BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 3 Sociology 2019-20 Question Paper with Solutions

Ethnocentrism is the tendency to judge other cultures by the standards of one's own and to regard one's own group as the centre of everything and as naturally superior. The term is William Graham Sumner's, from Folkways (1906).

It follows directly from his distinction between the in group, the "we" group, marked by loyalty and cooperation, and the out group, the "they" group, viewed with indifference, contempt or hostility.

Its opposite principle is cultural relativism, the requirement that a cultural trait be understood in its own context rather than judged by an outside standard.

Amitate is a kinship usage in which the father's sister, the amita in Latin, is given special respect, authority and importance, and is treated as more significant than the mother in certain matters affecting her brother's children.

She may have a decisive voice in their marriage, receive special gifts, be consulted at rituals and be entitled to particular deference. The usage is found among the Toda and in parts of south India.

Its counterpart is the avunculate, in which the mother's brother, the avunculus, holds a special position of authority and obligation towards his sister's children. The avunculate is characteristic of matrilineal societies, as among the Nair, Khasi and Garo, where descent and property pass through the mother's line.

Democracy, from the Greek demos, people, and kratos, rule, is a system of government in which supreme power rests with the people, exercised directly or through representatives chosen in free and periodic elections.

Abraham Lincoln's formulation is the standard one: "government of the people, by the people, for the people."

Its types are direct democracy, in which citizens decide themselves, as in the Greek city states and in the modern referendum, and indirect or representative democracy, in which they choose representatives.

Its essential conditions are universal adult franchise; free, fair and periodic elections; more than one party and a legitimate opposition; rule of law and an independent judiciary; fundamental rights, especially of speech, assembly and association; a free press; and the accountability of the executive.

A single parent family is a household in which one parent alone is responsible for the care and upbringing of one or more dependent children.

It arises through death of a spouse, historically the commonest route in India, producing the very large number of widow headed households; divorce or separation; desertion; unmarried parenthood; single person adoption, permitted under the Juvenile Justice Act and the CARA regulations; and migration, where one parent works elsewhere.

It is overwhelmingly headed by women, and the difficulties it produces, a single income, the double burden of earning and caring, stigma, difficulty in renting accommodation and legal obstacles over maintenance and guardianship, fall very unequally on the two sexes.

Scheduled Tribes, about 8.6 per cent of the population and specified under Article 342, face problems distinct in kind from those of Scheduled Castes: their disadvantage is territorial rather than ritual. The principal problems are:

1. Land alienation, the gravest: tribal land passing to non tribals through debt, fraud and non enforcement of protective legislation.
2. Displacement by development projects, dams, mines, industry and protected areas, with poor rehabilitation.
3. Loss of forest rights, which forest law converted into encroachment, addressed by the Forest Rights Act, 2006.
4. Indebtedness and bonded labour.
5. Poverty, malnutrition and the worst health indicators of any group.
6. Educational deprivation, worsened by instruction in a language not spoken at home.
7. Cultural erosion: loss of language, customary institutions and traditional knowledge.

Role conflict. Incompatible demands arising from two or more different statuses held at the same time, so that fulfilling one means failing the other. The clash is between roles.

Examples: a woman who is both a judge and a mother, required in court on the morning her child is ill; a police officer required to arrest a relative; a working woman carrying both employment and the whole of domestic work.

Types: inter role conflict, between two statuses, which is role conflict proper; intra role conflict, between the different expectations attached to one status, which is role strain; and person role conflict, where a role requires conduct contrary to the occupant's own values, as with an official ordered to do something he believes wrong.

Role strain. Incompatible demands arising within a single role. An advocate's one role requires both zealous advocacy for the client and a duty of candour to the court. Merton's own illustration is the schoolteacher: nobody asks the teacher to stop teaching, they ask one teacher to be several things at once.

How societies manage both.

For full marks, cover: what urbanisation is and its scale in India, the characteristics of urban life, the problems under clear heads, the sociological analysis, and the measures.

Urbanisation is the process by which an increasing proportion of a population comes to live in towns and cities, accompanied by the spread of urban ways of life. India's urban population was about 31 per cent at the 2011 Census and is projected to approach 40 per cent by 2030.

