{"id":7746,"date":"2020-07-31T11:10:59","date_gmt":"2020-07-31T11:10:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=7746"},"modified":"2020-07-31T11:10:59","modified_gmt":"2020-07-31T11:10:59","slug":"caste-not-the-first-stone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2020\/07\/31\/caste-not-the-first-stone\/","title":{"rendered":"Caste not the first stone"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week's Economist had a long article on the caste system in India \u2013 Hinduism's original sin. \u00a0I read this with the sustainable development goals in mind, although the author(s) did not mention them. \u00a0You can read the article <a href=\"https:\/\/www.economist.com\/asia\/2020\/07\/23\/even-as-india-urbanises-caste-discrimination-remains-rife\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>As it's an Economist article, there are facts and figures galore. \u00a0Most of them thoroughly depressing showing that the upper tiers of the system (the priestly \/ warrior \/ merchant classes) who account for ~20% of the 1.3bn population still have the best jobs and \u00fcberbest life chances. \u00a0Here's a sample:<\/p>\n<p>Of the 89 highest ranked civil servants in central government 85 come from the upper tiers. \u00a0Of the 121 people in senior newspaper jobs, 106 were from the upper tiers, and none were from the 220m people in the bottom Dalit (formerly known as untouchable) tier. \u00a0Zero out of 220 million. \u00a0Quite a statistic.<\/p>\n<p>My point in this recitation, is that India gets very little UK media scrutiny about all this. \u00a0Compare it with how the USA is examined almost on a daily basis for its own original sin of slavery. \u00a0And yet far more people suffer miserable lives and early deaths.<\/p>\n<p>Why is this do you think?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week's Economist had a long article on the caste system in India \u2013 Hinduism's original sin. \u00a0I read this with the sustainable development goals in mind, although the author(s) did not mention them. \u00a0You can read the article here....<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7746\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}