Touch Thee Not : Group Conflict, Caste Power, and Untouchability in Rural India

We investigate the impact of community power on the practice of untouchability - the avoidance of physical contact – engaged in by upper and intermediate caste (OBC) Hindus vis-à-vis ‘scheduled’ castes (SCs) in rural India. Despite legal prohibition, the practice remains common, limiting access of SCs to public spaces and facilities as well as informal social and professional networks. Yet, the question of what determines its extent has received scant attention. We develop the novel argument that an upper caste or OBC household’s propensity to practise untouchability is determined not solely by its own characteristics but, crucially, also by the inter-group distribution of resources across both caste and religious divides, via the mediation of a process of political contestation. Our theoretical model predicts that any increase in the collective resource endowment (power) of SCs, or, more interestingly, that of Muslims and Christians, will reduce the likelihood of an upper caste or OBC Hindu household practising untouchability. Any decrease in the collective resource endowment of the combined upper caste and OBC bloc will have the same effect. A marginal redistribution of resources from OBCs to upper castes may reduce it as well. Identifying a community’s power with its population weighted land share, we find empirical associations consistent with these hypotheses in data from the India Human Development Survey 2011-12