Characteristics of urban life, in Louis Wirth's classic statement: cities are marked by size, density and heterogeneity, and these three produce a distinctive way of life, impersonal, segmental, superficial and transitory relationships, weakened primary groups, and reliance on formal social control.

The problems

1. Housing and slums. Acute shortage of affordable housing; a very large proportion of the urban population living in slums and informal settlements without secure tenure; overcrowding; and settlement on marginal land, along drains, on floodplains and beside landfills.

8. Social disorganisation and anomie. Weakening of primary groups; loneliness and isolation, particularly among migrants and the elderly; family breakdown; addiction; and, in Durkheim's account, the normlessness that follows rapid change.

9. Problems of migrants, who arrive without networks, work in the informal sector, live in insecure housing and are frequently excluded from entitlements tied to residence.

10. Health, both communicable disease from density and poor sanitation, and non communicable disease from sedentary life, pollution and stress.

11. Weak urban governance. Municipal bodies with inadequate finances, staff and powers despite the 74th Amendment; master plans unenforced; and multiplicity of agencies.

For full marks, cover: the definitions, the distinction with its practical test, the sources and types of power, Weber's three types of authority in detail, legitimacy, and the application to the modern state.

Power is the capacity to impose one's will on the behaviour of others even against their resistance, by whatever means, including force. Max Weber: "Power is the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance."

Authority is legitimate power: power that those subject to it accept as rightful, so that obedience is voluntary rather than compelled. Authority is a species of power, distinguished by consent and by a felt obligation to obey.

The distinction. Power may be legitimate or illegitimate; authority is by definition legitimate. Power may rest on force alone; authority rests on acceptance. Power compels, authority commands.

Sources of power. Force and coercion; wealth and control of resources; knowledge and expertise; numbers and organisation; office; and personal qualities.

2. Charismatic authority. Legitimated by the extraordinary personal qualities of a leader, held to be exceptional or even superhuman, and obedience rests on personal devotion. Examples: a prophet, a revolutionary, a war hero, a godman. It is inherently unstable, since it dies with the leader and requires continuing proof of the gift, and it must undergo the routinisation of charisma into traditional or legal rational form if the movement is to survive.
3. Legal rational authority. Legitimated by impersonal, enacted rules. Obedience is owed to the office and to the law, never to the person, and the holder's own authority is bounded by the rules that created it. Examples: a judge, a Collector, a company director. Its characteristic administrative form is bureaucracy, and it is the type of the modern state.

Legitimacy is the bridge concept: it is what power lacks and authority has. In a modern democracy the primary means of legalising power is election under a constitution, followed by its exercise through legally defined offices subject to judicial review.

Influence should be distinguished from both: the capacity to affect another's conduct without any right to command and without coercion, resting on persuasion, prestige or personal relationship.

• Durkheim: from mechanical solidarity, based on likeness, to organic solidarity, based on the division of labour.
• Morgan: savagery, barbarism, civilisation. Tonnies: Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft. Maine: from status to contract.

Criticisms: the unilinear assumption is false; the schemes are Eurocentric; they equate "later" with "better"; and they cannot explain decline.

2. Cyclical theories. Change is recurrent: rise, maturity, decline, repeat.

• Spengler, The Decline of the West: every culture is an organism passing through birth, growth, maturity and decay, and none escapes. Fatalistic.
• Toynbee: challenge and response; growth continues while a creative minority answers challenges and the majority imitates, and decline begins when that minority becomes a merely dominant minority ruling by force. Decline is not inevitable.

Criticism: one dimensional; the predictions of polarisation and revolution in industrial societies were not borne out.

Comparative assessment. The four fall into two pairs. Evolutionary and cyclical theories disagree about the shape of change, a line or a circle. Functionalist and conflict theories disagree about its source, outside the system as a disturbance or inside it as a contradiction. No single theory accounts for all change: evolutionism captures long term direction, cyclical theory accounts for decline, functionalism explains gradual adaptation, and conflict theory explains revolution and the role of interest.

2. Secondary kin: the primary kin of one's primary kin, such as father's brother or wife's brother.
3. Tertiary kin: the secondary kin of one's primary kin, such as wife's brother's son.

Descent. Patrilineal, traced through the father, which is the Indian norm; matrilineal, through the mother, as among the Nair, Khasi and Garo; and bilateral, through both.

