
lady of the house, Bhakta. Next to her was a young mother
breastfeeding her child. Her husband slept on a charpoy nearby. He
reeked of alcohol, as did most of the other men in the village, across
castes. The Mallik family were distinctly poorer than the others we had
met in the village. But they were constructing a new home. The
unfinished skeletal architecture of this new brick-and-cement structure
formed the backdrop for our conversation.
The Malliks showed us the most intricately woven bamboo baskets
and fans. This was their only source of income. They sold the fans at
NPR 30 apiece and the basket at a mere NPR 50—a pittance for such
exquisitely skilful craft. The women served us water they had fetched
from the nearby hand pump. They proudly told us that they could now
draw water from the village well along with all the other castes. Bhakta
also informed us, ‘Now we are served full meals in the eateries in the
village without any discrimination. The Bahuns, Chhetris let us sit
together with them.’
Earlier, during my recce of Sindhuli, I had interviewed a former
human rights worker and radio presenter for a government channel.
He had spoken of the Maoist movement’s role in reducing caste
discrimination, and I had scarcely believed him. But he had argued so
fervently that his insights had expanded the course of my doctoral
analysis. I now asked the Malliks if the Maoist guerrillas had made any
efforts to reduce caste discrimination. To my surprise, they nodded in
agreement: ‘After the Maoist movement, untouchability stopped, as
everyone listened to them since they had a high position in society.’62
The Dom family clarified that, though the guerrillas created a
general atmosphere of fear, nobody was forced at gunpoint to end
discrimination. Instead, the rebels used various tactics to increase social
interactions between castes in a deeply stratified society. For example,
they regularly held collective meetings in the village at night that
included revolutionary songs and slogans such as ‘Naya Nepal
Nirman’ (creation of a new Nepal), which was rooted in the vision of
an egalitarian society.
The Malliks said that social relations and social power had changed
during and after the People’s War. Bhakta reminded me more than once
that she could now go to temples to pray. In a classic sign of
Sanskritisation, the walls of her house were full of posters of a range of
gods—Shiva, Saraswati, Paravati, Ganesh, Vishnu and so on.63
Interestingly, many of our upper-caste hosts complained that the
Maoist cadres had often insisted on being fed when they had spent the
night in their homes. A Bahun shopkeeper complained that, during the
rebellion, the Maoists had frequently demanded goats, cows and other
animals to eat at night, without paying for them. Another Bahun
health worker from a nearby village also grumbled, ‘Maowadi
(Maoists) came to our home at night and asked us to cook, then they
disappeared into the jungle.’
But a former Maoist foot soldier from the Janajati community,
whom I interviewed in another village, had a completely different
narrative. He used gestures to emphasise the significance of
marginalised caste rebels crossing the threshold to enter upper-caste
kitchens. Such small acts broke centuries-old taboos against inter-caste
dining.64 The Maoists also encouraged inter-caste marriages65 and
feasts with an eye to increasing social interaction between castes.66
Changing the school curriculum was another distinct strategy that
was used to influence the ‘institutions of indoctrination’. Many
teachers like Hari were themselves members of the party. Another
Newari Maithili teacher recounted how the Maoists had ‘kidnapped’
him for a few days and taken him to a remote location to teach him the
new syllabus. The guerrillas also opposed the teaching of the Sanskrit
language, in order to erase overt symbols of upper-caste domination.67
The cumulative impact of these multiple strategies was that caste
discrimination reduced perceptibly in Nepal, especially in the Terai and
hill areas. It has far from vanished, though, and the stranglehold of
caste continues in Nepal’s mountainous regions.68
While it is true that, after the conflict ended, the Maoists
transformed into a democratic political party and won a landslide
victory in the 2008 Constituent Assembly elections, the armed rebels
also have a profoundly dark history. Generations of Nepalis have been
traumatised by the socio-economic and psychological scars of the
guerrilla violence. Almost 37 per cent of Maoist guerrillas were under
the age of eighteen,69 effectively being child soldiers.70 There were
reports of kidnappings, abductions and mass recruitment of underage
children.71 The Maoists also strongly encouraged at least one member
of every family to join the armed conflict. In the throes of the conflict,
many female cadres also faced sexual violence both from the Royal
Nepal Army and the guerrillas.72 Tellingly, after the war, most of the
enlisted female combatants chose voluntary retirement.
I interviewed a high-ranking female government bureaucrat who was
deeply critical of the Maoists. At the same time, however, she did
acknowledge that, ‘the Maoists did a lot to change the mindset and
build social awareness to build an equal society. The Constituent
Assembly was created due to them, and ganatantra [democracy] was
also restored because of the Maoists.’73 Another interviewee who was
affiliated with the party told me about the egalitarian vision of the
Maoists. ‘The overarching aim of the party was to build an equal
society which would be Savarna Bagun Mukti [Free of Oppressor
Caste Hegemony] with Mahila Mukti [Women’s Liberation].’
During the final leg of the People’s War, the most influential female
rebel leader Comrade Parvati, alias Hisila Yami, observed, ‘Today
Nepalese Dalits are way ahead of Indian Dalits in the field of breaking
caste barriers.’ However, she also acknowledged that, ‘Maoist Dalits
cadres can enter high caste houses without any obstruction, but local
Dalits from the same village are often discriminated’.74 Still, she
believed that the ‘transformation which would have taken centuries
before the revolution have taken ten years’.75
Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ focuses on new changes that societies
adapt to in order to survive extreme circumstances. The People’s War’s
explicit intent was to catalyse these profound cultural transformations.
Anthropologist Ina Zharkevich, in her book Maoist People’s War and
the Revolution of Everyday Life in Nepal, documents how the
Thabangi ethnic community in mid-western Nepal, which traditionally
considered cows to be sacred animals and not to be killed, normalised
beef-eating during the conflict years.76 As the villagers explained to her,
‘bani parepachi mitho lagyo [once the habit was acquired, beef turned
out to be tasty], and gradually became a part of the local diet’.77

DAUGHTERS OF THE EVEREST

Traditionally, in pahadi (mountain) cultures including in Nepal,
women have enjoyed relatively greater freedoms. In the 1940s, the
early Nepali women’s organisations were born as offshoots of political
parties. They mobilised women to overthrow the Rana monarchs and
establish democracy. Only after women earned the right to vote, in the
1950s, were schools for girls opened. In the 1960s, under the new
Panchayat system, the king banned all political parties. Hence, most
women’s organisations, too, had to go underground.78 After the brief
return of democracy in the 1980s, many international NGOs also
began adult literacy classes and micro-credit programmes.79 These
changes transformed women’s social capital, political engagement and
cultural norms.
The decades of conflict and international migration have also altered
the rural landscape of Nepal. In the years of the violent conflict, in
whole villages in the western hill districts of Nepal, there were no
men.80 Now, women head one of every three Nepali households.81 This
is twice as many as in Bangladesh or India.
Though wars generally increase women’s vulnerabilities, sometimes
they can also empower women.82 Usually, ‘women living in
communities directly affected by violent political conflict rated more
highly on empowerment measures’.83 They are more likely to work
outside the home and also end up making more decisions within the
home.84 During the World Wars, for example, when men fought on the
frontlines, women temporarily85 took their place on factory shop floors
across industrialised countries.86
In Nepal, too, especially after the conflict, women’s employment has
soared.87 Nepal’s Gender Inequality Index, too, has fallen and is now
better than both India and Bangladesh.88 Even in the midst of the
conflict, Nepal’s Gender Development Index rose from 0.77 in 1995 to
0.92 in 2015. The combined impact of Jan Andolans, international
migration and the Maoist War has ignited a gender transformation in
Nepal.
Women actively participated in the first Jan Andolan in the 1990s.
Also, during the Maoist conflict years (1996–2006), many age-old
regressive traditions dissolved. Many widows, for example, refused to
wear white-coloured clothes.89 The ‘badge of resistance is the sindoor
(vermillion) on the forehead and her pothay (red beaded necklace),
symbols of a married woman, which she wears in defiance of her
widowhood’.90 These small but meaningful cultural changes
symbolised the depth of the post-conflict transformation in women’s
lives.
In the Second Jan Andolan in 2006, which saw street protests to
overthrow the monarchy and restore democracy, women from seven
political parties formed the Inter-Party Women’s Alliance (IPWA). Two
years later, these feminists lobbied fiercely for reservations to be
provided in the Interim Constitution. They ensured that Nepal became
the first country in South Asia to earmark 33 per cent of seats for
women at all levels of the executive, legislature and local bodies. The
2015 Constitution also has a specific quota to ensure women gain
leadership positions in Parliament.91
In 2016, Nepal appointed its first female parliamentary speaker,
Onsari Gharti Magar. Simultaneously, the first woman president,
Bidhya Devi Bhandari, and the first female chief justice, Sushila Karki,
also took their oaths of office. The progressive 2015 Nepali
Constitution, amongst the youngest in the world, has enshrined the
principle of proportional representation. So, in the 2017 local
government elections held after a gap of seventeen years, women won
41 per cent of all elected posts.92 Significantly, 47 per cent of these
women were Dalit, due to a landmark intersectional sub-quota
provided for in the Local Level Election Law 2016, which ensures that
at least one of every five ward members is mandatorily a Dalit
woman.93 India’s long-awaited Women’s Reservation Bill though
enacted by the Parliament after twenty-seven years, in September 2023,
does not have similarly progressive sub-quotas for OBCs and is likely
to be implemented only after another decade.94
In spite of these gains, women in Nepal largely continue to be
appointed only to figurehead positions. Only 2 per cent of mayors are
women. However, 91 per cent of the ceremonial posts of deputy mayor
have been given to women to fulfil the quota. Of them, very few are
Dalits95—a clear indication that, despite a robust feminist movement,
women from marginalised communities continue to be deeply under-
represented in positions of real power.
Since the conflict years, the mass migration of four million Nepali
men abroad has also altered the country’s gender landscape. For one,
marriages have become more fragile. Across villages, we heard stories
of men who had migrated abroad and abandoned their families. In one
village, two of the three Dalit women we met said that their husbands
worked in the Middle East, but had not visited for years and had also
stopped sending money. Much to our surprise, in another village, one
of our Bahun hosts in his sixties, also had his second wife living next
door.96 Though polygamy is now illegal, it has a long social history in
Nepal. Again, in another village, we met two co-wives who lived in
adjoining houses. Due to the prolonged absence of men and lack of
alternative livelihoods, women have also started to perform
traditionally male agricultural tasks, such as ploughing.97 Clearly,
Nepali society is in the midst of a profound gender transformation.
The ten years of the Maoist guerrilla conflict were another crucial
historical turning point. The Maoist Party had submitted a forty-point
charter of demands to the government before declaring the People’s
War in 1996. One of their key demands was the right of women to
inherit property.98 But the most significant aspect of the war was the
recruitment of women guerrilla combatants.
Women formed 30–40 per cent of the frontline Maoist cadres.
During the People’s War, ‘poor, peasant, illiterate and Janjati women …
achieved a level of political visibility never before imaginable in Nepal’s
politics’.99 Hundreds of women joined the Maoist Party and its sister
organisations.
To learn more about their motivations, I took a bus to the Maoist
headquarters in Kathmandu to interview a high-ranking woman leader.
Suddenly, as I got off the bus it started to rain heavily and I had to stop
to buy an umbrella. After many wrong turns, I found the Maoist
headquarters—an imposing, fortified building with unmistakable red
flags everywhere. Without a second thought, I pulled out my camera
and started to take some photos. From the corner of my eye, I noticed
a woman glaring at me from the first-floor balcony. This was my
interviewee, and since I was late by a few minutes, she was waiting for
me impatiently. After we waved at each other, she came downstairs to
check my identity card, after which she greeted me with an unusually
firm handshake. My mind raced, with a mix of unexpected fear,
anxiety and excitement. This promised to be one fascinating interview.
We walked up to the first floor and then down a corridor with
arresting oil-on-canvas paintings of fallen comrades bathed in red
blood, on the wall. Once we had entered her room, with its
comfortable cloth sofas, she slowly read out my surname from a
notebook and asked about my caste. This was always the first question
in Nepal before the inevitable one about my marital status. I usually
managed to dodge, distract or refuse to answer. But this once, to put
her at ease, I answered truthfully. She then said that I must have figured
out from her surname that she was a Bahun, though frankly, I hadn’t. I
blurted out that I was surprised that a Bahun woman had joined the
Maoist party, which had mainly fought for the upliftment of the
oppressed castes.
That got us talking and she slowly opened up. Her own marriage
was inter-caste, she said. Her parents were communists. From a young
age, their rural house was filled with guests who would discuss left-
wing ideology. So, she was always attracted to its core principles. The
turning point in her life came when her father decided to re-marry. Her
illiterate mother was left emotionally traumatised and economically
vulnerable, with two daughters and two sons to care for single-
handedly. The strong-willed mother decided that she would educate all
her children, so they could stand on their own feet and never have to
face such vulnerabilities. And, that’s what she did.
Her family hailed from the Dang district, a hotbed of communist
activity in the mountain region. They had joined the original ‘Mashaal’
group founded by Mohan Vaidya.100 From the fourth grade onwards,
she had started participating in communist events. With time, her
commitment to political activism had organically grown stronger.
When she turned eighteen, the top leaders in the party had decided that
the time was ripe for her to get married. In keeping with their
encouragement of inter-caste alliances,101 her marriage had been
‘arranged by the party’ with a politically active leader from an
indigenous community. More than twenty years ago, top-ranking party
leaders had blessed her wedding, a celebration free of traditional
rituals. Instead, there had been speeches, revolutionary songs and
slogans.102 To me, these janabadi bibahs seemed quite similar to the
anti-caste, ritual-free self-respect weddings that happened in Tamil
Nadu (described in later chapters).103 Her husband had steadily risen to
the top echelons of the Maoist central leadership. Recently, she too had
won an election to become a parliamentarian.
I wanted to understand what motivated women to join the Maoist
army in such large numbers. She explained, ‘The first attraction for
village women was the unique opportunity to change their roop [form]
by wearing shirt-pant, carry the banduk [gun], and join the army as
full-timers, or support from the outside as part-timers.’104 In a
conservative society, these gun-carrying women in khaki trousers
challenged the ‘image of womanhood’.105 But many scholars have
wondered whether this mass recruitment of women was an act of
agency or exploitation. Anthropologist Lauren Leve argues that it is
incorrect to attribute their decisions to the Western notion of rebellious
choice, autonomy or agency. Rather, rural Nepali women joined the
Maoist rebels to display their moral commitment to ‘personal sacrifice’
that is more valued in Eastern cultures.106 In the course of the war,
more than 3000 women guerrillas were martyred.107
In the thick of the battle, in 2003, the most prominent Maoist female
leader, Hisila Yami (under the nom de guerre Parvati), had also
published an insightful survey in the Economic and Political Weekly.108
As per the survey, around 53 per cent of women combatants were from
the exploited classes. Although two-thirds of the total women rebels
were also unmarried.109 So, the war may have also been an unspoken
escape route for many women from the triple oppression of casteism,
feudalism and patriarchy.110 Some conflict zones even had women-only
guerrilla squads.
In their heyday, the guerrilla army controlled 75–90 per cent of the
rural Nepali countryside. They had established a parallel government
in all seventy-five districts.111 At that time, the Maoist rebels and their
sister organisations also undertook a number of campaigns against
abhorrent gender practices. In western Nepal, they advocated against
chhaupadi pratha112 and marriage-by-kidnapping. In the northwest,
they denounced polyandry. In the south, they rallied against the
regressive Teej festival113 and the sexual trafficking of Tamang
women.114 The most popular campaign, however, was the 2001
movement against alcohol launched by the women’s front of the Party.
In a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-religious country, the rebels
sought to build on this intersectionality of feminist struggles.
After the guerrilla war, the Nepali national army instituted specific
quotas for women.115 The majority of the female guerrillas, however,
chose to voluntarily retire rather than be absorbed into the Royal
Nepal Army. Many of these former Nepali combatants have silently
redefined traditional stereotypes of gender and division of labour in
other professions, due to the huge lack of stable post-war socio-
economic opportunities and the absence of men.116 In Kathmandu, I
saw working women in several traditionally male-dominated
occupations. Some ran street-food stalls, while others drove tempos.117

PEACE DIVIDEND
Lenin’s idea that war can bring rapid social transformation, which
would take much longer in times of peace, is debatable. But it does
seem that the decade-long ‘Maoist movement paved the way for a
radical transformation of Nepali society’.118 Still, the most crucial
changes in Nepal have been visible only after the war. The peace
dividend has enabled these evolutionary changes to ripen.
 6
BIHAR

As long as indignities without count

Are visited on the untouchables’ account,
Surely their tormentors too must pay
For the crimes they commit in every way.
– ‘Bechain’ (Kalu Ram Jatia),
Dalit poet and editor of Adi-Hindu1

B IHAR HAS A long history of violence against the oppressed castes. In

one of my fieldwork districts, around the time that I was there in July
2016, two Dalit youths were beaten up and urinated on by forward
castes.2 Everyday discrimination in Bihar is rife too. Almost 41 per
cent of Dalit families we interviewed in Muzaffarpur district admitted
that even they would ‘have a problem if a Musahar3 were to eat in our
home’.4 These thick layers of ‘graded inequality’ prevent marginalised
castes from forging unified class alliances to resist or overthrow their
oppressors.5
In one village, we visited a school in the Paswan6 hamlet first thing
in the morning, but found it closed. The building was painted bright
pink, but the rooms seemed to be on the verge of collapse. No
classroom had a blackboard, benches or even a mat to sit on the floor.
There was no child or teacher in sight. Worse still, we learnt from the
cook that she had not served midday meals for months. We returned
later in the afternoon. This time we saw some children. They were
sitting on a mat on the veranda floor, hanging on to every word their
teacher spoke. The teacher sat behind a rickety table on a high chair.
This physical distance between the teacher and the student reflected
the deep emotional distance between their caste positions in the social
hierarchy.
In another school in the same village, we saw two children with
blank faces and a few books neatly packed in plastic shopping bags
waiting outside the gates. The school was yet to open and they were
unsure if it was a holiday. Half an hour later, a teacher walked in, her
sari pallu fastened with a big pin. We tried to call the head teacher (he
was also the village head’s husband and was locally called ‘mukhiya
pati’), but he did not answer his phone. As with most schools we
visited in Bihar, there was a toilet each for boys and girls. But they
were so dirty as to be unusable.
In the next village, we visited the Musahar hamlet, and the mothers
we met complained bitterly to us that the anganwadi (pre-school)
worker rarely served any food to their children. The worker was from
the Telli caste, designated in Bihar as ‘economically backward’, but
considered to be superior to the Musahars, who are at the bottom
rung of the Dalits.
Even before we entered the anganwadi, we could hear the
anganwadi worker yelling. She became even more irritated when she
saw that we had come to pay a visit. We insisted that she feed the
children as per the law. After a heated argument for nearly an hour,
her helper finally showed up with an aluminium pot full of freshly
cooked khichdi. The dishevelled children brought out their plates and
ate hungrily. The mothers standing outside, were all smiles. This
experience gave us a taste of their daily battles for the most basic of
rights.
Research by social scientist Aparna John and her colleagues
confirms that such disputes are not uncommon in Bihar. The caste of
the anganwadi worker determines her social distance from the
villagers she serves. Especially when food is scarce, these power
differences become magnified and often cause ‘perceptions of bias,
physical violence episodes and create a hostile environment’.7
But why does Bihar suffer from such blatant caste discrimination?
How pervasive and profound is its impact on access to public services?
Why does Bihar, despite legendary experiments in socialism, have
callous teachers, non-functional schools, classrooms without benches,
crumbling hospital infrastructure and putrefying political will?

DEVELOPMENTAL STASIS
Walk into any cramped bus or auto stand in Bihar, and absolute
strangers will strike up a conversation on politics. Most of these witty,
earthy exchanges usually centre around poverty and welfare. For
example, the 2015 state election campaign was fought entirely on the
plank of ‘development’. Three-time Chief Minister Nitish Kumar
advocated for ‘inclusive’ development. On the other hand, Prime
Minister Modi’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) promised a
special ‘development package’ with sectarian undertones.8 By 2020,
these rival parties had joined hands to fight the next election in an
alliance. In the midst of the pandemic, they even achieved a contested
narrow victory but parted ways soon after. Through all of these
changes, development continued to remain the most crucial electoral
issue for Bihari voters.9 Yet, travelling in Bihar often feels like taking a
journey backwards in time.
In the last decade, Bihar has had stellar economic growth rates of
more than 8 per cent, which would be the envy of any developing
country. But this speed of change is an illusion, as Bihar has an
extremely low base of economic development. Bihar’s per capita
income is the lowest in the country.10 Similarly, while statistics on
paper may indicate that Bihar has been the fastest in the reduction of
multi-dimensional poverty, access to basic welfare services remains
abysmal. For example, most of the anganwadis we visited in
Kishanganj district were shut when we arrived. In one anganwadi,
after three visits, finally, around noon, we met the anganwadi sahayika
(helper), who got frightened when she saw us and hurried to wear her
official sari-uniform. In the dusty mud room, her unwell husband was
still sleeping. There was a parked motorcycle, a family cow and a pile
of hay in front of a curtain where the children were supposed to sit.
She explained that the designated anganwadi building next door was
broken, so she often conducted classes in this overcrowded room. But,
the blackboard on the wall looked unused and a pile of hay lay just
below it. So we headed to the next room, which was equally in
shambles with no teaching equipment.
The sahayika began to make khichdi in the corner of the room.
With their mothers waiting outside, we taught the children a few
words and sang nursery rhymes and songs to keep them occupied. We
also played and pretended to make invisible rotis, till the kichdi was
ready. Finally, the sahayika served the children the hot meal in small
plates while they sat in a row on jute sacks. The mothers were relieved
that their children were finally eating.
Later, when I informed the mothers that all children in Bihari
anganwadis were also supposed to receive an egg once a week, they
were genuinely perplexed.11 Their children rarely received any food,
let alone an egg. The sahayika, on her part, complained that the
government had not paid her a salary or sent money for meals in
months. Later, I complained to the supervisor-in-charge. He was
extremely polite on the phone, but I seriously doubted that he
intended to lift a finger on the matter.
The National Family Health Survey 2019–21 shows that three of
every five children nationwide receive food from anganwadis. In Bihar,
however, three of every five children do not receive any nutritious
meals at anganwadis, let alone eggs. Similarly, nearly two of every
four deliveries in Bihar take place at home instead of in a hospital or
health centre.12 Most crucially, 43 per cent of Bihari women are not
literate, nearly double the national average.13
Despite the repeated electoral focus on socio-economic
development, the question remains, why does Bihar perform so poorly
when it comes to access to public services? Why do the majority of
Musahar children shy away from schools? Why is corruption so rife
and public transport negligible? And why are most women unlettered?
In the 1970s, socialist thinker Sachchidanand Sinha, in his treatise
The Internal Colony, criticised the centralisation of power in Delhi.
He argued that the Union government exercised excessive control on
backward states like Bihar. Despite rich raw materials and cheap
labour, Bihar often could not fund local priorities.14 The central
government’s ‘freight equalisation’ policy,15 its diversion of tax
revenues and its meagre transfer of finances stymied Bihar’s
industrialisation and progress.16
Since the 1960s, agriculture has also been severely neglected in the
eastern states. In contrast, the Green Revolution pioneers like Punjab
and Haryana have received heavy public investment. To this day, only
half the agricultural land in Bihar is irrigated, compared to 90 per cent
in Punjab. Land is also very scarce in Bihar, and most rural homes are
packed close together. With growing impoverishment, the proportion
of agricultural workers who do not own any land in rural Bihar has
increased from 42 per cent in 1971 to 53 per cent in 2011.17
In 1912, the British carved Bihar as a separate province from
Bengal. But colonial power remained concentrated in Calcutta.
Economist Shaibal Gupta has argued that zamindari landlords were
the ‘worst elements’ of Permanent Settlement in Bihar. ‘Though Bihar
was politically linked with Bengal, this (Bihari Westernised elite) class
emerged very late in comparison to its Bengali counterpart’—the
bhadralok.18 Even before Independence, for most Biharis, caste was
more important than a pan-Bihari identity.19 While Bihar was active in
the national independence movement, communities with roots outside
the state dominated commerce and industry within.20 Hence, despite
rich mineral resources, Bihar remained underdeveloped.
Post-independence, feudal Bihari leaders preferred to attract capital
from other states, but were staunchly ‘opposed to any radical tenancy
reform and … indifferent to indigenous industrial development’.21 So,
an important contributor to Bihar’s social, economic, political and
industrial backwardness is a continued sense of ‘retarded sub-
nationalism’. In a society riven by caste divisions, there is a lack of
socio-culture pride in a pan-Bihari identity.22
The ‘quagmire of caste’ has also impacted democratic politics.23
Until 1977, the forward castes blocked genuine land reform. Over
subsequent decades, oppressed castes gradually tilted the balance,
especially through the reservation policy and their strength in numbers
in democratic politics. The ‘politicisation of caste’ has cemented social
solidarity among the marginalised castes. The tenures of former chief
ministers Lalu Prasad Yadav (1990–97) and his wife Rabri Devi
(2000–5), in particular, promoted social justice for the marginalised
classes. But crime rates soared as job creation and public
infrastructure were sorely neglected during their terms,24 and the
perception of Bihar’s backwardness increased. Bihari migrants in
industrial cities, in particular, routinely had to deal with this stigma.25
However, the 2009 elections seemed to mark a shift from caste
affinity26 to ‘clean development’.27
Since 2005, with chief minister Nitish Kumar’s sushasan (good
governance), Bihar has undoubtedly seen rapid economic growth.28
However, this construction-led lopsided growth has resulted in the
sore neglect of agriculture.29 The smokescreen of ‘development’ has
also side-lined caste injustices. Journalist M. Rajshekhar feels that
even with widely-publicised development policies, such as distributing
bicycles to girl students, in reality, Bihar has an ‘absent state’.30 In the
corridors of power, the official mantra is ‘inclusive growth’. But, in
reality, poor people and marginalised communities remain excluded.
Bihar continues to have India’s lowest average income and the highest
levels of poverty and malnutrition.31 Improvements in education and
healthcare have also been much slower than in other states. Ironically,
public investments have also worsened existing social disparities. For
example, cities, urban towns and villages near motorable roads have
cornered most of the developmental spends.32 On the other hand, the
remotest corners of Bihar, like the Muslim-majority Kishanganj
district, where I did my fieldwork, are threadbare, with few roads and
utter neglect of public services.
Land reform has also been far from adequate in Bihar.33 Around 86
per cent of Dalit families and more than half of OBC families do not
own any land—amongst the worst kind of exclusion in the country.34
In a classic pattern of graded inequality, marginalised castes and
Muslims also have the least access to public services.35 As the
journalist Santosh Singh concludes about Bihar in his book Ruled or
Misruled, ‘The development card, in any case, is not the main text as
it appears on the surface.’ Instead, there is a surfeit of empty ‘claims,
counter-claims and resultant cacophony’.36
Despite Bihar being ‘the cradle and the birthplace of socialism in
India’, it is stuck in a developmental inertia. Upper caste feudal
hegemony,37 an underdeveloped sense of sub-national Bihari identity,
economic degradation as an ‘internal colony’ and non-inclusive
growth have inflamed socio-economic inequalities.

SILENCED REVOLUTION
At every turn in Bihar, caste and religion raise their ugly heads. In
Kishanganj, one evening, a progressive Muslim family informed us
that they would have a problem if a Musahar were to share a meal
with them. In another village, my Dalit researcher, who preferred to be
called ‘Harijan’, said he could not stay with me in a Muslim home as
they ate gau maas (cow meat), which many Hindus do not eat. It was
with great difficulty that I convinced him that Muslims certainly do
not eat beef at every meal.
In another Dalit home, a man displayed the same prejudice and
even said that he would have a problem if a Muslim visited his home.
His logic was that his family was Hindu and worshipped the cow,
while Muslims ate only cows. ‘So, how can we serve them food?’
The Hindutva lie has been spread so effectively that millions of
Indians like him seem to assume that Muslims eat beef at every meal.38
After dusk, in another conversation in a nearby village, with my OBC
host, a Muslim researcher and his Dalit friend, I heard even more
absurd tales of blatant prejudice. While they movingly spoke of their
own struggles against discrimination, their own prejudices against the
Musahars were appalling. The three men claimed that the Musahars,
who lived across the river, did not want to progress. They were
apparently so subservient that they bent low, called everyone ‘sarkar’
(landlord) and refused to sit on a chair. Of course, this victim-blaming
is not uncommon in a country steeped in putrid caste prejudice.
 Bihar, in particular, festers with extreme caste discrimination.
Amongst the Dalits, Musahars are the most marginalised. Their
population size is not insignificant. In Bihar alone, there are 2.7
million Musahars, which is more than the entire population of
Botswana or Qatar. An equal number live in Uttar Pradesh. Though
Jitan Manjhi, a Musahar, had a brief stint as the chief minister of the
state, it appears to have made little difference to the condition of his
community. Most continue to live in hamlets that reek of neglect. In
1901, only 0.1 per cent of Musahars were literate. More than a
century later, only 22 per cent can read the alphabet.39 In village after
village, we met Musahar children playing at home rather than
studying in school due to the bitter discrimination they face, both
within the classroom and outside.40 As anthropologist George
Kunnath recollects in his insightful book Rebels from Mud Houses,
most Musahar parents are resigned to the futility of their children’s
schooling due to the utter lack of social mobility. One mother
rhetorically asked him, ‘Musahar ka bachcha padhkar daroga
banega?’ (Will going to a school make a Musahar child a police
inspector?)41
The historical origins of the caste system are hazy. More than 3,000
years ago, in the late Vedic period, caste hierarchies were gradually
cemented with the transition to settled agriculture across northern
India. Each caste in the hierarchy was expected to concentrate only on
their specialised occupation. In the second century, Kautilya’s
Arthashastra even suggested caste-specific punishment for the same
crime.42 By the fifth century, caste practices had become nothing short
of appalling. Chinese traveller Fa-Hien (337–422 AD), who visited the
ancient capital Pataliputra43 (now Bihar’s capital Patna), documented
that Chandalas44 who cremated corpses had to tap wooden sticks on
the ground as they walked, so that high-caste Hindus could avoid even
the sight of them.45
Bihar has also had one millennium of Buddhist influence and two
centuries of Mughal rule. Unlike East Bengal, the local population did
not convert en masse to Islam. Caste hierarchies have, therefore,
remained rigid through generations. With the advent of British
colonialism, the oppressed castes, however, did find new economic
opportunities for social mobility,46 but as sociologist M.N. Srinivas
notes:

That is quite different from making progress towards an

egalitarian society … increased economic mobility, led to
increased social mobility and the traditional process of
Sanskritisation ensured that such mobility did not lead to
revolution.47

Sanskritisation is a process where marginalised castes emulate the

rituals, customs, rites and practices of the upper castes to claim a
higher status.48 One of my Dalit host families in Bihar, for example,
had built a separate bhagwan ghar (shrine) in the courtyard that
looked even better than his own home.
Still, Bihar has had its fair share of progressive social movements.
Marginalised castes, Dalits and peasants have consistently fought for
their rights. However, internal disunity and upper caste resistance have
repeatedly silenced and quelled the embers of these rebellions. Two
millennia of caste dominance have crushed meaningful social mobility.

