We are a minority, like the lions.
—Raakesh (Interviewee 68)
Bangalore is the “New India.” New roads, gleaming autos, and new glass buildings pushing themselves up from streets lined with Western brands and cosmopolitan shoppers. Billboards advertise a lifestyle of luxury goods—cars, homes, jewelry. At the Hard Rock Cafe, the metro class of emerging professionals drinks, smokes, and chats over the roar of Soundgarden, Nirvana, and other cultural artifacts shared by our generation and demographic. I’m sitting with new friends who started out in call centers but have moved on to more dynamic sectors of the economy. They’re a cursing, smoking, partying lot—a guy tells me that he doesn’t drink on Mondays and Wednesdays but that the rest of the week they’re all out late. I’m invited to a ska show. I agree. Someone else leans in with an anecdote about the time they took a train across the state—they all laugh at his fear of being accosted by a eunuch in this apparently unique adventure beyond Bangalore.
It is difficult to sketch India without repeating the “two Indias” mantra that has typified Western efforts to understand the country’s cacophonous blend of languages, practices, histories, religions, and castes. Yet a flight from Bangalore to Varanasi—always via Delhi, the country’s administrative anchor—conjures the mantra all the same. The holy city of Varanasi is best approached by air. It is only from this vantage point that you can properly appreciate the geography of exploitation. In circles and squares a city that has been home to humans for more than three millennia inscribes itself into the earth and into the lives of the tens of thousands of bonded laborers who call this corner of Uttar Pradesh home. Dusty and vibrant, Varanasi is the living soul of India. It is pockmarked by poverty and punctuated with beauty, home to ancient Buddhist temples, the holy waters of the Ganges and its riverfront Ghats, and Islam’s Gyanvapi Mosque. Varanasi itself is some 3,500 years old, “the world’s oldest living city,” many tell me, “the soul of India,” claim others. From the air, you can see the city, ringed by farmland and brick kilns. The agricultural production is laid out in perfectly symmetrical right angles, squares, and rectangles. These small but tidy parcels are plotted out as far as the eye can see, unbroken except for the intersection of two roads where a small town has sprung up. I say “sprung up” as if this is a recent happening. In reality, most of the region is thousands of years old.
The second thing best seen from the air is the expansive tapestry of brick kilns. Their layout is always the same: at the center lies a smokestack five stories tall, surrounded by hundreds of tons of bricks, neatly stacked, and interlaced with footpaths trod by the hundreds of workers required to maintain the operation. The owner, more likely than not, lives in Varanasi. A middleman of some sort manages the kiln’s day-to-day operations. Whether he is a contractor or a cousin hardly matters. More important is plausible deniability for the abuse required to keep so many workers working so hard for so little.
India has a rich cultural and political heritage, but it has also been straddled by caste, colonialism, poverty, and corruption. In contemporary terms, India’s economic and political position is critical. India is many things—the world’s largest democracy, the world’s second-most-populated country, home to a unique political culture, and a social movement society in which hardly a day goes by without a major protest event closing down some major institution, industry, or thoroughfare (Ray 1999, Ray and Katzenstein 2005). These historic attributes are amplified by India’s emerging economic and political power. India is transforming from largely rural and feudal into a more urban and outward-focused society.
This may be seen at the Hard Rock Cafe in Bangalore, more broadly in the loosening restrictions on multinational corporations and foreign direct investment, and in the spread of cell phones and Wi-Fi hotspots. These developments contribute to strong year-on-year economic growth that has pulled many out of poverty and is widely regarded to be “lifting all boats.” India’s dynamic political and economic scene is the backdrop for the story told here. Even further in the background is India’s unique role in the contemporary global context as a country and its unique internal processes and contradictions as a society and economy. The challenge is to frame this tectonic activity properly—inarguably a process that touches the lives of virtually all of India’s billion-plus citizens. Of course, India’s particular attributes matter, but only insofar as they shape the micro socioeconomic relations and experiences of the individuals I interviewed. The focus is on their experience, rather than on the India visible through national balance sheets, public-opinion polls, or electoral politics. The emphasis is on particular cultural traits as interviewees see them, rather than on orientalist conceptions of India as exotic and wholly other.