Residence. Patrilocal, the wife joining the husband's household; matrilocal, the reverse; neolocal, a new household; and avunculocal, with the husband's maternal uncle.

Kinship usages, the prescribed ways of behaving between particular kin:

• Avoidance: certain kin must keep apart, as a daughter in law from her father in law.
• Joking relationships: permitted teasing and familiarity, as between a man and his wife's younger sister.
• Teknonymy: addressing a person through a third, as "Ramu's mother".
• The avunculate: the special authority and obligation of the mother's brother, strong in matrilineal societies.

For full marks, cover: the meaning, why conformity occurs, its types, the agencies producing it, its functions and dysfunctions, and the relation to deviance and social control.

Meaning. Social conformity is behaviour that accords with the norms and expectations of the group to which a person belongs. It is the ordinary condition of social life and the necessary counterpart of deviance, which is departure from those norms.

Why conformity occurs.

1. Socialisation and internalisation. The most important cause. Norms learned in childhood become part of the person, so that conformity requires no external pressure and departure produces guilt. This is internal control.
2. Fear of sanctions. Informal, through disapproval, gossip, ridicule and ostracism; and formal, through fine, imprisonment or dismissal.

Agencies producing conformity. The family, the peer group, the school, religion, the workplace, public opinion and, formally, law.

Functions. Conformity makes behaviour predictable, which is the condition of all cooperation; it maintains order and stability; it preserves the culture and transmits it; it produces solidarity; and it makes social life possible among strangers.

Dysfunctions. It suppresses individuality and creativity; it obstructs social change and reform; it can enforce harmful norms as readily as beneficial ones, since conformity is indifferent to the content of the norm; it produces groupthink, where the desire for agreement suppresses dissent; and in extreme form it produces collective violence, where a crowd's conformity dissolves individual restraint.

A note on the premise. The recorded figures have risen sharply since 2012. A rise in recorded crime cannot be read straightforwardly as a rise in offending: it reflects the widened definition after the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013, greater willingness to report, and improved registration after the amendment made a police officer's refusal to register such a case an offence. The honest statement is that reporting has certainly improved and the underlying incidence is not directly known, which is precisely why victimisation surveys matter. That said, the absolute numbers and the pattern of offences are grave, and the analysis below addresses the causes and the conviction problem.

5. Caste and class. A very large proportion of reported offences are committed against Dalit and Adivasi women, frequently as an assertion of dominance rather than as an isolated sexual offence. The Prevention of Atrocities Act, 1989, exists precisely because this pattern was identified.

6. Weak informal control in anonymous settings. Urbanisation and migration weaken the primary groups that once restrained behaviour, without the formal system having grown to replace them. That is Durkheim's anomie.

7. The adverse sex ratio in some regions, and the social consequences of large numbers of unmarried men.

8. Alcohol and substance abuse, aggravating rather than originating causes.

9. Exposure to violent and pornographic content, which the research associates with desensitisation rather than with simple imitation.

10. Institutional failures: unlit and unpoliced public spaces, unsafe transport, and workplaces without functioning committees.

5. Attitudes within the system. Stereotyped assumptions about how a "genuine" victim behaves; questioning about character, notwithstanding Section 53A and the proviso to Section 146 of the Evidence Act, now carried into the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023, which bar evidence of previous sexual history; and the discredited "two finger test", prohibited by the Supreme Court in Lillu v. State of Haryana (2013) and again in State of Jharkhand v. Shailendra Kumar Rai (2022).

6. Under reporting and late reporting, which weakens the evidence when a case is eventually brought.

7. Weak victim support: no protection, no counselling, no accompaniment, and the cost of repeated attendance.

8. Overburdened courts and prosecutors, and the shortage of designated fast track and special courts despite the statutory scheme.

9. Definitional expansion, which mechanically affects the ratio: a wider definition brings in a wider range of cases, and the conviction rate is a fraction whose denominator has grown.

Who minorities are. A minority in sociology is a group which, because of its physical or cultural characteristics, is singled out for differential and unequal treatment and which therefore regards itself as an object of collective discrimination. Louis Wirth's definition is the standard one, and its crucial feature is that a minority is defined by subordination, not by number: a numerically larger group may be a sociological minority if it is excluded from power.