6.1: Main caste-groups in undivided Bihar based on

the 1931 census
 Source: Pradip Bose, ‘Mobility and Conflict: Social Roots of
Caste Violence in Bihar’, in D. Gupta (ed.), Social
Stratification

During the British Raj, there were two waves of Bihari marginalised
caste movements. The British census, from its early days, inadvertently
created an opportunity for caste mobility. The 1901 census in the
Bihar province classified Bhumihars and Kayasthas as ‘backward
castes’, lower than the Brahmins and Rajputs. To seek upward
mobility, the Kayasthas set up caste associations that claimed descent
from Emperor Chandragupta.49 The Bhumihars even conducted a
1924 Purohiti Andolan to claim priestly status.50 Both groups
successfully upgraded their status to upper castes in the 1931 census.51
The second wave of caste movements by the ‘upper-backward’
castes, however, such as Yadavs, Kurmis and Koeris, was unsuccessful.
The Kurmis started wearing the sacred thread. The Yadavs converted
to vegetarianism and teetotalism,52 and joined both the cow protection
and Ahir movement against the zamindars.53 But their status in the
hierarchy was not elevated.
The British, through the 1919 Montagu–Chelmsford reforms,
granted only two seats to the ‘Depressed Classes’54 in Bihar’s
legislative assembly, compared to ten in Madras.55 Even before
Independence, the Dalit leader Jagjivan Ram lamented that the Bihari
‘Depressed Classes’ were not only more backward, but also unable to
create a united Dalit organisation.56
After independence, Babasaheb Ambedkar ensured that reservations
for Dalits and Adivasis were introduced to reverse generations of
social discrimination.57 Marginalised castes in northern India have
been less able to utilise these quotas due to their lower levels of
education.58 It is political quotas that have been more successful in
ensuring representation in Bihar.59 In the social sphere, however, caste
remains deeply entrenched as a form of ‘hidden apartheid’.60 Though
untouchability is legally banned, residential, social and economic
segregation continue to be widely practised.61 Around 47 per cent of
rural households nationwide admitted in the recent India Human
Development Survey that they still practise untouchability with
northern India displaying the most prejudice.62 After all, as Babasaheb
Ambedkar warned, anti-discrimination laws alone are ineffective
without ‘determined efforts on the part of government’.63
As noted, political reservations have, to a certain extent, increased
unity among the Bihari marginalised castes against the ‘Brahmin–
Bania Raj’.64 In the 1970s, the All Indian Kurmi Mahasabha started a
campaign to unite the marginalised castes using their strength in
numbers for electoral advantage. For over three decades now, with the
successive election of former chief minister Laloo Prasad Yadav and
Chief Minister Nitish Kumar (both Kurmi), there has been a rise in the
political clout of the ‘other backward classes’ in Bihar. Political
scientist Christophe Jaffrelot argues that post-Independence, there has
been a ‘silent revolution’ in India’s socio-political landscape across
northern India. Bihar, too, has seen the rise of the ‘backward castes’.65
But Dalits continue to remain on the margins.
In regions with competition for scarce resources, even the ‘other
backward classes’ castes have also increasingly begun to commit
atrocities against Dalits. As Human Rights Watch documents based on
a police report, ‘In rural areas in which the “backward classes” have
been surging forward to take up positions of power and control in
society, knocking down the upper castes who had held sway in such
positions all along in the past … there is greater tension between
structural neighbours in this hierarchy than between the top level and
the bottom level.’66 Needless to say, it is ‘structural neighbours’ that
tend to have the greatest interaction as well as the need to vie for the
same limited rural resources. In other words, the ‘rise to power and
dominance of the upper layers of the middle castes, especially the
Kurmi, Koeri and Yadav communities, lead to a further intensification
of Dalit exploitation.’67
In the face of this oppression, in the late 1960s, the Naxalite
movement germinated as a Maoist guerrilla movement to end feudal
and caste exploitation. By the late 1990s, the Naxals had spread to
thirty-six of the fifty-four districts of Bihar. In the initial days, the
Naxals were considered to be fighting for the Dalit cause. Musahars
‘since the eighties have formed a significant part of the rank and file of
the Maoist movement’.68
In Nepal, the Maoist movement was able to realign caste equations
to a certain extent within a decade. In stark contrast, the Naxals in
Bihar faced a violent backlash from the upper and middle castes. In
the 1990s, Bhumihars, especially, organised ‘dominant caste sena or
private caste militias or armies’.69 These militias murdered, robbed
and raped hundreds of Dalit peasants and landless labourers70 with
impunity. Central Bihar was a hotbed of caste violence.71 Of these
militias, the Ranvir Sena with a standing army of 12,000 was the most
brutal. Between 1995 and 2000, they led twenty-seven gruesome
massacres. Even the Naxals considered the ‘Ranvir Sena to be the
deadliest sena’.72 In 1991, the Ranvir Sena beheaded Dalit and Adivasi
labourers in Jehanabad district, who had demanded a minuscule wage
increase. In the 1990s, more than 400 people were killed in conflicts
between the various militias and the Naxalites.
By the turn of the millennium, the Naxals began to recruit guerrillas
from all castes. Their own leadership and ranks, too, were no longer
immune to caste prejudice. ‘Dalit alienation was further accentuated’,
as the Naxals could no longer ‘meet their socio-economic
aspirations’.73 Dalits in Bihar also did not have their own private
militias.74
In 2007, the Nitish Kumar government created a new category of
Mahadalits which has slowly expanded to include most of the Dalit
communities in Bihar. My Bihari researcher explained it thus, ‘We
Harijans are the topmost in the Scheduled Caste list. Then there are
Chamars and many other categories of Mahadalits. The Doms are at
the bottom.’ Initially, the new category of Mahadalits created further
rifts, as it only excluded the Paswans.75 Despite their inclusion in
2018, caste gradations remain sharp in Bihar.76 In 2014, after former
chief minister Jitan Manjhi visited a temple, it was apparently
‘washed’ and ‘purified’.77

LAND AND CONFLICT

Bihar is one of the most densely populated regions in the world.
Hunger for land has also been one of the key reasons for these armed
conflicts. Despite numerous peasant movements before Independence,
land redistribution remains elusive.
In Mughal India, half the average farm produce was extracted as
taxes.78 In 1793, the British introduced the Permanent Settlement. This
shift led to surplus extraction of taxes and such extreme exploitation
of tenants by the zamindars that it altered feudal social relations.79
After the Great Depression in the 1930s, with fewer peasants able to
pay their taxes, land evictions increased. By the time of India’s
independence, the feudal hegemony of the zamindars had increased
substantially.80
Unsurprisingly then, Bihar was once the crucible of peasant
uprisings. The tribal-dominated areas rose up in the 1855 Santhal
Rebellion, protesting against acute exploitation. The 1860 Indigo
Uprising against the forced plantation of the cash crop was brutally
repressed by the British.81 In 1917, Mahatma Gandhi led the
Champaran Satyagraha. By 1934, the Congress Socialist Party
advocated for Kisan Sabhas (peasant associations) across Bihar.82 After
1940, the sabhas even adopted a militant strategy due to communist
influence.83
Since the 1930s, ‘Bihar has also been the cradle and the birthplace
of socialism in India’, intermingled with caste politics.84 The short-
lived Congress Socialist Party (1934–39), born in Patna, was
conceived of by socialists Acharya Narendra Dev and Jayaprakash
Narayan, among others.85 By the 1960s, Ram Manohar Lohia, a
stalwart of the Socialist Party, was advocating for radical ideas such as
compulsory inter-caste marriages and inter-caste dining for
government servants. Karpoori Thakur, another socialist stalwart and
two-time chief minister, introduced a sub-quota for the Most
Backward Classes (MBCs).86 In 1974–75, Jayaprakash Narayan led
the Sampoorna Kranti (Total Revolution) movement in Bihar, which,
as a powerful student protest movement, also emphasised the
upliftment of the oppressed castes.
All these socialist movements were short-lived, and like the peasant
and Dalit movements, never managed to alter the landscape of Bihar’s
developmental politics. The feudal hegemony of the upper and middle
castes remained largely untouched for centuries.
On paper, after Independence, Bihar was the first Indian state to
abolish the zamindari system. The landlords, however, actively
opposed the 1950 Bihar Land Reforms Act with violence, court cases
and other methods.87 The government also delayed the 1957 Land
Ceiling Bill to favour the landed elite, who subverted the loopholes to
undertake tenant evictions and land grabs.88 The upshot of all this was
that, even decades later, extreme land inequalities have persisted and
sharecroppers and landless labourers have been ‘more often than not
left out in the cold’.89
Despite numerous peasant movements and welfare laws, land
distribution in Bihar has remained essentially unchanged. The upper
castes have monopolised control—they form two-thirds (65 per cent)
of the big landlords/peasants. On the other hand, 76 per cent of
agricultural labourers without land, who largely survive hand-to-
mouth, belong to marginalised classes and castes (Dalits, Adivasis and
OBCs). Even families from marginalised communities who do own
land have only small parcels. Almost 43 per cent of land holdings are
of less than 0.4 hectares.90 In 2009, one-third of the cultivated area
was sharecropped by tenants. The pandemic lockdowns have been
particularly brutal for those with scarce or no land, with minimal
alternative safety nets to fall back on.

6.2: Distribution of castes and communities by size

of landholdings, Bihar, 2009

Source: Alakh Sharma and Jerry Rodgers, ‘Structural

Change in Bihar’s Rural Economy’.

Fifteen million people were uprooted from their homes by India’s

1947 Partition. Seventy years later, during the pandemic, India was in
the throes of its worst reverse migration. This time, the population
exodus was estimated to be more than double. For two months,
India’s national highways were filled with millions of migrants
trudging hundreds of kilometres on foot, cycles, trucks and trains,
back to their villages. For the ruling classes, these reverse migrants
desperately walking home might as well have been ghosts. Most of
them were returning from developed industrial cities and towns in
southern and western India to their impoverished homes in the
backward eastern states, Bihar among them. Due to poverty,
unemployment, landlessness and hunger, more than half of Bihari
households have at least one member who is a migrant, largely within
India.91

NARI PUJA: WORSHIP OF WOMEN?

Ask any Bihari and they will tell you that Chhath is the most
important festival on the calendar. Most of my female surveyors
refused to work for a week before the festival. They said they had to
prepare an array of sweets at home—from laddoos to thekuas.
Outside many houses, we saw women pounding rice for the kheer,
using large stone mortars and pestles. The excitement was palpable as
families bought new clothes and migrants returned home in droves for
the festivities. During one train ride, a Bihari migrant I met told me
that, if he did not return home for Chhath, his family would mock
him as an unworthy man.
When celebrations began in the village in Muzaffarpur district that
we were in, I was stumped by how wide and visible the hold of
patriarchy was. This was only an hour’s drive from Patna. In most
houses that I went to, women fasted for thirty-six hours at a stretch.
The men did not fast. Twice a day, at dawn and dusk, these women
walked to their local ponds, with men carrying baskets of fruits. Fully
clothed, the women would take dips in these ponds to pray to the
virile sun god.92 Four of every ten Bihari women are underweight, and
three of every five are anaemic.93 Predictably, I saw many women faint
during this marathon physical ordeal. In contrast, in Muslim homes in
Bihar and across the border in Bangladesh, during the holy month of
Ramzan (Ramadan), both men as well as women fast from dawn to
dusk.94
In West Bengal and Nepal,95 during the major Hindu festival of
Dashien (Dussehra), the goddess Durga is worshipped for her warrior
skills. Even a century ago, Begum Rokeya criticised this superficial
worship of women (nari puja), which masks their routine
subordination.96 In Bihar, on the other hand, even the illusion of
women’s worship barely exists. Instead, poet Savita Singh, in her
haunting poem about Bihari women, ponders, ‘Kaun hai mera
parmeshwar? (Who is my god?)’.97 In colloquial Hindi, husbands are
often called ‘parmeshwar’ and equated to deities. In one of my
fieldwork villages, my octogenarian host always referred to her
husband as ‘maalik’ (master). She wouldn’t think twice about eating
leftovers from his plate. She explained to me that, since husbands are
holy, foods tasted by them is like prasad (food blessed by the gods).98
Across rural Bihar, many of my female researchers confirmed that this
was indeed a common practice in their own homes too.
In most Bihari homes, as my survey recorded, women often ate last
at every meal, and also invariably the least. Rural Bihari women rarely
step out of the confines of their homes, and only 8 per cent earn an
income. With high dependence on men, 43 per cent of married Bihari
women also face domestic violence—double the Indian average.99
But why is the status of women in Bihar so dismal? What in its
history explains it? Unlike Nepal or Bangladesh, why haven’t radical
movements for social change in Bihar addressed the ‘women’s
question’?
In the second or third century, the ancient Hindu text Manusmriti
codified traditional patriarchy: ‘Though destitute of virtue, or seeking
pleasure (elsewhere), or devoid of good qualities, (yet) a husband must
be constantly worshipped as a god by a faithful wife.’100 In Bihar, these
words acquire a particular menace. Worse, the state practised one of
the most extreme forms of ‘sexploitation of the dalit women’ with the
barbaric ritual of Dola Pratha,101 where the ‘newly wed Dalit girl has
to spend her first night with local upper/middle caste/class
landlords’.102
In this climate of extreme feudal and patriarchal sexual violence,
northern Indian social reform movements have been able to make only
limited progress across centuries. In the nineteenth century, these
emancipatory movements were primarily led by men. Raja Ram
Mohan Roy fought against sati103 and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar
supported widow remarriage.104 With the gradual spread of education,
by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, in various parts of
India, Savitribai Phule, Fatima Sheikh, Sarala Devi Chaudharani,
Pandita Ramabai, Swarnakumari Devi and other women pioneers
began to lead these struggles for gender equality and education.105
However, even in the 1920s, a decade after Bihar was carved out as
a separate province from Bengal, its purdah continued to be ‘the most
deplorable’ in India.106 Although their literacy rate was less than 1 per
cent,107 Bihari women launched a vibrant anti-purdah movement. In
1929, the All India Women’s Conference held in Patna also passed
resolutions against purdah and dowry, and in support of the Child
Marriage Restraint Act enacted that year.108 Thousands of Bihari
women also actively participated in Mahatma Gandhi’s Civil
Disobedience Movement through the boycott of foreign cloth. It was
largely married, semi-literate women from smaller towns who took
part in these anti-government protests with the support of their
husbands.109
By the 1940s, women’s activist organisations had mushroomed
across India. Unfortunately, the nationalist movement continued to
glorify the virtues of self-sacrifice in the imagery of ‘Mother India’.110
After Independence, the Indian Constitution adopted universal
franchise and legislated gender equality. In those early decades of the
new nation, girls’ and women’s education spread rapidly. However,
progress in terms of true empowerment was slow. Even women’s
movements focused primarily on empowerment in the domestic space.
In 1973, for example, the left-leaning United Women’s Anti-Price Rise
Front conducted massive demonstrations against inflation.111 ‘Ten to
twenty thousand women’ went, ‘to gherao (encircle) MPs and
industrialists and offer them bangles as a token of their (the
industrialists’) emasculation’.112
In the more radical flaming fields113 of Bihar, similar to Nepal, the
Naxalite rebellion by Marxist–Leninist–Maoist armed guerrillas
championed the struggles of the oppressed.114 Since the 1960s, the
Naxal movement was opposed to the patriarchies of feudal caste
landlords, the nation-state and those that existed within the home.
Women were estimated to form a third115 of the Naxal cadre, most of
them from marginalised castes and tribes. Many of these women had
been displaced from their lands due to industrialisation, grinding
poverty, upper caste sexual violence or oppressive patriarchy.116 But
unlike Nepal,117 the agency and participation of women guerrillas in
the armed struggle118 was not socially transformative.
One crucial reason for this lack of progress was the brutal
retaliation by upper caste private militias in Bihar. While previously
militias would only target men, the ruthless Ranvir Sena, created in
1994 mainly by the Bhumihars, perpetrated femicide.119 In the 1997
Lakshmanpur Bathe massacre, they raped girls and murdered
pregnant women to symbolise ‘killing the demon in the womb’. These
men specifically targeted oppressed caste women120 with full
impunity.121 A Ranvir Sena commander openly justified their atrocities
on Dalits: ‘Yes, we kill the women because they give birth to Naxalites
… we have decided that if they kill two of us, we will ruin their whole
khandan (clan); we will kill 15 of them.’122
Since 2005, with Nitish Kumar’s rise to power as the chief minister,
violence by caste armies has reduced substantially.123 Women voters
have also enthusiastically supported his policies. In particular, the ban
on alcohol has been the most popular, along with the reservation of 50
per cent of seats for women in the panchayat elections and 35 per cent
in government jobs.

6.3: Armed private caste militias in Bihar

 Source: HRW, ‘Broken People: Caste Violence against
India’s “Untouchables”’.

In this largely semi-literate and semi-feudal society, most Bihari

women are still miles away from meaningful empowerment after
millennia of subjugation.
Since the 1990s, the Dalit ‘Feminist Standpoint’, inspired by
Marxism and Black feminism, has emphasised the overlapping layers
of oppression faced by Dalit women in terms of class, caste and
gender.124 Musahar women, in particular, typify this triple,
intersectional oppression.
The horrific rape and murder of three dozen orphaned girls in
shelter homes in my fieldwork district of Muzaffarpur illustrates this
diabolic imbalance of power.125 The main accused, a business
magnate, belonged to the upper caste. The impunity he enjoyed due to
strong political, media and bureaucratic connections highlights the
toxic stranglehold of patriarchy, feudalism and casteism in Bihar126—a
hegemony that literally stunts the life chances of Bihari women.

ABSENT STATE
India, and Bihar in particular, are also among the world’s laggards in
social spending.
In his book Last Among Equals, M.R. Sharan documents the
travails of the Samaj Parivartan Shakti Sanghathan (SPSS), a small,
independent Bihari network, largely comprising women from
marginalised castes and classes, that had sprung up to demand
employment from the government under the Mahatma Gandhi
National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 (MGNREGA, or
Manrega, as it is colloquially referred to). During my fieldwork in
Muzaffarpur district, their mud-hut office became my second home.
The women of the SPSS receive no government support, though one of
every five Bihari women has joined the state-sponsored Jeevika self-
help groups. Though Bihar remains one of the most impoverished
states, of the 100 days of NREGA work guaranteed by law, the
average days of employment provided to each participating household
in 2022-23, was only 47 days.
So, SPSS women spend most of their time knocking on the doors of
the apathetic Bihari state.
 7
SOUTHERN SUPERMODELS: SRI LANKA,
KERALA AND TAMIL NADU

Get a little more noisy and boisterous

like the suffragettes in England and
break a few glass windows.
– A.M.K. Coomaraswamy,
Secretary of the Diocese of Colombo,
addressing the Ceylon Women’s Franchise
Union in 19281

T ALL WAVES LASHED the coconut tree-lined shore. In this serene village
in Kerala, even the weathered fisherfolk were wary of plunging into
the mighty Arabian Sea. Even in the midst of such majesty, the
village’s resilient social networks were truly awe-inspiring to me. In
2018, Kerala had been devastated by a flood. After two years of
COVID-19, the overall mood in the state was distinctly grim. In God’s
Own Country, tourism had drastically declined. Income from fishing
and other traditional occupations had fallen substantially. Many
breadwinners had lost their jobs in the Middle East and other foreign
shores, and had been forced to return home. Money was scarce all
around. Despite these trials, the village had no dearth of the bare
essentials for survival—food, shelter and social bonds.
Since the 1990s, Malayali women across Kerala have formed nearly
300,000 Kudumbashree (Prosperity to the Family)2 neighbourhood
groups with government support. Similar to the Jeevika self-help
groups in Bihar and Aama Samuhas in Nepal, 4.6 million village
women from every second home across Kerala meet with their
Kudumbashree neighbours each week to chat, bond and pool their
savings. Each group also specialises in producing simple goods for
household consumption and sale. In the village where I was staying, I
visited two Kudumbashree meetings which were being held within a
few metres of each other. In one, the women had collectively made
packets of very low-cost detergent powder and soaps. They had also
filled used plastic water bottles with sweet-smelling liquid household
cleaners and dishwashing liquid. These household necessities helped
each family to save money and allowed the collectives to earn modest
revenues. A family could purchase all their household cleaning
products for two months with only a Rs 500 note. Branded, factory-
made products at local shops would have cost at least twice as much.
The other Kudumbashree group I met was equally enterprising.
These women had procured a strip of land by the beach from the local
panchayat, and grew vegetables there. Since the land was not very
fertile, the quality of these vegetables, in terms of shape, colour and
texture, were not suitable for sale in the market. But they were more
than sufficient for their own family needs, thus helping the women
provide nutritious meals to their families and reducing household
expenses. Similarly, across the length and breadth of Kerala, more
than 40,000 Kudumbashree women’s groups cultivate more than 10
million acres of what were earlier fallow lands.3
The Kerala government has not only actively supported these
Kudumbashree groups from the very beginning, but has also
encouraged their convergence with NREGA to increase women’s
employment. Now, 90 per cent of NREGA workers in Kerala are
women, the highest in the country.4
The fair price ration shop in this village where I was staying was
run by a woman as a family business. In Kerala, nearly every family is
entitled to a ration card, even if one-third of them do not include any
subsidy.5 Families across classes purchase their grains from these
ration shops. The poorest households receive twenty-eight kilos of rice
absolutely free of cost every month. We saw some of these families
walk barefoot to the shop with several neatly folded plastic bags
tucked under their arms to carry back the rice. Wealthier families
usually arrived on bicycles or motorbikes. The public distribution
system across Kerala has become a shining symbol of food security,
come what may—flood, sunshine, or indeed a pandemic.6
The anganwadis in Kerala are, equally, a class apart. I requested a
few teenage girls who were returning from college to take me to the
nearest anganwadi. As we entered, the teacher smiled, recognising
them as her ex-students. Now she was teaching their younger siblings.
She had also taught their parents, most of whom were fisherfolk in
this village. Later, I requested the college-goers and their younger
siblings to gather around for a group photo. They stood in the order
of their heights to show me the different generations of students
taught by the same anganwadi teacher. It was fascinating how one
educated woman teacher could impact an entire village.
Similarly, in Tamil Nadu, I met many anganwadi workers who had
worked for thirty to forty years as a part of the Integrated Child
Development Scheme initiated in 1975. These welfare workers were
primarily women who had dedicated their entire lives to educating the
young for a modest salary and had in the bargain shaped generations.
In anganwadis across Tamil Nadu and Kerala, I saw that, unlike
Bihar, children were fed two small meals every day. It was like
clockwork, punctual and without any fuss. On arrival in the morning,
children usually received a healthy snack such as channa chundal (stir-
fried chickpeas). Then, after some games and learning, they all ate a
small lunch. Some would then lie on mats on the floor for a quick
afternoon nap.
This anganwadi by the beach in Kerala was particularly well-
resourced. It had marble flooring that an ecotourism resort nearby had
laid as part of their corporate social responsibility initiatives. A five-
star hotel had also donated many toys and games. Seeing the boys in
the anganwadi casually play with dolls was a delight. I noticed that
their teacher, too, looked on proudly.
Unsurprisingly, since the turn of the twentieth century, Kerala and
its neighbour Sri Lanka have achieved levels of human development
comparable to developed countries despite modest levels of per capita
incomes. For this unique feat, they have been collectively hailed as the
‘Kerala–Sri Lanka model’.7 Decades later, their neighbour Tamil
Nadu, too, caught up with these social development pioneers.8
The main question, however, is, how did these southern Indian
states achieve similar human development as their neighbour Sri
Lanka, when large parts of northern India have lagged behind? Why
are anganwadi workers in Kerala so committed, unlike those in Bihar?
Why do women of all castes and religions join the Kudumbashree
groups and work together with such camaraderie? Like Bangladesh
and Nepal, did the Southern Neighbours trio, too, invest in diluting
inequalities?9 Also puzzling is why Sri Lanka and Kerala, despite being
politically different regions, had their human development
acceleration at roughly around the same time—from 1820 to 1977?
Also, why did Tamil Nadu take longer to develop to the same level?
Kerala, Tamil Nadu and their neighbour Sri Lanka share deep-
rooted social, economic, historical and cultural ties. So, it is interesting
that this southern triad has progressed in human development without
rapid economic growth. Between 1911 and 1955, for example, when
female life expectancy in Sri Lanka doubled from thirty to sixty years,
per capita incomes were stagnant in the country. This experience is
different from that of developed countries or even of newly
industrialising ‘miracle’ Asian economies.10 Jean Drèze infers:

If Gujarat is a model, then the real toppers in development

indicators, like Kerala and Tamil Nadu, must be supermodels.11

Since Gujarat is certainly not a model for human development,12 the

term ‘Southern Supermodels’ could be termed an exaggeration. But it
does serve to highlight the exceptional performance of these southern
states compared to the Indian average.
The advances of Bangladesh and Nepal are of more recent origin,
both within the last half-century. The Southern Supermodels, on the
other hand, were early achievers. Sri Lanka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu’s
successes date back to the pre-colonial period. This book examines the
specific time periods when these regions experienced their respective
human development acceleration: Sri Lanka (1830–1977), Kerala
(1820–1975) and Tamil Nadu (1916–to date).13 It does not, therefore,
comment on their present socio-political scenarios.

COMMONALITIES
For millennia, the three Southern Supermodels have shared close ties
due to their geographic proximity. For instance, Kerala is named after
its abundant coconut trees,14 which probably came originally from Sri
Lanka.15 But, in fact, Sri Lanka and the two southern Indian states
have entirely different histories, languages and cultures.
Mapping the chronological evolution of the distinct ‘critical
junctures’ of these three regions helps to understand the period of
their human development advances.16 Interestingly, Sri Lanka and
Kerala have roughly simultaneous development arcs. Tamil Nadu
matured decades later.
Despite their differences, the Southern Supermodels as early
pioneers share four overarching similarities which aided their human
development advances.

1. Social Reform Movements

In the southern trio, the cumulative impact of successive social
movements has considerably bridged inequalities. Sociologist Charles
Tilly argues that social movements are a form of contentious politics.
They enable marginalised communities to challenge the ‘exploitation
and opportunity hoarding’ done by ruling-class governments and
elites.17 The strong influence of communist movements is another
common feature in the southern trio.

Kerala
The slow ripples of Kerala’s backwaters reflect an unusually turbulent
social history. Most tourists cruise along these famous backwaters on
tranquil houseboats. My experience of travelling in a diesel-powered
commuter boat with a loud spluttering engine was entirely different.
These journeys in Alleppey gave me a flavour of the local sights and
sounds. As we waited at a boat-stop to pick up some local passengers,
I noticed a huge, glass-encased statue of Mahatma Ayyankali, the anti-
caste social reformer. The social history of Kerala is firmly anchored in
its radical social movements.
Until the eighteenth century, Kerala had one of the worst forms of
caste discrimination. Unlike the four-fold Varna system in the rest of
India, the Nambudiri Brahmins of Kerala considered all other castes
to be Shudras. They practised not only untouchability but also
‘distance pollution’ and ‘unseeability’.

An Ezhava must keep a distance of 36 steps from a Brahmin,

and a Pulayan must not approach him within 96 steps. There
are even castes so defiling that their mere sight alone is
polluting …18

Only after decades of anti-caste movements was there a ‘loosening and

levelling of the cultural soil’.19 Kerala’s evolution as a ‘metaphor for a
high HDI despite a low GNP’ would have been inconceivable without
these social justice movements.20
In the 1800s, two hundred Ezhavas21 (Izhavas) attempted to enter
the Vaikkom temple. But the protesters were attacked viciously,
murdered and barred from all public roads.22 In the nineteenth
century, Christian missionaries in Travancore23 began campaigns
against agrestic slavery and for the empowerment of marginalised
castes. The missionaries also influenced John Munro, the British
resident in Travancore, to initiate government policies to expand
education.24 The main motive of the missionaries was evangelical. But
by educating and uplifting the marginalised castes, they prepared the
ground for future social movements.
The Mappila revolts (1836–1922)25 also marked a distinct change in
subaltern protests. Muslim tenants agitated against their severe
economic exploitation.26 By the time the British crushed the Mappila
rebellion, the demands of various subjugated communities for social
justice had begun in earnest.
Although the Ezhavas achieved some economic prosperity,
education and social mobility, they continued to experience severe
caste discrimination. In 1881, they formed 16 per cent of Kerala’s
population but held only 1 per cent of government jobs. By
comparison, Nairs (Nayars), with roughly an equal population share,
held 52 per cent of government jobs. Brahmins, who formed only 0.8
per cent of the population had cornered 18 per cent of these plum
jobs.27
In 1891, therefore, 10,000 non-Brahmins issued the ‘Malayali
Memorial’ petition accusing the government of favouring the
Brahmins.28 Political scientist Prerna Singh believes that this petition
marked a turning point in the building of an overarching sense of
Malayali ‘we-ness’ and sub-national pride in Kerala.29 Soon after, in
1896, the caste-specific Ezahava (Izahava) Memorial was submitted
which demanded greater equality of opportunity between castes.
Ezhava activism finally bore fruit only in the 1930s. The popular
Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam (SNDP), a religious and
social reform movement in Travancore, enabled the ‘transformation of
caste consciousness to class consciousness’.30 Sree Narayana Guru
(1856–1928) preached an inclusive philosophy of ‘One Caste, One
Religion and One God’.31 Since Ezhavas were denied entry into most
temples, the movement built new temples open to all castes. Narayana
Guru’s followers also silently supported the landmark 1924-25
Vaikkom Temple Entry Satyagraha, led by the Congress party.32 Even
Mahatma Gandhi came to Vaikkom to negotiate with the temple
management.33 Even then, the government issued a legal proclamation
permitting temple-entry for everyone only a decade later.
At the bottom of Kerala’s social pyramid, the Pulayas and Parayas,
as agrestic slaves, were even more marginalised than the Ezhavas.34
Mahatma Ayyankali (1863–1941), whose shrines are so prominent
across Kerala, emerged as a Pulaya leader in Travancore. He urged his
followers to fight for their children’s right to education, and their right
to use public roads and wear dignified clothes.35 These cumulative
cultural revolts gradually eroded caste barriers.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the matrilineal Nair taravad36
joint-family also collapsed.37 Social scientist Robin Jeffrey argues that,
in a society plagued by jarring inequalities, upper caste déraciné men
were drawn to communist ideals to fill this social vacuum.38
After Independence, in 1956, modern Kerala was created through
the merger of the princely states of Cochin and Travancore, along
with the Madras Presidency district of Malabar. A year later, the state
welcomed the first democratically elected Communist government in
India (and the world). For more than ten of the twenty years until
1977, Kerala had Communist-led or Communist-majority coalition
governments. By the 1970s, the ‘Kerala model’ of development was
being eulogised, as the state had achieved a progressive reduction in
caste and class inequalities with high human development outcomes.39
Academics have variously attributed Kerala’s successes to its class
struggles,40 the matrilineal legacy41 and the sub-national ‘we-ness’
solidarity.42 My research, however, indicates that the long arc of
Kerala’s evolution over the course of more than a century of social
movements (including the oft-neglected 1813-1859 Channar Upper
Cloth revolt can be placed largely before rather than after
Independence.43 From the first Vaikkom Temple Entry movement in
the early nineteenth century, Kerala’s evolution as a model of human
development has been a hard-won achievement over centuries, even
though caste prejudices have not entirely vanished. Academic V.K.
Ramachandran lists out the wide range of movements which enabled
Kerala to transform itself into a ‘development model’:

The freedom movement, the radical and anti-caste sections of

the social reform movement, the movement against
landlordism, the movement against autocracy and monarchy,
the movement for the linguistic reorganization of the region
and the establishment of a unified Kerala, and, of course, the
modern movement of workers, peasants and radical
intellectuals … Communists played a leading part in the
 literary movement and in the cultural movement (including the
theatre movement) in Kerala.44

The left movement has also been one of the many catalysts of change
in Kerala, in the later period. The first biography of Marx in an Indian
language was published in Malayalam in 1912.45 Post-Independence,
Kerala democratically elected the first communist government in
India.46 This government implemented radical reforms in land rights,
healthcare, education and food distribution. The communist parties in
Kerala, unlike West Bengal,47 had a mass political base of workers,
peasants, agricultural labourers, students, teachers, youth and
women.48 Kerala has also had communist or communist-majority
coalition governments in a series of short spurts: 1957–59, 1967–69,
1969–70 and 1970–77. Even when the left has not been in power,
public services have remained at the centrestage of socio-political
debates, which has led to the acceleration of human development.

Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu’s human development gains, too, would have been
inconceivable without its vibrant socio-political movements. These
reform movements challenged stultifying caste practices. Previously,
for many castes ‘mere acts of going to school, drinking water, wearing
footwear, sporting decent clothes, riding bicycles, entering a
restaurant, finding a place to stay during travel have been a
challenge.’49
Tamil Nadu’s human development achievements, however, were
largely visible only after Independence. They have been shaped by
successive waves of predominantly identity-based anti-caste ‘great
social movements’.50 The Non-Brahmin Dravidian Self-Respect
movement and later the Dalit movement have diluted centuries of
Brahminical hegemony. The fruits of this Tamil renaissance have also
encouraged everyday ‘decentralized collective action’, for example,
hunger strikes and mock funerals to demand and monitor public
services such as NREGA employment.51 So, successive political
regimes have continuously been under pressure to fund welfare
services, especially for marginalised communities.
I had my first taste of the flavour of these public services at the
Amma Canteens in Chennai. In the boiling afternoon heat, the canteen
I went to was packed with customers of all classes. Since there was no
place to sit, we all stood around tall, stainless-steel tables. The
sambar-rice and thayir sadam (curd-rice), prepared by the female
cooks, each cost only 5 Indian Rupees and tasted like home-cooked
food. Labourers, IT sector workers, migrants, students and even
backpacking tourists flocked like bees to these subsidised canteens.
The late Tamil Nadu chief minister and former actor J. Jayalalithaa
had started these populist Amma Unavagam canteens in the last few
years of her life. They have since bridged class and political divides.
Even Chief Minister M.K. Stalin of the rival Dravida Munnetra
Kazhagam party has retained these popular canteens. These subsidised
cafeterias, vote-catchers though they may be, embody the Dravidian
spirit of public service.
A hundred years ago, even the existence of these innocuous eateries
would have been unthinkable in Tamil Nadu. In the late nineteenth
century, C. Iyothee Thass, a Dalit intellectual,52 described the extreme
social segregation between castes:

If those who are known as Brahmins enter the villages and

streets occupied by our people, who were the original
Dravidians, but now called Panchamas by the Hindu high-
caste-men, they (Brahmins) are driven out of the place in the
most disgraceful manner amidst tumult and uproar on the
ground that the spots stepped on by them have become
polluted. The measure adopted to eradicate the impurity thus
caused, is to cleanse the places trodden by these so called
Brahmins by means of cow-dung, and the pots used for such
purposes are destroyed beyond the limits of such towns. This
treatment is similar to the one done when a person is dead and
the body removed from the house … Such is the hatred
 between the two classes of people … I began to enquire into the
cause for such animosity between the two classes from the time
I could think myself.53

In this environment of acute caste stratification, Brahmins, who

formed only 3 per cent of the population in 1886, ‘held 42 per cent of
all posts in the Madras Government’.54 The Dravidian movement
arose to challenge this hegemony. The first step was the 1916 ‘Non-
Brahmin Manifesto’55 published by prominent leaders of marginalised
castes. Perhaps, Kerala’s 1891 Malayali Memorial and the 1896
Ezhava Memorial were inspirations. Within a year, the ripples of
change were visible.
The framers of the original Non-Brahmin Manifesto formed the
Justice Party. E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker, later revered as Periyar,56 also
joined forces with them. In the face of this intense public pressure, two
years later, the 1918 Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms reserved 28 seats
for the non-Brahmin majority in the Madras Legislative Council. The
Justice Party then went on to win the 1920 elections. In a first in
India, they introduced reservation quotas for non-Brahmins in
government.
But Dravidian activism was truly ignited when Periyar launched the
radical Suyamariathai Iyakkam (Self-Respect Movement) in 1926.
Initially, this social movement only promoted inter-caste dining and
inter-caste marriage. Over time, the movement’s goals became more
radical, seeking to abolish caste and religion entirely. For at least three
decades, this ‘cultural project of emboldening people’57 systematically
diluted caste hegemony in Tamil society, polity, economy and even in
the spoken word. In 1938, the anti-Hindi agitations opposed Hindi
for being an alien language,58 also pointing to its affinity to Sanskrit
and Brahminism. This language rebellion united the Justice Party and
the Self-Respecters towards building the Dravida Kazhagam, led by
Periyar, as a mass organisation.
In the 1950s, Tamil Nadu was born as a separate linguistic state in
independent India. At that time, the anti-Brahmin spirit was so potent
that the 1954 Congress Chief Minister K. Kamaraj established his first
cabinet without a single Brahmin. He also introduced universal
education and free noon meals for school children.59 Additionally, his
government rolled out extensive rural electrification that boosted
irrigation, agricultural productivity and industrialisation.
Interestingly, both the major political parties in Tamil Nadu today,
the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and All India Anna Dravida
Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), owe their birth to the Self-Respect
Movement of the Dravida Kazhagam. For nearly five decades, these
two Dravidian parties have traded power in every election, despite
colossal corruption charges against each of them. With many larger-
than-life film makers and artists from the Tamil film industry in their
ranks, the two Dravidian parties have amplified the anti-caste ethos.60
Artists, writers, poets, musicians and filmmakers have celebrated the
spirit of Dravidian consciousness and Tamil pride. The second anti-
Hindi agitation in the 1960s was the zenith of this Tamil cultural
renaissance.61
In 1967, the DMK won the state elections with the former film
scriptwriter M. Karunanidhi as the kingmaker. A decade later, M.G.
Ramachandran (MGR), with his film hero image of a ‘protector of the
poor’, rose to power with the breakaway AIADMK faction. The
1980s saw rapid improvements in the primary health care system,
school education, nutrition, childcare and other public services. This
also translated into improvements in life expectancy, infant mortality,
maternal mortality and other human development outcomes.62
In 1990, when the Mandal Commission reforms ushered in
reservations for OBCs nationally, only the Tamil Nadu assembly
welcomed this historic initiative. Reservations had already been highly
effective in Tamil Nadu. Non-Brahmins employed in gazetted
government jobs rose from a mere 19 per cent in 1927 in the British
Madras province to more than half in 1970 in post-Independence
Tamil Nadu.

7.1: Administration of the Madras Province (and

later Tamil Nadu) in Gazetted posts by caste and
community, 1927–1970
 Source: Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution: The
Rise of the Lower Castes in North India, p. 240, Table 7.4

While marginalised castes gained upward mobility with the Self-

Respect Movement, Dalits continue to remain extremely marginalised
and oppressed. Caste violence against Dalits is rampant.63 Villages in
Tamil Nadu are highly caste segregated. Dalit colonies are usually
located on the outskirts, with access to fewer public amenities. Even
Dalit women elected as panchayat presidents face blatant
discrimination.64 The Dalit movement in Tamil Nadu has a long way
to go to achieve equalities.65
In 1987, the Vanniyar agitations began,66 but it was only in 2021
that the government set aside a specific quota for the sub-caste within
the existing quota reserved for largely Dalits and Adivasis in the Most
Backward Classes (MBC) and Denotified Communities (DNCs) Act
2021, though the Supreme Court in 2021 expunged the law.67 In
2007, after agitations by the Muslim Munnetra Kazhagam, a 3.5 per
cent exclusive reservation was carved out from the larger OBC quota
for Muslims and Christians each.68 Tamil Nadu has improved its
social development outcomes primarily due to these concerted efforts
at reservations in both the political and social spheres.
The left parties have never officially held power in Tamil Nadu. But
when communist organisations were banned in 1924, the Self-
Respecters sheltered them.69 In the first state assembly elections held in
1951-52, the Dravida Kazhagam (DK) had also decided to extend
support to the Communist Party. So, the influence of left ideologies in
moulding Tamil Nadu’s welfare state has not been entirely negligible.

Sri Lanka
In the third century BCE, Buddhism was introduced in the island nation
by Emperor Ashoka’s children Mahinda and Sanghamitra. In Ceylon
(Sri Lanka since 1972), caste divisions, especially among the majority
Buddhist community, have never been as stark as in India. The
majority caste of agriculturalists was called the ‘Goigama’ in the
Sinhalese-dominated areas and ‘Vellalla’ in the Tamil areas.70 Also, as
a Ceylonese suffragette highlighted in 1928:

There is no untouchability in Ceylon … unlike the people of

India, the Ceylonese, both men and women, mix freely in
society and have no scruples about mixed dining. Even
interracial marriages are not anything extraordinary in modern
Ceylon.71

Ceylon also has had a long history of colonisation—by the Portuguese

(1505–1658), the Dutch (1658–1795) and the British (1795–1948).72
The British considered Ceylon to be the ‘senior colony of the new
empire’.73 The imperial administration tried to implement in Ceylon
ideas of social liberalism, especially Fabianism, which was influential
in Britain at the time.74 The Ceylonese nationalist, trade unionist and
suffragette movements also contributed significantly to the pressure to
build a welfare state.
The vision of the Sri Lankan welfare state was initiated with the
1833 Colebrooke–Cameroon Reforms.75 They ensured that Ceylonese
received university education and were appointed in the bureaucracy.76
However, the real breakthrough happened two decades before
Independence. The Donoughmore Commission visited Ceylon in 1929
to introduce partial ‘self-government’.77 In 1931, Ceylon was the first
Asian country to adopt universal franchise.78 This was only two years
after women in Britain earned the right to vote.79
Christian missionaries have also been prominent agents of change.80
Mission churches insisted that converts of all castes should sit together
as equals. Indeed, school education proved to be a great leveller. In
1893 and 1908, Theosophist Annie Besant, co-founder of the Fabian
Society, also visited Ceylon to advocate for women’s education.
Further, Anagarika Dharmapala,81 founder of the Maha Bodhi society
in 1891, led a Buddhist reform movement (1875–1933) to rekindle the
spirit of egalitarianism.82
In the 1930s, the influence of the left ideology was also strong. Left-
wing political parties built an urban trade union movement, influenced
by the British labour movement, Fabian socialists and Trotskyism.83
The anti-imperial Suriya Mal Movement of the 1930s against the sale
of poppies to British veterans also politically supported a militant
strike by textile workers. The Lanka Sama Samaja Party, an offshoot
of this strike, was the nation’s first socialist and later Trotskyite
political force.
Since Sri Lanka’s independence in 1948, the right-wing United
National Party (UNP) and the centre-left coalition headed by the Sri
Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) have alternated in gaining electoral
power.84 During the period of accelerated human development, the
SLFP was in power in three stretches: 1956–60, 1960–65 and 1970–
77. The Trotskyite Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) and the
Communist Party of Sri Lanka have both been part of these successive
SLFP-led left-wing coalitions. Even when the left was out of power,
governments have sought to maintain welfare subsidies to stem the left
tide. In this post-Independence phase (1948–77), Sri Lanka
substantially strengthened the welfare state. After the Second World
War, the government provided all families with free rice rations.85 The
1953 Health Services Act insisted on compulsory rural postings for
doctors.86 By the early 1970s, the government was spending 10 per
cent of Sri Lankan GDP on welfare.
 However, in 1977, the newly elected right-wing government
liberalised the economy and rolled back the welfare state. By 1981,
welfare expenditures fell to 4 per cent of GDP. The government even
replaced the earlier universal free rice scheme with food stamps
targeted only at the ‘poorest of the poor’. In these years, the armed
insurgency by the Tamil minority in the north also erupted. The Sri
Lankan welfare state thus ebbed.
I saw the embers of the once mighty Sri Lankan welfare services
after the 2004 tsunami. At that time, I was visiting the country to
evaluate the state of schools for a civil society education coalition. The
schools we visited were struggling with the availability of electricity
and infrastructure. The most lasting impression etched in my memory
is of a family I met in Galle. They continued to live in utmost fear in a
home that had developed cracks. While they were grateful to be alive,
the women showed me their idle sewing machines—all their raw
materials had been washed away and international orders had dried
up. On that trip, I also met the humanitarian A.T. Ariyaratne, the
founder of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement. Rooted in
Gandhian and Buddhist ideals, the movement focused on collective
solidarity and played an important role in post-tsunami reconstruction
to mitigate the dilution of Sri Lanka’s welfare state.

2. Universal Public Services

In a school playground in Chennai, a group of boys were playing an
unusual game during their recess. They had lined loose bricks together
to resemble a small, open-air car, which they took turns to sit in and
‘drive’. I felt myself smiling as I watched their joy in this simple game
under the shade of trees in the hot, sultry Chennai summer. Creativity
and resourcefulness, I soon realised, was also encouraged within the
classroom. Most Tamil Nadu teachers are expected to plot students’
milestones on an innovative chart designed as a game of snakes and
ladders. This chart depicts all the necessary competencies a child needs
to accomplish from grade 1 to grade 5, such as recognition of
alphabets, learning multiplication tables and mastering carry-over
subtraction. Teachers map each child’s progress, up a ladder as they
gain some competencies or down a snake as they forget others. This
evaluation enables teachers to quickly know which lessons to refresh
till each student climbs all the appropriate learning ladders.
Tamil Nadu is one of the few states in India to adopt this model of
continuous and comprehensive evaluation (CCE) as envisioned in the
Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009.
Almost every classroom has plastic trays stacked in racks, filled with
activity sheets for each child to complete during the year. Most of
these activity sheets are innovative. For example, addition is taught
with currency notes. Photos pictorially explain the meaning of words.
Each day, after children complete the designated activities in the
classroom, the teacher grades them. There are no end-of-term exams.
With progressive learning, every day in the classroom counts.
In several schools, the four walls of the classroom have been
converted into blackboards with a simple coat of black paint. These
blackboards are divided into segments, and each child is assigned a
slot with their name written in chalk. The children can freely doodle
on their wall-space every day. Most children we met were very
possessive of this space, proudly displaying their work on it. Schools
in Tamil Nadu are certainly a cut above those in most of India.
A distinguishing feature of the southern trio has been their historical
support for education as a universal tool to temper inequalities. For
example, Travancore’s Queen Gowri Parvati Bayi’s Royal Rescript on
Education is considered to be the Magna Carta of education. As early
as 1818, she boldly proclaimed:

The state should defray the entire cost of the education of its
people in order that there might be no backwardness in the
spread of enlightenment among them …87

Among the southern trio, this history has led to a ‘culture of public
action’ to demand public services with a sense of entitlement.88 Tamil
Nadu typifies this trait. On the one hand, politicians, mainly from the
popular Tamil film industry,89 have engaged in competitive populism
to woo voters with freebies.90 On the other hand, Tamil voters have
also developed an aggressive sense of entitlement. Social scientist S.
Vivek, in his book Delivering Public Services Effectively, describes
how bureaucrats and politicians constantly face pressure from
‘uncontrollable people’91 who demand public services as a matter of
right.92 The political class in the largely Dravidian two-party state has
been consistently committed to universal, rather than targeted,
services. The majority of people in Tamil Nadu avail the services of
government schools, primary healthcare centres, public distribution
ration shops and other government services.93
Similar to other human development high-achievers, the southern
trio also share three characteristics.94
Firstly, they tend to invest more as a proportion of GDP in ‘equity-
enhancing’ policies for education, healthcare, nutrition and other
essential services. In Sri Lanka, between 1959 and 1968, for example,
expenditure on primary and secondary education was one of the
highest in Asia. More than 4.5 per cent of GNP was spent to achieve a
literacy rate of 85 per cent.95 The government funded compulsory
education, food subsidies and free healthcare through heavy taxation
on the export of plantation crops.96
Secondly, the southern trio also focus more on primary rather than
tertiary levels of care. In healthcare, for example, prevention is often
better and cheaper than cure in hospitals.97 Kerala’s most impressive
public health programmes focused on immunisation. Smallpox
vaccination began in 1879 in Travancore and reached the entire
population within six decades.98

7.2: Literacy rates (15+ years) in Kerala’s erstwhile

provinces of Travancore, Cochin and Malabar
compared to Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, 1871–2011
 Source: Created by the author with data obtained for
India, Kerala and Tamil Nadu from 1871–1991: V.K.
Ramachandran, ‘On Kerala’s Development Achievements’;
1991–2011: Census of India. Data obtained for Sri Lanka
from 1881–1981: James Warner Björkman, ‘Health Policy
and Politics in Sri Lanka: Developments in the South Asian
Welfare State’; 1981–2011: World Development Indicators

Lastly, the three regions have also effectively tapped into synergies
between health, nutrition and education.99 During the Second World
War, for example, apart from school meals, ‘fair price’ ration shops
were also established in Kerala, a food-deficit state.100
Still, economist Surjit Bhalla has questioned, ‘Is Sri Lanka an
Exception?’ in human development and even claims that ‘it might
have been a “failure”’.101 But his analysis measures Sri Lanka’s
advances only in the limited time period of 1960–78. By then, the
country was well past its prime acceleration. The 1970s actually
witnessed ‘a retreat from the expansionism of social welfare
programs’.102 Instead, ‘the really fast expansion of Sri Lanka’s social
welfare programmes came much earlier, going back at least to the
1940s’, when food distribution, school meals, malaria eradication and
other public policies were expanded.103 Bhalla’s criticism, therefore,
has been justly dismissed for the ‘inappropriate’ time period examined
in his analysis and the lack of appreciation of the ‘accumulated history
of the expansion of social welfare programs stretching over many
decades’.104
Still, to re-examine the superior performance of the southern trio, I
have analysed education as an illustrative case during the entire period
of the ascendency, from 1871 onwards.
I have compiled and created a unique graph with more than a
century of comparative statistical data on literacy rates as available
from 1871 to 2011. This illustration clearly shows that even as early
as 1881, Ceylon was ahead of its neighbours Kerala and Tamil Nadu
in terms of literacy. Within Kerala, the princely states of Cochin and
Travancore performed better than British-governed Malabar. After the
introduction of specific policies, distinct acceleration is evident.
Importantly, the data also shows that rapid improvements in mass
education in Kerala largely predate the post-independence left-wing
governments by several decades.

Sri Lanka
In Ceylon, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch
colonists established co-educational parish schools.105 Christian
missionaries also built several schools. By 1884, there was one school
for every 900 Ceylonese.106 In 1870, when India’s first ‘Lady Doctor’
Anandibai Joshi was a mere child of 5 years—eventually she went to
the United States to study medicine in 1885107—the Ceylon Medical
College had already been established, and several women doctors had
been trained.108 In 1911, primary education was also made
compulsory across the island.
The 1927109 Donoughmore Constitution,110 which had a clear
vision that ‘the Ceylonese peoples are now coming to a new
independence’,111 marked the birth of the Sri Lankan welfare state.112
In the 1930s, universal franchise ‘stimulated the politically conscious
minority to provide greater educational facilities for the rather
apathetic majority.’113 The education budget more than doubled from
1931 to 1945. The 1943 Education Act guaranteed all Sri Lankans
free education in their mother tongues. In the 1940s, rural secondary
schools were also opened across the island. Economically
disadvantaged children even received state scholarships. Also ‘the
Minister of Education made a great contribution to public health
when he succeeded against fierce opposition in introducing a system of
school meals for children’.114
After Independence, Sri Lanka strengthened its welfare state. By the
1960s, education essentially became a state monopoly, with free
education for all students from school to university.115

Kerala
As early as 1817, the Royal Rescript by the Queen of Travancore,116
declared that the state would support the educational expenses of all
citizens. The state would also fund two teachers in every primary
school. This also aligned with Macauley’s 1835 ‘Minute on Indian
education’ to promote English education and create an Indian elite to
support colonial rule.117 By 1866, across Kerala, vernacular schools
had mushroomed.118 With the increase in free schools for girls,
enrolments trebled in the 1890s and more than doubled in the next
decade.119
But why did the princely states invest so heavily in schools and
universal public services? Sociologist Manali Desai argues that the
monarchies of Cochin and Travancore wanted to prevent annexation
by the British. The governor of Madras, for example, had threatened
to annex Travancore when the spread of literacy was temporarily
neglected during the reign of Raja Swati Tirunal (1829–47).120
Christian missionaries also supported mass education and the
monarchs adopted educational expansion as a ‘preemptive response to
British proximity and the threat of annexation as well as the threat of
mass conversions to Christianity’.121 Over time, these cumulative
educational investments, in a deeply unequal society, ignited radical
caste and class movements.122

7.3: Male Literacy Rates in Travancore by Caste,

1875–1931

Source: Collated by the author from the Imperial Census

of India data of many years especially that of Ayyar 1922
and Pillai 1932

In the nineteenth century, literacy in Kerala depended on caste and

religion. Brahmin men had the highest literacy, followed in descending
order by Nairs, Ezhavas and, finally, the so-called agrestic slaves.123
Children of the marginalised castes were not even permitted to enter
government schools.124 Only the missionary schools offered free
education to all.125 Literacy rates of ‘Christians were ahead of
Muslims’ and ‘right behind the Nayars’.126 Despite matrilineal
traditions, in 1875, only 1.2 per cent of Nair women in Travancore
could write.
There were a series of agitations by the oppressed castes to demand
entry into state-run schools and public employment. Finally, in 1904,
the government committed to funding the education of children from
marginalised castes.127 Special schools were also opened for oppressed
castes and girls.128 In 1911-12, the restriction on the admission of
Pulaya children into government schools was removed. With the
expansion of ‘print capitalism’, textbooks, newspapers and magazines
were also published for mass consumption.129 Public libraries were
opened across cities and villages. These reading rooms built the
foundation for a Malayalam literary and cultural renaissance.
By 1931, even before Independence, Kerala was the most literate
region of India. Around 34 per cent of the population in Cochin
district, 29 per cent in Travancore, and 14 per cent in Malabar could
write, compared to 8 per cent in India as a whole. The first communist
chief minister of Kerala, who was earlier with the Congress party,
described in an interview:

[O]ur effort was to have, in every village, a village Congress

Committee, and, attached to it, a reading room and a night
school.130

Tamil Nadu
In contrast, until 1951, the literacy rate in the Madras Presidency was
not higher than the Indian average of 19 per cent. M.C. Rajah, a
prominent Dalit leader in the Madras Legislative Council (1920–23),
had powerfully argued that, for marginalised castes, subsidised tuition
alone would not be sufficient. School meals, scholarships and other
complementary policies would also be essential.131 The Madras
Elementary Education Act of 1920 devolved the responsibility for
education onto local authorities.132 With that, the enrolment of girls
rose modestly.
Only after Independence did women’s education in Tamil Nadu see
a rapid increase. The first chief minister of Tamil Nadu, Rajaji,
introduced a controversial system of caste-based education. In
contrast, his successor K. Kamaraj (1954–63), also of the Congress,
built a school in every village. His government also pioneered free
noon meals for school children. Within a span of seven years, primary
enrolments accelerated.133 Subsequently, MGR (1977–87)
universalised these meals across schools. Then, in the DMK years,
nutritious eggs were added to the menu.134
The spread of education, including medical colleges, predated by
several decades, improvements in health outcomes, such as decline in
infant deaths. Over time, each advance has been mutually reinforcing,
especially the progress in gender outcomes.
Two questions come up in this context. Why did the historical
development of literacy rates in Kerala parallel that of Ceylon during
1830–1977? Why did Tamil Nadu develop only decades after
Independence? The timelines of the three regions clearly indicate three
significant developments.135
Firstly, Kerala’s human development accelerated in the nineteenth
century after a series of social movements by the subaltern classes. In
Tamil Nadu, it was only after the 1920 Non-Brahmin Manifesto that
the Dravidian Self-Respect Movement germinated. Secondly, the
princely states in Kerala offered more significant avenues for social
progress. The Madras province, on the other hand, was governed by
the British.136 Lastly, the work of the Christian missionaries in
education and social justice was greater in Kerala than in Tamil Nadu.
This laid the foundation for the empowerment of oppressed castes and
women.

3. Women’s Agency
The advances of the Southern Supermodels are often credited to the
greater freedoms enjoyed by women. Women’s agency is usually
displayed in their ability ‘to earn an independent income, to work
outside the home, to be educated, to own property’.137 The ability to
vote and be elected to political office are also equally important. Each
of the three regions faced their own unique challenges in bringing
women to the forefront.
My research highlights only three iconic turning points. Kerala’s
nineteenth-century Channar Upper Cloth Revolt for women to earn
the right to dignified clothing, Sri Lanka’s twentieth-century
suffragette movement for women’s right to vote and Tamil Nadu’s
Dravidian Self-Respect Movement, with women’s emancipation at its
core.

Kerala
The success of Kerala is often attributed to the matrilineal Nair
community.138 But the Nairs form only 16 per cent of Kerala’s
population. Women belonging to marginalised castes have had to fight
for every inch of their freedom.
Barbaric customs did not permit women of oppressed castes139 to
clothe the upper parts of their bodies.
Only Brahmin and Nair women had the privilege to cover
themselves when they went out, but not within the home.140 Especially
in the presence of the princely family and Namboodiri Brahmins, all
marginalised castes had to be semi-naked. ‘The Namboodiri Brahmin
women would bare their breasts only to the idols of deities; the Nairs
would bare their breasts to the Brahmins; those lower in the caste
order—the Channars, the Ezhavas and the Nadars, amongst others—
had to bare their breasts to all the savarnas’.141
In the seventeenth century, an East India Company writer John
Grose described even Queen of Attingal as being bare-chested at the
Padmanabha temple procession. It is said that she even ordered the
breasts of a Nair woman, who had dared to cover herself, to be cut
off.142 In 1788, the Muslim ruler Tipu Sultan outlawed this practice
after his conquest of northern Kerala. In southern Kerala, the custom
continued till 1865.143
This is an aspect of Kerala’s history that has deliberately been
erased from the public memory. In 2016, the revisionist BJP
government even deleted a chapter dealing with this casteist, regressive
custom from NCERT school textbooks.144 The oral history of this
appalling practice, however, remains alive. When I asked my
grandmother, who grew up in Travancore, why she had not told me
about this earlier, all she said was, ‘You never asked.’ As my enquiries
widened, I realised that most Malayalis who grew up in Kerala are
well aware of this history. A friend texted back, ‘My great grandaunt
was a victim of the breast tax.’
Sitting in the majestic reading rooms of the National Archives of
India, a heritage building in the heart of Delhi,145 I was stunned to
read the book A People’s Revolt in Travancore: A Backward Class
Movement for Social Freedom by R.N. Yesudas, published in 1975 by
the Kerala Historical Society. It is one of the few books in English that
document in detail the four decades of the Maru Marakkal Samaram
(Channar Upper Cloth Revolt) (1812–59) when oppressed caste
women from the Shannar146 (also referred to as Channar or Nadar)
caste ardently fought for their right to wear dignified clothing.147
Keralopatti is an ancient multi-author Malayalam treatise, written
on palm-leaves. It claims that the mythical Brahmin sage Parasurama
created Kerala with the throw of an axe and prohibited women from
covering their bosoms.148 Even the thirteenth-century Venetian
traveller Marco Polo has written about this unusual custom.149 The
Travancore kings even imposed a breast tax on women from
oppressed castes who dared to cover themselves.150 ‘Baring breasts
also meant acknowledging one’s position in the caste hierarchy and
amounted to paying obeisance to the upper castes.’151 In a legend
about the protest, it is believed that Nangeli, a poor Ezhava woman,
cut off her breasts and bled to death rather than pay this unjust breast
tax.152
 In 1812, British Resident Commissioner Colonel Munro issued an
order to permit at least Christian women to cover their upper
bodies.153 But even a decade after that, high-caste Hindus would
violently attack Shannar Christian women who covered themselves.
So, in 1828–30, there was a second revolt. In retaliation, upper caste
Hindus burnt homes, chapels and schools.154 Women were also
forcibly stripped and assaulted in public. On 3 February 1829, Queen
Rani Parvati Bai, a decade after her far-sighted Magna Carta on
education, issued a regressive royal proclamation,

… as it is not reasonable on the part of Shannar women to

wear clothes over their breast, such custom being prohibited,
they are required to abstain in future from covering the upper
part of their body.155

The order went on to blame Shannar women who, ‘in opposition to

orders and ancient propriety are wearing their cloth over their
shoulders, in consequence of which there are many disturbances in the
country …’156 Still, increasingly, Hindu Shannar women began to wear
upper body clothes and kupayyam (jackets) in public places, similar to
Christian, Muslim and Upper caste Hindu women. The turning point
was the third revolt of 1858–59. Upper caste Hindus, in collusion
with the government, launched a series of violent mob attacks on
Shannars, followed by counter-attacks.157 Shannar women continued
to face imprisonment and fines for the mere act of wearing a shoulder
cloth.158 At that time, the British government in Madras strongly
admonished Maharajah Uthram Thirunal Marthanda Varma for these
clothing restrictions ‘unsuited to the present age and unworthy of an
enlightened Prince’.159 A few months later, Governor Charles
Trevelyan reiterated:

I have never met with a case in which not only truth and justice
but every feeling of our common humanity is so entirely on one
side. The whole civilized world would cry shame upon us if we
did not make a firm stand on such an occasion.160
Under intense pressure from the British, the Maharaja issued a
proclamation on 26 July 1859, ‘We hereby proclaim that there is no
objection to Shannar women … covering their bosoms in any manner
whatsoever, but not like women of high caste’.161 Only six years later
did the princely state end all clothing restrictions.162 This iconic
movement by oppressed caste women in Kerala demanding their right
to wear dignified clothes predates even the first wave of the Western
suffragette feminist movement.
This was only one of the many hard-won victories of women in
Kerala over centuries. The Sabarimala temple entry163 for women
controversy, too, despite a 2018 Supreme Court verdict permiting
entry to all women, continues to rage on with new challenges in the
courts.164

Sri Lanka
In Ceylon, on the other hand, women have been joining the Buddhist
monastic order as nuns since the third century. This offered an
alternate lifestyle to male-dominated sexual control.165 Besides, in pre-
colonial times, Sinhalese marriages could be either diga (patrilocal) or
binna (matrilocal).166
Sri Lankan women have also always been at the forefront of
politics. They were the first in Asia to obtain the right to vote. Middle-
class men in Sri Lanka had received the right to vote in 1912. By
1927, women leaders had formed the Women’s Franchise Union. In
1929, the Union formally joined the International Women Suffragette
Alliance.167 The Union strongly argued with the Donoughmore
Commission168 that since ‘women are entitled to hold property and
deal with them as they like, they should be given a voice in making
laws affecting such property’.169 The Commission was suitably
impressed and felt that ‘it is difficult to deny the force of the
argument’.170 Thus, Ceylonese women secured the right to vote in
1931. At the penultimate hour, Fabian socialist Sidney Webb also
agreed to their demands and reduced the voting age for women from
thirty to twenty-one years.171
Three decades later, Sirimavo R.D. Bandaranaike became the first
woman in the world to be elected as prime minister. This was partly
the fruit of Sri Lankan women’s early political evolution.172 Despite
these early successes, since preferential quotas have never been
adopted, only 5.8 per cent of Sri Lankan parliamentarians in 2023 are
women.173

Tamil Nadu
In Tamil Nadu, the women’s movement evolved as a part of the
radical Self-Respect Movement. Periyar even condemned
monogamous marriage as an institution that sustained patriarchy. In
one of his diatribes, he said:

The concept of husband–wife relationship has been one of

master–slave relationship. The essential philosophy of marriage
has been to insist on women’s slavery … why should human
being alone keep such contract of one-man-one-woman
relationship … until women are liberated from such marriages
and from men, our country cannot attain independence.174

In the three decades of the movement, thousands of ritual-free Self-

Respect weddings (suyamariyadai) were officiated without priests.175
Instead of the tali,176 considered to be a symbol of women’s slavery,
the newlyweds exchanged rings. Couples addressed each other as
‘comrades’ and took oaths of equality.177 Periyar was also against
‘chastity as an ideal for women’.178 He supported property rights for
children born out of wedlock.
Over the decades, the participation of Tamil women in the labour
market also increased steadily. Former chief minister MGR
significantly expanded women’s employment to a range of welfare
services such as anganwadi workers, school meal cooks, nurses,
teachers and so on. This was also a populist measure to appeal to
women voters as not only did they gain employment, but they also got
access to a range of public services to supplement familial care
responsibilities. J. Jayalalithaa, the erstwhile chief minister of Tamil
Nadu, even reserved 30 per cent of jobs in the police for women.
Textile hubs, such as Tirupur, also primarily employ women. Women’s
participation in the labour force of Tamil Nadu was 38 per cent in
2019-20, higher than the Indian average of 22 per cent.179
Across the Southern Supermodels, as more rural women have been
educated, the opportunities to train and hire them as teachers, nurses
and midwives have expanded. Women continue to be largely
employed outside the home only in feminised professions such as
nursing, teaching and textile manufacturing/production.180 But gender
stereotypes too have been gradually broken, especially with an
increase in the number of ‘the female labour migrants to the Middle
East, female car park attendants, police women and female bus
conductors’.181

4. Cultural Ties
Lastly, the cultural ties between the Southern trio have had a
significant role in their progress in human development outcomes.
These connections date back to pre-historic times.182 Archaeological
remains indicate similarities even during the early Iron Age.183
Emperor Ashoka’s children introduced Buddhism in the third
century BCE in Sri Lanka. In the eleventh century CE, the Chola
empire is believed to have conquered Sri Lanka and established the
Kingdom of Jaffna in the north.
Through generations, these historical and cultural ties enabled the
diffusion of progressive ideals across borders. Tamil Nadu’s Justice
Party, for example, from the early days of the non-Brahmin
movement, extended support to the ‘untouchables’ of Malabar
province. Party journals supported the Thiyyas184 and their right to
use public roads, especially outside the Tali Temple in Malabar.
 Periyar also often capitalised on these cultural ties. Politically, he cut
his teeth at the 1924 Vaikkom Temple Entry Satyagraha in
Travancore. He was arrested twice for his fiery, rhetorical, crowd-
pulling speeches at the protest venue:

[T]hey argue that pollution would result if we untouchables

passed through the streets leading to the temple; I ask them
whether the Lord of Vaikkom or the so-called Brahmins would
be polluted by the presence of untouchables. If they say that the
presiding deity at the temple would be polluted, then it could
not be God, but a mere stone fit only to wash dirty linen
with.185

The Self-Respect Movement inspired the Tamil Buddhist movement

amongst the marginalised castes in Sri Lanka. The Tamil Buddhists
also had ‘close ideological cooperation with the Sinhalese nineteenth
century Buddhist Renaissance’ led by Anagarika Dharmapala.186 In
1898, Pandit Iyothee Thass went from Tamil Nadu to Ceylon in order
to convert to Buddhism, based on his faith in the historical Buddhist
lineage of his Pariah caste. The significance of this conversion was that
‘although they had been degraded to the lowest social level under the
caste system in India, at the moment when they became Buddhists all
these arbitrary social distinctions were stripped off their shoulders.’187
Soon after, Iyothee Thass returned and founded the magazine Oru
Paisa Tamilian which was the pivotal platform where ‘the concepts of
Dravidianism, anti-Brahmanism and rationalism came to be
debated’.188
Sri Lanka was also a melting pot of ethnic communities. In the
ancient times, Tamils of Indian origin had established a kingdom in
Kandy. Between 1839 and 1843, one-and-a-half million Tamilians,
especially Nadars from Tinnevelly (modern Tirunelveli district),
migrated from Madras to Ceylon to work in the plantations. More
than half returned to their homeland to purchase land and shops.189
Migration from Tamil Nadu and Kerala to Ceylon continued steadily
in the colonial period. Rummaging through papers at the British
National Archives in Kew, I even chanced upon a pamphlet which
showed that the Malayali associations of Colombo had advocated
with the British government in 1928 asking them to recognise
Malayalam as one of the official languages to qualify for the vote in
Ceylon.190
There has been a steady exchange of progressive ideas across the
southern borders. For example, the Channar Upper Cloth Revolt was
sparked by Christian Nadar women in Travancore who were not
allowed to cover themselves191, only after they realised that their caste
sisters across the border in Tamil-speaking areas of Tinnevelly did not
face similar restrictions.192
The left movement in the three regions has also shared a common
heritage. In the 1920s and 1930s, Kerala and Sri Lanka had waves of
communist and labour movements. During this period, even the Self-
Respect Movement in Tamil Nadu began to lean towards the left.

