Oh! Shit!

OH! SHIT![1]

By Ajit Chaudhuri

“Toilets are more important than Temples” J. Ramesh in 2012, N. Modi in 2013

One of the myths we grow up with is that Indian Muslims are dirty – they bathe less, they have unclean personal habits, and their habitations are unsanitary compared with other communities in India. Don’t deny it – many of us think it, not just those with Hindu right wing leanings. Even I remember, back in 1986 when I shared a barsati with two friends, one of us Muslim and all three non-religious, his younger brother visited for a day en route to some other destination and decided against having a bath. Two of us smirked, and the third furiously hauled his befuddled brother off into the bathroom.

It was therefore a pleasure to read an econometric paper whose findings contradict this common assumption. Now, I normally give academic papers that use structural equation modelling and multivariate analyses a wide berth, but there was something compelling about this one; the simplicity with which it was written, the sheer force of what it was saying, and the policy implications emanating from its findings. This note attempts to describe the paper ‘Sanitation and Health Externalities: Resolving the Muslim Mortality Paradox’[2].

Indian Muslims are poorer, less educated, and more backward on average than Hindus, which should contribute to them having higher child mortality rates (I will use Ms and Hs to abbreviate for the two communities respectively, and CMR is the number of children dying before their fifth birthday per 1,000 live births). And yet, the CMR for M children is 18 percent lower than for H children across socio-economic categories, a robust and consistent pattern that has been evident since the 1960s. It means, in effect, that an additional 1.7 M children per hundred survive up to age 5. This phenomenon is well documented, does not reconcile with the literature on the importance of income and education in explaining mortality differences, and has therefore been termed ‘the puzzle of the Muslim Child Mortality advantage’.

The paper uses data from three rounds of the National Health and Family Survey (1992/93, 1998/99, and 2005/06), studies mortality rates from birth history information of 310,000 children, and shows that differences in defecation practices between Ms and Hs account for the entire CMR gap.

This is because human shit is particularly dirty – it contains pathogens (bacteria and parasites, such as worms), and open defecation (I will use OD for this one) introduces these pathogens into the environment, into feet, hands, mouths and the water supply, leading to acute and chronic illnesses.

Ms are 40 percent more likely than Hs to use pit latrines or toilets, which serve to safely dispose of excreta. The reason for this is difficult to trace! It could be because of institutional features of the respective religions – the Hadith forbids OD (‘Guard against three things that produce cursing: relieving oneself in watering places, in the middle of the road, and in the shade’[3], something that any modern epidemiologist would parrot), whereas H tradition views excreta as something to be kept away from home (‘Far from his dwelling let him remove his urine and excreta’ – The Law of Manu, chapter 4, verse 151). It could also be that different sanitary practises evolved between the largely segregated H and M communities for purely secular reasons. Either way, H households are more likely to have electricity than to use a toilet, even better off H households, with assets such as motorcycles, opt for OD, and toilets constructed or paid for by the government for Hs tend to remain unused or be re-purposed. The prominence of OD among Hs is not due to affordability.

More importantly, Ms are more likely to have M neighbours who do the same. The defecation practise of a neighbourhood as a whole is far more important than that of a particular household in accounting for mortality rates, to the extent that moving from a locality where everyone ODs to one where no one does is associated with a larger difference in CMR than moving from the bottom to the top twenty percent of the population in terms of wealth. And it is defecation practise that explains the difference in CMR, not idiosyncratic religious or cultural differences between Hs and Ms; Hs living in mainly M villages have lower CMRs than Hs living among other Hs; in places where Ms and Hs have similar OD rates, they also have similar CMRs; and the M advantage reverses in the rare places where Hs have less OD rates than Ms.

The persistence of OD among Hs has been of concern for some time. MK Gandhi famously observed in 1925 that ‘sanitation is more important than independence’, and cultural scholars have associated it with the caste system, where the link between human waste and ‘polluted’ castes reinforces norms that make sanitation problems ignored even by upper caste Hs. Policy makers have recognized the problem, and there are a multitude of government schemes that encourage the building and use of toilets. Thinking politicians from both ends of the political spectrum, as can be seen from the title quote, have also joined in despite the issue not being a vote-catcher.