This approach follows Amartya Sen’s (2006, 31) sense that, rather than being cast in amber, India’s traditions are constantly negotiated and that this negotiation happens across religious, class, caste, and gender boundaries. Such a perspective recognizes one of India’s most obvious traits—heterodoxy—as a strength and a pivot point for debate and change, since “traditions have their own interactive influence, and it is necessary to avoid being imprisoned in formulaic interpretations [that] oversimplify India’s past and present.”
By our best reckoning, South Asia is home to ten to twenty million people living in bonded labor (Bales 2012; Breman, Guerin, and Prakash 2009, 334; International Labour Organization 2012),
1 more than half of the world’s inhabitants who live as slaves (Bales 2012). The magnitude of the problem outstrips estimates of those trafficked, held in commercial sexual exploitation, or held in any other single region on earth (Belser, de Cock, and Mehran 2005; ILO 2012). India itself has more people living in slavery than any other country on earth (Lerche 2009, 364). Bonded labor is widespread. It is also persistent, having deeper roots in feudal social relations than in the global political economy (Quirk 2011). It is these deep cultural roots, rather than present economic gains, which explain this prevalence, since other forms of slavery, especially human trafficking for sexual exploitation, appear to be far more profitable (Kara 2009).
If bonded labor is the least profitable form of slavery in India, debt bondage in the rural agricultural sector appears to be the least profitable form of bonded labor (Kara 2011). In other words, bonded labor in agriculture is the least profitable version of slavery’s least profitable form. While other forms of contemporary slavery flourish in ungoverned pockets of the global economy, bonded labor thrives in feudal social practices. While other forms of slavery are driven by a desire for significant returns on investment, bonded labor, in agriculture especially, thrives on tradition.
Slavery has persisted in India throughout its recorded history, and current practices are rooted in ancient teachings regarding debt, obligation, and caste.
2 Slavery in India poses a stark challenge for the Western mind. While in Greek and Roman political philosophy slavery was the antithesis of freedom, in India slavery exists at the far end of a “continuum of various degrees of subservience” (Kara 2011, 17). The
Arthashastra, for example, set forth nine ways one can enter slavery, including four that specify bonded labor: “One whose life is saved during famine in exchange for enslavement; One pledged to be a slave upon acceptance of money by a master; One who becomes a slave upon release from a heavy debt; and One who becomes a slave in order to receive basic maintenance” (Kara 2011, 18).
Slavery here rests on poverty and obligation rather than on ownership and lost freedom. The implication is that slavery is its own reward: one may become a slave in order to gain something. In Western philosophy, the language of duty and loss persists to this day in the way many of us conceptualize both slavery and freedom. But in India, it is rather the sense that the oppressor has done something for the oppressed that defines slavery’s fundamental nature. The slave has exchanged something of comparably little value (freedom in poverty) for something of great value (enslavement in sustenance).
Historically, virtually all of those suffering from enslavement have been at the lowest end of India’s steep caste ladder. The caste system is critical in both curtailing other options for vulnerable laborers and in corralling them into exploitative relationships with those of the higher caste. This is true whether or not the exploitative relationship is secured through debt bondage. If the historical pattern of enslavement in India has been one of culturally reinforced inequality, the colonial era saw little improvement.
When Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807, the colonies were not included in this legislation. When the British banned chattel slavery with the passage of the Anti-Slavery Act in India in 1843, bonded labor was allowed to persist. Elites reorganized exploitative labor relations around bonded labor as a purely contractual relationship, which provided legal cover for the prioritization of the contract and the broad use of bonded labor as a substitute for slavery (Breman and Guerin 2009, Pouchepadass 2009). The reason for this was simple: bonded and forced labor was necessary to maintain British exports.
India’s postcolonial efforts at emancipation are marked by similar contradictions. While the ILO’s Forced Labor Convention was passed in 1930, it was not ratified by India for another twenty years. It wasn’t until 1976—more than 130 years after the Anti-Slavery Act—that the Bonded Labor System (Abolition) Act (BLA) addressed bonded labor. The act recognizes that rather than an aggregate of one-off instances of exploitation, bonded labor takes place within a “system of forced, or partially forced, labour under which a debtor enters…into an agreement with the creditor to the effect that”—whether through interest, “customary or social obligation,” generational debt, or “by reason of his birth in any particular caste or community”—the laborer would sacrifice wages, labor mobility, physical mobility, or the right to sell property at market wages.