In Indian law, religious minorities are notified under the National Commission for Minorities Act, 1992: Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Parsis and, since 2014, Jains. Linguistic minorities are protected under Articles 29, 30 and 350B. In T. M. A. Pai Foundation (2002) the Supreme Court held that minority status is to be determined state wise, not nationally.

7. Political marginalisation, with declining representation in legislatures and the treatment of minorities as a vote bank rather than as a constituency with interests.

8. Identity and cultural anxiety: pressure on language, dress, food and personal law, and the demand to demonstrate loyalty.

9. Hate speech, stereotyping and media representation, and the amplification of both on social platforms.

10. Internal problems, which an honest answer includes: conservatism within communities, resistance to reform of personal law, low female education in some sections, and leadership focused on symbolic rather than developmental issues.

11. The double disadvantage of minority women, who face community based and gender based subordination together.

5. Security and accountability: prompt and impartial registration and prosecution of communal offences; departmental action against officers who fail to act; and speedy compensation and rehabilitation of victims, since impunity after one episode is the strongest invitation to the next.

6. Anti discrimination measures in housing and employment, and enforcement against refusal to let on grounds of religion.

7. Institutional machinery: the National Commission for Minorities, the Ministry of Minority Affairs, and implementation of the recommendations of the Sachar Committee and the Ranganath Misra Commission.

8. Media regulation and the countering of hate speech, and rapid rebuttal of rumour.

9. Inter community contact: mixed housing, mixed schools, joint festivals and civic associations with mixed membership.

10. Reform within communities, on female education and on personal law, which is more durable when it comes from inside than when it is imposed.

3. Manufacturing and workshops: bangles and glass, brassware, matches and fireworks, lock making, beedi rolling, gem polishing and carpet weaving, several of them involving heat, dust, chemicals and fine work that damages eyesight.

4. Construction, where whole migrant families work at sites and children carry loads and are exposed to injury.

5. Hotels, dhabas, tea shops and roadside eateries, which the 1986 Act specifically prohibited.

6. Rag picking and waste sorting, with exposure to infection, sharp waste and toxic material.

7. Brick kilns and stone quarries, frequently under bonded conditions where the family's debt is worked off across generations.

8. Fireworks and matches, notably in Sivakasi, historically the most cited hazardous concentration.

9. Begging, and organised trafficking for begging, including deliberate maiming.

10. Trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation, the gravest form.

11. Entertainment and advertising, permitted with safeguards under the 2016 amendment.

2. It breaks the intergenerational cycle. A working child becomes an unskilled adult whose own children must work. Education is the only intervention that interrupts the cycle rather than managing it.

3. It creates achieved status, and so breaks the link between birth and occupation that keeps the poorest communities in the same work across generations.

4. It supplies the incidental support that makes attendance possible: the Mid Day Meal, now PM POSHAN, which addresses the immediate hunger that drives a child to work and is the single most effective enrolment intervention in Indian education; free textbooks and uniforms; and bicycles and transport.

5. It functions as a monitoring mechanism. A school that records attendance identifies the children who have disappeared into work, and School Management Committees under the 2009 Act give the community a formal role in it.

6. It socialises, developing the personality, the capacity for self control and the awareness of rights that a child who has never attended school does not acquire.

7. It is a legal entitlement, so a child out of school is not merely unfortunate but is being denied a fundamental right under Article 21A.

3. Modes of production. Primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and, he predicted, socialism and communism. Each contains a contradiction between its forces and relations of production which eventually bursts it.

4. Class and class struggle. "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Class is defined objectively by the relationship to the means of production, and in every epoch there are two fundamental classes. He distinguished a class in itself from a class for itself, the transition obstructed by false consciousness.

5. Surplus value and exploitation. Labour power produces more value than its wage; the difference, surplus value, is appropriated by the capitalist. Exploitation is therefore built into the wage relation rather than being a matter of any employer's conduct.

6. Alienation. The worker is estranged from the product, from the act of production, from his species being and from other people.

7. Ideology and religion. "The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class." Religion is "the sigh of the oppressed creature... the opium of the people".

3. The four types of social action. Zweckrational, goal rational; wertrational, value rational; affective; and traditional.

4. Authority. Power is the probability of carrying out one's will despite resistance; authority is legitimate domination, of three pure types: traditional, resting on immemorial custom; charismatic, resting on the extraordinary qualities of a leader and requiring routinisation to survive him; and legal rational, resting on enacted impersonal rules, which is the type of the modern state.