I hope they succeed! And yet, I remember with fondness my own defecation habits in the villages I worked in in western Rajasthan in the early 1990s, in each of which I had my designated spot and time, where the long trek with a lota[4] in hand would enable the building of pressure (or ‘vatavaran nirman’, as we called it), and where we joked about situations when a crow came and tipped the lota over (my favourite – when it happened to a person twice in a row, he washed up before defecating the third time). I also remember my time in the harsh Changthang (eastern Ladakh) winters of 1997 and 1998, when the job had to be done in -30c temperatures every morning, where the task of minimising the exposed surface area without impeding the free fall of matter was arduous, and where discussions on the most important invention of all time unanimously settled on toilet paper. Coming generations of rural extension workers will miss the opportunities that OD provides for building relationships from one of the few things in which we are all on an equal plane.

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[1] Borrowed from the sign on the toilet door at the students’ accommodation ‘Citadel’ in VV Nagar, Gujarat.

[2] By Michael Geruso and Dean Spears, March 2014, available on the Internet.

[3] Mishkat-al-Masabih (a Muslim sacred text), page 76.

[4] The local term for a metal urn that is used to carry water for washing up in the aftermath.

The Cruelest Month

THE CRUELLEST MONTH

Introduction: April, according to TS Elliot in his poem ‘The Wasteland’, is the cruellest month; it breeds lilacs out of the dead land, mixes memory with desire, stirs dull roots with spring rain, and other such things. What he misses is that it is also when another cohort of young graduates set off from the comfort of their campuses into the wild world, just as I did 30 years ago.

What can I tell these kids about the trials and tribulations ahead – the challenges they will face, and the hard choices they will have to make? Not much – the world has changed, and anyway they have to make their own journeys through life. At best, I would sound like that old codger in the film ‘The Graduate’ who extols the virtues of plastic to Dustin Hoffman.

Sadly, the nature of the ‘wannabe guru’ business is such that having nothing relevant to say is at best a minor factor in a decision to go forth and pontificate. I will therefore commemorate April by listing five (academic) papers that I wish I had read before beginning my own professional journey (instead of in my late 40s). I will, however, not exacerbate April’s cruelty by regurgitating the papers for you – instead, I will merely describe why I wish I had read them earlier. Here goes, in no particular order!

1.    Panopticism – Michel Foucault – 1977

This likening of power relations and social control mechanisms in modern institutions to a 19^th century idea of a model prison gave me a creepy feeling at the bottom of my spine – it described my boarding school (not a pleasant place) almost exactly. The idea of power being diffused and ever present, in every person (including the so-called powerless), family and institution, and in every action, would have helped me make sense of some simple but incomprehensible things – like the space you occupy on a ‘charpoy’ at a village meeting being reflective of your status, like the serving order at a family dinner, and like the fact that people who have complete control over you (one’s spouse, the local drug lord, and the Prime Minister of India) being as pathetically prisoners of their circumstances as you are of yours.

An additional dimension to Foucault’s arguments comes from the Czech poet-politician Vaclav Havel’s 1978 essay ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in which he analyzes submission and dissent using the parable of the sign ‘Workers of the World Unite’ outside a vegetable store. He sees ideology as something that offers a person the illusion of identity, dignity and morality while making it easier to part with these virtues, and as a veil behind which humans can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to status quo. Required reading for anyone who has to exist among the vocally ideological – no shortage of this type in many professional spheres.

2.    The Use of Knowledge in Society – Frederick von Hayek – 1945

A common trait in my early professional life was that of seeing the devil in market principles and America – and fusing them into one. In those days of cold war politics and Keynesian ideas on the role of the state, Pepsi was as close to pederasty and paedophilia in perception as it would be in a dictionary (though it was acceptable to have Windows open on one’s computer). There was also a deep-seated belief in the nanny state, where everyone had right of access to food, childcare, education, public sector employment, and everything else, with little thought on who would pay. Today, such ideas would belong to Jurassic Park or to left-of-centre think tank bar discussions after a bottle or two have emptied, but they were dominant in the late 1980s.

The importance of Hayek’s paper is that he makes a logical case for market principles at a time when central planning and an overarching state were considered the way to go. He compares centralized decision making systems with anarchic markets in their ability to make efficient use of resources, and says that the beauty of the price system as a signalling device is that it has ‘economy of knowledge’ – individuals need to know very little in order to take the right action. The scarcity of one raw material, without an order being issued, and without more than a handful of people knowing the cause, results in many people using the material and its products more sparingly. He quotes Alfred Whitehead in saying that ‘it is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them.’