3 Lest there be any confusion on the matter, the BLA clearly states: “bondage is slavery.”
4The approach advanced by the BLA is in line with international legal norms while also recognizing the unique nature of bonded labor in the context of the subcontinent. The recognition of both social obligation and caste brings the broader social context into focus (Srivastava 2009). Debt bondage in India is never a simple matter of financial exchange or legal contract, as some would have it. Stark economics are only one part of a broader mesh of social and interpersonal relations, especially in the village context, where hierarchy and dependency punctuate relationships (Quirk 2011, 196). Previous chapters have shown the extent to which contemporary bonded labor harkens back to classic feudalism characterized by a “reciprocal system in which obligations implied servitude to an individual with superior status…in return for protection” (Campbell 2005, qtd. in Quirk 2011, 196). Dominant castes recognize debt as testimony to fealty, familiarity, family, and trust, rather than evidence of exploitation and abuse. There is broad agreement that those officials tasked with enforcing the BLA are likely to identify the system as reciprocal rather than exploitative, with courts inclined to agree (Gupta 2003, Sankaran 2009).
The passage of the Bonded Labor Act attracted some early attention. While the number of identified cases reported by the Government of India Planning Commission in the late 1970s stood at 26,000, it leaped sixfold to 163,000 in the 1980s before tapering off in the 1990s (56,000) and 2000s (24,000).
5 Yet the total number of cases identified and the subset rehabilitated from the late 1970s through 2007 (267,000) pale in comparison to the estimated size of the problem.
The large gap between the estimated size of the problem and official numbers has long plagued scholarship on human trafficking (Gozdziak 2009, Laczko and Gozdziak 2005). Yet it appears that in India the disconnect between estimates and rehabilitation is attributable to general ambivalence and inaction—“official apathy and absence of any concerted effort,” in the words of one report—rather than an inability actually to identify and prosecute cases (National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector 2007, 105).
6 While the power to investigate and report on bonded-labor abuses falls to the Human Rights Commission, it does not have a mandate to enforce the law. This task falls to 640 district magistrates spread across the country. District magistrates are tasked to investigate abuse, but many are as likely to have connections to those employing bonded laborers as they are to have a commitment to the rule of law (Gupta 2003, Breman and Guerin 2009).
Furthermore, the actual condition of those “rehabilitated” during this period deserves scrutiny for two reasons. The first is that beliefs about caste-based discrimination, including untouchability, persist, especially in rural areas. The second is that most government-led rehabilitations have focused on the simple disbursement of benefits rather than on a broader strategy of equipping former bonded laborers to advocate for their rights economically, politically, and socially. Subsequent analysis suggests that benefits alone have a high failure rate when it comes to sustainable rehabilitation (Government of India Planning Commission 2012). The cultural notion of ritual pollution (i.e., untouchability) and the reality of caste hierarchy have created a social space where notions of dominance persist. Indian scholars note that in the early nineteenth century, “the pariahs were always looked upon as natural slaves, and became the property of any person who contributed to their marriage expenses”—a relational dynamic and cultural expectation that “was the usual practice at that time for initiating hereditary slavery” (Vidyasagar 1985, 130). The majority of bonded laborers are estimated to be from untouchable communities (Anti-Slavery International 2001). This is not to conflate untouchability with slavery but instead to emphasize the significant preexisting cultural conditions that contribute to dehumanization before, during, and after emancipation. Bluntly put, vulnerability persists despite technical emancipation.