LAND REFORMS
The one main difference among the southern triad is that of land
reforms. With the support of the left parties who had gained political
power, Kerala and Sri Lanka implemented radical reforms. But
effective land redistribution has eluded Tamil Nadu.
In 1957, Kerala democratically elected the first Communist
government, which implemented radical ‘land to the tiller’ reforms by
providing rights to the tenants. The number of landless households in
Kerala fell from 31 per cent in 1962 to 13 per cent in 1982.193 In
1983-84, 92 per cent of the rural population in Kerala owned land.
The path-breaking Agricultural Workers Act 1975 also offered an
unemployment allowance. Despite these advances, land distribution in
Kerala remains greatly skewed. In 2011, 84 per cent of Dalit farmers
in Kerala had to depend on wage labour for survival.194
On the other hand, Sri Lanka’s 1972 land reform legislation ensured
that the state acquired 20 per cent of all cultivable land. The law also
nationalised plantation estates.195 In 2002, only 6 per cent of Sri
Lankans were landless, even though 22 per cent owned only their
homes.196 Sri Lanka’s land laws also discriminate based on gender, and
women have not yet secured equal property rights.
Of the Southern Supermodels, Tamil Nadu is the only one that has
not even legislated egalitarian land reforms. Although 92 per cent of
rural Tamilians own their homesteads, agricultural land ownership
remains very skewed.197

DEVELOPMENT BEFORE GROWTH?

The Southern Supermodels analysis showcases that Sri Lanka and the
Indian states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu have had long periods of
accelerated human development, even in times of stagnant economic
growth.198 Their key similarity lies in their efforts to combat multi-
dimensional inequalities—with investments in universal public
services, progressive social movements, women’s agency and cultural
ties—in the course of more than a century.
 8
THE PRICE OF INEQUALITY

T HE POHELA BAISAKH (Bengali New Year) celebrations in Dhaka are a

riot of colour. The traffic comes to a grinding halt with traffic jams
everywhere and large crowds on every street.
Dhaka University has the largest celebrations. At the end of our
fieldwork, Safiq thoughtfully gifted me a white sari with a red border
so that I could join in the revelry, suitably dressed. The main concert
stage had Bangladeshi Bollywood singer James belting out rock songs
in Hindi and Bengali in his distinctive voice. One of the songs was
appropriate for me—the popular number Alvida (goodbye).
I had a whale of a time. The Rabindra sangeet, traditional dances,
poetry, street food and theatre performances across the campus had
created a joyous ambience, even in the clammy summer heat. Most of
the women students unmindful of the sweltering weather, were dressed
in red-and-white saris (sometimes with hijabs), bindis and tiaras of
fresh flowers in their hair like Greek goddesses. Watching their
enthusiasm brought home the import of how cherished and hard-won
these festivities were. The Language Movement and Liberation War
had paved the way decades earlier for this joyous celebration of the
Bengali language and culture to take place today.
Historian Fernand Braudel highlights the longue durée in the gradual
evolution of civilisations.1 Like fine wine, social transformations, too,
take long years and even decades to ferment, ripen, mature and get
absorbed in a cultural context. Development pathways evolve
differently depending on these transformations. Countries within South
Asia have had diverse development journeys. But on an average Sri
Lankans, Bangladeshis, Nepalese and Bhutanese tend to live longer
than Indians.2
The persistent question for this research has therefore been—why
does India increasingly lag behind in human development while most
of its South Asian neighbours are speeding up their social
achievements? Even Bangladesh and Nepal, despite being poorer, have
overtaken India on many social indicators, from literacy and life
expectancy to infant mortality and happiness. Their achievements
prove that high economic growth is not a necessary precondition to
improve the quality of life of ordinary citizens. These advances also
challenge the claim that the only ‘miracle’ route to success is the East
Asian mantra of ‘the rising tide seems to have lifted all boats’.3
Studies on the contrasts within South Asia, however, are few and far
between. The Lancet, for example, describes Bangladesh as ‘one of the
great mysteries of global health’. As political sociologist Naomi
Hossain points out, ‘Bangladesh punches well below its weight
internationally.’ So, its achievements are not sufficiently celebrated.4
In this potholed landscape, I worked on a pan-South Asian canvas
with the spotlight on India’s increasing slow-footedness.
The data from my unique cross-border primary survey across eighty
villages also clearly shows that India’s poorer Eastern Neighbours
Bangladesh and Nepal performed better on a range of human
development indicators. Villages that scored better were also more
likely to have good quality schools, better health facilities, greater
women’s agency and compressed social distances. The advantage of
these Indian neighbours seems to clearly lie in their concerted welfare
investments and ability to dilute deep-rooted multi-dimensional
inequalities.
In Bangladesh, my research shed light on social, religious and
women’s movements that have cumulatively, over long decades and
even centuries, altered social hierarchies. For example, during
fieldwork in Panchagarh district, I saw archaeological excavations
underway in the ancient sixth-century Bhitorgarh fort, which
unearthed Buddhist stupas, temples and viharas built along the Silk
Route. This reminded me that East Bengal, which was once a part of
the ancient Pala and Chandra empires, had more than one millennium
of egalitarian Buddhist influence before the advent of syncretic Islam in
the twelfth century. So, even before the mass conversion of the
population to Islam in East Bengal, there had long been fewer caste-
style disparities.
This book also traces how class hierarchies shrank after three unique
historical waves of elite displacement. After the 1905, 1947 and 1971
partitions, the Hindu zamindar and bhadralok classes largely shifted to
India. So, rural Bangladeshis who were left behind had fewer social
divisions among them. Especially after the 1974 famine, a unique
social contract developed between the Bangladeshi ruling classes of all
hues and the ordinary citizens to prioritise welfare services—come
cyclone or sunshine.
In contrast, in Nepal, the process of Hinduisation, from the third
century BCE, institutionalised crippling caste inequalities and
discrimination. But the combined influence of social movements and a
progressive 2015 democratic constitution, to a certain extent, tempered
these caste inequalities. Equally significantly, in Bangladesh and Nepal,
women’s movements succeeded in expanding women’s freedoms both
within and outside the home.
The Southern Supermodels analysis also reaches similar conclusions.
From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, Sri Lanka and
Kerala evolved along similar arcs. Sri Lanka had fewer class, caste and
gender disparities. But social change in Kerala, which was once a
‘madhouse of caste’, was a hard-won victory after centuries of
progressive movements. Similarly, Tamil Nadu’s human development
progress in the last century would have been inconceivable without the
anti-caste movement that cemented a lasting commitment to social
welfare.
In many ways, the frontrunner regions in both groups—Northern
Neighbours and Southern Supermodels—resemble the ethos of the
Scandinavian ‘social democratic’ welfare states. Usually, the more
equitable a country is, the more likely it is to build a universal welfare
state. After all, democracies depend on populist policies for votes.5
Based on the ‘paradox of redistribution’,6 Sri Lanka, Tamil Nadu and
Kerala have also largely prioritised universal benefits instead of only
narrowly targeting poor people. With its universal old age pensions
and healthcare, this is true for Nepal as well, to a greater extent than
even for Bangladesh.
Another similarity across these high-performing regions is that of
land reforms. In Bangladesh, only 8 per cent of rural households are
landless, due to land reforms that took place when it was still a part of
Pakistan. However, due to the high population density and decreasing
farm sizes, only a third of rural families now primarily depend on
agriculture. In Nepal, 86 per cent of rural families and 60 per cent of
Dalit homes own land. Similarly, in both rural Kerala and Sri Lanka,
where substantial land reforms took place, more than 90 per cent of
households own agricultural land, although sharp caste differences
persist.7 Rural land reforms, however, have eluded Tamil Nadu, which
is now one of the most urbanised states in India.8
In contrast, in northern India, land is the prized possession of a few.
On the porch of her modest home, a Bihari widow, Sakshi Devi, whom
I was chatting with, blurted out proudly, ‘Nobody has a damaad [son-
in-law] as rich as mine. He has eight kathas land and earns Rs 15,000
every month selling medicines.’ Of course, women’s ownership of land
in Bihar continues to be abysmal.

NORTH VERSUS SOUTH INDIA

Within India, there is a ‘vast difference between the North and the
South’ in the social contract of the state which impacts the lives of
ordinary citizens—women, men and children.9 In Babasaheb
Ambedkar’s words:

The North is conservative. The South is progressive. The North

is superstitious, the South is rational. The South is educationally
forward, the North is educationally backward. The culture of
the South is modern. The culture of the North is ancient.10
The conclusions from my research are less sweeping in their
generalisations, but stark nonetheless.
Political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot pertinently points out the
significant contrasts which have made north India lag behind the
south.11 The northern caste movements, including those in Bihar, relied
mainly on emulation and ‘Sanskritisation’. As sociologist M.N.
Srinivas has pointed out, in northern India, the ‘low castes
concentrated on acquiring the symbols of high status’. In contrast, the
belligerent southern movements focused more on differentiation and
assertion. These ambitious movements aimed to overthrow caste
entirely.12 In south India, the spotlight was always on ‘the real sources
of high status, that is, political power, education and a share in
economic opportunities’.13 Importantly, the upper castes have always
been greater in numbers and more confrontational in northern India
than in the south.14 Bihar typifies these northern states.
The quality of life in northern India, especially Bihar, is particularly
stunted. Multiple layers of inequalities of income, caste, religion and
gender compound one another. They worsen across time and
generations as ‘inequality traps’.15 The pandemic, which magnified
these inequalities, has been an eye-opener.
The achievements of Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal, on the other
hand, share some key similarities: higher investments in public services
and progressive social movements have, to an extent, bridged
overlapping vertical and horizontal inequalities. India, the sleeping
giant, should learn from their impressive social progress.
Within India, the inspirational southern states of Kerala and Tamil
Nadu also prove that consistent commitment to social welfare and
social reform can dilute even inter-generational inequalities. So,
transformative progress in the lives of citizens, even in the backwoods
of northern India, is definitely within reach—in our lifetimes.
APPENDICES
 Appendix A1: Comparison of select South Asian
countries and Indian states on population
parameters in 2016

Sources: Population, Population Density, Urban Population,

Electricity, Gini Index (WDI, June 2016 version)
*For Indian states: Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh,
West Bengal, Odisha: [Census of India 2011, Population
Enumeration Data (Final Population)]
**For Indian states: Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Uttar
Pradesh, West Bengal, Odisha: National Family Health
Survey 2015-2016 (IIPS and ICF, 2017, ‘National Family
Health Survey (NFHS-5), 2019-21: India Report’)
Notes: In the gini index 0 represents perfect equality and
100 implies perfect inequality in the distribution of
incomes while the population density is defined as people
per sq. km of land area
 Appendix A2: South Asian average incomes in
purchasing power parity (current international $),
1990–2019

Source: Author calculations based on World Development

Indicators 1990-2019, GNI per capita, PPP (current
international $) and PPP conversion factor, GDP (LCU per
international $) and Press Information Bureau India,
Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation, 2017
Note: For Indian states, GNI per capita has been calculated
by converting per capita income in Indian rupees to
purchasing power parity in US dollars by dividing it with
the GDP conversion factor which indicates the number of
local currency units required to buy the same amounts of
goods and services in the domestic market. (Arabinda
Ghosh, Dean Spears and Aashish Gupta, ‘Are Children in
West Bengal Shorter Than Children in Bangladesh?’)
Appendix A3: Evolution of social changes to reduce
caste, class and gender inequalities
 Appendix A4: Population with essential welfare
services and amenities (%)

*In Sri Lanka, age-appropriate measles vaccines are

provided at 24 months
**Households with electricity
#Bangladesh 2017-18; only preliminary data for the 2022
DHS has been released so far
Source: Latest available Demographic and Health Surveys
(DHS)
 Appendix A5: Share of pre-tax national income
between the top 10% and bottom 50% of adults

Source: Chancel, L., Piketty, T., Saez, E., Zucman, G. et al.

World Inequality Report 2022
 Appendix A6: Some selected gender and
development indicators of South Asian countries

Source: WDI June 2023 version

 Appendix A7: Caste-based ‘Graded Inequality’ in
access to essential services in India

(In the National Family Health Survey, population with

primary schooling is defined as the percentage
distribution of household populations above age six who
have completed less than five years of schooling)
Source: IIPS and ICF, ‘National Family Health Survey (NFHS-
5), 2019-21: India Report’
 Appendix A8: Underweight children among rich
and poor families, 2019–2022

Source: Demographic and Health Surveys

 Appendix A9: Selection of sample districts in the
Northern Neighbours

Source: GoI, Census of India 2011, Population Enumeration

Data (Final Population), GoN, Nepal – National Population
and Housing Census 2011, Marks 100 Years of Census
Taking in Nepal and GoB, Population and Housing Census,
2011.
 Appendix A10: Sample districts in Nepal,
Bangladesh and Bihar

Source: Author’s Household Survey 2016

Appendix A11: Four indices created with survey data
from 80 villages

Source: Author’s Household Survey 2016

 Appendix A12: Students in Grades 1 to 5 with
minimum* educational competencies by wealth
quintiles

Note: *The minimum ASER test competencies in language

and mathematics assumes that children in grades 1 to 4
are able to achieve at least grade 1 level competency and
those in grade 5 at least grade 2 level educational
attainment
Source: Author’s Household Survey 2016
Appendix A13: Households with Toilets That Work
(%)

Source: Author’s Household Survey 2016

Appendix A14: Inequalities in indices by caste and
religion

Source: Author’s Household Survey 2016

 Appendix A15: Scatter Plot of the Human
Development Composite Indices in 80 villages

Source: Author’s Household Survey 2016

Appendix A16: Nepali caste system hierarchy as per
the Muluki Ain, 1859*

*This is a representative figure of the layers of the

hierarchy, not of demographic composition
Source: Ishtiaq Jamil and Hasan Muhammad Baniamin,
‘Representative and responsive bureaucracy in Nepal: a
mismatch or a realistic assumption?’
Appendix A17: The punishment for public flatulence,
Article 62, Muluki Ain, 1854

Source: Rajan Khatiwoda, Simon Cubelic and Axel

Michaels, ‘The Muluki Ain of 1854: Nepal’s First Legal Code’,
Table 9, p.43
 Appendix A18: Timeline of Sri Lanka’s socio-political
developments after the advent of British
colonialism

Year Events Description

1833 Colebrooke- Foundation for a liberal democratic political system.

Cameroon
Reforms

1905- Temperance Popular mass-based movement with the creation of a

1919 Movement decentralized network of political temperance societies.

1927 Donoughmore Appointed by Sydney Webb to draft a new constitution for

Commission Ceylon.

1931 Universal Introduction of universal adult franchise.

Suffrage

1939 Poor Laws Laws introduced that attempted to deal with poverty
through state assistance.

1943 Free Kannagara Report, which recommended universal and

Education compulsory free education from kindergarten to university
and the passage of the Education Act.

1944- Independence Soulbury Commission and Independence.

1948

1950 Right to The Cumpston Report based on the principle of the right
Healthcare to health.

1953 Health Service Passage of Health Service Act, which abolished private
Act practice for doctors employed in the state sector.

1972- Land reform Land Reform law of 1972 and nationalization of

1975 plantations in 1975.

1977 Economic The UNP government comes to power and introduces the
Liberalisation new economic policy based on economic liberalisation.
 Appendix A19: Timeline of Kerala’s significant social
and political developments

Year Events Description

1800s Christian Christian Missionaries began to establish schools for

Missionaries disadvantaged communities such as the Ezhavas.

1800 First Ezhavas attempt to enter the Vaikkom temple but are
Vaikkom brutally attacked.
temple entry
attempt

1817 Royal Queen of Travancore issues a Royal Rescript declaring state

Rescript on responsibility for mass education.
Education

1836 Mappila 33 Mappila Revolts (Moplah Uprising) in Malabar

- Uprisings culminate in the Mappila Rebellion by Muslim tenants.
1921

1858 Channar Nadar Christian women in Travancore protest for their

Upper Cloth right to cover the upper parts of their bodies and violence
Revolt breaks out in several places.

1891 Malayali 10,000 non-Brahmins accuse the government of

Memorial discrimination in employment in government jobs in favour
of Brahmin outsiders.

1896 Ezhava 13176 signatories demand that the administration adopt

Memorial socio-political egalitarianism within the state to include
excluded castes.

1924- Second Indian National Congress-supported Vaikkom satyagraha in

5 Vaikkom Travancore, backed by the Ezhava leader Shree Narayana
Temple-entry Guru, brings both E.V. Ramaswamy (later Periyar) and
Satyagraha Mahatma Gandhi to Kerala.

1936 Temple entry Temple entry proclamation in Travancore to open temples

proclamation to all castes.

1948 Universal Universal suffrage in Travancore and Cochin—Congress

suffrage wins the elections.
1956 First E.M.S. Namboodiripad becomes the Communist Chief
Communist Minister of the new Kerala.
government

1967 Left-led CPI (M)-led United Front government (UF) formed with
government Chief Minister E.M.S. Namboodiripad.

1969 Land Kerala Land Reform (Amendment) Act passed.

Reforms

1973 Gulf Oil crisis, large-scale Gulf emigration begins.

migration

1975 ‘Kerala Report produced by the Centre for Development Studies,

Model’ Trivandrum hails Kerala’s achievements as a ‘Model’.

Source: Adapted from Robin Jeffrey, ‘Politics, Women and

Well Being: How Kerala Became a Model’ and other
sources
 Figure A20: Timeline of Tamil Nadu’s significant
social and political developments

Year Events Description

1916 Non- Prominent nationalists from the Madras Presidency issue the
Brahmin ‘Non-Brahmin Manifesto’.
Manifesto

1920 Justice Party The Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms provide non-Brahmins

comes to with separate representation in the Madras Legislative
power Council and the Justice Party comes to electoral power.

1921- Reservations The Justice Party institutionalizes reservation in government

22 for non- service for non-Brahmins as Backward Castes.
Brahmins

1925 Self-Respect E.V. Ramasamy (EVR for short and later revered as Periyar)
Movement launches the Self-Respect Movement.

1938 First anti- The anti-Hindi movement sees the Justice Party and the Self-
Hindi Respecters unite. EVR is elected president of the Justice Party
agitations in 1938. He organises a separatist agitation for Dravida
Nadu to unite Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and
Kerala.

1949 DMK Leaders break away from the Dravida Kazagham (new name
formed of the Justice Party) to form the Dravida Munnetra
Kazagham (DMK).

1951 Reservations After agitations in the Madras state the first amendment to
for Non- the Indian constitution is passed to ensure reservation of
Brahmins seats for non-Brahmins in educational institutions and
government jobs.

1953 Madras Madras state is formed along linguistic lines.

state formed

1954 Kamaraj’s Under Chief Minister K. Kamaraj, Madras is the first state to
First not have a single Brahmin in its ministry.
Ministry
without
Brahmins
1954- Universal Universal free education is introduced in Kamaraj’s tenure
63 education along with the introduction of school meals.

1965 Second anti- Widespread agitations in response to the Central

Hindi Government’s directive
agitations making Hindi the National Language.

1969 Renamed Madras state is renamed as Tamil Nadu by the DMK

Tamil Nadu government.

1977 AIADMK M.G. Ramachandran (MGR), a film actor, wins his first term
formed and as chief minister after leaving the DMK, to form a new party,
MGR comes the Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (later AIADMK
to power preceded by All India).

1987 Reservations An agitation by the Vanniyars. The government in a 2021

for law sets aside 20 percent out of the total 50 percent BC
marginalised reservation, but the Supreme Court annuls the law in 2021.
communities

1990 Mandal Tamil Nadu state assembly is the only Indian state to pass a
Commission resolution welcoming V.P. Singh’s Mandal Commission
welcomed reforms with 27 per cent reservation for the backward
classes in Government jobs.

2007 Reservations After agitations by the Muslim Munnetra Kazhagam, a 3.5

for Muslims percent separate reservation within the 30 percent backward
caste quota is reserved for Muslims.

2013 Amma A year before her death chief minister Jayalalithaa of the
Canteens AIADMK launches the Amma Canteens and a range of other
subsidised welfare programmes under the brand name
‘Amma’.

2021- School The newly elected DMK chief minister Stalin announces that
3 Breakfasts the Amma Canteens will retain their name and be expanded;
and that all schools would also serve breakfasts to children.
 NOTES

1. A HUMAN DEVELOPMENT PUZZLE

1 Field Notes, Panchagarh district, Bangladesh, June 2015. The Government of
India began the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan in October 2014 and declared India
open defection–free in 2019. But even in 2019–21, as the latest 5th National
Family Health Survey indicates, 26 per cent of all rural households and 16 per
cent in rural West Bengal do not have a toilet (IIPS and ICF, ‘National Family
Health Survey (NFHS-5), 2019–21: India Report’; Aashish Gupta and Sangita
Vyas, ‘Is Open Defecation Still Prevalent in Rural North India?’). Earlier
Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) from 2015-16 showed that while in
rural India ‘55% of households report defecating in the open, open defecation
has been almost eliminated from Bangladesh’. (Diane Coffey and Dean Spears,
‘Open Defecation in Rural India, 2015–16: Levels and Trends in NFHS–4’).
Even in 2011, less than 5 per cent of households in Bangladesh practiced open
defection.
2 As a doctoral student, between 2015 and 2016 alone, I made three separate
trips to Bangladesh to conduct the recces and fieldwork in Panchagarh district
and to attend a South Asian conference in Dhaka.
3 Field Notes, Boda and Tetulia upazilas, Panchagarh district, Bangladesh, 12
February–29 March 2016.
4 Bangladesh’s agro-food processing industry contributes to around 1.7 per cent
to GDP. It employs about 2,50,000 people and contributes to 20 per cent of the
country’s manufacturing output.
5 iDE, ‘A New Standard for Sanitation’.
6 Diane Coffey and Dean Spears, Where India Goes: Abandoned Toilets, Stunted
Development and the Costs of Caste.
7 Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA), or Clean India Campaign, was initiated by
Prime Minister Modi in 2014 with much fanfare, including public oath-taking
 ceremonies to eliminate open defecation and improve solid waste management,
along with overall cleanliness in public spaces.
8 Demographic and Health Surveys compiled at www.statcompiler.com.
9 Nineteen per cent of all households and 26 per cent of all rural households did
not have any toilet facilities (IIPS and ICF, ‘National Family Health Survey
(NFHS-5), 2019-21: India Report’).
10 Since the 1970s, Indians have consistently been richer than Bangladeshis in
GDP per capita in purchasing power parity terms. But especially in the wake of
the pandemic, during 2019–22 Bangladesh’s average incomes (GDP per capita)
has overtaken India in current USD in nominal terms. Sri Lanka, Bhutan and
Maldives also have higher per capita incomes than India (GDP per capita, PPP
[current international $], in WDI, World Development Indicators, June 2023).
11 News reports. See, for instance, Scroll Staff, ‘West Bengal: “Not Even a Bird
Will Be Allowed from Across the Border If BJP Wins,” says Amit Shah’.
12 World Development Indicators, June 2023 version.
13 Prevalence of underweight, weight for age (% of children under 5), Prevalence
of underweight, weight for age (% of children under 5), Prevalence of stunting,
height for age (% of children under 5), in WDI, World Development Indicators,
June 2023.
14 World Development Indicators, June 2023 version.
15 To be precise, the graph depicts, as per demographers, the expected life
expectancy ‘in prevailing mortality conditions’ experienced in 1971 and in 2021
respectively.
16 Jean Drèze, ‘Bangladesh Shows the Way’.
17 Amartya Sen, ‘What’s Happening in Bangladesh?’, p. 1966; Jean Drèze and
Amartya Sen, An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions.
18 Angus Deaton, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of
Inequality.
19 Angus Deaton, ‘The U.S. Can No Longer Hide from Its Deep Poverty Problem’;
Fox, ‘Is Mississippi Worse Off than Bangladesh?’ There are nearly fifty counties
in the United States heavily populated by African–Americans, Native Americans
and non-Hispanic Whites which in 2014 had a lower life expectancy than
Bangladesh’s seventy-four years in 2020 based on the health profiles created by
the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at healthdata.org.
20 Office for National Statistics, ‘How Has Life Expectancy Changed over Time?’;
Life expectancy at birth, female (years), in WDI, World Development
Indicators, June 2023. Of course, due to technology diffusion, recent life
 expectancy improvements across countries worldwide have been faster than in
the past on the Preston curves.
21 All names of villagers have been changed.
22 Life expectancy for women in Kerala is based on Sample Registration System
data for 2016–20 with 2018 as the mid-year by the Office of the Registrar
General & Census Commissioner, India, released in November 2022. Life
expectancy for men in the United States was seventy-six years in 2018 (Life
expectancy at birth, male and female [years] in WDI, World Development
Indicators, June 2023).
23 ICJ, ‘Unprepared and Unlawful: Nepal’s Continued Failure to Realise the Right
to Health during the COVID-19 Pandemic’; Golam Rasul, et al., ‘Socio-
Economic Implications of COVID-19 Pandemic in South Asia: Emerging Risks
and Growing Challenges’.
24 Bhutan has one of the lowest case fatality rate for COVID-19 at 0.03 per cent,
which is significantly lower than the WHO’s global case fatality rate of 1.02 per
cent and India’s average of 1.19 per cent as of 7 February 2023, based on data
from Johns Hopkins University CSSE COVID-19 dashboard,
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html.
25 Most independent estimates range from 6.3 million to 2.7 million excess deaths
compared to the Indian government’s statistic of 0.5 million COVID-19 deaths.
The WHO estimate is 4 million, which the Indian government has disputed
(Murad Banaji, ‘Why India’s Response to WHO on Excess COVID-19 Deaths
Doesn’t Hold Water’; Murad Banaji and Aashish Gupta, ‘Estimates of Pandemic
Excess Mortality in India Based on Civil Registration Data’).
26 India imposed the second-longest duration of school closures in the world, after
Uganda, during the COVID-19 pandemic. For more, see UNDP, COVID-19 and
Human Development: Assessing the Crisis, Envisioning the Recovery, Human
Development Reports.
27 Post COVID-19, in the latest 2021 Human Development Index, India has
slipped two places to the 132nd rank among 191 countries. The World Bank
estimates that COVID-19 has reversed poverty decline and pushed 56 million
Indians into poverty (World Bank, Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2022:
Correcting Course).
28 Sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo argues that the pandemic, as an unprecedented
period of worldwide crisis and heightened mobilisation of the state apparatus,
has also escalated social confrontations by exacerbating old grievances to the
extreme to trigger pre-modern, spontaneous protests such as toppling statues to
banging pots and pans (Paolo Gerbaudo, ‘The Pandemic Crowd: Protest in the
Time of COVID-19’).
29 Field Notes, Kishanganj district, Bihar, 8–11 September 2016.
30 Please see Chapter 5 on Nepal. Also, Punam Yadav, Social Transformation in
Post-conflict Nepal: A Gender Perspective and Dhruba Kumar, Social Inclusion,
Human Development and Nation Building in Nepal.
31 M.N. Parth, ‘In Kheri: Changing Sides for Health’.
32 World Inequality Report 2022 states that ‘India is amongst the most unequal
countries in the world’, ‘exhibiting extreme’ and ‘spectacular increases in
inequality’, due to an obscene ‘increase in private wealth’ from 290 per cent in
1980 to 560 per cent in 2020, higher than Russia and China. (Lucas Chancel, et
al., World Inequality Report 2022, pp. 3, 11)
33 Based on Forbes, Real-time Billionaire List and Bloomberg Billionaire Index
(accessed 26 December 2022). Also see Berkhout Esmé, et al., The Inequality
Virus; How India Lives 2021; Asit Manohar, ‘Indian Billionaire Made More
Money than Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates in Q4’.
34 Niha Masih, ‘Who Is Gautam Adani? Asia’s Richest Man Is Rocked by Fraud
Claims’.
35 Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Tracker,
https://covidtracker.bsg.ox.ac.uk/.
36 APU, State of Working India: One Year of Covid-19; World Bank, Poverty and
Shared Prosperity 2022.
37 Oxfam, ‘Inequality Kills: India Supplement 2022’.
38 Manish Kumar and Deepshika Ghosh, ‘No Aadhaar, No Food? 11-Year-Old
Girl Died “Begging for Rice”, Says Jharkhand Family’.
39 Swati Narayan, ‘In Jharkhand, Suspected Starvation Death Sheds Light on
Deprivation of a Whole Settlement’.
40 Nitin Tagade, Ajaya Kumar Naik and Sukhdeo Thorat provide a wealth
estimate based on the All India Debt and Investment Survey, 2013 conducted by
the National Sample Survey Organisation (Nitin Tagade, Ajaya Kumar Naik
and Sukhadeo Thorat, ‘Wealth Ownership and Inequality in India: A Socio-
Religious Analysis’). In 2020 Oxfam estimated that the wealth share of the
bottom 50 per cent of India’s population was only 3 per cent (Oxfam, ‘Survival
of the Richest: The India Story’).
41 Nitin Tagade, Ajaya Kumar Naik and Sukhdeo Thorat estimate that Dalits and
Adivasis who comprise 22 per cent of India’s population own only 11 per cent
of the wealth. Hindu OBCs, who constitute approximately 36 per cent of the
total population, possess 30 per cent of the wealth, while Muslims with a 14
per cent population share possess only 8 per cent wealth share. In contrast, the
 Hindu forward castes with a 22 per cent population share monopolise around
41 per cent of wealth (Nitin Tagade, Ajaya Kumar Naik and Sukhadeo Thorat,
‘Wealth Ownership and Inequality in India’).
42 Swati Narayan, ‘Aadhaar-for-food Can’t Be a Mandatory Requirement’; Rahul
Bhatia, ‘How India’s Welfare Revolution Is Starving Citizens’.
43 Wire Staff, ‘Rajasthan: Nine-Yr-Old Dalit Boy Passes Away After Alleged
Assault by Schoolteacher’.
44 The Quint, ‘Dalit Youth Killed in Rajasthan for His “Good Looks”, Say Kin;
Cops Cite Rivalry’.
45 B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, in BAWS Collection, 1(1), p. 61.
46 Jhilam Ray and Rajarshi Majumdar, ‘Snakes and Ladders: Intergenerational
Income Mobility in India’; Sam Asher, Paul Novosad and Charlie Rafkin,
‘Intergenerational Mobility in India: New Methods and Estimates across Time,
Space, and Communities’.
47 Aashish Gupta and Nikkil Sudharsanan, ‘Large and Persistent Life Expectancy
Disparities between India’s Social Groups’.
48 WEF, Global Gender Gap Report 2021.
49 Between 2013 and 2017, about 4,60,000 girls in India were ‘missing’ at birth
each year. According to an UNFPA report, gender-biased sex selection accounts
for about two-thirds of the total missing girls, and post-birth female mortality
accounts for about one-third (UNFPA, Against My Will: State of the World
Population 2020).
50 Prabhat Jha, et al., ‘Trends in Selective Abortion of Female Foetuses in India’.
51 Half of rural women in India have not even completed nine years of education,
and only 26 per cent were employed outside the home in 2019–21.
52 This argument has also been made lucidly in Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, An
Uncertain Glory.
53 Rajiv Kumar, ‘On an Average, India Reported 10 Cases of Rape of Dalit
Women Daily in 2019, NCRB Data Shows’, based on National Crime Records
Bureau, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India.
54 Shikhar Yadav, ‘Dalit Billionaires & “De-Sanskritisation”: Is India Ready to
“Rap”?’
55 Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in
North India; Christophe Jaffrelot and A. Kalaiyarasan, ‘Dominant Castes, from
Bullock Capitalists to OBCs? The Impact of Class Differentiation in Rural
India’.
56 See A5 for comparisons of pre-tax income inequalities in South Asian countries.
57 UNDP, Human Development Report 2020: The Next Frontier—Human
Development and the Anthropocene.
58 Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality
Makes Societies Stronger.
59 UNDP, Human Development Report 2013: The Rise of the South—Human
Progress in a Diverse World; UNDP, Human Development Report 2019:
Beyond Income, beyond Averages, beyond Today: Inequalities in Human
Development in the 21st Century
60 Prannoy Roy and Dorab R. Sopariwala, The Verdict: Decoding India’s
Elections.
61 Mosiqi Acharya, ‘India’s Newly Elected MPs: Almost 90 Per Cent Are
Millionaires and 43 per Cent Face Criminal Charges’. This research is by the
Association of Democratic Reforms.
62 B.R. Ambedkar, ‘Condition Precedent for the Successful Working of
Democracy: Speech at the Poona District Law Library on 22nd December 1952’
in BAWS Collection, 17(3), p. 485; also quoted in Yogendra Yadav, ‘Ambedkar
Said Tyranny of Majority Is No Democracy. Indians Must Read Him Again’.
63 World Bank, ‘Treasures of the Education System in Sri Lanka: Restoring
Performance, Expanding Opportunities and Enhancing Prospects’.
64 Popular quote by Chairman Mao Zedong during the Chinese cultural
revolution to promote gender equality.
65 Naila Kabeer, ‘The Rise of the Daughter-in-Law: Why Son Preference Is
Weakening in Bangladesh’.
66 Punam Yadav, Social Transformation in Post-conflict Nepal.
67 Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World.
68 A. Kalaiyarasan and M. Vijayabaskar, The Dravidian Model: Interpreting the
Political Economy of Tamil Nadu. This insight is based on their elucidation in
the online book discussion ‘The Dravidian Model: Interpreting the Political
Economy of Tamil Nadu’ on 4 March 2021 organised by Kings College,
London.
69 The ‘high growth-rising inequality phenomenon’ in the state further worsens
social segregation (Sukanta Bhattacharya, Sarani Saha and Sarmila Banerjee,
‘Income Inequality and the Quality of Public Services: A Developing Country
Perspective’, p. 1).
70 Travelling in northern India, there often ‘lingers a sense of decay, despite the
customary presence of the state’ (Shobhit Mahajan, ‘Decay and Darkness in
Bihar’, p. 79).
71 Ashwini Deshpande, The Grammar of Caste: Economic Discrimination in
Contemporary India; Surinder Jodhka and Ghanshyam Shah, ‘Comparative
Contexts of Discrimination: Caste and Untouchability in South Asia’.
72 IIPS and ICF, ‘National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), 2019–21: India
Report’.
73 Author calculations based on Pratham, Annual Status of Education Report
(Rural) 2022 Provisional and MoE, Report on Unified District Information
System for Education Plus (UDISE+), 2021-22 (English).
74 Author calculations based on Government of India, ‘Population Enumeration
Data (Final Population)’, Census of India 2011.
75 Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag.
76 Proportion of seats held by women in national parliaments (%) and Labour
force participation rate, female (% of female population ages 15+) (modelled
ILO estimate), in WDI, World Development Indicators, June 2023. Oddly,
Nepal’s female labour force participation, which was estimated at more than 80
per cent by the WDI in their online tables for the last decade, has now been
reduced to 29 per cent in 2022 in the June 2023 version and the back series
have also been altered. The reasons for this substantial change is unclear,
without transparency. Still Nepali women’s workforce participation remains
more than India.
77 Prevalence of stunting, weight for height (% of children under 5) in WDI,
World Development Indicators, June 2023; HDI 2021-22 dataset, expected
years of schooling, in UNDP, COVID-19 and Human Development.

