Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty: With Dalit Perspectives

Nation has been an issue of discussion around the world because a nation is a bunch of people who have bounds based on race, color, culture, customs, religion, etc. But in India, caste is the biggest component of a nation.

By Dr. Krishan Kumar

Nation word has been sparked as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel for 2024 of USA-based economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Jonson, and James Robinson “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity. ( Indian Express, October 16, 2024,p.12) The excellent book Why Nations Fail was written in 2012 by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. They mentioned that a country&’s policies determine whether it succeeds or fails. Like the USA, UK, Germany, and Italy, countries implementing inclusive economic, political, and social policies have been growing into powerful nations.

In his book, they describe the example of Zimbabwe. In January 2000, the country where the national lottery was run by the Zimbabwe Banking Corporation (Zimbank), a bank that was partially controlled by the state. All customers who maintained $5,000 or more in Zimbabwean dollars in their accounts as of December 1999 were eligible to enter the drawing. Z$ 100,000 was the lottery prize. But the most unexpected revelation was that it was won by the president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, who had controlled the country since 1980 by way or by crook—mostly with an iron fist. He had earned five times the nation’s yearly per capita income from the lottery. Zimbank asserted that Mr. Mugabe’s name was selected from a pool of thousands of qualified clients, nevertheless. The lottery ticket was simply one more example of the exploitative institutions that exist in Zimbabwe. This may be referred to as corruption, but it was only an illustration of an exclusive system.

The same thing also Dalits are also incensed over the fact that the judiciary is made up of members of a small number of castes or families and that all ragpickers and sanitation workers are inevitably from the same caste. Caste has been a persistent and defining principle of inequality and discrimination in India. In recent decades this has become a more visible issue outside India. A 60-page report, Caste Discrimination: A Global Concern, focused on the Dalits or so-called untouchables of South Asia – including Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan. In recent years, human rights groups, including the Dalit Solidarity Network UK, have campaigned for a legal ban on caste discrimination. They argued that Dalits –‘the lowest group in the caste hierarchy – lacked legal protection against discrimination from members of ‘upper castes’. The government acknowledged the existence of caste discrimination but initially preferred a community education program to legislation. The reluctance to legislate may have been brought on by pressure from Hindu and Sikh groups in the UK.

Wilkerson spoke about the origin of caste; the word caste, which has become synonymous with India. The word caste came from the Portuguese word casta, a Renaissance-era word for “race” or “breed.” The Portuguese, who were among the earliest European traders in South Asia, applied the term to the people of India upon observing Hindu divisions. Thus, a word we now ascribe to India arose from Europeans’ interpretations of what they saw; it sprang from the Western culture that created America. It has been argued that in the USA, racism maintains only social hierarchy, for while blacks are in the minority in there, they were able to achieve the top position in politics when Barack Obama became the first black President of the USA. After the election, white Americans in both parties claimed that racism was a thing of the past in the USA. “We have a black President, for heaven’s sake”. They proclaimed a new post-racial world, but as per data, the majority of white Americans didn’t vote for the country’s first black President. An

estimated 43 percent went to him in 2008 and 39 percent in 2012. Which shows caste is a big matter for Americans also. But, India is not yet able to have a Dalit Prime Minister. It could be observed that the dynamics of caste in India are shaped by religious affiliation, which makes the Indian caste system more and more rigid than the USA’s caste. Another issue is global economic disparity, which has been rising steadily since 2020, according to an Oxfam study (2024) that revealed that although over five billion people have become poorer, the wealth of the wealthiest individuals has doubled.  In the context of India, caste is the biggest matter for its poverty, discrimination, exploitation, and disparity in politics and economics.