While corruption and official apathy are significant aspects of slavery’s prevalence in the subcontinent, the persistence of bonded labor is the product of durable inequality rooted in the caste system. Indeed, caste mitigates against the emergence of a collective concept of humanity and contributes to a dehumanization that facilitates human rights violations. It is true that the vigilance committees established by the Bonded Labor Act do not meet. They should meet. It is true that the district magistrates and subdistrict magistrates charged with bringing cases of bonded labor forward rarely do their job. They should do their job. It is true that virtually none of the individuals held in bonded labor have been identified. They should be identified. It is true that benefits do not reach beneficiaries. They should do so in such a way that survivors are able to rebuild lives of their own choosing. It is true that many cases advanced against perpetrators have resulted in acquittal. They should instead end in jail time and steep fines. But the root of the problem is not a lack of resources for vigilance committees, or a lack of time or knowledge from magistrates, or an inability to identify bonded laborers, or a shortage of benefits for survivors, or a shortage of lawyers to prosecute cases.
Bonded labor persists because too few of these actors—magistrates, lawyers, and community members—consider it to be a problem. This official indifference mirrors that of the general public—bonded labor is not considered to be a problem by Indian society at large. The committed work of social movement actors and nonprofit groups has resulted in piecemeal outcomes. There is strong evidence that the root of the problem is that India has yet to develop an indigenous commitment to “comparable humanity” for all of its citizens (Kara 2011, 12). The most superficial evidence of this failure is the institution of untouchability (Davenport and Trivedi 2013).
SLAVEHOLDING IN INDIA
I had imagined for years what I might say if I ever met a trafficker. Would I demand to know how he could knowingly profit by sending women and children to be tortured? Would I throttle him, turn him over to the police, demand a list of victims and destinations so the slaves could be freed? When I met Salim on a sunny, crisp day in the remotest reaches of Bihar, my mind went blank. He was so ordinary—just a man, wearing simple village clothes. His aspect was common, his mustache trimmed, his hair neatly combed. He spoke without emotion.
—Siddharth Kara
Very little is known about slaveholders, despite the vast number of interventions intended to arrest their activities. Perpetrators are often seen in ideal-type terms: scowling villains willing to rape and enslave for profit. This framing helps galvanize public opinion and motivate policy makers, but it sheds more activist heat than scholarly light on slaveholders’ attitudes and behaviors. It stands to reason that the prototypical trafficker or slaveholder in the literature and on the advocacy circuit does not describe the reality of most perpetrators. Recent studies seem to support this assessment. To my knowledge, only one other study has attempted to engage contemporary slaveholders in India. In a larger study on trafficking of women and children, Sankar Sen and P. M. Nair (2005) draw on data from twelve Indian states, as well as Delhi, Bangladesh, and Nepal. A number of important factors emerge from interviews with brothel owners and traffickers. Brothel owners were predominantly middle-aged, lower-caste, and illiterate Hindu women who had themselves been victims of commercial sexual exploitation prior to taking ownership of the brothel. The majority reported feeling that they had no choice but to enter management. A significant majority, nearly four-fifths of those interviewed, reported that when they retired they would leave the business to someone like themselves. Even in the commercial sex industry, the image of the leering and lecherous male brothel owner is undermined by data suggesting perpetrators are formerly exploited women doing what they can to survive. Indeed, the study found that the mean annual income for these owners and managers was about 4,000 dollars, or about $13 per day, making them lower middle class.
7 This is well above the poverty line but hardly wealthy.
The same study’s findings on traffickers suggests that the average trafficker is married, illiterate, just as likely to be a woman as a man, middle aged, and predominantly Hindu. Their monthly incomes are below those of the brothel owners. A majority suggested that trafficking is a “social evil,” but almost half did not think that the problem could be solved. Hardly any reported being afraid of the police, though traffickers, brothel owners, and managers alike reported police satisfaction as a key priority in their operations. While few were forthcoming with details, it was clear that both brothel keepers and traffickers used the devices within their means to pacify police. Many respondents were probably simultaneously perpetrators of gross violations of human rights, including rape, torture, and child sexual exploitation. But these data also present a rather prosaic image of slaveholders and traffickers as businesspeople and entrepreneurs.