3.    Power: A Radical View – Steven Lukes – 1974

A common tool of analysis from the 1980s onwards was ‘participatory rural appraisal’ or PRA – going into villages for short durations in teams and conducting a series of exercises (village mapping, wealth ranking, chapatti diagrams, activity mapping, etc.) that resulted in a village plan. ‘This is what the village has decided for itself,’ was the common refrain after a PRA, ‘as per its own needs and priorities. This plan has a people’s mandate.’

Though a user of its techniques, I was never quite comfortable with the legitimacy that PRA ascribed to its planning outputs, and I did not know why – until I read up on Steven Luke’s concept of the three dimensions of power.

Creating spaces to speak on a level footing and providing information to participants, as PRA requires, addresses only Luke’s first dimension. It does not address the fact that there are hidden power equations in such spaces that constrain or enable the expression of particular viewpoints. The tenants’ expression of satisfaction in arrangements with local landlords may have less to do with their perceptions of fairness and justice and more with their wanting to continue to live and their interest in the continued virtue of their women – but no PRA will capture this second, hidden, dimension.

The greatest form of domination, according to Lukes, is ‘the power to prevent people from having grievances by shaping their perceptions so that they accept their role in the existing order of things, either because they can see no alternative to it, or because they see it as natural and unchangeable, or because they value it as divinely ordained and beneficial.’ This third dimension explains things that otherwise confound, such as – why do women participate in the killing of girl children, or think it is OK for their husbands to beat them? Or, why do Hindu ceremonies require Brahmins to be fed?

4.    The Logic of Power – Mancur Olsen – 2000

What is this beast called government, which the philosopher Thomas Hobbes likened to a twisted sea monster and a gatekeeper of hell in his book ‘Leviathan’ in 1651? How did it come about? Why do we need it? What would happen if it didn’t exist? Would life be ‘nasty, brutal and short’ in its absence? Though not among those who spent happy years of unemployment studying for civil service exams, I have always been fascinated by these questions.

The simplest, and most potent, explanation of government is from this essay by Olsen. He likens it to a stationary bandit, one who has acquired a monopoly over theft in a given area and whose interests thereby have changed dramatically. He will not bother to steal any more, and will demand a hafta from his victims instead. He will reduce the percentage of hafta so that his victims retain incentives to produce and trade, and may even spend some of his takings on public goods that benefit his victims, like education and health, and make them more productive. He will become the government, and the hafta tax. Government, therefore, arises because of the rational self-interest of those who can organize the greatest capacity for violence.

5.    Representation, Citizenship and the Public Domain in Democratic Decentralization – Jesse C. Ribot – 2007

Some common questions we in the NGO sector faced back in the 1990s were – who has given you the right to do what you are doing? And, who are you accountable to? That we had no answers did not trouble us – we were confident that we did ‘good’ work, for which donor agencies gave us money, and who was anybody to question our intentions anyway in a free country? I for one balked only when the international charity I worked for began to claim that it was speaking for India’s poor at various international development forums. How did an organization that was accountable to a board consisting of three old white men take on the responsibility of representing India’s 300 million plus poor? Certainly, nobody from the 300 million had a say in this.

My argument against such acts of delusion, and for a rational role for NGOs in the development space, would have been better for a reading of Ribot’s paper. Democracy requires strong institutions to pay dividends, as everyone tells us in this season of elections. Ribot is considerably more specific; he says that these institutions should be democratic, and for them to be democratic they have to be representative – accountable to people, and equipped with the power to make policy and to convert policy into practise. People should ‘belong’ to such institutions by virtue of residence and not ethnicity, religion, linguistic affinity or any other identity or interest-based identifiers. And these institutions should retain substantial powers in the public political space, where citizens feel able and entitled to influence authorities.

‘Good’ public institutions, therefore, are not merely those that do good work. They also strengthen democracy by being representative of society, by enabling citizenship, and by enhancing the public domain.

ON NATURAL LAW

ON NATURAL LAW

Ajit Chaudhuri – January 2014

Does a man have the right to beat his wife? A group of women panchayat representatives and a delegation of visiting (male) Afghan district assembly members discussed the question at a meeting in Rajasthan, and there was unanimity in the opinion that a) a man did and b) under certain conditions, it was also perfectly OK to do so – because this complied with natural laws. Well, not quite unanimity! The interpreter at this discussion, who happened to be me, suggested that Indian law did not recognize this so-called right. I was shushed with a pointed reminder of my mandate to translate and not interfere.

