Stereotypes about Caste

I read an article titled "Schedule Conflict: the persistence of caste in India" by a Harvard student recently. It brought home to me how stereotypes that are propagated and reinforced in Western schooling don't go away after a student grows up and begins thinking for himself. Here are some peculiarities:

1. the perennially disappointing “Hindu rate of growth.” -- Does anybody still use this offensive phrase, even flippantly or in quotes? The author probably picked it out of some newspaper or the other. It's used in the Indian media sometimes, but only to sarcastically point out the way the West perceived India's religion. I'd like to provide an analogy using America's race conflicts, but it would be too crass.
2. Traditional hierarchies—like caste—are supposed to be getting weaker. Why then was the nation’s capital suddenly in the grip of caste-based protests once again last week? -- This seems vaguely inaccurate. When you say "caste-based protests", one gets the sense that it has something to do with the way society treated them (recently), anger with their place in a hierarchy. These protests had nothing to do with this. It was simply a group with a sense of common identity demanding something. The Gujjars were a caste, but they were acting as any other group with a common interest would. This was not a caste conflict.
   
3. This is closely related to what I feel is a difference in perception of caste between Indians and the West. The West tends to think of caste as a "system", a social arrangement created with a particular purpose. If you're a particular caste, other castes must have treated you this way, you're above these castes, below those. Indians tend to view caste as a means of explaining identity, a label that identifies history. If you're a particular caste, you might have been born in this area, your ancestors must have done this kind of work, these are your customs.
   
4. what an Indian gets is still as much about who they are as what they have done. Caste members are eligible for certain government programs and jobs, as well as educational opportunities, based almost exclusively on their caste identity. -- This seems to be contrasting the Western work-reward notion (what you get depends on what you do, not who you are) with a hereditary reward notion. But that's not what's going on. The Gujjars are demanding affirmative action based on historical disadvantage. If a Gujjar shows acumen, he can still become a doctor or a businessman or a scientist.
   

Is Caste Causally Responsible for Poverty?

Caste is, of course, a very good indicator of poverty in India. In the past, people were denied access to certain facilities based on their caste. This meant that certain castes weren't allowed to develop in certain ways, and it became the root cause of today's poverty structure, which is overwhelmingly biased against certain castes.

But I want to ask the question: does caste continue to be causally responsible for poverty? More specifically, conditional on the situation prevailing say 10 years ago, is caste still being used to deny opportunities to people today? Or, are we confusing the effect of the socio-economic stratum for the effect of caste?

Let's be even more specific. Descendants of poor families are more likely to be poor than descendants of rich families. Descendants of both poor and rich families are also likely to retain their caste, since caste is hereditary and inter-caste marriage is still relatively rare. Thus descendants with castes which are poorer today are likely to be poorer than descendants of castes which are richer today. In statistical terms, the wealth of the family at the start of the time period under study is a confounder for the effect of caste.

The right way to ask the question is: take two families with similar economic conditions but with different caste; is one of the families likely to have richer descendants, say 50 years in the future?