2. INDIA TRUMPED?
1 Irish poet quoted in Kofi Annan, ‘Kofi Annan on Economic Inequality: “People
Are Seduced by the Siren Songs of Cynical Populists”’.
2 As per the latest Rural Health Statistics for 2020-21 in rural Bihar, on average,
sub-centres are located at a 1.7 km distance, while the national average, which
includes hilly areas, is 2.5 km, (GOI, Rural Health Statistics, 2020-21).
3 Field Notes, Tehragacch block, 22–29 August 2016, Kishanganj district, Bihar.
4 A. Mahat, et al., ‘Medical Scholarships Linked to Mandatory Service: The
Nepal Experience’.
5 The 2015 blockade lasted about six months, and created a political, economic,
social and humanitarian crisis in Nepal. Then Nepali prime minister K.P.
Sharma Oli in a televised address called on India to end the crisis: ‘Nepal is
passing through a serious humanitarian crisis which should not happen even
during the wars. The blockade imposed by our southern neighbour has
underestimated the feeling of the Nepali and Indian people. Imposing a
blockade to a landlocked nation is a breach of international treaties, norms and
values.’ Nepal has accused the Indian government of supporting the Madhesi
ethnic community of Indian origin with the undeclared blockade against the
new Nepali constitution. Nearly 95 per cent of Nepal’s population was affected
by crippling shortage of cooking fuel, leading to illegal logging of forests for
firewood, shortage of life-saving drugs and blood bags, delay in the printing of
15 million textbooks and post-earthquake rebuilding (BBC, ‘Nepal Blockade:
Six Ways It Affects the Country’; Firstpost, ‘Nepal PM Oli Urges India to Lift
Economic Blockade, Says It’s Causing a “Humanitarian Crisis”’; Saif Khalid,
‘India’s “Blockade” Snuffs Out Nepal’s Medical Lifeline’).
6 Anil Deolalikar, ‘Poverty and Child Malnutrition in Bangladesh’; Jean Drèze,
‘Bangladesh Shows the Way’; Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, An Uncertain
Glory; Swati Narayan, Serve the Essentials: What Governments and Donors
Must Do to Improve South Asia’s Essential Services; UNDP, Human
Development Report 2005, Human Development Report 2016.
7 The Maddison Project Database, version 2020 (Bolt Jutta and Jan Luiten van
Zanden, ‘Maddison Style Estimates of the Evolution of the World Economy: A
New Update’).
8 Aakar Patel, Price of the Modi Years.
9 Jagriti Chandra, ‘Global Hunger Index Attempt to Tarnish India’s Image:
Centre’. In 2023, India has again slipped four places on the GHI and now ranks
lowest in South Asia, but the government has once again criticised the
methodology as ‘flawed’ and ‘erroneous’.
10 Banjot Kaur, ‘WHO Is Disputing India’s COVID Death Numbers, So Govt
Wants to Bury Global Report’; Jammi N. Rao, ‘Inconvenient Truth: Why the
Modi Govt Is Choosing “Denial” as Its Response to WHO’s Covid Death Toll’;
WHO, ‘14.9 Million Excess Deaths Associated with the COVID-19 Pandemic in
2020 and 2021’.
11 Rukmini S., ‘India’s Objections to WHO COVID-19 Mortality Estimates Are
Misleading, Experts Say’; Murad Banaji, ‘Why India’s Response to WHO on
Excess COVID-19 Deaths Doesn’t Hold Water’; Bindu Shajan Perappadan,
‘WHO Has Released the Excess Death Estimates Without Adequately
Addressing India’s Concerns: Health Ministry’; Rahul Shrivastava, ‘WHO
 “Excess Covid Death” Report: Govt Lens on Pharma Firms Denied Entry to
India’.
12 Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya, India’s Reforms: How They Produced
Inclusive Growth, p. 58.
13 Life expectancy at birth, male and female (years), in WDI, World Development
Indicators, June 2023.
14 Theda Skocpol, ‘Historical Institutionalism in Contemporary Political Science’.
15 F. Mackay, M. Kenny and L. Chappell, ‘New Institutionalism through a Gender
Lens: Towards a Feminist Institutionalism?’
16 British philosopher John Stuart Mill, in his 1843 book, chalks out five methods.
The five Mill’s Methods are the method of agreement, method of difference,
joint method of agreement and difference, method of residue and the method of
concomitant variations (John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic Ratiocinative and
Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the
Methods of Scientific Investigation, p. 388).
17 Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of
Power, Prosperity and Poverty, p. 9.
18 Arend Lijphart, ‘Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method’.
19 Based on the ‘Method of Difference’. Mill describes this method as one with
‘two instances resembling one another in every other respect, but differing in
the presence or absence of the phenomenon we wish to study’ (John Stuart Mill,
A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive, p. 483).
20 Bihar shares a 726 km border with Nepal. West Bengal, at 2,217 km, shares the
longest border with Bangladesh. The Banglabandha Zero Point border crossing
in Bangladesh’s Panchagarh district is connected to the Siliguri Chicken’s Neck.
This is a small strip of land in West Bengal that connects India’s northeastern
states to the mainland and is less than 50 km as the crow flies from Bihar’s
Galgalia village and Thakurganj town in Kishanganj district. Siliguri is also less
than 20 km from Nepal’s open border with India and Bhutan’s Jaigaon land
border.
21 Mill’s ‘Method of Concomitant Variation’ (John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic
Ratiocinative and Inductive, p. 495).
22 Rex Casinader, ‘Making Kerala Model More Intelligible: Comparisons with Sri
Lankan Experience’; Thomas Timberg, ‘Regions in Indian Development’; S.
Vivek, Delivering Public Services Effectively: Tamil Nadu and Beyond
23 See Appendix A1.
24 Alfred Stepan, Juan J. Linz and Yogendra Yadav, Crafting State-Nations: India
and Other Multinational Democracies.
25 Yogendra Yadav, The Rise of State-Nations—Lecture Transcript.
26 Prerna Singh, ‘We-ness and Welfare: A Longitudinal Analysis of Social
Development in Kerala, India’.
27 Bihar’s average income in 2014 was also four-fifths that of Nepal and three-
fourths that of Bangladesh. So, comparisons on the human development front
amongst these three regions then were not unnecessarily skewed due to
differences in average incomes. But, since 2014, the Indian government has
controversially changed the methodology for the calculation of economic
growth. This change seems to have substantially depressed West Bengal’s and
Bihar’s average incomes. On the other hand, Bangladesh’s economic growth has
soared and inched much closer to West Bengal after 2014. The World
Development Indicators estimate that, especially in the wake of the pandemic,
from 2019–22 Bangladesh’s average incomes (GDP per capita [current
international $]) have overtaken India, and in 2019, 2020 and 2022, also in
terms of growth rates. However, in terms of purchasing power parity (GDP per
capita, PPP [current international $]), Bangladeshi income has always remained
lower than India’s since 1990s. See Appendix A2.
28 Siliguri Chicken’s Neck is a small strip of land in West Bengal that connects
India’s northeastern states to the mainland and is a mere 50 km as the crow flies
from the Banglabandha Zero Point border of Bangladesh, Nepal’s open border
with India and Bhutan’s Jaigaon land border.
29 BIMARU is an acronym of the first alphabets of the Indian states of Bihar,
Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh (before their bifurcations and
now would include Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh) coined by demographer
Ashish Bose in the 1980s to refer to backward states. The Hindi word ‘Bimar’
means ‘sick’.
30 UNDP, Human Development Report 2021-22, Uncertain Times, Unsettled
Lives: Shaping Our Future in a Transforming World.
31 UNDP, Sri Lanka Human Development Report 2012.
32 On 8 November 2016, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that,
within four hours, all Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 banknotes in circulation would lose
their value as legal tender with the issuance of new bank notes.
33 Tadit Kundu, ‘Why Kerala Is Like Maldives and Uttar Pradesh, Pakistan’.
34 UNDP, Human Development Report 2021-22, Uncertain Times, Unsettled
Lives: Shaping Our Future in a Transforming World.
35 India’s MPI scores in 2022 and 2023 were updated with the latest 2019–21
Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data. But Nepal and Bangladesh’s latest
2022 DHS survey data is not yet fully available, so the MPI used Multiple
Indicator Cluster Surveys for 2019 were used as substitutes. Sabina Alkire, Usha
Kanagaratnam and Nicolai Suppa, ‘A Methodological Note on the Global
Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) 2022 Changes over Time, Results for 84
Countries’.
36 Sabina Alkire, Christian Oldiges and Usha Kanagaratnam, ‘Examining
Multidimensional Poverty Reduction in India 2005/6–2015/16: Insights and
Oversights of the Headcount Ratio’.
37 Stefan Klonner and Christian Oldiges, ‘The Welfare Effects of India’s Rural
Employment Guarantee’.
38 Andaleeb Rahman, ‘Universal Food Security Program and Nutritional Intake:
Evidence from the Hunger Prone KBK Districts in Odisha’.
39 See Appendix A7 for caste-based ‘graded inequality’ in access to essential
services.
40 Swati Narayan, ‘Towards Equality in Healthcare: Trends Over Two Decades’.
41 Swati Narayan, ‘Aadhaar-for-food Can’t Be a Mandatory Requirement’; Rahul
Bhatia, ‘How India’s Welfare Revolution Is Starving Citizens’.
42 Abhinash Dash Choudhury, ‘Jharkhand’s Starvation Deaths Raise Questions
About India’s Welfare Schemes’.
43 IIPS and ICF, ‘National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), 2019–21: India
Report’.
44 K.D. Maiti and Santosh Mehrotra, ‘The Curious Case of India’s Millions of
“Missing” Poor People.’
45 Estimates from the FAO, ‘The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World
2023’.
46 The World Happiness Index constructed largely from the Gallup World Poll of
life evaluations is based on national averages of individuals’ own assessments of
their lives. The data from 137 countries is averaged over the years 2020–22.
The index score is primarily based on answers to the single-item Cantril ladder
life-evaluation question. The question asks respondents to evaluate their current
life as a whole using the mental image of a ladder, with the best possible life for
them as a 10 and the worst possible as a 0. Typically, around 1,000 responses
are gathered annually for each country and then weighted for population
representativeness.
47 Deniz Kandiyoti powerfully argues that there are largely two distinct forms of
patriarchy. In the sub-Saharan African pattern, the insecurities of polygyny are
 matched with relative autonomy for women. In the belt of classic patriarchy in
South Asia, East Asia and the Middle East, based on patrilocality and
patrimony, women’s subordination to men is offset by the control older women
attain over younger women (Deniz Kandiyoti, ‘Bargaining with Patriarchy’).
48 WDI, World Development Indicators, June 2023.
49 WEF, Global Gender Gap Report 2023.
50 However, in the penultimate chapter, the heydays of Sri Lanka’s historical
human development trajectory (1830–1977) are analysed at a time when its
economic growth rates were modest.
51 Jean Drèze and Mrilalini Saran, ‘Primary Education and Economic
Development in China and India: Overview and Two Case Studies’.
52 Hasan in grade 2 was easily able to read a paragraph from his textbook. In my
2016 survey in Panchagarh, 90 per cent of students in grade 5 in Panchagarh
district of Bangladesh were suitably competent in language skills to be able to
read at least a standard grade 2 level paragraph in Bengali. Fifty-eight per cent
of students in grades 1 to 4 also had grade 1 language skills.
53 See Pratham, Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) 2022 Provisional. The
2016 ASER survey also uncovered that less than half the children in grade 5 in
rural Bihar (42 per cent) and rural India (48 per cent) could read a grade 2
curricula paragraph in their medium of instruction. The competency for
arithmetic was even more dismal at 27 per cent in rural Bihar and 26 per cent
across rural India.
54 As per the latest 2022 ASER survey, after the pandemic the proportion of
children (age 6 to 14) enrolled in free government school has increased sharply
from 65.6 per cent in 2018 to 72.9 per cent in 2022. Further, amongst Indian
children in the same grade the gap between those from the poorest 40 per cent
of households and the richest 20 per cent is 34 per cent in numeracy and 44 per
cent in literacy (Maryam Akmal and Lant Pritchett, ‘Learning Equity Requires
More than Equality: Learning Goals and Achievement Gaps between the Rich
and the Poor in Five Developing Countries’).
55 From 2012 to 2018, the ASER surveys found that less than half of students in
grade 5 could read a grade 2 level text. After the pandemic, the latest 2022
national ASER survey has reported a reduction in reading levels to pre-2012
levels. The proportion of these children with reading skills in grade 5 fell from
50.5 per cent in 2018 to 42.8 per cent in 2022.
56 Jean Drèze, et al., Locked-out: Emergency Report on School Education.
57 The 2020 child mortality rates are based on the World Development Indicator
estimates developed by the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality
 Estimation (UNICEF, WHO, World Bank, UN DESA Population Division)
at https://childmortality.org/.
58 As per the World Health Organization’s modelled estimates, for every 1,00,000
live births, in 2017, 145 mothers in India died compared to 173 in Bangladesh
and 186 in Nepal. And in Sri Lanka, there were only thirty-six deaths.
59 V. Ramalingaswami, U. Jonsson and J. Rohde, ‘Malnutrition: A South Asian
Enigma’.
60 Based on the latest Demographic Health Surveys. Please see A8.
61 See Appendix A8 for underweight children among rich and poor families,
2017–22.
62 As per the preliminary NFHS 2019–21, 30 per cent of homes in India do not
have improved sanitation facilities and 19 per cent no toilets. Also see Diane
Coffey and Dean Spears, Where India Goes; Avani Kapur and Devashish
Deshpande, ‘Swachh Bharat Mission (Gramin) 3 Years On’; Nikhil Srivastav,
‘Labelling versus Outcomes: On Swachh Bharat Mission’.
63 The Government of India’s Swachh Bharat Mission had a self-imposed October
2019 deadline to make the country open defecation-free (ODF), and on its
website, https://swachhbharatmission.gov.in, makes the controversial claim that
95.7 per cent of rural households have a toilet. Instead, the semi-autonomous
Swachh Survekshan Gramin 2017 survey pegs the figure at a more modest 62.5
per cent (Rashmi Verma, ‘Swachh Survekshan Gramin Reports 62% Toilet
Coverage, Surveys 0.72% Villages in India’; IPE Global, National Annual Rural
Sanitation Survey Data 2017-2018: Provisional Summary Results Report), and
the latest National Family Health Survey 2019–21 also reach a similar
conclusion based on preliminary data.
64 Aashish Gupta and Sangita Vyas, ‘Is Open Defecation Still Prevalent in Rural
North India?’.
65 T.G. Ajay, ‘How “Swachh Bharat” Is Being Forced Upon Chhattisgarh
Villagers’.
66 The Wire Staff, ‘2 Dalit Children Beaten to Death For Defecating in Public in
Madhya Pradesh’.
67 Vidya Subrahmaniam, ‘There Can Be No Swachh Bharat Without Ending
Institutional Discrimination against Dalits’; Bezwada Wilson, ‘Will Swachh
Bharat Abhiyan Be a Success?’; Swagata Yadavar, ‘Casteism Will Not Allow
Swachch Bharat Abhiyan to Succeed’.
68 Newclick, ‘Women Sanitation Workers Protest Against Govt “Lies” on Sewer
Deaths’.
69 Dean Spears, ‘Exposure to Open Defecation Can Account for the Indian
Enigma of Child Height’; Coffey, et al., ‘Stunting among Children: Facts and
Implications’; Diane Coffey and Dean Spears, Where India Goes; Robert
Chambers and Gregor Von Medeazza, ‘Sanitation and Stunting in India:
Undernutrition’s Blind Spot’.
70 Arabinda Ghosh, Dean Spears and Aashish Gupta, ‘Are Children in West Bengal
Shorter Than Children in Bangladesh?’
71 GoN, New ERA and ICF, Demographic and Health Survey 2016: Key
Indicators Report.

3. EASTERN NEIGHBOURS: EAR TO THE GROUND

1 This poem is included in the syllabus of the Central Board of Secondary
Education in India. The translation is by Nissim and available on the website
https://nepalgo.de/ (last accessed 1 August 2023).
2 Santosh Mehrotra and Richard Jolly, Development with a Human Face:
Experiences in Social Achievement and Economic Growth.
3 Ha-Joon Chang, ‘Rethinking Development Economics: An Introduction’, p. 4.
4 The choice of the four districts was based on four comparable criteria: cultural
similarities, economic development, social attributes and proximity to the
border. See Appendix A9.
5 See Appendix A10 for the map on the sample districts in Nepal, Bangladesh and
Bihar. This border at Zero Point was opened only at the tail end of my
fieldwork. As a result, each trip to reach Panchagarh for the survey fieldwork
and recce required a circuitous journey of two nights in buses from Kolkata via
Dhaka.
6 In every district, based on a random selection from respective national censuses,
twenty villages were selected for the survey. Further, in every village, twenty
households were selected based on the ‘every fifth household rule’ adopted by
the ASER survey across four hamlets in each village to ensure random selection
attuned to rural realities (Pratham, ‘Survey Process— ASER Centre’). The
method involved creating a village map and then dividing the population into
clustered hamlets based on geography, caste or other universal and easily
identifiable markers. From these, four hamlets were randomly chosen with an
eye to ensure the representation of diverse castes and communities. Then, from
the centre-point of each hamlet, five households were selected based on the
‘every fifth household rule’ by traversing in a circular manner and selecting
every fifth household on the route. If a house was shut or unoccupied, then the
next house on the lane was selected. Additionally, for the survey we only
 selected households which had at least one child pursuing an education, and in
most cases, the respondent was a mother in the reproductive age.
7 The questionnaires drew inspiration from a number of established surveys—
Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) (Pratham, Annual Status of
Education Report (Rural): 2017 Beyond Basics), India Human Development
Survey (IHDS) (Sonalde Desai and Reeve Vanneman, India Human
Development Survey-II (IHDS-II), 2011-12), Demographic and Health Surveys
(DHS) (IIPS and ICF, ‘National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), 2019–21:
India Report’), Public Evaluation of Entitlement Programmes (PEEP) (Jean
Drèze and Reetika Khera, ‘Recent Social Security Initiatives in India’; Kritika
Goel and Reetika Khera, ‘Public Health Facilities in North India: An
Exploratory Study in Four States’) and Sanitation Quality, Use, Access and
Trends (SQUAT) (Diane Coffey, et al., ‘Revealed Preference for Open
Defecation’).
8 The questionnaires were designed, fine-tuned and translated into three
languages by translators based in Kolkata (Bengali), Kathmandu (Nepali) and
Ranchi (Hindi).
9 See Appendix A11 the four indices created with survey data from eighty villages
and Appendix A15 for the scatter plot.
10 Though the HDI inspired this index, the variables were completely different and
based on my primary survey in the village, not on national data.
11 The methodology for constructing each composite index consisted of three
identical steps—aggregation, normalisation and calculation of geometric means,
in that specific sequence.
12 upazilas in Bangladesh are the second-lowest tier of governance at the sub-
district level. In the Indian context, they are the equivalent of a ‘block’ and in
Western countries a county or borough. The lowest tier in Bangladesh is
referred to as a ‘union parishad’ which is equivalent to a ‘panchayat’ in India.
13 The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines participant observation as ‘a research
technique in anthropology and sociology characterized by the effort of an
investigator to gain entrance into and social acceptance by a foreign culture or
alien group so as better to attain a comprehensive understanding of the internal
structure of the society.’
14 During my initial recce in Bangladesh during the month of Ramzan, one of my
Muslim hosts gently requested me to cover my head with a dupatta as a hijab.
She confided that, despite naysayers in her village, she had, with much
trepidation, taken a leap of faith to host us. Since then, I made it a point to
cover my head throughout my travels in Bangladeshi villages, which helped in
 blending in and also in winning the trust of the villagers (Field Notes,
Panchagarh district, Bangladesh, 17–27 June 2015).
15 The Kajoli model has been developed by Research Initiatives Bangladesh (RIB).
16 To compute the human development index from my survey data, the scores of
the entire sample of 1,404 students from grades 1 to 5 whom we tested were
aggregated. A total of 58 per cent of tested students in Bangladesh and 48 per
cent in Nepal possessed the minimum language skills compared to only 29 per
cent in Bihar. In mathematics, half the children in Bangladesh, less than a third
in Bihar and less than a quarter in Nepal passed the rudimentary test. The
evaluation was whether children in grades 1 to 4 could demonstrate at least
grade 1 level competencies and those in grade 5 who could fulfil at least grade 2
level proficiencies. The reason for the low benchmark was that the syllabus
varied marginally across the countries. For example, carry-over subtraction that
we tested, which was taught in Indian schools in grade 2, was taught in Nepal
in grade 3. Therefore, a majority of children in grade 3 were unable to solve it
at the time of the survey in May 2016, as they had just started the school year.
17 Pratham, Annual Status of Education Report (Rural): 2017 Beyond Basics.
Even before the pandemic, in 2019, the all-India survey showed that less than
half the children in grade 5 could read a simple paragraph. In Bihar, the
situation was even worse, where only a third of the students had learnt this
simple skill. The 2016 ASER survey discovered that less than half the children
in grade 5 in rural Bihar (42 per cent) and rural India (48 per cent) could read a
grade 2 level paragraph in their medium of instruction. The competency for
arithmetic was even more dismal at 27 per cent in rural Bihar and 26 per cent
across rural India.
18 However, in mathematics, while Bangladeshi students far outshone those in
Bihar, Nepalis trailed behind both. One reason for the unusually low scores in
mathematics in Nepal may be an error in the administration of our survey—the
test was printed in Devanagari script which is the basis of the Nepali written
language. Later, we realised that in schools across Nepal, for mathematics
alone, teachers preferred to use the Roman script. We detected this flaw at the
orientation training itself and surveyors were instructed to handwrite the
Roman script on the testing sheet. There may have been an error in the
administration of the test in some villages.
19 The ratio of competent pupils in the lowest income quintile to the highest
income quintile is 1.07 in the Bangladeshi district indicating a highly
progressive ratio, 0.87 in Nepal which is near parity and an abysmal 0.45 in
Bihar. Therefore, in the Nepali and Bangladeshi districts there is minimal
disparity in ASER test scores based on wealth, while in Bihar educational
achievement is regressively influenced by wealth. See Appendix A12.
 As per my survey data, competent pupils in the lowest income quintile were
20 better learners than those in the highest income quintile.

21 Abhay Kumar, ‘Over 3,000 Teachers Surrender Fake Degrees in Bihar’; ‘“Fake”
Degree Probe in Bihar: For 53,000 Contract Teachers, “Last Chance” to Prove
Degrees Real’.
22 Field Notes, Tehragacch block, Kishanganj district, Bihar, 22–29 August 2016.
23 Amitava Paran and Kanika Sharma, ‘Where Are the Kids? The Curious Case of
Government Schools in Bihar’.
24 In my survey, students in both Bihari government and private schools that we
tested were more likely to enrol for private tuitions (44 and 82 per cent
respectively) than Nepal (26 and 67 per cent) and Bangladesh (27 and 31 per
cent). But it must be noted that only 14 per cent of students in Bihar were
enrolled in private schools, NGOs or madrassas compared to 41 per cent in
Bangladesh (largely in NGO-run schools) and 31 per cent in Nepal.
25 Bangladesh Post, ‘Draft Law Forbids Private Tuition’; Wasim Bin Habib, ‘Jail,
Fine for Pvt Tuition’.
26 They were queried regarding seven rudimentary healthcare factors—whether
consumption of milk was good for pregnant women, colostrum for the
nutrition of infants, and consumption of fluids for diarrhoeal patients. Further,
they were asked to identify typhoid as a water-borne disease, the period of the
greatest likelihood of pregnancy during menstruation cycles, to confirm the
harmful effects of open defecation on health and their ability to prepare oral
rehydration salts (ORS) as a hygienic sugar–salt therapeutic solution.
27 FAO, Guidelines for Measuring Household and Individual Dietary Diversity.
Across a range of food groups, except starchy staples. Also, ‘oils and fats’
replaced the second category of vegetables, as we did not expect rural
respondents to eat two different varieties of vegetables in a single meal. Weights
were attached to each food group based on their respective calorific density
(calories derived per gram) to calculate final scores. The calories per gram were
defined based on the toolbox available in the Google search engine created by
the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Composition
Databases.
28 Only 15 per cent of women we spoke to ate meat the previous night, 18 per
cent fish and 18 per cent eggs with consumption on all counts being double in
Muslim-dominated Kishanganj district compared to Muzaffarpur.
29 As per the latest NFHS survey, in 2019–21, only 49 per cent of Bihari homes
have improved sanitation facilities. In 2015-16, during the period of my
fieldwork, it was only 25 per cent. Also, please see Appendix A13.
30 Field Notes, Tehragacch block, Kishanganj district, Bihar, 22–29 August 2016.
31 Sonalde Desai and Reeve Vanneman, India Human Development Survey-II
(IHDS-II), 2011-12. Calculations by Aashish Gupta (personal
communications).
32 Field Notes, Maidan Dighi union, Boda upazila, Panchagarh district,
Bangladesh, 22–29 February 2016.
33 Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, Quran: A Simple English Translation, chapter 5,
verse 6.
34 Field Notes, Pradhangachh, Bhojanpur Union, Tetulia upazila, Bangladesh, 23–
26 March 2016.
35 The human development scores were created by integrating all the four
indicators with equal weights and normalising the final scores across the
villages.
36 On a range of 0 to 1, where 1 implied the highest level of human development,
Panchagarh district in Bangladesh was ahead (0.78) of Sindhuli district in Nepal
(0.61), while both the Bihari districts (Muzaffarpur 0.38 and Kishanganj 0.32)
lagged behind.
37 For education, four key indicators were merged—teachers, seating arrangement,
educational material and basic amenities. For health the indicators were
functional facilities, basic medicines and reproductive and child health.
38 A multi-country World Bank survey in 2004 documented that 25 per cent of
teachers in government primary schools in India (and 38 per cent in Bihar) and
15 per cent in Bangladesh remained absent from work on any given day. On the
other hand, a survey led by Azim Premji University across six states found a
substantially lower absenteeism rate of 3 per cent. Still, they too noted that in
reality often 19 per cent of teachers were not present in the classroom for a
variety of reasons (Anurag Behar, ‘The False Narrative of Teacher
Absenteeism’).
39 While the intent behind this policy was progressive, many of the teachers were
recruited by the local panchayats based on fake certificates involving massive
corruption, which has adversely affected the quality of education (Satyavrat
Mishra, ‘Bihar’s Bitter Lesson in Teacher Recruitment’); Field Notes, Bihar, 29
August–14 September 2016.
40 Field Notes, Sirthouli VDC, Nepal, 25–31 May 2016.
41 The Bangladesh education ministry has also created a series of fifty colourful
educational posters that we unfailingly found in every school, neatly covered in
plastic to prevent wear-and-tear. Most of the posters are designed by UNICEF
and a range of donors such as USAID, Wateraid, etc., in partnership with the
 Ministry of Education. In schools in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, similar
visual activity sheets were used in the classroom for children of different
competencies.
42 Field Notes, Maidan Dighi Union, Boda upazila, Panchagarh district,
Bangladesh, 22 January– 9 February 2016.
43 Field Notes, Tehragacch block, Kishanganj district, Bihar, 22–29 August 2016.
44 Abhijeet Singh et al., ‘School Meals as a Safety Net: An Evaluation of the
Midday Meal Scheme in India’.
45 The lowest tier of the health infrastructure in India is referred to as the primary
‘sub-centre’, in Nepal it is called ‘health post’ and in Bangladesh as ‘community
clinic.’
46 MoHFW, Community Clinic Based Health Care (CBHC), DGHS.
47 Antibiotic tablets for adults and syrup for children, paracetamol, eye ointment,
iron tablets, vitamin A, vitamin B, vitamin C, deworming doses, oral
rehydration salt (ORS) sachet packets, anti-allergy products, anti-acidity tablets
and anti-bacterial ointments.
48 Omar Haider Chowdhury and S.R. Osmani, ‘Towards Achieving the Right to
Health: The Case of Bangladesh’.
49 Aparna John, Performance of India’s Community Nutrition Workers:
Anganwadi Workers of the Integrated Child Development Services Scheme in
Bihar. Anganwadis are government-run pre-schools which are expected to
provide early childhood care and education (ECCE). India has more than a
million such anganwadis which cover more than 80 million children under the
age of six. Each anganwadi under the National Food Security Act, 2013 is
expected mandatorily feed children freshly cooked snacks in the morning and
‘supplementary nutrition’ or a small meal in the afternoon.
50 Field Notes, Kishanganj district, Bihar.
51 Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, India: Development and Participation, p. 181.
52 Swati Narayan, ‘Towards Equality in Healthcare: Trends Over Two Decades’;
Gobinda Pal, ‘Caste and Access to Public Services’; A.K. Shiva Kumar et al.,
‘Inequities in Access to Health Services in India: Caste, Class and Region’;
Anand Teltumbde, ‘No Swachh Bharat without Annihilation of Caste’.
53 Mayank Kumar, ‘Dalit student dies after being beaten by teacher in U.P.,
Opposition mounts pressure on government’.
54 News 18 Team, ‘School Teacher Trashes Dalit Boy for Allegedly Not Bringing
Plate from Home’.
55 ‘“Jitne bhi Mohammedan bachche hai…” UP teacher makes kids beat fellow
student’.
56 Field Notes, Maidan Dighi Union, Boda upazila, Bangladesh, 22–29 February
2016.
57 Field Notes, Musahar Tola, Muzaffarpur district, Bihar, November 2016.
58 Field Notes, Hatpate VDC, Sindhuli district, Nepal, 1–3 June 2016.
59 Maitreyi B. Das, Whispers to Voices : Gender and Social Transformation in
Bangladesh.
60 Field Notes, Maidan Dighi Union, Boda upazila, Panchagarh district,
Bangladesh, 22–29 February 2016.
61 In Bangladesh the World Bank Gender Norms survey in 2006 found that 36.3
per cent of women in the 15–25 age group married men with less education;
Niels-Hugo Blunch and Maitreyi Bordia Das, ‘Changing Norms about Gender
Inequality in Education: Evidence from Bangladesh’.
62 This is also a growing trend in India with IHDS and NFHS survey data from
2005-06 also indicating that 30 per cent of women in the 15–45 years age
group married men with less education than them. Munoz Boudet, et al., ‘On
Norms and Agency: Conversations about Gender Equality with Women and
Men in 20 Countries’.
63 See the 2015-16 India Human Development Survey results (Sonalde Desai and
Reeve Vanneman, India Human Development Survey-II (IHDS-II), 2011-12).
The 2015 Social Attitudes Research India (SARI), too, concludes that women
who live in households where men eat first are more likely to be underweight
(Diane Coffey, et al., ‘Revealed Preference for Open Defecation’).
64 Field Notes, Dighalbank block, Kishanganj district, Bihar, 1–6 September 2017.
65 These verses are quoted in the Hadith by Wahshi bin Harb on the ‘Etiquette of
Eating’, Book 3, Hadith 743 (Abu Dawud).
66 Field Notes, Bhimstan VDC, Sindhuli district, Nepal, 16–22 May 2016.
67 In Kishanganj district, we came across a hamlet of Shersabadi Muslim families
who still practice an extreme form of purdah. Married women are not allowed
beyond the walls of the household. Working outside the home is strictly
prohibited, except in the madrassa to teach children. Yet, as a pleasant surprise,
they were well educated and, in some homes, had spent more years in schools
or madrassas than even their husbands. One 22-year-old mother aced all the
questions on healthcare in our survey, the only one in her village (Field Notes,
Dighalbank block, Nepal, 14 September 2016).
68 For more details on the standard linear regression analysis, please see Appendix
A15 and my doctoral thesis, Swati Narayan, ‘India Surpassed: The Price of
Inequality in South Asia’.
69 Please see Appendix A14.