Studies outside of India support these findings. Interviews with incarcerated individuals accused of trafficking in Cambodia showed that the vast majority of interviewees were “poor uneducated women” who lacked other forms of livelihood and who earned very little for their troubles (Keo et al. 2014). An earlier study, conducted in Cambodia, found that many female traffickers had themselves been trafficked at an earlier point in time (Brown 2007), and a study conducted in Israel found that 10 percent of perpetrators of trafficking were women (Levenkron 2007). A study overseen by my colleague Ami Carpenter (2015) drew on interviews with jailed gang members in the United States and determined that while many were involved in some aspect of “domestic human trafficking,” very little of this resembled organized crime. Erin Denton analyzed seventy-two trafficking cases in the United States and found that most perpetrators were of the same ethnicity as their victims (Denton 2016). Likewise, Anqi Shen conducted interviews with women who had been involved in the sale and trafficking of children in China (Shen 2016). Although the sample size was small, her research suggests that these women were often poor and socially isolated. As a result, they were rarely able to negotiate their compensation with the slightly stronger or better-networked individuals who managed more sophisticated elements of the exploitation process.
8CASTE AND CULTURE EXPLAIN PERSISTENCE MORE BROADLY
If particular combinations of resources explain persistence
after a challenge, what explains why India is home to half the world’s slaves in the first place? Why does this radical exploitation and inequality persist into the present? An important part of the answer lies in the caste system, which gives rise to a culture of servitude that affects landlords and bonded laborers alike. This worldview is punctuated by paternalism, which frames exploitative labor relations in familial terms, with the landlord as the caring parent and the laborer as the dutiful child.
9 Caste, cultures of servitude, and paternalism are all specific and local examples of the legitimizing myths that persist in all cultural spaces.
10In their work on domestic servants in West Bengal, the sociologists Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum (2009, 3) suggest this labor arrangement has given rise to a culture of servitude in which “social relations of domination/subordination, dependency, and inequality are normalized and permeate both the domestic and public spheres.” The use of
culture in this approach “treats the total social process of experience and consciousness in terms of power,” while
servitude captures “the persistence of forms of dependency and submission.” Though Ray and Qayum are writing about domestic servitude among urban elites, the same may be argued for their rural counterparts. Servitude is normalized and “legitimized ideologically such that domination, dependency, and inequality are not only tolerated but accepted…and…are reproduced through everyday social interaction and practice.” In such a cultural space it becomes “virtually impossible to imagine life without it, and practices, and thoughts and feelings about practices, are patterned on it.”
Since this culture of servitude is also bound up in “collective patterns of subjectivity,” it leads to relationships that carry “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt,” in the words of the critic Raymond Williams (1977, 132). These meanings and values include a sense of familial duty and obligation not just from the laborer to landlord but also from the benefactor to the supplicant. Contemporary efforts to end slavery in India face a unique challenge. They must address exploitation in the absence of popular outrage or popular notions of illegality—as well as exploitation in the presence of genuine emotional bonds. The complexity of this challenge may be seen in a practical comparison of the dominant notion of slaveholders with the reality of slaveholding in India.
The author Kevin Bales (2004, 25) has argued that perpetrators of contemporary slavery, especially in South Asia, are often “businesspeople (usually men) who tend to be family men…pillars of the local community…well integrated socially, well connected legally and politically.” This theme has deep roots. Slaveholders in the American South claimed they were responsible for slaves’ well-being (Davis 1999, Fox-Genovese and Genovese 2005). Mary Jackman (1994) has persuasively argued that, while oppressors may resort to coercive force, a pervasive paternalism does the day-to-day work of maintaining an ideological cocoon around the practice of authoritarianism and indeed around the entire set of social relations. Oppressors’ attitudes and behavior are not pathological. They are intimately connected to cultural systems of legitimizing myths (Gaventa 1982, Sewell 1992). Such myths are held individually but aggregate socially and manifest in social relations with subordinated members of society (Sidanius and Pratto 1999).
Under normal conditions, the legitimizing myths of the dominant group are widely held and rarely challenged. While this approach holds in a wide range of social systems, it is particularly well suited to the task of explaining the prevalence of caste-based thinking. The reality of this approach becomes part of one’s personal identity and part of a collective identity within a particular segment of society. A caste-based worldview is rooted in several thousand years of tradition that persists across social relations and is often adopted by higher and lower castes alike. Current manifestations of caste inequality are not as blatant in contemporary India as in the past. Caste no longer rests on the performance of ceremonial rituals; rather, it serves as the cultural underpinning of an entire unspoken system of being, relating, and knowing, irrespective of caste and class. Nowhere is this more true than in the cultural logic that has underwritten the widespread use of bonded labor in the rural Indian context (Tucker 1997, 475).