5. Bureaucracy. Hierarchy, written rules, defined competence, selection by qualification, salaried career officials, separation of office from person, written records and impersonality. Technically superior to every other form of organisation, and productive of the iron cage.

6. The Protestant ethic. Calvinist predestination produced anxiety, relieved by treating success in a worldly calling as a sign of election; combined with the prohibition of luxury this produced methodical work, thrift and reinvestment, which is capital accumulation. The wider argument is against economic determinism: ideas can be causes.

For full marks, cover: the definition and characteristics, the classification by number of partners, by rules of mate selection, by residence and descent, and by mode of acquiring a mate, the functions, then the changes with their causes, the problems, and a conclusion.

Definition and characteristics

Marriage is the socially approved union of a man and a woman which establishes a family and regulates sexual relations, descent, inheritance and mutual obligation.

Westermarck: "Marriage is a relation of one or more men to one or more women which is recognised by custom or law and involves certain rights and duties both in the case of the parties entering the union and in the case of the children born of it." Malinowski: "a contract for the production and maintenance of children."

Characteristics. Universality; social approval, which distinguishes it from cohabitation; reciprocal rights and duties; ceremony; the intention of permanence; and regulation by rules of endogamy, exogamy and prohibited degrees.

B. By rules of mate selection

Endogamy, marriage within one's own group, whether caste, sub caste, tribe, religion or class; exogamy, marriage outside a defined group, in Indian forms gotra, pravara, sapinda under Section 5(v) of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, and village exogamy; hypergamy (anuloma) and hypogamy (pratiloma); levirate and sororate; and cross cousin marriage in the south and parallel cousin marriage among Muslims.

C. By residence, descent and authority

Patrilocal, matrilocal, neolocal and avunculocal residence; patrilineal and matrilineal descent; patriarchal and matriarchal authority.

D. By mode of acquiring a mate

Marriage by negotiation, by purchase with bride price, by service, by exchange, by capture, by intrusion, by elopement and by trial. The classical Hindu texts list eight forms: Brahma, Daiva, Arsha, Prajapatya, Asura, Gandharva, Rakshasa and Paishacha, the first four approved and the last four disapproved.

6. Changing roles within marriage in dual earning households, though domestic work has not been redistributed in proportion.
7. Nuclear residence replacing the joint household.
8. Smaller families, later childbearing and voluntary childlessness.
9. Dowry declining in form and persisting in substance.
10. Alternatives alongside marriage: live in relationships, recognised for limited statutory purposes in D. Velusamy and Indra Sarma under the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005; single parenthood.
11. Custom replaced by statute: the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, the Special Marriage Act, 1954, the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961.

Causes. Education, particularly of women; employment and economic independence; urbanisation; industrialisation, which separated home from workplace; legislation and judicial decision; mass media; Westernisation in Srinivas's sense; and the growth of individualism.

Problems. Dowry and dowry death; domestic violence; child marriage persisting despite the statute; the adverse sex ratio; marital rape, still excepted; desertion and maintenance disputes; the double burden; and honour crimes.

For full marks, cover: the meaning and forms of conflict, its integrative effects with the theorists who established them, its disintegrative effects, then formal social control in full with its means and agencies, its relation to informal control, and the connection between the two halves.

A. Social conflict

Definition. Conflict is a dissociative social process in which individuals or groups seek their ends by directly opposing, harming, defeating or destroying the opponent. Gillin and Gillin: "the social process in which individuals or groups seek their ends by directly challenging the antagonist by violence or threat of violence."

Characteristics. Universal; conscious and deliberate, unlike competition; personal, directed at the rival himself; and intermittent, occurring in bursts.

4. It produces social change that no other process delivers. The trade union movement, the anti caste movement, the freedom movement and the civil rights movement each worked through conflict, and none of the changes they achieved would have come by consensus.
5. It creates new rules and institutions. The settlement of a conflict is usually a new arrangement: labour legislation came out of industrial conflict, and the Geneva Conventions out of war.
6. It leads to accommodation and a new equilibrium, since conflict cannot be sustained indefinitely.
7. Simmel's deeper point: conflict is a form of sociation. It presupposes a relationship and binds the antagonists to one another as much as it separates them; a society entirely without conflict would be one without interaction.
8. It establishes and maintains a balance of power, since conflict is how the relative strength of parties becomes known.