This is not the first time that I have come across natural laws being evoked as a justification for the obnoxious; khap panchayats do so regularly when they issue fatwas against young lovers from the same sub-caste, as did feudal lords demanding the first night with the bride in all weddings in their fiefdoms (I’m not making this up – the practise was prevalent, for example, in Khurki block, Garwha district, Jharkhand, until the naxalites took control of this area). The Indian Supreme Court too did so recently while making gay sex illegal.

What are natural laws, and where did they come from?  The early thinking on natural laws was that they came from one of two sources – they were either coined in heaven, or they were based upon the adage that ‘might is right’.

The religious approach suggested that certain practices were acceptable or not ultimately because God had ordained them so. Needless to add, different religions had different conceptions of natural laws, and therefore different principles for deciding on matters of right and wrong in society. It followed that people of one faith, because of their specific natural laws, had no obligation to treat people of others in a morally correct way – a belief that enabled and justified terrible acts by ‘good’ people. Many terrorists, for example, are religious types who justify their acts under natural laws, just as many ordinary, honest, tax paying, and church-going citizens of Nazi Germany were comfortable with the regime’s treatment of Jewish, Slavic and gypsy communities. This line of thinking was also convenient for Europeans during their early encounters with indigenous populations in the Americas and Asia.

The ‘might is right’ argument saw natural laws as the outcome of acts of will by the powerful over the weak that brought about equilibrium in the social, economic and political food chains of life. The meek, under this approach, may not inherit the earth as the Bible suggests, but principles of obedience and obsequiousness to those above them in pecking orders enables survival.

This leads to the question – why should we observe such laws? If I am inclined towards having sex with someone of my own gender, should I not do so because my religion forbids it under the ‘natural laws’ doctrine? If someone bigger than me wants me, do I have to turn around and spread as ordained in the ‘might is right’ argument? This, apparently, is among philosophy’s most enduring problems. As all parents know, ‘do it because God says so’ and ‘do it because I will otherwise kick your butt/curtail your outings/cut your pocket money’ does not make the most compelling basis for the actions of children and, at least in my case, invariably results in a raised middle finger waived in my face (though, I must admit, they don’t dare try the latter with their mother).

I would like, at this stage, to introduce to you a 17^th century Dutch philosopher called Hugo Grotius – a remarkable man who led an interesting life; he was, inter alia, a leading politician, a prison escapee, a refugee and a shipwreck survivor, doing all this while maintaining a wife and seven children. As the Governor of Rotterdam in 1613, he led a Dutch delegation to secure the freedom of two ships seized by an English fleet in the seas near Greenland on the grounds of trespassing. Grotius’s arguments eventually came to form an integral component of today’s international law of the sea; at that time, however, the English were considerably more powerful than the Dutch and they neither returned the cargo nor conceded the legal points. He also wrote two classics of which the first, “On the Law of War and Peace” discusses the causes of war, the origins of property rights, and the case for state formation.

Grotius also managed to rescue the concept of natural law from the tyranny of religion and power. He suggested that the source of natural laws is human nature’s desire for peace and order, which manifests itself in two essential properties – the desire for self-preservation, and the need for society. Two things are therefore imperative for a person’s successful existence; one, s/he should engage in the reasonable pursuit of self-interest, and two, s/he should abstain from taking what belongs to others. He added two more principles – that, three, evil deeds must be corrected and four, good deeds must be recompensed. Grotius proceeds to build up laws governing both individual behaviour and the conduct of nations from these four tenets.

To return to the original question on the right, under natural laws, of people to do obnoxious things, I argue that it depends upon the basis for the existence of natural laws under which the justification is made. The system of patriarchy, which would be considered natural law in most religious and all power doctrines, does provide justification for wife-beating under certain and all conditions respectively – and therefore the women panchayat representatives and Afghan delegates may not have been wrong to shush me up. But the same under Grotius’s rationalization, and under most liberal legal doctrines, is a despicable act of bullying that has no basis in any natural law.

Confusing? I have a simpler explanation of natural laws from a rather more modern philosopher, my 13-year-old son. “Anything that has a basis in nature, and is therefore not questioned in any society or culture, is a natural law,” he told me, “like parents taking care of their children.” Not entirely coincidentally, the little squirt was negotiating a raise in his monthly allowance at that time.