4. BANGLADESH
1 There is a similar Persian couplet, ‘The first year we were Jolāhās, the next
Shaikhs; this year, if prices fall, we shall become Saiyads’ (Quoted in Asim Roy,
The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal, p. 62). Saiyads are considered to
be direct descendants of Prophet Mohammad and accorded the highest honour,
Sheikhs are Muslims of Arab origin, while Jolāhās are weavers.
2 Personal interview with Meghna Guhathakurta, Director, Research Initiatives,
11 April 2016.
3 According to Article 9 of the Fundamental Principles of State Policy of the
Constitution of Bangladesh, and through the Local Governmental (Union
Parishad) Act of 1997, three directly elected seats are reserved for women in the
Union Parishads (one from each of the three wards), the lowest level of councils
in the sub-national administration. As per Article 65 (3A) of the Constitution,
of the 350 seats in Parliament, fifty are reserved for women (International
IDEA, Gender Quotas Database).
4 In India, due to the rotational nature of the gender quota system, men are more
likely to be vested in ensuring that female family members are elected to
reserved seats that they may have previously occupied to ensure proxy
representation. But in Bangladesh, qualitative interviews seem to indicate that
‘Bangladeshi women members do not act as proxies of their husbands’
(Mahbub Alam Prodip, ‘Cultural Obstacles to Women’s Political Empowerment
in India and Bangladesh: A Comparative Perspective’). But, the larger
constituency size for reserved women members in Bangladesh is an institutional
constraint which diminishes their ability to both serve their constituents and
influence decisions in the Union Parishad (Mahbub Alam Prodip, ‘Exclusion
Through Inclusion: Institutional Constraints on Women’s Political
Empowerment in India and Bangladesh’).
5 Transparency International’s 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index ranks
Bangladesh in 147th place out of 180 countries and the worst in South Asia,
apart from Afghanistan.
6 The 2022 V-DEM liberal democracy index released in March 2023 ranks
Bangladesh as lower than Pakistan in South Asia. Since then, with the recent
political developments in Pakistan, the ranks are likely to change substantially
 in the next annual report (Evie Papada, et al., ‘Defiance in the Face of
Autocratization’, Democracy Report 2023’).
7 Partyarchy is a term coined in political science and often used in the context of
Bangladesh to describe socio-political domination whereby ‘political parties
monopolise the formal political process and politicise society along party lines’
(Michael Coppedge, Strong Parties and Lame Ducks: Presidential Partyarchy
and Factionalism in Venezuela, p. 24).
8 Field Notes, Maidan Dighi Union, Boda upazila, Bangladesh, 22–29 February
2016.
9 Naomi Hossain, The Aid Lab: Understanding Bangladesh’s Unexpected
Success, p. 4.
10 Salil Tripathi, ‘Bangladesh’s Quest for Closure’.
11 Mirza Hassan, ‘Political Settlement Dynamics in a Limited-Access Order: The
Case of Bangladesh’.
12 Naomi Hossain and Naila Kabeer, ‘Achieving Universal Education and
Eliminating Gender Disparity in Bangladesh’.
13 Mirza Hassan, ‘Political Settlement Dynamics’. The alternating monopoly that
the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party exchange determines
the nature of party–state relations, as well as those between the state and the
society, with the characteristic of monopoly (winner takes all).
14 Mirza Hassan, ‘Political Settlement Dynamics’, p. 33.
15 Mirza Hassan, ‘Political Settlement Dynamics’, p. 33.
16 Naomi Hossain, The Aid Lab, p. 5.
17 Bangladesh has had a spate of student protests since the Language Movement in
the 1950s and against the military dictators on the 1990s (TRT, ‘Bangladesh’s
History of Student Protest Movements’).
18 BBC, ‘Bangladesh Protests: How a Traffic Accident Stopped a City of 18
Million’; N. Tanjeem and R.E. Fatima, The 2018 Road Safety Protest in
Bangladesh: How a Student Crowd Challenged (or Could Not Challenge) the
Repressive State.
19 Haroon Habib, ‘At Shahbagh, Bangladesh’s Fourth Awakening’; Saimum
Parvez, ‘Understanding the Shahbag and Hefajat Movements in Bangladesh: A
Critical Discourse Analysis’.
20 Naila Kabeer’s remark at the launch of Naomi Hossain’s book The Aid Lab:
Understanding Bangladesh’s Unexpected Success at the event ‘Out of the
 Basket: Lessons from Bangladesh’s Development Successes’ at the London
School for Economics, 7 March 2017.
21 Nayanika Mookherjee, The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories,
and the Bangladesh War of 1971.
22 Naomi Hossain, The Aid Lab, p. 6.
23 Naomi Hossain, The Aid Lab, p. 5.
24 Naomi Hossain, The Aid Lab, pp. 5–6.
25 Simeen Mahmud was a wonderful source of knowledge during my PhD. I met
her in her office in Dhaka in 2016 and in Brighton in 2017 when we had
attended a conference on Bangladesh at IDS Sussex. Sadly, she passed away
suddenly in 2018.
26 Wahiduddin Mahmud and Simeen Mahmud, ‘Development, Welfare and
Governance: Explaining Bangladesh’s “Development Surprise”’, p. 70.
27 Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger despairingly described
Bangladesh in 1972 as an ‘international basket case’.
28 Atul Gawande, ‘Spreading Slow Ideas’.
29 The Lancet, ‘Water with Sugar and Salt’.
30 Child deaths under five years. IHME, Global Burden of Disease, 2019.
31 Fazle Hasan Abed, ‘Bangladesh’s Health Revolution’; A.M.R. Chowdhury and
Richard Cash, A Simple Solution: Teaching Millions to Treat Diarrhoea at
Home; Amy Yee, ‘Profile: The Icddr,b—Saving Lives in Bangladesh and
Beyond’.
32 Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: The Story of the Grameen Bank.
33 Hence ‘overall poverty would have been close to 5 per cent higher without the
spread of micro-credit’ mainly by NGOs. Siddiqui Osmani, ‘Has Microcredit
Helped the Rural Poor of Bangladesh? An Analytical Review of the Evidence So
Far’.
34 BRAC is one of the world’s largest in terms of the number of employees. In
2019, it employed more than 1,10,000 development workers. BRAC works not
only in every one of the sixty-eight districts of Bangladesh but also in Kenya,
Liberia, Afghanistan, Myanmar and other developing countries. (Jenny Lei
Ravelo, ‘The World’s Largest NGO Rethinks Its Future’).
35 BRAC’s social enterprises include handicrafts, poultries, dairies, fisheries and
nurseries, and they also have additional investments including tea estates, low-
cost housing, banks, stock-brokerage, mobile money remittances, life insurance,
etc.
36 The 2021 BRAC Annual Report indicates that only 14 per cent of BRAC’s
revenues are generated from external development grants compared to 66 per
cent from microfinance and 15 per cent from social enterprises. From the total
revenues, 20 per cent of BRAC’s expenditures are allocated for ‘development
programmes’ (BRAC, Annual Report 2020-21.)
37 GB, About Grameen Bank’ (blog).
38 The Tom Cruise starrer was estimated to have earned $1.440 billion globally.
39 Anu Muhammad, Rise of the Corporate NGO in Bangladesh.
40 Field Notes, Panchagarh town, Bangladesh, 20 June 2015.
41 Naomi Hossain, The Aid Lab, p. 17.
42 The teachers had gathered from across the upazila for a meeting. Field Notes,
Maidan Dighi Union, Boda upazila, Bangladesh, 22–29 February 2016.
43 Field Notes, Salbahan Union, Tetulia upazila, Bangladesh, 9 March 2016.
44 NGOs cater to around 1.3 million children. Of these, 70 per cent are enrolled in
BRAC primary schools alone (BANBEIS, ‘Table 3.5.6: Number of Schools with
Different Activities, 2016’).
45 BRAC has started a new form of ‘Shishu Schools’ where each child has to pay
Tk 200 per month as fees. In one school we visited with thirty-two students, the
teacher was paid a salary of Tk 2,600, i.e., one-tenth that of a government
school teacher (Field Notes Panchpir union, Boda upazila, Bangladesh, 1–4
March 2016).
46 Mirza Hassan, ‘Political Settlement Dynamics in a Limited-Access Order’, p. 18.
47 Jean Drèze, ‘Democracy and the Right to Food’; Alf Gunvald Nilsen, ‘India’s
Turn to Rights-Based Legislation (2004–2014): A Critical Review of the
Literature’.
48 Mirza Hassan, ‘Political Settlement Dynamics in a Limited-Access Order’, p. 35.
49 Shamsul Haque, ‘The Changing Balance of Power Between the Government and
NGOs in Bangladesh’.
50 GB, About Grameen Bank’ (blog).
51 Mohammed Yunus attempted to form a political party in 2007 which was
quickly rescinded in a few months, but by 2011 he was removed as the
managing director of Grameen Bank and the High Court confirmed the
dismissal.
52 Grameenphone is a joint venture enterprise between Telenor (55.8 per cent), the
largest telecommunications service provider in Norway, and Grameen Telecom
(34.2 per cent), a non-profit organisation of Bangladesh.
53 The multiplier effect of foreign remittances in Bangladesh is estimated to range
from 1.35 (World Bank, ‘Migration and Remittance Flows: Recent Trends and
Outlook, 2013-2016’) to 3.3 per cent of GNP (K.A.S. Murshid, K. Iqbal and
M. Ahmed, ‘A Study on Remittance Inflows and Utilization).
54 Naomi Hossain, The Aid Lab.
55 India’s Constitution recognises several Muslim communities as ‘Other
Backward Classes’ (OBC) based on their social and educational disadvantages.
Families are often keen to make a claim for these certificates, which offer
affirmative action in educational institutions and employment. In Bihar, the
central list consists of thirty and the state list of twenty-three identified Muslim
communities including Momin, Kasab (Kasai), Idrisi (Darzi), Dhobi, Dhunia
and several others.
56 Richard Eaton, ‘The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760’.
57 Richard Eaton, ‘The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760’, p. 9.
58 Historian Panikkar contends that the Palas were Shudra in origin (M.N.
Srinivas, ‘Mobility in the Caste System’).
59 In the eighth century, in India the Pratiharas ruled in the North, the
Rashtrakutas in the Deccan and the Pandyas and Pallavas in the South—all
espousing Hindu religious theology. The 1881 census records only 2,00,000
Buddhists in India and of these 1,55,809 were in Bengal.
60 Mohammad Bakhtiyar was initially under the suzerainty of the Delhi Sultan
Muhammad Ghuri, until he rebelled.
61 Richard Eaton, ‘The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760’.
62 H. Beverley, Report of the Census of India 1872; W.W. Hunter, The Indian
Mussalmans.
63 Richard Eaton, ‘The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760’, pp.
133–34.
64 While the Chishtiya Sufi order from Afghanistan with Moinuddin (Ajmer),
Qutubuddin (Delhi), Nizamuddin (Delhi) and Fariduddin (Pakpattan) was more
influential in northern India, the Suhrawardi Sufi order was more popular in
Bengal.
65 Abdul Momin Chowdhury, ‘Reflections on Islamisation in Bengal’, p. 48.
66 Imtiaz Ahmad, Caste and Social Stratification among the Muslims.
67 These verses are quoted in the Hadith included in the confirmed collection by
Al-Bukhari and published in Volume 8 of the book by Musnad Imam Ahmad
Bin Hanbal in 2012.
68 H. Beverley, Report of the Census of India 1872, p. 132.
69 Imtiaz Ahmad, Caste and Social Stratification among the Muslims; A.R.
Momin, ‘Muslim Caste: Theory and Practice’. In the seventeenth century, East
Bengal had essentially four types of elites—the intellectual elite or the alim
(Arabic scholars), the governing elite including the kazi (judges), the priestly
elite such as the mullah, and the spiritual elite consisting of the fakirs, pirs and
the murshids (R.K. Dasgupta, Revolt in East Bengal, pp. 8–9). By the nineteenth
century, Muslims in India were largely divided into only two main social
divisions. The upper crust of ashraf were assumed to have foreign ancestry. On
the other hand, the ajlaf or atrap were considered to be converts of indigenous
origin. Dr Ambedkar further highlighted a third invisiblised ‘lowest of all’ class
of arzal who were forbidden to enter the mosque and even use the public burial
ground (B.R. Ambedkar, ‘Social Stagnation’).
70 Saiyads are considered to be direct descendants of Prophet Mohammad and
accorded the highest honour; Sheikhs are Muslims of Arab origin; Mughals are
Muslims of Central Asian origin; and Pathans are of Afghan origin (Padmanabh
Samarendra, ‘Between Number and Knowledge: Career of Caste in Colonial
Census’); Imperial Census of India, various years compiled by the author (Swati
Narayan, India Surpassed: The Price of Inequality in South Asia, Figure 6.6, p.
152).
71 Asim Roy, The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal, p. 62.
72 Imtiaz Ahmad, Caste and Social Stratification among the Muslims.
73 Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–
1947; Girilal Jain, ‘Response to the West: Hindu-Muslim Divergence in India’.
74 Atis Dasgupta, ‘Variations in Perception of the Insurgent Peasants of Bengal in
the Late Eighteenth Century’.
75 Amartya Sen, ‘Imperial Illusions’.
76 R.K. Dasgupta, Revolt in East Bengal, p. 13.
77 Muntassir Mamoon and Mo Māhabubara Rahamāna, Material Conditions of
the Subalterns: Nineteenth Century East Bengal.
78 Karl Marx, Notes on Indian History, p. 116–20.
79 Peter Hardy, The Muslims of British India, p. 44.
80 Iftekar Iqbal, ‘The Political Ecology of the Peasant: The Fairaizi Movement
between Revolution and Passive Resistance’, pp. 78–82.
81 A.L. Basham, A Cultural History of India, p. 385.
82 A.K. Fazlul Huq, later the Prime Minister of East Bengal province, was a
Muslim who belonged to an elite family of jotedars.
83 Dilip Kumar Chattopadhyay, ‘The Ferazee and Wahabi Movements of Bengal’.
84 Shaikh Maqsood Ali, From East Bengal to Bangladesh: Dynamics and
Perspectives.
85 Upazilas are sub-districts in rural Bangladesh which were previously called
thanas. It is similar to a ‘county’ or ‘borough’ in Western countries and ‘block’
in India.
86 Under this legislation, the State became the owner of all land, abolishing all
intermediaries, with compensation paid over a period of time. The law fixed the
ceiling at 33.3 acres of land per family (Shaikh Maqsood Ali, From East Bengal
to Bangladesh: Dynamics and Perspectives).
87 Field Notes, Bura Buri Union, Tetulia upazila, Bangladesh, 21 March 2016.
88 Shaikh Maqsood Ali, From East Bengal to Bangladesh, pp. 102–4.
89 ‘East Bengal therefore did not have feudal landed aristocracy in the West
Pakistani sense’. Further, ‘[h]istorically, there was no caste/biradari or tribal
division in East Bengal in the pattern of West Pakistan. Most important, the
institution of marriage was mostly exogamous (as against large endogenous
pattern in the West)’. So, ‘the main criteria for social advance in East Bengal
was money and education’. (Shaikh Maqsood Ali, From East Bengal to
Bangladesh: Dynamics and Perspectives, pp. 102). With the rise of the middle
farmers (Jotdars) after the 1950 land reforms elite reorientation increased rural
vertical social mobility. Still, East Bengal society was somewhat divided between
the lives of the upper classes with ‘the former Choudhuries (revenue collectors)
and Talukdars (small landholders), the Kazis (marriage registrars)’ in contrast to
the ‘Zolahas (weavers), the Kulus (oil grinders), Dai (mid-wives)’ (M.
Rashidnzzamn, ‘Election Politics in Pakistan Villages’).
90 BBS, Preliminary Report on Agricultural Census 2019.
91 Muhammad Sanaullah, A.K. Fazlul Huq: Portrait of a Leader.
92 The 1943-44 Bengal Famine led to mass de-peasantisation, landlessness, and
increased the dependence on sharecropping. In the early years of the twentieth
century, Bengali sharecroppers were expected to not only bear all the costs of
production but also hand over half their harvest to the landlords. The Tebhaga
Andolan in pre-partition Bengal in 1946-47 was the ‘three-shares’ movement.
Sharecroppers demanded from the zamindar landlords and the British
administration that atleast a third of the produce be retained by the cultivators
of land.
93 Muhammad Sanaullah, A.K. Fazlul Huq: Portrait of a Leader.
94 Under the British colonial empire, which was headquartered in Calcutta as the
capital from 1757 to 1911, an elite English-speaking Bengali social class
emerged initially in urban centres, which included petty officials, nouveau riche,
zamindars and entrepreneurs, all colloquially referred to as bhadralok or
gentlemen. Marxist historians compare the bhadralok to the ‘bourgeois’ or
‘middle class’, but Sumit Sarkar and S.N. Mukherjee argue that rather than a
social class, they were simply the educated class in a largely illiterate society
(S.N. Mukherjee, ‘Class, Caste and Politics in Calcutta 1815–38’).
95 ‘Babu’ is a colloquial Bengali term for a man from this gentrified class.
96 Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided, p. 4.
97 Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided, p. 5.
98 Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided, p. 13.
99 Muhammad Sanaullah, A.K. Fazlul Huq: Portrait of a Leader.
100 Gopal Maju Mukherjee, ‘C.R. Das and the Bengal Pact’.
101 Muhammad Sanaullah, A.K. Fazlul Huq: Portrait of a Leader.
102 Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided, p. 15.
103 Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand
for Pakistan.
104 Shaikh Maqsood Ali, From East Bengal to Bangladesh: Dynamics and
Perspectives, pp. 102–4.
105 The Vested Property Act (earlier Enemy Property Act) originally enacted in
1948 during the partition of British India allows the Bangladeshi government to
confiscate property from any person deemed to be a state enemy.
106 Rehman Sobhan, Bangladesh: Problems of Governance. Governing South Asia.
On the other side of the border, in the late 1960s, West Bengal was at the
epicentre of the left wing, militant Maoist Naxalite movement, which sought to
combat extreme socio-economic inequalities.
107 Syed Badrul Ahsan, ‘When Mr Jinnah came to Dhaka’.
108 Bangladeshis have convinced the United Nations to declare 21 February as
International Mother Language Day, which coincides with the day when
students in Dhaka opposed the imposition of Urdu as the national language in
East Pakistan. This day is celebrated with much fanfare across rural and urban
Bangladesh.
109 Interview with a Marxist academic who had led a battalion of armed men of
the Mukti Bahini (Freedom Army) in the 1971 war (Field Notes, Boda upazila,
Bangladesh, 21 February 2016).
110 Interview with a Hindu academic (Field Notes, Boda upazila, Bangladesh, 21
February 2016).
111 Journalist Salil Tripathi, in his book The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The
Bangladesh War and Its Unquiet Legacy, depicts the utter brutality unleashed
during this civil war, based on interviews with several eye-witnesses and
participants on all sides of the conflict.
112 In the US Congress on 14 October 2022 a historic resolution was introduced to
recognise that a genocide had occurred in East Pakistan in 1971 (H. Res. 1430 -
Recognizing the Bangladesh Genocide of 1971, 117th Congress). It has already
been recognised by the the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and
Genocide Watch.
113 The National Board of Bangladesh Women’s Rehabilitation received 22,500
applications from raped women, of whom 86 per cent were illiterate and two-
thirds rural. Countless cases remained unreported as families preferred secrecy
(Yasmin Saikia, Women, War and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering
1971, Thaslima Begum, ‘“We Lay Like Corpses. Then the Raping Began”: 52
Years On, Bangladesh’s Rape Camp Survivors Speak Out’.
114 Salil Tripathi, The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and
Its Unquiet Legacy, pp. 77–78.
115 After partition of British India in 1947, thousands of Muslims from Bihar
migrated to East Bengal, which became East Pakistan. They largely supported
the Pakistani administration as middle-level government officials. After
Bangladesh’s independence in 1971, more than a million Urdu-speaking people
were stranded in the newly formed Bangladesh and also faced deep stigma as
Urdu-speaking ‘Biharis’. Until 2008, most remained ‘stateless’ and lived in
appalling conditions, when the government of Bangladesh recognised only their
children born after Bangladesh’s independence in 1971 as citizens. Between
1973 and 1993, 1,78,069 ‘Biharis’ were also repatriated to Pakistan.
116 The narrative of the famine in the air-conditioned NGOs in Dhaka were very
different from the recollections of ordinary villagers I met. The NGOs waxed
eloquent about the work of the UN and donors in a war-ravaged country.
However, octogenarians we interviewed in the villages had an entirely different
tale. They recollected that the only relief they received was from their own local
elected leaders who organised langarkhanas (Field Notes, Bangladesh,
February–April 2016).
117 Surinder Jodhka and Ghanshyam Shah, ‘Comparative Contexts of
Discrimination: Caste and Untouchability in South Asia’.
118 Personal communication with Megha Guhathakurta, Director, Research
Initiatives, 11 April 2016.
119 But across household interviews, even in Panchagarh, we found an unwritten
gender rule—as soon as girls are married, around the age of sixteen, they
usually stop riding bicycles unless they have a job. Only paid employment seems
to enable married women to secure permission from their families to ride
bicycles.
120 Naila Kabeer, ‘The Rise of the Daughter-in-Law’.
121 Sonia Amin, The World of Muslim Women in Colonial Bengal, 1876–1939.
122 Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, ‘The Worship of Women’.
123 Dagmar Engels, Beyond Purdah? Women in Bengal, 1890–1939, p. 1.
124 Brahmo Samaj, which commenced in 1828, was a monotheistic reform
movement of the Hindu religion. It flourished during the nineteenth and the
early twentieth century and was a part of the Bengal Renaissance.
125 Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 1849–1905, p.
228.
126 Sonia Amin, The World of Muslim Women in Colonial Bengal, 1876–1939.
127 Dagmar Engels, Beyond Purdah?, p. 1.
128 Kavita Punjabi, ‘Otiter Jed or Times of Revolution: Ila Mitra, the Santals and
Tebhaga Movement’, p. 58.
129 Ila Mitro, the feminist, who was the leader of the Nachol revolt, shifted to
Kolkata after Independence. She acquired a legendary status through the oral
traditions across generations of the East Bengali Santhals (Kavita Punjabi,
‘Otiter Jed or Times of Revolution’, p. 58).
130 One lakh Santhals from across Bangladesh gathered to meet Ila Mitra when she
visited the country on the fiftieth anniversary of the Tebhaga Andolan. The
tribal community, through their oral tradition, consider the Santhal Rebellion of
1855 to be connected to the Nachol Tebhaga revolt of 1948 (Kavita Punjabi,
‘Otiter Jed or Times of Revolution’).
131 Martina Mondol, ‘Women’s Contribution in Language Movement’.
132 E.A.M. Asaduzzaman, ‘Women Language Movement Heroes of Nilphamari’.
133 Nayanika Mookherjee, ‘Gendered Embodiments: Mapping the Body-Politic of
the Raped Woman and the Nation in Bangladesh’.
134 Hameeda Hossain, ‘Women’s Movements in Bangladesh: The Struggle Within –
Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières’.
135 Nayanika Mookherjee, ‘Gendered Embodiments’.
136 Interview with Raunaq Jahan, Centre for Policy Dialogue, 2 December 2015.
 ‘Birangana’ means ‘war heroines’ and was a term coined by Bangladesh’s first
137
Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to refer to the estimated 2,00,000–
3,00,000 rape survivors and acknowledged their ‘sacrifice’ for the freedom of
the nation. ‘Nari jodha’ is a more dignified term coined by women’s activists,
which means women fighters (Laxmi Murthy, ‘The Birangana and the Birth of
Bangladesh’).
138 Nayanika Mookherjee, The Spectral Wound.
139 Yasmin Sakia, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh, p. 146.
140 Naila Kabeer, Minus Lives: Women of Bangladesh, p. 5.
141 Naila Kabeer and Naomi Hossain, ‘Achieving Universal Primary Education and
Eliminating Gender Disparity’, p. 4095.
142 Interview with Raunaq Jahan, Centre for Policy Dialogue, 2 December 2015.
143 Micro-credit involves lending credit in the form of small loans with no
collateral largely to women as borrowers. As the borrowers return the loan with
interest, in instalments, the repayments are often employed to provide larger
loans. Women are often encouraged to form self-help groups to engage in both
micro-credit and micro-savings. Self-help groups are also often savings groups,
where women collectively pool their savings at regular intervals in order to
create a corpus of financial reserves for extending micro-credit, with or without
external sources of funds.
144 Shelley Feldman and Florence E. McCarthy, ‘Purdah and Changing Patterns of
Social Control among Rural Women in Bangladesh’.