The disintegrative effects of conflict

1. Destruction of life and property.
2. Disruption of social unity, and the creation of lasting hatred between groups which outlives the dispute.

1. Law, the principal instrument: general, applying to all alike; definite, so what is required is knowable in advance; backed by the organised coercive power of the state; with sanctions defined in advance; enforceable against the powerful; deliberately changeable, which is why it can be an instrument of reform; and reviewable, since a decision can be appealed.
2. Coercion, physical and non violent, the latter including strikes, boycotts and non cooperation.
3. Codified rules of organisations: service rules, professional codes, university regulations.
4. Education, formal in its organisation and largely informal in its effect.
5. Propaganda and mass communication.
6. Administrative regulation and licensing, controlling conduct in advance rather than punishing it afterwards.

Agencies. The state; the legislature, which makes the rules; the police, which detect and prevent; the courts, which adjudicate; prisons and correctional services, which execute; the bureaucracy; the military; and formal organisations generally.

For full marks, cover: what social change is, then mass media as an agent with its mechanisms, positive and negative effects, then law as an agent with the theoretical debate and the conditions of success, then the interaction between the two, and a reasoned conclusion.

Social change is a change in the structure and functioning of society: in its institutions, patterns of relationship, norms and values.

A. Mass media as an agent of social change

Mass media are the institutions and technologies by which information, ideas and entertainment reach a large, dispersed and anonymous audience: press, radio, cinema, television and digital platforms.

Its mechanisms of influence:

1. Agenda setting. The best supported finding in the field, from McCombs and Shaw: the media may not tell people what to think, but it is strikingly successful in telling them what to think about. Simply by giving an issue prominence it becomes the question of the day.

Positive effects. Awareness of rights and entitlements; education; national integration through shared experience; campaigns on sanitation, immunisation, girls' education and road safety; a voice for the marginalised, since digital platforms allow publication without an editor's permission; and the exposure of corruption.

Negative effects. Misinformation and fake news, spread faster than correction; polarisation and echo chambers, since algorithms show people more of what they already accept; hate speech and communal mobilisation, with rumour as the standing mechanism of riot escalation; paid news and manipulation of elections; trial by media; consumerism; and effects on children, including violence, body image and addiction.

B. Law as an agent of social change

The classical disagreement. Savigny and the Historical School held that law expresses the Volksgeist, the spirit of the people; it grows with the nation, cannot be made deliberately and cannot be transplanted. Roscoe Pound held the opposite: law is social engineering, the deliberate balancing of competing individual, public and social interests so as to satisfy the maximum with the minimum of friction and waste.

How law produces change:

Conditions on which success depends. Some existing social support; a functioning enforcement machinery; publicity; a beneficiary class able and willing to invoke it; consistency with the constitutional order; and an accessible remedy.

The Indian record, honestly stated. Where those conditions were present, law worked: untouchability can no longer be publicly defended, and reservation changed the composition of public employment and of legislatures. Where they were absent, it failed: dowry prohibition has been ineffective largely because the complainant's own family participates in the transaction, and land ceiling legislation failed because those it threatened controlled its implementation.

C. The interaction between the two

The two are not independent, and this is the part a strong answer supplies.

1. Media creates the climate in which law becomes possible. The Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013, followed sustained public attention after December 2012; the Vishaka guidelines and later the 2013 harassment statute followed campaigns that made the problem visible.

For full marks, cover: the definition and elements of religion, the theories, evolutionary, functionalist, conflict and Weberian, the functions and dysfunctions of the religious institution, secularisation, and the constitutional position in India.

Definition and elements

Religion is a system of beliefs and practices relating to sacred things which unites its adherents into a moral community.

Durkheim: "Religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say things set apart and forbidden, beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a church all those who adhere to them." Tylor, the minimum definition: "the belief in spiritual beings."

Elements. Belief in the supernatural; the division of the world into sacred and profane; ritual and worship; a moral code; sacred objects, places and texts; emotion of awe and dependence; a community of believers; and often a priesthood.

