Structural Violence in India, Measured

Read the last six words again. "All forms of exploitation" is not the language of a criminal statute. It is the language of a document that understands harm structurally, and it is the constitutional warrant for the whole of this paper's third and fourth modules.

The four arrangements

Land. The distribution of land is the single arrangement from which most of Module II follows. Ownership is concentrated, tenancy is insecure where it is not illegal, and a large agricultural population is landless. Every peasant movement in Module II is about this, and every land reform statute is an attempt on it.

Labour. A wage below what a family needs is structural violence in its purest form: nobody strikes anybody, and the effects appear as illness, as stunting and as children out of school. The Constitution's answer is in article 39, and the statutory answer is the minimum wage, which Module II examines and finds largely unenforced.

Caste. The arrangement that assigns occupation, residence and marriage by birth. What makes it structural rather than merely cultural is that it allocates material things: which land, which work, which water, which street. Module IV is about it.

Residence. Where a settlement is placed decides what water it drinks, what it breathes and how far its children walk to school. In an Indian village the placement is usually by caste, which is why the last two arrangements are hard to separate.

Worked example

Take one household and follow the arrangements through it, because this is how an examiner wants the abstraction handled.

Lakshmi's family are landless agricultural labourers in a village in Marathwada. In a year:

• They get work for perhaps 150 days. The wage is below the notified minimum, and nobody in the village pays the notified minimum, so there is no employer to complain about. Labour.
• They live in the settlement at the low end of the village, where the drain runs. Two of Lakshmi's four children have had waterborne illness this year. Residence.
• Lakshmi's eldest daughter left school at eleven, because the family needed a second earner and because the walk was three kilometres. Labour and residence together.
• The family took a loan for a wedding. It is at an interest rate that cannot be repaid out of a labourer's wage, and repayment is by labour. Land and labour, and on these facts possibly the offence of keeping a person in bondage.

Where is the offender? There is not one. Every person in this account is behaving as people in that village behave. And the harm to this household over ten years is larger than the harm any single act of direct violence in that village has caused.

Where is the law? Article 39 requires that the health and strength of workers is not abused and that children are not forced by economic necessity into work unsuited to them. Article 46 requires the State to protect the weaker sections from all forms of exploitation. Both are directive principles, which article 37 makes not enforceable by any court while declaring them fundamental in the governance of the country. That gap between fundamental and enforceable is the standing criticism, and it is worth one careful sentence in any answer on this topic.

What it does NOT mean

It does not mean India is uniquely structurally violent. Every society has structural violence. What the Indian material offers is an unusually well-documented case in which the structure is recognised by the country's own Constitution, named in three articles, and largely uncorrected.

It does not mean poverty and structural violence are the same word. Poverty is a state. Structural violence is a claim about causation: that the deprivation is produced by an arrangement and could have been avoided.

And it does not mean the directive principles are worthless. They have been used to interpret article 21, they are the basis on which land reform legislation survived challenge, and they are why the Supreme Court could read a right to a minimum wage into the prohibition of forced labour. Their weakness is that they cannot be enforced directly; their strength is that they colour everything that can be.

Quick revision

• Four arrangements: land, labour, caste, residence, and the last two are hard to separate in a village.
• Article 38: a social order in which justice informs all institutions; minimise inequalities of income, status, facilities and opportunities, between groups as well as individuals.
• Article 39: material resources distributed to subserve the common good; no concentration of wealth; equal pay; the health and strength of workers not abused.
• Article 46: promote the interests of the weaker sections and protect them from social injustice and all forms of exploitation.
• Article 37: the directive principles are not enforceable by any court but are fundamental in the governance of the country. That gap is the criticism.
• Structural violence is a claim about causation and avoidability, not a synonym for poverty.

Test yourself

1. Name the three directive principles that address structural violence and give the operative words of each. Article 38, a social order in which justice, social, economic and political, shall inform all the institutions of the national life, and the minimising of inequalities of income, status, facilities and opportunities. Article 39, the material resources of the community distributed to subserve the common good, and the health and strength of workers not abused. Article 46, protection of the weaker sections from social injustice and all forms of exploitation.

2. What is the constitutional weakness of relying on those three articles, and what is the answer to it? Article 37 makes the directive principles unenforceable by any court while declaring them fundamental in governance. The answer is that they are not useless: they inform the interpretation of article 21, they sustained land reform legislation against challenge, and they supplied the reasoning by which a wage below the minimum was held to be forced labour.

3. Distinguish poverty from structural violence. Poverty describes a condition. Structural violence asserts that the condition is produced by an identifiable arrangement and was avoidable, which is a claim about causation and about responsibility, though not about criminal responsibility.

4. Why are caste and residence hard to separate in an Indian village? Because the placement of settlements has historically followed caste, so the material consequences of where a family lives, its water, its drainage, its distance from a school, are consequences of caste operating through geography.