5. NEPAL
1 A collection of Maoist songs translated by Matthew W. Maycock,
matthewmaycock.com/file/Maoist_Tharu_songs.html, last accessed 17 July
2023.
2 Sujit Mainali, ‘How Discriminatory Was the First Muluki Ain against Dalits?’
3 The Print Staff, ‘Nepal’s Latest Crisis and Its Unstable Political History with 49
PMs in 58 Years’.
4 Yurendra Basnett, From Politicization of Grievances to Political Violence: An
Analysis of the Maoist Movement in Nepal.
5 Gyan Pradhan, ‘Nepal’s Civil War and Its Economic Costs’.
6 GoN and UNDP, Nepal Human Development Report 2014 Beyond Geography
—Unlocking Human Potential; UNDP, Human Development Report 2005.
 Data from the Third Nepal Living Standards Survey quoted in IMF, ‘Nepal:
7
Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper Progress Report’.
8 Bishwa Nath Tiwari, ‘An Assessment of the Causes of Conflict in Nepal’.
9 As per the SWIID database, Nepal’s Gini index increased from 0.40 in 1996 to
0.41 in 2006 but fell to 0.38 in 2010.
10 Stephen Jones, ‘The Politics of Social Rights’, p. 262.
11 Bandita Sijapati, ‘The Quest for Achieving Universal Social Protection in Nepal:
Challenges and Opportunities’.
12 Robert Palacios, ‘Universal Social Protection: Universal Old-Age and Disability
Pensions, and Other Universal Allowances in Nepal’.
13 Nepal’s social pension benefit amount is equivalent to 16 per cent of GDP per
capita, compared to only 8 per cent in Bangladesh and 5 per cent in India of
GDP per capita, respectively.
14 B. Babajanian, ‘Tackling Old Age Poverty and Vulnerability’. Nepal’s social
pension benefit amount is equivalent to 16 per cent of GDP per capita,
compared to only 8 per cent in Bangladesh and 5 per cent in India, respectively
(Stephen Kidd, Rebecca Calder and Emily Wylde, ‘Assessing Targeting Options
for Nepal’s Social Grants—What Does the Evidence Tell Us?’).
15 The Village Development Committee (VDC) conveniently hands over the money
to pensioners. However, many Musahars and Doms whom I met during
fieldwork near the border areas, though acutely impoverished, do not receive
this pension. One eligible and malnourished Dom lady, as many others, said
that she did not receive the pension as she did not have a citizenship card. Her
application was not processed as she does not have a letter from the VDC
where she was born to testify her citizenship. The Nepali government is highly
wary of the claims of citizenship of Doms and many communities in the Terai
belt and suspect that they may be from India. So, as highly marginalised Dalits,
they often face even more discrimination (Field Notes, Sirthouli VDC, Nepal,
25–31 May 2016).
16 Stephen Jones, ‘The Politics of Social Rights’.
17 In 2009, Nepal’s government initiated the Child Grant, a monthly cash transfer,
for up to two children per family under the age of five. Initially, the grant
targeted the Karnali region and Dalit families living in poverty in the rest of the
country. But it was quickly extended to cover all children aged under five in
twenty-five or seventy-seven districts. In 2023, the Child Grant covers around
40 per cent of children under the age of five with NPR 532 (US$4) paid per
month per child.
18 Biswas Baral, ‘What Is Delaying the Landmark Left Merger in Nepal?’.
19 For example, if Nepal were to lower the age criterion for the universal pension
to sixty years and also universalise the child grant to all children under five
years of age, then the programme would cover three-fourths of the population
and 88 per cent of the poor at 1.5 per cent of GDP (Stephan Kidd, Rebecca
Calder and Emily Wylde, ‘Assessing Targeting Options for Nepal’s Social
Grants’).
20 Keshav Acharya, ‘Evaluating Institutional Capability of Nepali Grassroot
Organisations for Service Delivery Functions’.
21 Field Notes, Sirthouli VDC, Nepal, 25–31 May 2016.
22 Sangita Thebe Limbu, ‘Nepal’s House of Cards: Are Women Included or Co-
opted in Politics?’
23 Y.B. Malla, ‘Changing Policies and the Persistence of Patron-Client Relations in
Nepal: Stakeholders’ Responses to Changes in Forest Policies’.
24 John Whelpton, ‘The Quest for “Development”: Economy and Environment,
1951–1991’.
25 Murari Raj Joshi, ‘Community Forestry Programs in Nepal and Their Effects on
Poorer Households’; John Whelpton, ‘The Quest for “Development”’.
26 Ridish K. Pokharel, ‘Pro-poor Programs Financed through Nepal’s Community
Forestry Funds: Does Income Matter?’.
27 Since the school principal was an active member of both the school
management committee and community forest user group (Field Notes,
Bhimstan VDC, Nepal, 16–22 May 2016).
28 World Bank, Moving Up the Ladder: Poverty Reduction and Social Mobility in
Nepal.
29 Shridhar Thapa and Sanjaya Acharya, ‘Remittances and Household
Expenditure in Nepal: Evidence from Cross-Section Data’, p. 11.
30 Field Notes, Sirthouli VDC, Nepal, 25–31 May 2016.
31 Ann Vogel and Kim Korinek, ‘Passing by the Girls? Remittance Allocation for
Educational Expenditures and Social Inequality in Nepal’s Households 2003–
2004’.
32 Interview with Feminist Dalit Organisation (FEDO), Kathmandu, Nepal, 15
June 2016.
33 Prakash A. Raj, Maoists in the Land of Buddha.
34 Uddhab Pyakurel, Maoist Movement in Nepal; John Whelpton, ‘The Quest for
“Development”’.
35 Harka Gurung, ‘The Dalit Context’.
36 The code classified people into five groups, ‘Tagadhari (those wearing the sacred
thread called Janai across their torso), Masinay Matuwali (enslavable liquor
drinkers), Namasine Matuwali (unenslavable liquor drinkers), Pani Nachalne
Chhoichhito Halnu Naparne (Impure but touchables including foreigners,
Muslims and Christians also fall under this category), and Pani Nachalne Chhoi
Chhito Halnu Parne (Impure and Untouchable, upon touching whom one
needed to purify themselves by sprinkling gold-dipped water)’. Sujit Mainali,
‘How Discriminatory Was the First Muluki Ain against Dalits?’
37 Please see Appendix A16.
38 Harka Gurung, ‘The Dalit Context’. See Appendix A17.
39 Krishna Kant Adhikari, ‘Criminal Cases and Their Punishments: Before and
During the Period of Jang Bahadur’.
40 Rajan Khatiwoda, Simon Cubelic and Axel Michaels, ‘The Muluki Ain of 1854:
Nepal’s First Legal Code’; Amish Raj Mulmi ‘Codifying the Breaking of Wind’.
Please see Appendix A17.
41 John Whelpton, ‘The Quest for “Development”’.
42 GoN, Nepal – National Population and Housing Census 2011, Marks 100
Years of Census Taking in Nepal.
43 GoN and UNDP, Nepal Human Development Report 2014: Beyond
Geography. Inequalities also have a geographic dimension. In 2010, the average
income of a pahadi Brahmin in the hills was twice as high as a Dalit in the Terai
plains (GoN 2010).
44 GoN and UNDP, Nepal Human Development Report 2014: Beyond
Geography.
45 In Ward 1 of Sirthouli VDC, for example, 5 per cent was reserved for Dalits
(Sarki, Khami, Musahars), 5 per cent for Janajatis (Dhanuar, Magar, Bhote), 5
per cent for Adivasis (Mahato), 10 per cent for women, 5 per cent for children
and adolescents and 5 per cent for the differently abled (Field Notes, Nepal, 25–
31 May 2016).
46 ILO, Labour Migration for Employment: A Status Report for Nepal 2014/2015.
47 Field Notes, Sirthouli VDC, Nepal, 25 May 2016.
48 Yogendra B. Gurung, et al., Nepal Social Inclusion Survey 2012: Caste, Ethnic
and Gender Dimensions of Socio-Economic Development, Governance and
Social Solidarity.
49 ‘People’s War’ was a term coined by Chairman Mao Tse Tung who founded the
People’s Republic of China.
50 Prakash A. Raj, Maoists in the Land of Buddha.
51 Baburam Bhattarai, Monarchy vs Democracy: The Epic Fight in Nepal. The
ruling families in the hills of central and western Nepal are known as Thakuris,
who claim descent from Indian Rajputs from Mewar (Krishna Hachhethu, ‘The
Nepali State and the Maoist Insurgency, 1996-2001’).
52 Yurendra Basnett, From Politicization of Grievances to Political Violence.
53 Uddhab Pyakurel, Maoist Movement in Nepal.
54 My sample district Sindhuli in the eastern hills was also one of the hotbeds of
the Maoist movement from its early days. On 8 September 2002, the rebels
attacked and killed forty-nine policemen at the police post in one of my sample
villages at midnight. They used women and children as human shields. A
teachers in one of the other villages narrated how their school playground was
converted into a rebel camp (S.D. Muni, Maoist Insurgency in Nepal: The
Challenge and the Response).
55 Field Notes, Sirthouli VDC, Sindhuli district, Nepal, 25 April–1 May 2016.
56 Alpa Shah and Judith Pettigrew, Windows into a Revolution: Ethnographies of
Maoism in India and Nepal.
57 Field Notes, Ranibas VDC, Sindhuli district, Nepal, 3–6 June 2016.
58 Hisila Yami, People’s War and Women’s Liberation in Nepal, pp. 121–22.
59 Prakash A. Raj, Maoists in the Land of Buddha.
60 Michael Hutt, Himalayan People’s War: Nepal’s Maoist Rebellion.
61 Sara Schneiderman and Mark Turin, ‘The Path to Jan Sarkar in Dolakha
District: Towards an Ethnography of the Maoist Movement’.
62 Field Notes, Sirthouli VDC, Sindhuli district, Nepal, 25–31 May 2016.
63 Field Notes, Sirthouli VDC, Nepal, 25–31 May 2016.
64 Even in village homes, we experienced abhorrent inter-dining taboos. In one
Bahun home, we saw an orphan Dalit adolescent boy whom they had ‘adopted’
(more as a child labourer rather than a son). He was not permitted to eat within
the house. He had to wait until the rest of the family finished their meal and
after he had washed their dirty dishes. In another Bahun home that we stayed
in, my translator and I were not permitted to enter the kitchen while the lady of
the house was cooking, although we ate there afterwards, sitting on the floor
with the rest of the family (Field Notes, Sindhuli district, 5–10 April 2015 and
Bhimstan VDC, 16–22 May 2016).
65 Hisilia Yami, People’s War and Women’s Liberation in Nepal, p. 122.
66 Ina Zharkevich, Maoist People’s War.
67 Michael Hutt, Himalayan People’s War.
68 Jeevan Sharma, Political Economy of Social Change and Development in Nepal.
69 In the midst of the guerrilla war, the most powerful woman leader of the
guerrillas published the findings of a survey for an international audience in the
Economic and Political Weekly even though it had a number of unsavoury
revelations such as the acute need felt by women cadres for ‘family planning’
and ‘menstrual hygiene’, and the preponderance of sexual violence even within
the force (Parvati, ‘Women in the People’s War in Nepal’).
70 As per international law, under the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the
Rights of the Child, non-state guerrilla rebels are forbidden from recruiting
anyone under the age of eighteen years.
71 HRW, ‘Hidden Apartheid’.
72 HRW, ‘Silenced and Forgotten’.
73 Interview with female head of a government body to monitor transparency
(Field Notes, Kathmandu, 15–16 June 2016).
74 Hisila Yami, People’s War and Women’s Liberation in Nepal, p. 124.
75 Hisilia Yami, People’s War and Women’s Liberation in Nepal, p. 9.
76 Ina Zharkevich, Maoist People’s War.
77 Ina Zharkevich, Maoist People’s War, p. 141.
78 Keshav Acharya, ‘Evaluating Institutional Capability of Nepali Grassroot
Organisations for Service Delivery Functions’.
79 Lauren Leve, ‘“Failed Development” and Rural Revolution in Nepal:
Rethinking Subaltern Consciousness and Women’s Empowerment’.
80 Shobha Gautam, Amrita Banskota and Rita Manchanda, ‘Where There Are No
Men: Women in the Maoist Insurgency in Nepal’, p. 214.
81 Female Headed Households (% of households with a female head), World
Development Indicators.
82 Cardona Justino, R. Mitchell and C. Müller, ‘Quantifying the Impact of
Women’s Participation in Post-conflict Economic Recovery’.
83 Patti Petesch, ‘Women’s Empowerment Arising from Violent Conflict and
Recovery: Life Stories from Four Middle-Income Countries’.
84 Cardono Justino, R. Mitchell and C. Müller, ‘Quantifying the Impact of
Women’s Participation in Post-conflict Economic Recovery’.
 Penny Summerfield, Women, War and Social Change: Women in Britain in
85 World War II.
86 Pilar Domingo, et al., Assessment of the Evidence of Links between Gender
Equality, Peacebuilding and Statebuilding: Literature Review.
87 Cardono Justino, R. Mitchell and C. Müller, ‘Quantifying the Impact of
Women’s Participation in Post-conflict Economic Recovery’.
88 Nepal’s Gender Inequality Index improved from 0.71 in 1995 to 0.45 in 2021.
In contrast, India’s value was worse at 0.49 and Bangladesh at 0.530 in 2021.
89 Punam Yadav, ‘White Sari: Transforming Widowhood in Nepal’.
90 Shobha Gautam, Amrita Banskota and Rita Manchanda, ‘Where There Are No
Men’, p. 233.
91 The 2015 Constitution, revised in 2016, guarantees gender quotas both in
reserved seats and legislated candidate quotas. Article 91(2) of the Nepali
Constitution specifies that there must be ‘one woman out of the Speaker and the
Deputy Speaker’ in the Parliament.
92 Sangita Thebe Limbu, ‘Nepal’s House of Cards’. The law mandates that in each
ward, there will be one chair and four ward members—two of whom must be
women, including one Dalit woman.
93 The share of Dalits in Nepal’s population is estimated to be between 18 and 20
per cent as per the just released 2021 census. So the proportional representation
sub-quotas negotiated by Dalit and feminist activists in Nepal does represent a
landmark policy of social inclusion. In India, one-third of the seats of
panchayati raj institutions (at the lowest tier of governance) and one-third of
the chairperson posts are reserved for women. Within these reserved women’s
seats, one-third are reserved for Dalit/Adivasi women, unlike Nepal’s higher
sub-quota of half (50 per cent) for Dalit women.
94 India’s Women’s Reservation Act (The Constitution [128th Amendment] Bill,
2008) has been enacted in September 2023. Women currently represent only 14
per cent of Indian parliamentarians. Amongst feminists the lack of inter-
sectional ‘quotas within quotas’ has been an important point of debate and
contention which ‘seemed to set (mainly upper caste) feminists against (mainly
male) OBC leaders’ (Gail Omvedt, ‘Women and PR’; Meena Dhanda,
‘Representation for Women: Should Feminists Support Quotas?’; Nivedita
Menon, ‘Elusive “Woman”: Feminism and Women’s Reservation Bill’; Surbhi
Karwa, ‘Intersectionality, The Missing Link in the Women’s Reservation Bill’).
However, the newly enacted law neither has sub-quotas for OBCs, nor minority
religions. Further, the rotational constituencies for women have also been
criticised.
95 Bhola Paswan, ‘Data Reveals Local Elections a Disaster for Gender Equality’.
96 Field Notes, Bhimstan VDC, 16–22 May 2016.
97 Shobha Gautam, Amrita Banskota and Rita Manchanda, ‘Where There Are No
Men’; Punam Yadav, ‘White Sari’.
98 Urmila Aryal, ‘All Nepal Women’s Association’; Hisila Yami, People’s War and
Women’s Liberation in Nepal.
99 Shobha Gautam, Amrita Banskota and Rita Manchanda, ‘Where There Are No
Men’, p. 215.
100 Journalist Aditya Adhikari lucidly explains this genesis of the Nepali communist
movement in his fascinating book From the Bullet to the Ballot Box: The Story
of Nepal’s Maoist Revolution.
101 Punam Yadav, Social Transformation in Post-conflict Nepal.
102 Conversation with leading women cadre member of the Maoist party, Field
Notes, Kathmandu, Nepal, 15–16 June 2016.
103 Often women or men could have more than one proposal put forward by the
party as documented in the interviews with former combatants (Punam Yadav,
Social Transformation in Post-conflict Nepal, p. 109). Yet, after the war, several
couples, especially with Dalit brides, faced opposition when they returned to
their village (Interview with a member of the Feminist Dalit Organisation—
FEDO—on 13 June 2016). Still, after the conflict, the Nepali government
institutionalised a 1,00,000 Nepali Rupee ($1,270) cash reward to encourage
inter-caste Dalit marriages (AFP, ‘Nepal Introduces Grants for Inter-Caste
Marriages’).
104 Interview with a high-ranking women Maoist party official, 13 June 2016.
105 Punam Yadav, Social Transformation in Post-conflict Nepal, p. 103.
106 Lauren Leve, ‘“Failed Development” and Rural Revolution in Nepal’, p. 127.
107 Hisila Yami, From Liberation to First Lady.
108 The survey was spearheaded by Comrade Parvati, which is the nom de guerre of
Hisila Yami, the most influential female combatant amongst the Maoist
guerrilla rebels. She also summarised the survey in her 2021 memoir, Hisila:
From Liberation to First Lady.
109 Parvati, ‘Women in the People’s War in Nepal’. The survey also specifies that
‘while unmarried women outnumbered married ones, when it came to having
children, those bearing children out-numbered those without’.
110 Hisila Yami, People’s War and Women’s Liberation in Nepal, p. 3.
111 Yurendra Basnett, From Politicization of Grievances to Political Violence.
112 Chhaupadi Pratha is a traditional custom where menstruating women are
considered untouchable and have to live in communal sheds away from their
homes. Although the Nepali Supreme Court declared the practice illegal in
2005, it continues to be practised in the far western region.
113 Teej is a Hindu festival where women fast for the long life of their husbands,
and to find suitable husbands.
114 Hisila Yami, People’s War and Women’s Liberation in Nepal.
115 Punam Yadav, ‘White Sari’.
116 Punam Yadav, ‘White Sari’.
117 K.C. Luna and Gemma Van Der Haar, ‘Living Maoist Gender Ideology:
Experiences of Women Ex-combatants in Nepal’.
118 Punam Yadav, ‘White Sari’.

6. BIHAR
1 S. Sheoraj ‘Bechain’, Voices of Awakening.
2 In July 2016, the viral video of the public flogging of Dalit youth in Una block
led to the anti-caste Dalit Asmita Yatra led by Jignesh Mewani in Gujarat which
dominated the newspaper headlines for weeks. The Bihari incident however did
not lead to any anti-caste protest. Mohammad Sajjad, ‘Atrocity against Dalits in
Bihar’.
3 Musahars, traditionally denigrated as ‘rat eaters’, are amongst the most
discriminated Dalits and are at the bottom of the caste hierarchy.
4 Survey Data and Field Notes, Bihar, August to November 2016. In contrast, in
Kishanganj only 15 per cent of Dalit households expressed the same prejudice
in my survey.
5 Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution.
6 The Paswans, also known as Dusadh, are Dalits who in urban spaces often find
employment as security guards.
7 Aparna John, Performance of India’s Community Nutrition Workers, p. 75;
Aparna John, et al., ‘Factors Influencing the Performance of Community Health
Workers: A Qualitative Study of Anganwadi Workers from Bihar, India’.
8 Though the incumbent chief minister Nitish Kumar, in a grand coalition, won
the 2015 election with a landslide, two years later the coalition dissolved and
his party joined hands with the right-wing BJP to retain power as a regional
 satrap. In 2022, Nitish Kumar announced that the alliance with the BJP was
over and he has now aligned with the Indian National Developmental Inclusive
Alliance (INDIA) coalition for the forthcoming 2024 polls.
9 In both the 2015 and 2020 post-poll Bihari surveys, 31 and 36 per cent of
voters respectively identified development as the most important issue.
Cumulatively, with unemployment, poverty and hunger, the proportion was 46
and 61 percent respectively as per Lokniti-CSDS (Shreyas Sardesai, et al.,
‘Decoding the Close Bihar Election 2020 Verdict’).
10 The per capita income of Bihar in 2021-22 was even lower than other
impoverished states of Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh
at INR 54,383 or approximately USD 652 per person per year on an average.
IANS, Bihar per capita income is lower than Jharkhand, UP and Odisha: CAG.
11 Government Order (ICDS/40025/25-2012/4636 dated 13/08/2014).
12 IIPS and MoHFW, ‘National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) India Report’. In
Bihar, 76 per cent of deliveries overall and 71 per cent among Dalits take place
in a health facility compared to 89 per cent, the national average.
13 The National Family Health Survey 2019–2021 is based on a representative
sample of women in the 15–49 years age group at the national, state and
district levels. The 2011 census also indicated that 46 per cent of women above
the age of fifteen in Bihar were illiterate compared to the national average of 35
per cent.
14 Girish Mishra, ‘Review of the Internal Colony’; Sachchidanand Sinha, An
Internal Colony: A Study in Regional Exploitation.
15 Under the policy of ‘freight equalisation’ introduced soon after India gained
independence, the central government guaranteed uniform prices nationwide for
essential commodities, which included minerals such as coal, steel and cement.
As a result of this protectionist policy which heavily subsidised the
transportation of minerals within the country, private industries preferred to
locate their factories and industries nearer the ports in western, eastern and
southern India for onward international trade. Till this policy was abandoned
with economic liberalisation, it severely hampered the economic incentive for
industrialisation especially in the mineral-rich, landlocked areas of Jharkhand,
Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh which had no port facilities.
16 Golam Rasul and Eklabya Sharma, ‘Understanding the Poor Economic
Performance of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, India: A Macro-Perspective’.
17 Census of India 2011, Population Enumeration Data (Final Population).
18 Shaibal Gupta, ‘Non-development of Bihar: A Case of Retarded Sub-
nationalism’, p. 1496-1502
 Prerna Singh, How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social
19
Development in India.
20 Shaibal Gupta, ‘Non-development of Bihar’, p. 1500.
21 Shaibal Gupta, ‘Non-development of Bihar’, pp. 1496–1502.
22 Shaibal Gupta, ‘Non-development of Bihar’, p. 1496.
23 Shaibal Gupta, ‘Non-development of Bihar’, p. 1500.
24 Rajni Kothari, Caste in Indian Politics.
25 Awanish Kumar, ‘A Class Analysis of the “Bihari Menace”’.
26 Awanish Kumar, ‘Where Is Caste in Development?’.
27 Sanjay Kumar and Rakesh Ranjan, ‘Bihar: Development Matters’.
28 Chirashree Das Gupta, ‘Unravelling Bihar’s “Growth Miracle”’.
29 Gerry Rodgers, et al. The Challenge of Inclusive Development in Rural Bihar
30 M. Rajshekhar, Despite the State: Why India Lets Its People Down and How
They Cope.
31 Gerry Rodgers, et al., The Challenge of Inclusive Development in Rural Bihar.
32 Yuko Tsujita, Hisaya Oda and Prabhat Ghosh, ‘Development and Intra-state
Disparities in Bihar’.
33 Yuko Tsujita, Hisaya Oda and Prabhat Ghosh, ‘Development and Intra-state
Disparities in Bihar’.
34 In Bihar, 86 per cent of Scheduled Caste households do not own land compared
to the highest in the Green Revolution states of 87 per cent in Punjab and 92
per cent in Haryana based on the 70th round of the National Sample Survey in
2013 (Ishan Anand, ‘Dalit Emancipation and the Land Question’).
35 Swati Narayan, ‘Towards Equality in Healthcare’.
36 Santosh Singh, Ruled or Misruled: Story and Destiny of Bihar, p. 328.
37 Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution, p. 256.
38 Eram Agha, ‘Hindu Right Wrongly Says Muslims Brought Beef-eating—
Hindutva History Is a Mystery: D.N. Jha’.
39 Census 2011: Table SC-08: Educational Level by Age and Sex for Population
Age 7 and Above.
40 In Patna, we were informed that the Nitish government had appointed shiksha
mitras (education supporters), tola sewaks (hamlet volunteers) and vikas mitra
(development assistants) from among Musahar communities themselves on
 handsome stipends, to ensure that children attend schools, but there was no
sign of them in schools in the hamlets we visited.
41 George J. Kunnath, Rebels from the Mud Houses: Dalits and the Making of the
Maoist Revolution in Bihar, p. 56.
42 For example, ‘A Kshatriya who commits adultery with an unguarded Bráhman
woman shall be punished with the highest amercement; a Vaisya doing the same
shall be deprived of the whole of his property; and a Súdra shall be burnt alive,
wound round in mats’ (Shamasastry, Kautilya’s Arthashastra).
43 Pataliputra refers to modern Patna, the capital of Bihar.
44 Dalit caste—they are tasked with cremating corpses.
45 B.S. Verma, Socio-Religious, Economic and Literary Condition of Bihar.
46 M.N. Srinivas, ‘Mobility in the Caste System’.
47 M.N. Srinivas, Caste in Modern India and Other Essays, pp. 17–18.
48 M.N. Srinivas, ‘A Note on Sanskritization and Westernization’. French
sociologist Gabriel Tarde has also described similar ‘laws of imitation’ by the
socially inferior classes; B.R. Ambedkar, ‘Social Stagnation’.
49 Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution; Pradip Bose, ‘Mobility and
Conflict: Social Roots of Caste Violence in Bihar’.
50 Pradip Bose, ‘Mobility and Conflict’, p. 373.
51 Pradip Bose, ‘Mobility and Conflict’, p. 373.
52 Pradip Bose, ‘Mobility and Conflict’, pp. 196–97.
53 Pradip Bose, ‘Mobility and Conflict’.
54 Since the 1850s, the British government used the term ‘Depressed Classes’ to
refer to the former untouchable castes and indigenous tribes. In the 1935
Government of India Act, the term ‘Scheduled Castes’ and ‘Scheduled Tribes’
replaced the generic classification.
55 Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution, pp. 175 and 206. In 1923, M.C.
Rajah led a delegation to the Madras government to complain that the non-
Brahmins who got twenty-eight seats in the Madras Legislative Assembly after
pressure from the Justice Party had benefited only the elite non-Brahmins, and
not Untouchables. So, the Depressed Classes category was enhanced separately.
56 Prakash Louis, ‘Lynchings in Bihar: Reassertion of Dominant Castes’.
57 Katherine S. Newman and Sukhdeo Thorat, Blocked by Caste: Economic
Discrimination in Modern India. Initially, only Hindus were defined as
Scheduled Castes (SCs) under the Constitution, but in 1956, Sikhs were
 included and in 1990 Buddhists too, but Christians and Muslims were never
considered for inclusion in the lists. In October 1994, the Kerala state
government decided to include the state’s entire Muslim population in the OBC
category by identifying them as ‘Mappilas’, thus making them eligible for
reserved positions in employment and education institutions.
58 Babasaheb predicted that ‘in politics we will have equality and in social and
economic life we will have inequality’ (B.R. Ambedkar, Speech at the
Constituent Assembly, 25 November 1949, in BAWS Collection, 13, p. 1249)
59 Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution.
60 HRW, ‘Hidden Apartheid: Caste Discrimination against India’s
“Untouchables”’.
61 OI and ANSISS, ‘Mapping Inequality in Bihar’; G.R. Sahay, ‘Substantially
Present but Invisible, Excluded and Marginalised: A Study of Musahars in
Bihar’.
62 Sonalde Desai and Reeve Vanneman, India Human Development Survey-II
(IHDS-II), 2011-12.
63 B.R. Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables,
in BAWS Collection, 9(3), p. 380.
64 Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution, p. 235.
65 Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution.
66 HRW, ‘Broken People: Caste Violence against India’s “Untouchables”’, p. 39.
67 George Kunnath, Rebels from the Mud Houses, p. 18.
68 George Kunnath, Rebels from the Mud Houses, p. 54.
69 Prakash Louis, ‘Bihar: Class War Spreads to New Areas’, p. 2206.
70 Ashwani Kumar, Peasant Unrest, Community Warriors and State Power in
India: The Case of Private Caste Senas (Armies) in Bihar.
71 HRW, ‘Broken People’.
72 Ashwani Kumar, Peasant Unrest, Community Warriors and State Power in
India, p. 192.
73 George Kunnath, Rebels from the Mud Houses, p. 136.
74 Mohammad Sajjad, ‘Atrocity against Dalits in Bihar’, p. 21.
75 In 2007, the Nitish Kumar government created the Mahadalit category to
signify the poorest amongst the Dalits. He set up the Mahadalit Commission
which classified twenty-one of twenty-two Dalit castes in Bihar as Mahadalits.
The Dusadhs (Paswans) are the only Dalit caste who were left out who
 constitute 30 per cent of the Dalit population in Bihar. However, this has been
criticised as an electoral ploy to marginalise popular politician Ramvilas
Paswan with a Dusadh vote bank (George Kunnath, ‘Compliance or Defiance?
The Case of Dalits and Mahadalits’).
76 IE, ‘Explained: Who are Mahadalits?’
77 Manish Kumar, ‘Temple Cleaned, Idols Washed after Bihar Chief Minister’s
Visit’.
78 Tirthankar Roy, The Economic History of India, 1857–1947.
79 Pradip Bose, ‘Mobility and Conflict’.
80 Under the Permanent Settlement since the British only demanded a fixed
quantum, by the time of India’s independence, the zamindars on an average
paid to the British only one-tenth of the gross rental they charged tenants and
seized the rest. Arvind Das, Agrarian Movement in India: Studies in 20th
Century Bihar.
81 Subhas Bhattacharya, ‘The Indigo Revolt of Bengal’, p. 13.
82 Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution, p. 256.
83 R.K. Barik, Land and Caste Politics in Bihar, p. 41.
84 Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution, p. 265.
85 Ram Sewak, ‘Congress Socialist Party in Bihar—1934-39’.
86 Jagpal Singh, ‘Karpoori Thakur: A Socialist Leader in the Hindi Belt’.
87 Peter Robb, ‘Peasants’ Choices? Indian Agriculture and the Limits of
Commercialization in Nineteenth-century Bihar’.
88 R.K. Barik, Land and Caste Politics in Bihar, p. 149; Indu Bharti, ‘Bihar’s Bane:
Slow Progress on Land Reforms’.
89 GOI, ‘The Causes and Nature of Current Agrarian Tensions’.
90 Alakh Sharma and Jerry Rodgers, ‘Structural Change in Bihar’s Rural
Economy’.
91 Archana K. Roy, et al., A Report on Causes and Consequences of Outmigration
in the Middle Ganga Plain.
92 Field Notes, Bihar, August–September 2016. The cult of Chhathi Mai, the
Mother Goddess who ‘ensures the perpetuation of vansha (lineage) by granting
the boon of having sons’ is a more recent introduction (K.S. Singh, ‘Solar
Traditions in Tribal and Folk Cultures of India’).
93 IIPS and ICF, ‘National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), 2019-21: Bihar.
94 Field Notes, Bangladesh, June 2015.
95 Dashien, referred as ‘Durga Puja’, is the biggest festival in the Indian state of
West Bengal which was socio-culturally, linguistically and political integrated
with Bangladesh prior to Independence.
96 Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, ‘The Worship of Women’.
97 Parmeshwar (God) is also a wordplay for husband as the colloquial Hindi term
‘Pati-Parmeshwar’ implies that husbands are considered to be equivalent to
God. Main kiski aurat hun? (Whose Woman Am I?), a poem by Savita Singh,
Bihari feminist poet and academic. Quoted in Vaishnavi Mahurkar, ‘Feminist
Poetry: Contemporary Woman Poets Who Challenge Patriarchy In Hindi &
Urdu’ with the rendition of the original poem (Savita Singh, ‘Hindi Kavita:
Main Kiski Aurat Hun’).
98 This social norm apparently goes back to the nineteenth-century Bengal
(Dagmar Engels, Beyond Purdah?, p. 20) and was also confirmed by ten of my
Bihari surveyors as prevalent in their own homes among the elder generation.
99 GoI, 2016, National Family Health Survey 4, 2015-16, State Fact Sheet Bihar,
Mumbai: International Institute for Population Sciences and Bangladesh (2007
DHS) and Nepal (2016 DHS) compiled from statcompiler.com for the question
‘Physical or sexual violence committed by husband/partner in last 12 months’.
100 George Bühler, ‘The Laws of Manu’.
101 Dola literally means the palanquin in which women were carried to their
husband’s homes.
102 Sumit S. Srivastava, ‘Violence and Dalit Women’s Resistance in Rural Bihar’, p.
35.
103 Sati was the traditional custom to burn widows on their husband’s funeral pyre.
It was banned in 1829.
104 Saroj Kumari, Role of Women in the Freedom Movement in Bihar, 1912–1947.
105 By 1848, Savitribai Phule with her husband Jyotiba Phule and Fatima Sheikh
had opened the first school for girls in Bhide Wada Pune. In 1882,
Swarnakumari Devi (sister of Rabindranath Tagore) founded the Ladies Society
in Calcutta to support widows. In 1889 Pandita Ramabai, herself a widow from
an inter-caste marriage, started the Arya Mahila Samaj in Pune to oppose child
marriages and Sharada Sadan in Mumbai largely to educate child widows.
Sarala Devi Chaudharani founded the Bharat Stree Mahamandal in Allahabad
in 1910, the first national-level women’s organisation, apart from editing a
women’s magazine, founding a girl’s school and participating in the freedom
movement.
 Saroj Kumari, Role of Women in the Freedom Movement in Bihar, p. 55. The
106 observation was by Kamala Nehru, a prominent freedom fighter, and also
Jawaharlal Nehru’s wife and Indira Gandhi’s mother.
107 Suruchi Thapar-Bjorkert, Women in the Indian National Movement: Unseen
Faces and Unheard Voices, 1930–42, p. 59.
108 Popularly referred to as the Sarda Act was passed by the Imperial Legislative
Council in 1929. The law fixed the age of marriage at fourteen years for girls
and eighteen for boys. Suruchi Thapar-Bjorkert, Women in the Indian National
Movement, p. 59.
109 Suruchi Thapar-Bjorkert, Women in the Indian National Movement.
110 Radha Kumar, The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for
Women’s Rights and Feminism in India, 1800–1990; Sheila Rowbotham,
Women in Movement: Feminism and Social Action.
111 Radha Kumar, The History of Doing, p. 103.
112 Radha Kumar, The History of Doing, p. 103.
113 The Naxalite violence in central Bihar has been characterised as ‘flaming fields’.
114 Indu B. Sinha, ‘“Escape” and “Struggle”: Routes to Women’s Liberation in
Bihar’.
115 Abhishek Bhalla, ‘Women Flock to Naxal Cause: Government Figures Reveal
60 Per Cent of Active Maoists Are Female’; Pratibha Singh, ‘Women’s Role in
the Naxalite Movement’.
116 Alpa Shah, ‘Humaneness and Contradictions’.
117 Hisila Yami, People’s War and Women’s Liberation in Nepal.
118 Kusum Lata, ‘The Women’s Question in the Naxalite Movement in Bihar:
Experiences of Women Leaders of Nari Mukti Sangharsh Samiti (NMSS) and
Nari Mukti Sangh (NMS)’.
119 Indu Sinha and Arvind Sinha, ‘Ranveer Sena and “Massacre Widows”’.
120 Sumit S. Srivastava, ‘Violence and Dalit Women’s Resistance in Rural Bihar’, p.
37.
121 On 9 October 2013, the Patna High Court set all the accused free citing ‘lack of
evidence’. On 1 April 2010, the trial court had convicted twenty-six of whom
sixteen were to face the death penalty and ten life terms.
122 Quoted in Ashwani Kumar, Peasant Unrest, p. 196.
123 Rajesh Kumar Nayak, ‘Naxalism, Private Caste-based Militias and Rural
Violence in Central Bihar’.
124 Sharmila Rege, ‘Dalit Women Talk Differently: A Critique of “Difference” and
towards a Dalit Feminist Standpoint Position’.
125 Mohammed Tarique, ‘How the Muzaffarpur Sex Scandal Was Unearthed’.
126 Mohammad Sajjad, ‘The Shocking Silence of Muzaffarpur’.