While our focus remains on perpetrators, victims and survivors of slavery are complex actors in this process as well. I was struck by a conversation with a survivor from the “untouchable” Musahar caste who had been enslaved by a particularly abusive landlord from the dominant Thakur caste, known for its strong-handed ways. I asked whether she felt she was owed an apology for the suffering she described to me, which included the murder of her father. She was unable to answer in the affirmative. She could recognize the injustice done to her, acknowledging she should receive back wages as compensation. However, she did not seem able to articulate, or perhaps even comprehend, that she was owed something simply by virtue of her membership in Indian society or the human family—a claim based in her inherent dignity. It is unclear whether this is evidence of a “culture of silence” and “fear of freedom” or is instead rooted more deeply in a fundamental lack of recognition of her rightful claim to “comparable humanity” based in human dignity, irrespective of caste (Friere [1970] 2000, Singh and Tripathi 2010). What this anecdote does make clear, however, is that perpetrators are not the only carriers of a paternalistic worldview. These dynamics are embedded, practiced, and reproduced broadly across the status hierarchy, at a very granular level in terms of an individual’s lifeworld.
Movement efforts face a particular challenge in the lack of widespread public opinion against bonded labor and other anti-Dalit rights violations.
11 Persistent casteism, widespread sexism, and entrenched poverty thwart the emergence of a broader human rights culture. When an American judge found a prominent Indian diplomat guilty of human trafficking because of the “barbaric treatment” of their domestic servant in the United States, the comments section in the
Times of India was home to a vigorous debate between skeptics sure the lawsuit was a ploy to secure a green card and those railing against corruption among the Indian elite (Press Trust of India 2012). By my estimation, more than one-fifth of the comments questioned the merits of the case. Outrage was focused on the entitled behavior of the diplomat, not the plight of the victim. The
Times readership represents some of the country’s best-educated and most-cosmopolitan citizens as well as countless expatriate Indians living in countries in the Gulf and the West. The comments demonstrate in a microcosm the problem that antislavery efforts have more generally in the region: cosmopolitan elites are outraged over corruption and entitlement, but few had much to say about the victims of seemingly banal crimes. In this case, the most direct attention received by the victim—who had been deceived, beaten, and starved—was from those who ascribed to her motives of opportunism, jealousy, and greed.
True, there is a rich vein of solidarity flowing through contemporary India from the works of Gandhi and Ambedkar, but the tremendous weight, power, and substance of their legacy has been forced through the syringe of courageous individuals and fractious social movement actors. As suggested earlier, the transition from chattel slavery to bonded labor was facilitated by the British, whose colonial enterprises required the total control of low-cost labor but whose domestic efforts against slavery prevented them from adopting a stance other than abolition. As a solution, much of slavery’s inertia passed into debt bondage, giving the Raj both political cover and free labor (Quirk 2011). This transformation precluded a radical break with the past. The British administrative shell game left basic systems of inequality largely intact while simultaneously establishing the caste system as
the organizing principle for social, political, and economic order.
Unfortunately, independence from Britain did not affect this transformation. Rather, the postcolonial era has seen the emergence of caste identity as one of the most important points of political mobilization. The salience of caste has only increased, given the dual mechanisms of reservation and the demands of electoral politics. Identity thus becomes the terrain for new political projects and challenges. This can be seen in cases of Dalit rights and uplift, as with Mayawati’s rule of the progressive BSP in Uttar Pradesh.
12 But it may also be seen in the assertion of Hindutva supremacy, as in Modi’s rule of the BJP in Gujarat and subsequent national leadership.
13 Rather than erasing caste and casteism, modern political projects have had the effect of establishing Dalit identity as the foundation for collective political rights (Rao 2009, 23, 25).
