The Multiple Factor Theory in India

In one line

The multiple factor approach describes Indian offending well, but the Indian list is not the Western one, because caste, dowry, land, communal identity and migration operate here in ways no imported catalogue contains.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: applying the multiple factor theory to India requires adding factors absent from Western lists, namely caste, communal and religious identity, land and agrarian relations, dowry and family structure, rural to urban migration, and the operation of the criminal justice system itself, and it requires acknowledging that India lacks the longitudinal data on which the modern form of the approach depends.

Why the Western list does not transfer

Because the social structure is different. Caste is not a variety of class and cannot be folded into it. It determines occupation, residence, marriage, access to institutions and the treatment a complainant receives at a police station, and it is the organising variable in a whole class of offences.

Because the family is different. Household size, joint residence, the arrangement of marriage and the transfer of dowry generate offending patterns that a study of nuclear families does not encounter.

Because the economy is different. Most employment is informal, most transactions are unrecorded, and land holdings are small and disputed. Each of these produces its own offending.

And because the criminal justice system is different. Delay measured in years, undertrial detention exceeding the likely sentence, and the well-documented difficulty of getting a complaint registered are not background conditions here; they are factors that shape offending, victimisation and desistance directly.

The Indian list

Six factors that any Indian application must contain, over and above the standard ones covered in the chapters that follow.

Caste. It supplies a class of offences defined by the identity of the victim; it determines whose complaints are registered; and it structures the rural violence that is a separate paper on this group.

Communal and religious identity. Episodic collective violence has been studied in India through commissions of inquiry more thoroughly than through any other route.

Land and agrarian relations. A very large share of rural violence, including homicide, arises out of disputes over land, boundaries and irrigation, and this is the commonest single context for serious violence in rural India.

Dowry and the position of women in the household. Cruelty within marriage, dowry death and the offences connected with them are a category with no close Western equivalent, and their explanation lies in family structure and property transfer rather than in individual pathology.

Migration and urban settlement. Mumbai's growth by absorbing migrants faster than housing, schooling and policing can be supplied produces exactly the conditions the Chicago School identified, and the operative variable, as that chapter showed, is instability of tenure rather than income.