7. SOUTHERN SUPERMODELS: SRI LANKA, KERALA AND

TAMIL NADU
1 TOI, ‘Imitate the English Suffragettes: Advice to Colombo Women’.
2 Kerala State Poverty Eradication Mission,
https://www.kudumbashree.org/pages/7.
3 Pranab Choudhury, Rana Roy and Aswani Munnangi, ‘Group Leasing
Approach to Sustain Farming and Rural Livelihoods: The Journey of Women
Farmers in Kudumbashree Kerala’; Hyfa M. Ali and Leyanna S. George, ‘A
Qualitative Analysis of the Impact of Kudumbashree and MGNREGA on the
Lives of Women Belonging to a Coastal Community in Kerala’.
4 Consistently over the last fifteen years, due to low NREGA wages, women have
constituted more than half of all NREGA workers based on self-selection by
rural households. However, it is the southern states of Kerala (90 per cent in
2002-23) and Tamil Nadu (86 per cent) which have consistently had the highest
participation of women compared to the impoverished states of Uttar Pradesh
(38 per cent), Odisha (48 per cent) and Bihar (56 per cent). This feminisation of
the government-run public works programme contrasts sharply with the fact
that India has amongst the lowest female labour force participation rates in the
world in paid employment, which has declined substantially in the last two
decades (from around 30 per cent to 20 per cent). (Swati Narayan, ‘Breaking
New Ground: Women’s Employment in India’s NREGA, the Pandemic
Lifeline’).
5 The National Food Security Act as a matter of legal right guarantees two of
every there Indians ration cards to purchase subsidised foodgrains. The Kerala
government has expanded this programme to ensure near-universal coverage
though many ration cards here for wealthier families offer limited or no subsidy.
6 Anto P. Joseph, ‘How Kerala is Feeding Its 3.48 Crore Residents, Migrants amid
the COVID-19 Lockdown’.
7 Rex Casinader, ‘Making Kerala Model More Intelligible’; Thomas Timberg,
‘Regions in Indian Development’.
8 S. Vivek, Delivering Public Services Effectively: Tamil Nadu and Beyond.
 The focus of the second part of this book is to map the commonalities between
9 the progressive Southern Triad. Mill’s ‘Method of Logic’ forms the basis of this
analysis to draw lessons from ‘similarities in similar cases’.
10 In East Asia, the first tier Newly Industrialising Countries (NICs) which
industrialised between the mid-1960s and 1980s are considered to be Japan,
South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. The second tier in Southeast
Asia which industrialised in the 1990s are Thailand and Malaysia, and some
have included China and Vietnam, which in the 1980s moved away from
Communism (Ha-Joon Chang, The East Asian Development Experience).
11 Jean Drèze, ‘The Gujarat Muddle’.
12 Jean Drèze, ‘The Gujarat Muddle’; P.K. Viswanathan and Chandra Sekhar
Bahinipati, ‘Growth and Human Development in the Regional Economy of
Gujarat, India: An Analysis of Missed Linkages’; Himani Baxi, Social
Expenditure and Human Development in Gujarat.
13 The secondary data on the Southern Supermodels has for decades indicated
their superiority in human development compared to other Indian states. So, a
primary survey would not only have been superfluous, but also required
translation in three additional languages with dear financial expenditure for a
doctoral student.
14 The earliest references to coconuts in Kerala appears in the tenth century in a
temple inscription which describes the fruit as ‘tengai’, where ‘ten’ means south,
as it was introduced either from Sri Lanka or the South Sea Pacific islands
(Helaine Selin, Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and
Medicine in Non-Western Cultures). According to oral folk tradition, the
Ezhavas, the largest caste group in Kerala, strongly associated with coconut
trees through their traditional occupation as toddy tappers, also identify
themselves as originally from Ceylon and as erstwhile Buddhists (Filippo Osella
and Caroline Osella, Social Mobility in Kerala: Modernity and Identity in
Conflict).
15 The island has had many names throughout its history. To Tamils, it has always
been known as Eelam while to the Sinhalas as Lanka. For Arabs it was Serendib
(from which the English word serendipity is derived) and to the British, Ceylon.
After independence the Sinhala-dominated government officially changed the
name to Sri Lanka in 1972 (John Holt, The Sri Lanka Reader: History, Culture,
Politics).
16 Please see the timelines in Appendices A18 to A20.
17 Charles Tilly, Durable Inequality, p. 193; Social Movements.
18 Robert L. Hardgrave Jr, ‘Caste in Kerala: A Preface to the Elections’.
19 G. Aloysius, Interpreting Kerala’s Social Development, p. 5.
20 G.K. Lieten, ‘The Human Development Puzzle in Kerala’, p. 47.
21 Ezhavas were the upper tier of the marginalised castes, who were a buffer
between the Brahmins and Nairs and the ‘untouchables’. Their hereditary
occupation was extracting coconut and palm wine and managing breweries.
22 G. Aloysius, Interpreting Kerala’s Social Development.
23 The Maharaja of Travancore signed a treaty with the British East India
Company in 1788 to protect his kingdom from Tipu Sultan, which opened the
doors for the entry of the Christian missionaries. The first congregation was
formed in 1685 (R.N. Yesudas, A People’s Revolt in Travancore).
24 R.N. Yesudas, Colonel John Munro in Travancore; The History of the London
Missionary Society in Travancore, 1806–1908.
25 In Malabar district, over 90 per cent of the land was owned by the Namboodri
Brahmins or Nairs (as janmis), and the Muslim Mappilas were frequently
evicted as tenants. The ‘Moplah Outrages’, as it was called by the British
administration at that time, occurred between 1836 and the final rebellion in
1921-22. The majority of the protests were in the first sixteen years. Each of
these uprisings culminated with the ‘suicide of all the Mappilas involved, in an
attempt to become shahids (martyrs for the faith)’ (Stephen F. Dale, ‘The
Mappila Outbreaks: Ideology and Social Conflict in Nineteenth-century Kerala’,
p. 86).
26 Stephen F. Dale, ‘The Mappila Outbreaks’.
27 V.K. Ramachandran, ‘On Kerala’s Development Achievements’.
28 Dick Kooiman, ‘The Strength of Numbers: Enumerating Communities in India’s
Princely States’; Yesudas, The History of the London Missionary Society, p.
197.
29 Prerna Singh, ‘We-ness and Welfare’.
30 Rex Casinader, ‘Making Kerala Model More Intelligible’, p. 3091.
31 V. Thomas Samuel, One Caste, One Religion, One God: A Study of Sree
Narayana Guru.
32 S. Osmana, Shree Narayana Guru.
33 Mahatma Gandhi’s negotiations with the Nambudiri Brahmin trustee of the
Vaikkom temple at the time of the satyagraha reeked of orthodox Hindu values.
He apparently argued, ‘No doubt they are suffering for their karma by being
born as Untouchables. But why must you add to the punishment? Are they
 worse than even criminals and beasts?’ (Eleanor Zelliot, ‘Gandhi and
Ambedkar: A Study in Leadership’, p. 198).
34 R.N. Yesudas, The History of the London Missionary Society.
35 M. Nisar and Meena Kandasamy, Ayyankali: A Dalit Leader of Organic
Protest; T.K. Oommen, ‘Development Policy and the Nature of Society:
Understanding the Kerala Model’.
36 In the nineteenth century, Nairs lived in matrilineal joint families. Generally, a
man lived in his mother’s house (taravad) and was permitted to form liaisons
(sambandhams) with women in nearby houses. The children born were the
responsibility solely of their mother’s taravad. A man’s legal heirs were his
sisters’ children, rather than his own. Under this system, by custom,
Namboodiri men, apart from the eldest, were permitted to enter into
sambandhams with Nair women. In 1912, Trivandrum passed a new law to
recognise Nair marriages. For more details, see Robin Jeffrey, ‘Matriliny,
Marxism, and the Birth of the Communist Party in Kerala, 1930–1940’.
37 Robin Jeffrey, ‘Matriliny, Marxism, and the Birth of the Communist Party in
Kerala, 1930–1940’, p. 77.
38 Robin Jeffrey, ‘Matriliny, Marxism, and the Birth of the Communist Party in
Kerala, 1930–1940’.
39 United Nations 1975. The then newly established Centre for Development
Studies in Trivandrum (now Thiruvananthapuram) in partnership with the
United Nations published the acclaimed report ‘Poverty Education and
Development Policy’, which analysed case studies based on Kerala’s unusually
progressive social development.
40 Patrick Heller, The Labor of Development: Workers and the Transformation of
Capitalism in Kerala, India.
41 Robin Jeffrey, Politics, Women and Well Being: How Kerala Became a Model.
42 Prerna Singh, ‘We-ness and Welfare’.
43 J. Ratcliffe, ‘Social Justice and the Demographic Transition: Lessons from
India’s Kerala State’.
44 V.K. Ramachandran, ‘On Kerala’s Development Achievements’.
45 Robin Jeffrey, ‘Matriliny, Marxism, and the Birth of the Communist Party in
Kerala, 1930–1940’.
46 G.K. Lieten, ‘The Human Development Puzzle’.
47 Manali Desai, ‘Party Formation, Political Power, and the Capacity for Reform:
Comparing Left Parties in Kerala and West Bengal, India’.
48 V.K. Ramachandran, ‘On Kerala’s Development Achievements’.
49 S. Vivek, Delivering Public Services Effectively: Tamil Nadu and Beyond, p. 85.
50 K. Nambi Arooran, Tamil Renaissance and Dravidian Nationalism, 1905–
1944.
51 S. Vivek, Delivering Public Services Effectively: Tamil Nadu and Beyond.
52 G. Aloysius, Iyothee Thassar and Tamil Buddhist Movement.
53 This quote is verbatim from a letter written in 1898 by C. Iyothee Thass to
Henry Olcott, seeking support to revive Buddhism in the Madras Presidency.
M.S.S. Pandian, Brahmin and Non-Brahmin: Genealogies of the Tamil Political
Present, p. 105.
54 M.S.S. Pandian, ‘Notes on the Transformation of Dravidian Ideology:
Tamilnadu, c. 1900–1940’, p. 85.
55 The Manifesto argued that India was not ready for self-rule due to the excessive
hegemony of the Brahmins, who formed a mere 3 per cent of the population in
the erstwhile Madras Presidency, but disproportionately dominated most
political parties, the bureaucracy, the academia, journalism and the bar.
56 ‘Periyar’ roughly translates from Tamil as ‘the Great One’.
57 S. Vivek, Delivering Public Services Effectively: Tamil Nadu and Beyond, p. 87.
58 Tamil is one of the world’s oldest languages from the Indo-Dravidian family
which dates back several millennia, with perhaps Sanskrit and Pali as
contemporary languages. Hindi developed only in the sixteenth century in the
Indo-European family of languages. For more details, please see Tony Joseph,
Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From.
59 Conversations with school teachers during field visits in Tamil Nadu between
2013 and 2015.
60 Vaasanthi, Cut-outs, Caste and Cine Stars: The World of Tamil Politics.
61 K. Nambi Arooran, Tamil Renaissance and Dravidian Nationalism: 1905–
1944.
62 S. Vivek, Delivering Public Services Effectively: Tamil Nadu and Beyond.
63 Arun Janardhanan, ‘Tamil Nadu’s Caste Fields: In 1 Year, over 100 Murders in
Two Southern Districts’.
64 Johanna Deeksha, ‘The Caste of a Chair’.
65 D. Karthikeyan, Hugo Gorringe and Stalin Rajangam, ‘Dalit Political
Imagination and Replication in Contemporary Tamil Nadu’.
66 The Vanniyars, numerically the largest caste in Tamil Nadu, were formerly
known as Palli and were agricultural labourers traditionally. After their
successful agitation in the 1980s, they were classified as ‘most backward castes’.
67 In Tamil Nadu, the Backward Castes (BC) category refers to Other Backward
Castes (OBCs). The Tamil Nadu government has also created a category of
Most Backward Castes (MBC) which refers largely to Scheduled Castes and
Dalits. Denotified Communities (DNCs) are those communities denotified from
the reprehensible colonial Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. In Pattali Makkal
Katchi v. A. Mayilerumperumal the Supreme Court, on limited grounds of
unavailability of quantifiable demographic data on the Vanniyakula Kshatriya
community, struck down the Most Backward Classes and Denotified
Communities Act, 2021 as unconstitutional.
68 The Tamil Nadu Backward Class Christians and Backward Class Muslims
(Reservation of Seats in Educational Institutions Including Private Educational
Institutions and of Appointments or Posts in the Services Under the State) Act,
2007.
69 Miwako Shiga, ‘The Non-Brahmin Movement’.
70 K.M. de Silva, Social Policy and Missionary Organisations in Ceylon, 1840–
1855.
71 Mrs G. de Silva providing evidence at the Special Commission on the
Constitution of Ceylon (Donoughmore Commission): on behalf of the Ceylon
Women’s Franchise Union, Witness Number 141 (Colonial and Dominion
Office Records, The National Archives, Kew, pp. 268–69).
72 Harshan Kumarasingham, ‘The Jewel of the East Yet Has Its Flaws’. The British
occupied the Dutch territories of Ceylon in 1796. Initially, the Madras
Government of the East India Company was expected to administer the newly
occupied territories, but due to their inexperience in the region, there were a
series of violations of local conventions. This resulted in a rebellion in 1797 and
the Company was compelled to share administration with the Imperial Crown
under a system of ‘Dual Control’ from 1802 (K.M. de Silva, Social Policy and
Missionary Organisations in Ceylon, 1840–1855).
73 Harshan Kumarasingham, ‘The Jewel of the East Yet Has Its Flaws’.
74 Laksiri Jayasuriya, Taking Social Development Seriously: The Experience of Sri
Lanka.
75 Charles Jeffries, Ceylon: The Path to Independence, p. 29.
76 Laksiri Jayasuriya, Taking Social Development Seriously.
77 The Donoughmore constitution, the only one in the British Empire aside from
Australia, South Africa and Canada, introduce universal adult franchise for
 elevtion of members to the State Council, which had both executive and
legilsative functions, but Ceylon remained a British colony. Sri Lanka attained
Independence from the British only in 1948. Dominion status within the British
Commonwealth was retained till 1972 when Sri Lanka was finally renamed as a
republic (K.M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka).
78 In 1931, the franchise was granted to every citizen over the age of twenty-one
and in 1959 the age was reduced to eighteen.
79 James Warner Björkman, ‘Health Policy and Politics in Sri Lanka:
Developments in the South Asian Welfare State’.
80 K.M. de Silva, Social Policy and Missionary Organisations in Ceylon, 1840–
1855.
81 K.M. de Silva argues that Dharmapala’s ‘propaganda bore the remarkable
similarity to that of the great champion of Hindu resurgence in Western India,
Tilak’, with its ‘blend of religious fervor and national pride, of a sophisticated
internationalism with a coarse insularity’ (K.M. de Silva, A History of Sri
Lanka, p. 374).
82 Unfortunately, though it led to ‘the erosion of caste fissures among the Sinhalese
but contributed to ethnic consciousness’ (Rex Casinader, ‘Making Kerala Model
More Intelligible’, p. 3092).
83 K.M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka.
84 James Warner Björkman, ‘Health Policy and Politics in Sri Lanka’.
85 Richard Goode, Government Finance in Developing Countries.
86 Laksiri Jayasuriya, Taking Social Development Seriously.
87 G. Ananthakrishnan, ‘200th Anniversary of Kerala’s “Magna Carta of
Education” Marked in Delhi’.
88 Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, ‘Public Action for Social Security: Foundations
and Strategies’.
89 Vaasanthi, Cut-outs, Caste and Cine Stars.
90 The Amma unavagams (subsidised canteens), chains of pharmacies and
packaged drinking water by the earlier chief minister J. Jayalalithaa were but
the latest avatars of this embedded cultural phenomenon, which previously
included offers of free-of-cost mixers, wet grinders, colour television sets, gold
for mangalsutras, laptops, rice, bicycles, spectacles, and kits for newborn
babies, in addition to subsidised iodised salt, departmental stores and even the
announcement of low-cost cinema theatres. The new government of M.K. Stalin
has also carried forward this distinct Tamil Nadu legacy with a cash transfer to
all families and free bus transport for women.
91 Apart from the Dravidian, Dalit, communist, and other ‘great social
movements’, S. Vivek documents how ‘decentralized public action’ in Tamil
Nadu has been ubiquitous in the form of marches, meetings, sit-ins, hunger
strikes, gheraos, petitions, postcard campaigns, mock funerals, blocking roads,
burning effigies, pattai-namam protest, pot breaking and other methods of
protests (S. Vivek, Delivering Public Services Effectively: Tamil Nadu and
Beyond).
92 S. Vivek, Delivering Public Services Effectively, p. 42.
93 S. Vivek, Delivering Public Services Effectively.
94 Santosh Mehrotra, Integrating Economic and Social Policy: Good Practices
from High-achieving Countries.
95 K.M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka.
96 K.M. de Silva, Social Policy and Missionary Organisations in Ceylon, 1840–
1855.
97 Santosh Mehrotra, Integrating Economic and Social Policy.
98 P.G.K. Panikar and C.R. Soman, Health Status of Kerala: The Paradox of
Economic Backwardness and Health Development.
99 Santosh Mehrotra, Integrating Economic and Social Policy.
100 Barbara H. Chasin and Richard W. Franke, Kerala: Radical Reform as
Development in an Indian State.
101 Surjit Bhalla, ‘Is Sri Lanka an Exception?’.
102 Surjit Bhalla, ‘Is Sri Lanka an Exception?’.
103 ‘Food distribution policies (e.g. free or subsidised rice for all, free school meals)
were introduced in the early 1940s, and health intervention was also radically
expanded (including taking on the dreaded malaria). Correspondingly, the death
rate fell from 21.6 per thousand in 1945 to 12.6 in 1950, and to 8.6 by 1960
(all this happened before the oddly chosen period 1960–78 used in Bhalla’s
much-publicized “international comparisons” of expansions).’ (Amartya Sen,
‘Food, Economics, and Entitlements’, in Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, The
Political Economy of Hunger, Volume 1: Entitlement and Wellbeing, p. 48).
104 Sen also criticises the methodology used by Bhalla as ‘the “level-level” approach
is confused with the “level-change” approach!’ (Amartya Sen, ‘Appendix: Sri
Lanka’s Achievements: How and When’, in Pranab Bardhan and T.N.
Srinivasan (eds), Rural Poverty in South Asia).
105 Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World.
106 John Ferguson, Ceylon in 1884.
107 Kavitha Rao, Lady Doctors: The Untold Stories of India’s First Women in
Medicine.
108 Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World.
109 The Commission was appointed by Sidney Webb who, as Lord Passfield, the
Fabian Socialist, was the first Labour Secretary of State for the Colonies during
1929–31. The Donoughmore Commission was constituted before he assumed
office (K.M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka). Nonetheless, two of the
commissioners, Sir Drummond Shiels, a Scottish Fabian who later served as
Webb’s under-secretary, and Sir Geoffrey Butler, an expert on the League of
Nations, were veteran Labour Party members. Lord Donoughmore was a
Liberal peer, previously chairman of the committees of the House of Lords
known for championing women’s rights. The Commission spent four months
interviewing 140 people including the women’s movement (K.T. Rajasingham,
Sri Lanka: The Untold Story).
110 Beatrice Webb, in her diary, notes that Ceylon’s Donoughmore Constitution is
‘said to be the work of Drummond Sheils’, the Fabian socialist (Beatrice Webb,
Typescript Diary, 30 May 1929–25 December 1931, p. 68).
111 Charles Jeffries, Ceylon, p. 50.
112 Laksiri Jayasuriya, Taking Social Development Seriously.
113 Colonial Office, Report of the Commission on Constitutional Reform:
Presented by the Secretary of State for the Colonies to Parliament by Command
of His Majesty, p. 34.
114 Colonial Office, Report of the Commission on Constitutional Reform, p. 35.
115 K.M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka.
116 The Queen Gowri Lakshmi Bayi Rani acceded to the throne at the age of twelve
years following the untimely death of her father. The Imperial Gazetteer of
South India claims she ‘confided the administration of the State to Col J.
Munro, the Resident, and from that date Travancore commenced a fresh career
of peace, progress, and prosperity’ (W. Francis, et al., Gazetteer of South India,
p. 407). Yesudas, in his hagiography of the British resident, claims that she
‘entrusted everything connected with Travancore into the hands of Munro’ and
considered him to be ‘her elder brother’ (R.N. Yesudas, Colonel John Munro, p.
11). In a letter urging him to accept a salary at least that of a Diwan, she exudes
that she is ‘continually impressed with a sense of the invaluable benefits that
have resulted to my Government and country from your labours and exertions.’
(R.N. Yesudas, Colonel John Munro, p. 60).
 Munro wrote in a letter in 1817, ‘The diffusion of English literature among the
117 people is one of the most effectual means of eradicating their errors, improving
their minds and attaching them to the British nation.’ (R.N. Yesudas, Colonel
John Munro, p. 53).
118 Sir Herbert Hope Risley, The Imperial Gazetteer of India.
119 Sir Herbert Hope Risley, The Imperial Gazetteer of India.
120 Desai highlights that after the 1857 mutiny these threats on native states
increased with poor governance and political instability as an overt justification
(Manali Desai, ‘Indirect British Rule, State Formation, and Welfarism in Kerala,
India, 1860-1957’, p. 466).
121 Manali Desai, ‘Indirect British Rule, State Formation, and Welfarism in Kerala,
India, 1860-1957’, p. 473.
122 Manali Desai, ‘Indirect British Rule, State Formation, and Welfarism in Kerala,
India, 1860-1957’.
123 V.K. Ramachandran, ‘On Kerala’s Development Achievements’.
124 Samuel Mateer, Native Life in Travancore.
125 R.N. Yesudas, The History of the London Missionary Society in Travancore,
1806–1908, p. 159.
126 V.K. Ramachandran, ‘On Kerala’s Development Achievements’, p. 264.
127 Nine castes were listed and the government declared that even a change of
religion would not affect their commitment to the child originating from a
backward caste (R.N. Yesudas, The History of the London Missionary Society
in Travancore, 1806-1908).
128 P.K. Michael Tharakan, History as Development Experience: Desegrated and
Deconstructed Analysis of Kerala.
129 Robin Jeffrey, ‘Testing Concepts about Print, Newspapers, and Politics: Kerala,
India, 1800–2009’.
130 V.K. Ramachandran, ‘On Kerala’s Development Achievements’.
131 S. Vivek, ‘Understanding Public Services in Tamil Nadu: An Institutional
Perspective’.
132 Santosh Mehrotra, ‘Well-being and Caste in Uttar Pradesh: Why UP Is Not Like
Tamil Nadu’.
133 S. Vivek, Delivering Public Services Effectively.
134 R. Kannan, MGR: A Life.
135 Please see Appendices A18 to A20.
136 Manali Desai, ‘Indirect British Rule’.
137 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, p. 193.
138 S. Vivek, Delivering Public Services Effectively.
139 Only Brahmin women had the privilege of covering themselves when they went
out, but not within the home. Nair women also covered themselves when they
went out but those more underprivileged were prohibited from covering their
bosoms (R.N. Yesudas, A People’s Revolt; S.N. Sadasivan, A Social History of
India).
140 R.N. Yesudas, A People’s Revolt.
141 Lavanya Shanbhogue Arvind, ‘When Women Paid Tax to Cover Their Breasts’.
142 S.N. Sadasivan, A Social History.
143 S.N. Sadasivan, A Social History.
144 In 2019, the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT)
deleted from the Class 9 history textbook a section on the Channar Upper
Cloth Revolt from the chapter ‘Clothing: A Social History’ based on the
curriculum rationalisation exercise without any public consultation (T.A.
Ameerudheen, ‘NCERT Decision to Remove Chapter on Caste Struggle in
Kerala from History Textbook Draws Criticism’).
145 The National Archives of India (NAI) built by architect Edwin Lutyens is being
refurbished as part of the Central Vista project. The British Library in London
also has a copy of the book.
146 In Tamil-speaking areas the caste was referred to as ‘Shannars’ or ‘Channars’. In
Travancore they were considered to be ‘Nadars’, though the words are used
interchangeably in border areas. Nadars were a sub-caste which historically had
the occupation of toddy tappers and made a living by climbing palmrya coconut
trees, though many converted to Christianity in the nineteenth century.
147 R.N. Yesudas, A People’s Revolt.
148 R.N. Yesudas, A People’s Revolt.
149 R.N. Yesudas, A People’s Revolt.
150 Similar taxes also dissuaded women from wearing jewellery and men from
growing a moustache. The breast tax was abolished in 1812 (Nidhi
Surendranath, ‘200 Years On, Nangeli’s Sacrifice Only a Fading Memory’).
151 Lavanya Shanbhogue Arvind, ‘When Women Paid Tax to Cover Their Breasts’.
152 BBC, ‘The Woman Who Cut off Her Breasts to Protest a Tax’.
153 R.N. Yesudas, A People’s Revolt.
154 R.N. Yesudas, A People’s Revolt.
155 R.N. Yesudas, The History of the London Missionary Society, p. 259, original
translated from Malayalam.
156 Manoj Mitta, Caste Pride, pp. 21–2.
157 R.N. Yesudas, Colonel John Munro; The History of the London Missionary
Society.
158 The primary objection to the shoulder cloth was that it was a caste marker of
the upper castes (Manoj Mitta, Caste Pride).
159 R.N. Yesudas, A People’s Revolt, p. 153; Manoj Mitta, Caste Pride, p. 25.
160 The letter by Governor Charles Trevelyan was dated 6 May 1859. Robert L.
Hardgrave, The Nadars of Tamilnad; p. 67; Manoj Mitta, Caste Pride, p. 26.
161 R.N. Yesudas, The History of the London Missionary Society, p. 311.
162 Samuel Mateer, The Land of Charity; Manoj Mitta, Caste Pride.
163 On 28 September 2019, the Supreme Court had in a 4:1 majority verdict
revoked a ban on the entry of women of reproductive age into the Sabarimala
temple in Kerala. Despite the support of the Kerala government, for more than
a month, thousands of protestors physically barred female worshippers from
entering the temple by resorting to vandalism.
164 In November 2019, the then chief justice Ranjan Gogoi headed a five-member
bench which in a 3:2 judgement three days before his retirement referred to a
larger bench of seven judges a batch of review petitions on the 2018 verdict
allowing entry of women of all age groups into Kerala’s Sabarimala Temple.
The judgement did not stay the earlier order, but clubbed petitions on ‘the entry
of women into mosques and Parsi temples’ which the dissenting judges objected
‘aren’t even before this court in the present batch of petitions in Sabarimala
case’ (Debayan Roy, ‘Supreme Court Refers Sabarimala Review Petitions to
Larger Bench in Split Verdict’).
165 Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism, p. 113.
166 Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism.
167 At the twenty-fifth anniversary of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance
Conference meeting in Berlin in 1929, the Women’s Franchise Union of Ceylon
was admitted as a member and represented by its President Lady Dias
Bandaranaike. The first meeting of the Alliance was in 1904 in Berlin, and
Indian delegates attended from 1913 at the Hungary conference (IWSA, Call to
the Ninth Congress of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance, Rome, 12–
19th May 1923).
168 Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism.
169 Special Commission on the Constitution of Ceylon (Donoughmore
Commission): Written Representation. Volume VII, 279. Women’s Franchise
Union, Ceylon, letter dated 9th December 1927 based on resolution passed by
the Union on 7th December 1927 (Colonial Office and Dominions Office
records, The National Archives Library, Kew).
170 GoSL, Women of Sri Lanka: A Special Publication on the Status of Women for
International Women’s Year.
171 The Women’s Franchise Association, Kandy, also submitted a memorandum
dated 19 September 1928 to the Donoughmore Commission stating, ‘The
association is unanimously of the opinion that the age limit in the case of
women should be reduced to 21 years.’ They added, ‘The age restriction
proposed would have the unfortunate and anomalous effect of shutting out a
large percentage of the very section of our women best qualified by reason of
their education and enlightenment to exercise this valued privilege.’ Special
Commission on the Constitution of Ceylon (Donoughmore Commission):
Written Representation. Volume VII, 279. Women’s Franchise Union, Ceylon,
Letter Dated 9th December 1927 based on resolution passed by the Union on
7th December 1927 (Colonial Office and Dominions Office records, The
National Archives Library, Kew).
172 Legend suggests that 2,500 years ago, Ceylon was ruled by a ‘demon’ queen
Kuveni and through the millennia various queens have been anointed as regents
(D. Rhys, Psalms of the Early Buddhists).
173 Inter-Parliamentary Union 2023.
174 S. Anandhi, ‘The Women’s Question’, p. 390.
175 E.S.A. Vishwanathan, The Political Career of E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker.
176 Tali is a yellow thread or gold necklace worn by married women in south India
similar to the mangalsutra in the north to signify their marital status.
177 S. Anandhi, ‘The Women’s Question’; Manoj Mitta describes in detail the legal
battle to legalise Self-Respect Weddings which finally received legal acceptance
after the enactment of the Special Marriage Act of 1954 (Caste Pride, pp. 134–
47).
178 S. Anandhi, ‘Sex and Sensibility in Tamil Politics’, p. 4876.
179 GOI, 2022, Periodic Labour Force Survey.
180 Rex Casinader, ‘Making Kerala Model More Intelligible’.
181 Rex Casinader, ‘Making Kerala Model More Intelligible’, p. 3086.
182 K.K. Pillay, South India and Sri Lanka.
183 ‘The introduction of paddy into Sri Lanka seems to have occurred from south
India’, while ‘gems, conch shells or shanks, pearls and pearl shells moved into
south India’ (Dr Sudharshan Seneviratne, Reading the Past in a More Inclusive
Way).
184 The Thiyyas are a group of Ezhavas, traditionally a toddy-tapping community
in Kerala, who lived in Malabar.
185 Vaasanthi, Cut-outs, Caste and Cine Stars, p. 8.
186 Susantha Goonatilake, ‘Sinhala Buddhist Roots of South Indian Tamil
Chauvinism’.
187 Described by Theosophist Col. H.S. Olcott in G. Aloysius, Iyothee Thassar, p.
66.
188 G. Aloysius, Iyothee Thassar, p. 82–5.
189 Robert L. Hardgrave, The Nadars of Tamilnad.
190 Satia Vagiswara Aiyar, ‘Well Attended Meeting of Malayalis: Under the
Presidency of the First Indian Member’.
191 Nadars were a sub-caste which historically had the occupation of toddy tappers
and made a living by climbing palmrya coconut trees, though many converted
to Christianity in the nineteenth century.
192 R.N. Yesudas, A People’s Revolt.
193 V.K. Ramachandran, ‘On Kerala’s Development Achievements’.
194 Harry Stevens, ‘Seven Decades after Independence, Most Dalit Farmers Still
Landless’.
195 UNDP, Sri Lanka Human Development Report 2012.
196 UNDP, Sri Lanka Human Development Report 2012.
197 Calculations from the 70th round of Land and Livestock Holdings Survey
(L&LS) of the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) seem to indicate that in
terms of ownership of non-homestead land, in a highly urbanised state, 77 per
cent of Dalits in Tamil Nadu are landless, compared to 58 per cent of OBCs and
72 per cent of forward castes (Ishan Anand, ‘Dalit Emancipation and the Land
Question’).
198 K. Ravi Raman, Development, Democracy and the State.

8. THE PRICE OF INEQUALITY

1 Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations.
2 Life expectancy at birth, total (years) in WDI, World Development Indicators,
June 2023.
3 Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya, India’s Reforms, p. 233.
4 Naomi Hossain, The Aid Lab, p. 1.
5 Gosta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism.
6 Walter Korpi and Joakim Palme, ‘The Paradox of Redistribution and Strategies
of Equality: Welfare State Institutions, Inequality, and Poverty in the Western
Countries’. Counter-intuitively, the ‘paradox of redistribution’ shows that
countries with universal welfare systems, which tax everyone at an equal rate
and also distribute benefits equally, have more effective redistribution than
those that tax the rich to give to the poor. The reason is that while taxes are
usually computed as a fixed percentage of income, benefits or services are
usually fixed in nominal values (John Holt, The Sri Lanka Reader).
7 Across India 44 per cent of the rural households did not own any land other
than their homesteads. Amongst rural Dalits, 58 per cent were landless, higher
than all social groups. In rural Kerala, only 41 per cent of the households of the
general population are landless, compared to 58 per cent of OBCs, 72 per cent
of Dalits and 93 per cent of Adivasis (Ishan Anand, Dalit Emancipation and the
Land Question).
8 As per the 2011 census, in Tamil Nadu 49 per cent of the population lives in
urban areas, the highest in the country (GoI, ‘Population Enumeration Data
[Final Population])’.
9 B.R. Ambedkar, Thoughts on Linguistic States. In BAWS, 1(5), p. 164.
10 It is important to note that Babasaheb Ambedkar made this comparison in the
context of the proposed post-Independence linguistic reorganisation of Indian
states as he believed that it would result in the Balkanisation of the south and
undue integrated dominance of the north (B.R. Ambedkar, Thoughts on
Linguistic States, in BAWS Collection, 1(5)).
11 Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution.
12 Gail Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution; Neil Selmer, A Theory of
Collective Behaviour.
13 M.N. Srinivas, ‘Mobility in the Caste System’, p. 319.
14 Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution.
15 World Bank, World Development Report 2006: Equity and Development.
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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

F ROM THE UNFORGETTABLE Ramzan iftar parties in the modest homes

of Bangladeshi villagers to celebrating chhath in Bihar to enjoying the
rural market fairs in Nepal, the journey of nearly a decade to complete
this book has been as memorable and colourful as it has been
insightful. Am eternally grateful for the depth of generosity, hospitality
and compassion that families in the humblest of homes have showered
on me.
From day one, this research owes immeasurably to the unparalleled
inspiration, commitment and generosity of Jean Drèze, my co-guide
from Ranchi University and the Delhi School of Economics—there are
simply no words in the dictionary, in any language. Infinite gratitude
for being the beacon of light at every step of this journey and for your
indelible legacy much beyond.
As an anchor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), I am
also thankful to Ashwani Kumar for his steadfast support as a guide,
and to all the faculty and staff at the School of Development Studies
and the Doctoral Student Office. This research has also been truly
collaborative with local researchers in every country, shaping and
enriching its texture. Five angels went out of their way to support the
logistics—Abul Kalam Azad of BRAC and Md Harun Ur Rashid of
Pally Sahitya Sangstha in Bangladesh’s Panchagarh district, Parbati
Sunuwar of Village Women Consciousness Centre (VWCC) in Nepal’s
Sindhuli, Sanjay Sahni and all the saathis of Samaj Pragati Shakti
Sanghatan (SPSS) in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur, and Abodh Kumar of
Project Potential in Kishanganj district. Special thanks also to the forty
women across the four districts who conducted this survey in local
dialects, and the host families of different religions, castes,
communities and languages who opened their doors and hearts.
For generously accompanying me on my preliminary recces as
interpreters, special thanks to Ram Narayan Shreshta and Mustafa
Shabuj of South Asian University. For Hindi translations of the survey,
I am thankful to Dheeraj Kumar and Snehil Mishra in Ranchi, for
Bengali to the generous Pratichi team especially Kumar-da, Swagata
Nandi, Toa Bagchi and Piyali Pal in Kolkata and for Nepali to Jagdish
Gautam in Kathmandu. For the meticulous data entry, my thanks to
Snehil Mishra.
For the fieldwork in Nepal, Bijeta Shreshta of Jawaharlal Nehru
University was extraordinary as an interpreter and friend. The icing
on the cake is that Bijeta and Ram, both of whom were my Nepali
translators, have now tied the knot—the best gift of my Ph.D. Time
flies so quickly that my wonderful translator from Dhaka University in
Bangladesh, Safiqul Islam, is also now married and soon will be a
father. In Bihar, the teams coordinated by Ashwini Kumar and
Mohammed Ismail in Kishanganj and by Sunita Devi and her band of
women in Muzaffarpur district were equally stellar.
Am also deeply thankful to my long-time activist colleagues and
friends. Maria Lourdes Almazan Khan of ASPBAE, Saloni Pradhan
Singh of Didi Bahini in Kathmandu, A.M.R. Chowdhury of BRAC,
Rasheda K. Chowdhury and K.M. Enamul Hoque of CAMPE, and
Chinmaya Kumar in Patna who kindly opened the doors to their large
networks of friends in civil society, journalism, bureaucracy and
academia across borders. Am also particularly grateful to economist
Rehman Sobhan in Bangladesh for his generosity. Special thanks also
to Aashish Gupta for being a pillar of statistical support, S. Vivek for
his insights on Tamil Nadu, and Chinnaiah Jangam, Sambuddha
Chaudhuri for their comments on specific chapters. Immeasurable
thanks are also due to many other unnamed friends and colleagues
who have anchored this journey along the way. Also, a special thank
you to all my friends in the Right to Food Campaign and other civil
society networks who have been an extended activist family.
 For the memorable year spent at the London School of Economics
and Political Science, am truly grateful to Naila Kabeer and the
Gender Institute, and to Duncan Green’s for his steadfast support
across decades. I also deeply value the many unforgettable friendships
forged through the SAVE FOOD network—your light shone brighter
than the London skyline.
Libraries are amongst the most cherished sacred spaces, and hope
scores more can be built, especially in rural areas and in every school.
For this research, am grateful for the facilities at the British Library
and LSE Library (including the iconic Women’s Library) in London,
the National Archives in Kew, Nehru Memorial Library and National
Archives in Delhi, the TISS Library in Mumbai, Bangladesh Institute
for Development Studies and Central Library in Dhaka, A.N. Sinha
Institute of Social Sciences Library in Patna and SAARC Library in
Kathmandu.
For their scholarships and travel grants, sincere thanks also to the
International Relations Office at TISS, the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust and
the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission. At my current
university, am truly grateful to Stephen P. Marks for his kindness and
support along with the wonderful cohort of faculty, friends and
students.
The storms after completing my doctorate were unexpectedly the
hardest. Infinite gratitude to my inspiring sister Anu, my ever-caring
parents Jaya and S.A. Narayan, and my extended family who have
supported me in untold ways, as only families can. This journey is
inspired by the fortitude of my grandmothers.
This book would have never seen the light of day without Rahul
Bhatia and his last-minute inputs, and Anish Chandy who has been an
angel as a wonderful literary agent and friend and has taken a leap of
faith in championing this book. Immense gratitude to Ajitha G.S.,
who has been a magnificently empathetic editor to work with, as has
the entire dream team at Westland Books. Am also so grateful to the
stalwart public intellectuals in the field who have so graciously
provided endorsements and, even more importantly, moral support
through their inspirational work.
 Travelling by train with the wind blowing on your face is one of the
best ways to gain perspective and also step into the shoes of your co-
travellers. I am most grateful that this cathartic journey across borders
has gone much further towards the horizon and truly transformed me.
In the end, I hope this book does justice to all the faith that so many
have placed in it. Hopefully, too, the contrasting of India’s blistering
inequalities with those of its neighbours will clear some of the mist in
our path ahead as a nation.