For those hoping economic growth would reverse centuries of discrimination against women and lower-caste communities, there is little room for cheer. Economic transformations are unmooring laborers to pursue work in urban environs where they are vulnerable to being trafficked and forced to work under similarly exploitative conditions in a new context. This trend is not limited to bonded labor. By way of example, the western state of Gujarat is widely heralded as a breakthrough success case for its investment in infrastructure and its openness to foreign investors. But these gains correlate with development decline: Gujarat has India’s highest levels of child malnutrition and is in the bottom five Indian states in the Global Hunger Index (Radhakrishna 2008, Chandhoke 2012). Nationally, an increase in household income is positively associated with
more feticide of the unborn girl child (Times of India 2012). Improvements in income are being used to more efficiently violate rights. Bride burning, acid attacks, and rape all continue to occupy the news (Economist 2012), suggesting a new humanitarianism is needed. Economic development in India cannot be unquestioningly correlated with advances in human rights standards in Gujarat. The same holds true for Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka.
Public opinion data from the World Values Survey (2014) provide some support for this theme. The majority of Indians, regardless of class or caste, identify poverty as the country’s most serious issue. However, the majority of upper-class respondents consider poverty to be the result of laziness, while nearly two-thirds of lower-class respondents attribute poverty to fundamental unfairness in society. Fifty-eight percent of upper-class respondents report that the government is doing enough, or too much, to end poverty. Those in the upper class, it may be argued, believe poverty is a serious issue whose victims are to blame and for whom enough is already being done.
Perpetrators, if we may extrapolate from the conversations with contemporary slaveholders, are often upstanding middle-class community members who take pride in their ability to care for those beneath them in the social hierarchy. That they demand subservience and nearly free labor in exchange is seen as part of a natural matter of course. It is no wonder, then, that they do not recognize themselves as criminals nor appear to have any regret for their behavior. It is additionally no wonder that an educated and wired civil society might consider the perpetrator to be a victim of unjust social movement activity rather than as a rights-violating criminal. The fact that bonded labor is a crime did not seem to bother most oppressors with whom I spoke—other than their obvious concern for being caught. It stands to reason that public-opinion data would reflect this gap between law and practice, should it be available. Indeed, this is the case with corruption in India—it is against the law, widely practiced, and the subject of broad social movements, but it is not a top social problem according to the World Values Survey.
In her work on middle-class involvement in environmental movements in India, Emma Mawdsley (2004) argues that India’s middle class generally lacks concern for the public good. She draws on recent scholarship to suggest this lack of empathy is rooted in a series of socioeconomic and historical factors, including globalization, colonialism, appropriation of power, neoliberalism, and the Emergency (during which Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended the constitution and ruled by decree).
14 Others trace this lack of sympathy to the caste systems’ dichotomization of the sacred and the profane, the home and the street, the high born and the untouchable (Gupta 2000, Douglas 2002). Whatever the source, Mawdsley (2004, 89) argues, the effect is a low value for, or understanding of, civil society.
Employer mentalities are thus fundamentally and necessarily rooted in the norms and expectations of caste’s cultural logic. This has the effect of undermining more universalist conceptualizations of human rights, citizenship, and civil society—the very approaches that consider all community members to be part of the human family. When states attempt to make slavery illegal, Ethan Nadelmann argues, “slavery can only persist where nonlegal social norms in supporting slavery are strong, where the state is sufficiently disinterested in eradicating slavery that ignores the efforts of slave owners to retain their slaves, or where slaves acquiesce, in one way or another, to their enslavement” (Nadelmann 1990, 498, emphasis added). Each of these three factors—supportive norms, disinterested state, and relationship-based acquiescence—is at play in much of rural India.