2. The functionalist theory (Durkheim). In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) he studied Australian totemism as the simplest religion available and concluded that the totem is a symbol of the clan, so that in worshipping it the clan worships itself. The essential religious distinction is between the sacred and the profane, not between god and man, and religion's essential function is social integration: ritual assembles people, produces collective effervescence, and renews the collective conscience. Malinowski added that religion relieves anxiety where human control fails, at death, illness and the start of a dangerous undertaking.

3. The conflict theory (Marx). Religion belongs to the superstructure, determined by the economic base and serving the ruling class. It is "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world... the opium of the people": it consoles the exploited with reward hereafter, explains suffering as ordained, and so produces false consciousness. In India the doctrines of karma and rebirth are cited as performing exactly this function for caste.

Criticism. Religion has also been revolutionary: the Bhakti and Sufi movements, liberation theology, Ambedkar's Buddhist conversion, and the black churches of the American civil rights movement.

8. Legitimation of the social order, conferring sanctity on marriage, kingship and property.
9. Rites of passage, marking birth, marriage and death and making life transitions socially recognised.
10. Social change, through reform movements: Bhakti, Buddhism's rejection of caste, the Brahmo and Arya Samaj, and Ambedkar's conversion.

Dysfunctions

Communal conflict, since religion defines out groups as sharply as in groups; obstruction of reform and of science; legitimation of inequality, particularly caste and the subordination of women; superstition, commercialisation and exploitation by self styled godmen; fundamentalism and intolerance; and diversion of resources into ritual.

Religion and the Indian Constitution

Articles 25 to 28 guarantee freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation, subject to public order, morality and health; the freedom to manage religious affairs; freedom from taxation for the promotion of a religion; and freedom from religious instruction in wholly state funded institutions. Article 25(2)(b) permits the state to throw open Hindu religious institutions of a public character to all classes of Hindus. Articles 14, 15 and 17 limit religious practice where it discriminates. Articles 29 and 30 protect minority culture and institutions. Secularism is part of the basic structure, S. R. Bommai (1994), and the essential religious practices doctrine, from Shirur Mutt (1954), confines Article 25 protection to practices integral to a religion.

Problems of Scheduled Tribes

1. Land alienation, the gravest problem: tribal land passing to non tribals through debt, fraud and non enforcement of protective legislation, despite the Fifth Schedule.
2. Displacement by development projects: dams, mines, industry and protected areas, with poor rehabilitation. Tribals are a small fraction of the population and a large fraction of those displaced since independence.
3. Loss of forest rights, which forest law converted into encroachment; the Forest Rights Act, 2006, was enacted to correct what its own preamble calls a "historical injustice", and implementation is uneven.
4. Indebtedness and bonded labour, despite the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976.
5. Poverty, malnutrition and the worst health indicators of any group, on infant and maternal mortality, anaemia and sickle cell disease.
6. Educational deprivation, worsened by instruction in a language not spoken at home and by distance from schools.
7. Cultural erosion: loss of language, customary institutions and traditional knowledge.

7. Political marginalisation despite reserved seats, since reserved constituencies are frequently decided by dominant caste votes.
8. Poor access to justice, with reluctance to register cases and low conviction rates.
9. Psychological effects: internalised inferiority, and what Ambedkar described as the destruction of self respect.

Problems of Other Backward Classes

1. Educational and economic backwardness, less severe than that of SCs and STs and very unevenly distributed within the category.
2. Occupational disadvantage: many are artisan and service castes whose crafts, weaving, pottery, oil pressing and leather work, were destroyed by industrial competition.
3. Ritual subordination in the traditional order, without untouchability.
4. Internal inequality within the category, the sharpest current problem, with dominant OBC groups capturing a disproportionate share of the benefit while the Most Backward Classes remain untouched.

Judicial. Champakam Dorairajan (1951), which produced the First Amendment; Indra Sawhney (1992), fixing the 50 per cent ceiling and excluding the creamy layer among OBCs; M. Nagaraj (2006) and Jarnail Singh (2018) on reservation in promotion; and Ashoka Kumar Thakur (2008).

Assessment. Reservation has produced a substantial middle class among Scheduled Castes and Tribes and has changed the composition of public employment and legislatures. It has been least effective where beneficiaries were poorest, because it presupposes a qualification the very poor cannot acquire; it does not reach the private sector, now the larger employer; and it does not touch social discrimination, which no quota can reach.