In this way, the nonlegal social norm of caste contributes to broadly distributed public opinions about who is a part of the imagined community. Movements face a deficit in the latent cultural resources available for the creation of widespread empathy as well as a lack of other options for the oppressed (Anderson [1983] 2006). The ability to empathize is a fundamental prerequisite for any positive shift in public opinion. In the absence of supportive public opinion, movements lose a critical fulcrum in their effort to pressure targets to change their behavior, especially against their economic will. For enslaved individuals, or the untouchable Dalit recently freed from bonded labor, few cultural opportunities exist. Conversely, this broader context suggests substantial opportunities for perpetrators within the cultural sphere—they inhabit a world in which legitimizing myths of inequality permeate the life world of
all parties, whether perpetrator, victim, lawyers, police, judges, or the general public. The net effect of these cultural forces is a significant gap between public policy and public opinion. Bluntly, public opinion, perhaps steeped in caste commitments, does not appear to be in favor of emancipation. This is exactly why resources matter in this particular case. In the absence of a social movement against bonded labor, perpetrators must yield only to their conscience and the market. Only the latter is visible to the social scientist.
Public-approval data on bonded labor simply do not exist in India. The reason for this is fairly obvious: disapproval of slavery is so high in the global North that it is not included on any measure of public opinion. My hunch is that the opposite is also true in South Asia: indifference to bonded labor is so high that it is not included in any measure of public opinion. One thing, however, is clear. The cultural opportunity is closed to Dalit claimants, especially those involved in rural labor and bonded labor. Few resources exist for the creation of an “injustice frame” that could capture the imagination of the Indian public writ large. While I have documented the experience of some employers of bonded laborers in rural India, there is no evidence that bonded labor is in general decline or at risk of becoming extinct. Changes in the political economy may undermine perpetrators’ ability to maintain the status quo, but they have not led to a national movement to end bonded labor.
SUMMARY
The final lesson here is clear: emancipation is not simple. A major wave of the antislavery movement led to a botched British emancipation, which channeled slavery into the institution of bonded labor, which has subsequently been reinforced by the caste system (see Quirk 2011). The caste system bears on our story in two critical ways. The first is that it undermines humanitarian efforts to resolve social problems that lie beyond caste borders and deprives movements of the raw material for humanitarian social movements for emancipation based on appeals to individual dignity. The caste system’s second effect is the sense of duty and obligation that feeds cultures of servitude and paternalistic relations between rights violators and their victims. These social realities make emancipation difficult and perpetuate everyday oppression.
Contemporary slaveholders in rural India are rights violators and criminals, but they do not fit the profile imagined by activists, policy makers, and the public. For rural landlords, feudal relations are, and always has been, a matter of fact. Bonded labor, then, is a deeply rooted social norm that defines appropriate social and economic relations. The stories told by slaveholders in the preceding chapters suggest that it is paternalism, rather than hostility or indifference, which informs their worldview.
I want to frame this case in broader terms, as a story about how so many of us face complex ethical challenges. Throughout the proceeding chapters, I have worked to clarify the Indian context without reifying it. There are two conjoined reasons for this. The first is that I do not want to essentialize and Orientalize the case. The second reason is that I believe the lessons here might be applied in other contexts. As I write these words, I am surrounded by personal analogies—my affordable trousers of dubious origins, the combustible engine of my car, my weakness for barbequed meat. I am currently living in a country plagued by intractable socioeconomic issues—the growing gap between rich and poor, a lack of universal high-quality education and health care, and incarceration policies that remove African American men from the labor market, the voting booth, and their families. Every one of these issues touches on key human rights norms and highlights those areas where we have failed to demonstrate a practical commitment to “comparable humanity.” Cultural practices mask rights violations everywhere. Caste ideology facilitates bonded labor in India, and market ideologies facilitate radical inequality in the United States.
My hope is that this observation allows us to test my ideas out in other places. The sociologist Gerry Mackie has argued that socially acceptable rights violations persist for the very simple reasons that they are socially acceptable and are part of the status quo (Mackie 1996, 2000). Things may change very rapidly when practices become socially unacceptable. In effect, while there may be a real or imagined original benefit to the practice, certain contemporary behavior is the result of inertia rather than any particular set of ideological commitments. Raising the social costs of particular practices—Mackie’s work focuses on campaigns to end female genital mutilation—increases the likelihood that they will be abandoned. This cost-raising process was also at play during the civil rights movement in the United States. Sit-ins and boycotts raised the price of segregation to such levels that racist storeowners abandoned racist customer policies rather than closing up their formerly profitable businesses (Luders 2006; see also Gamble 1943).