Presented in National Seminar B.R. Ambedkar College 26th Sept. 2008 )
History does nothing, it "possesses no Immense wealth" it "wages no battles". It is man real living man that does all that, that possesses and fights. Thus spoke Marx and it is important to understand all work of thought and imagination whether they are explicitly advanced, scientific, empirical, universal or conjectural, hypothetical and heuristic their true significance is ethical.
We live in a great no man's land of the complexity of negotiations, consultations, discussions and for all we understand it is integral to our existence. And on Friday night everyone tells everyone it is weekend and spends the evening by the individual method of recovering their own personalities - children; money-savings, seminar the garden and so on. Dualism of social -experience in which on one hand we try to assert our creativity, our internal control over external intrusions and on the other hand our most of our resistances are small, private subterranean residing only in half-hidden cracks in the institutional colossus dominating most of our lives but there are exceptions to this also.
Various types of inequalities have existed in different social-historical contexts and still we are far away from the situation where everybody will be rewarded according to his/her merits. The very genetic lottery creates differences of highest magnitude followed by factors like prevailing socio-economics cultural conditions. Certain social practices are reinforced creating-privileges for some and hardship of severe magnitude for the rest of the majority.
In this process dominant class successfully claim a disproportionate share of rewards by attaching socio-cultural notions of different kinds, pure coercion had existed in pre-Independent India
It is no wonder that individual born and socialized into different social groupings experiences life as beautiful and miserable both at different place and timings. And this difference of plenty is not only in terms of material conditions but more intriguing is the social conditions that tries to attach a prejudiced status to the under privileged.
Since inequality exists at the outset, there are two positive orientations: one that would tend to obliterate the natural inequality ^through social effort [John Rawls] and another that on the contrary would tend to reward everyone on the basis of his unequal qualities (Robert Nozick 1974, Milton Friedman 1962, Ayn Rand 1964).
Until now all psychology has remained fastened to moral prejudices and inhibitions: it has never dared to explore the depths. The power of moral prejudice has punctured deeply in Indian. social context and it goes without saying, has functioned there in a harmful, inhibiting, blinding, twisting fashion. History teaches us that one section of the population maintained itself as best and its members shared a vital public spirit, owing to the binding influence of their traditional irreversible principles. Countless men and women of weaker sections challenging this traditional superiority had to undergo variety of torture, bloodshed and sacrifice to bridge this chasm of man and man, caste and caste to maintain this distance of pathos. The .older form of cruelties has became more; refined in. the form of cultural colonization. No words are sufficient to. express my loathing of the despicable interest politics pursued by modern Indian elites which tries to give doles to the marginals plays the game of setting them against one another.
To try to understand these complexities of social differences among various groups it would be proper to incorporate certain social psychological concepts.
Cognitive aspects of prejudice
The psychological aspects of intergroup relations include the study of behaviour in intergroup situations, of behaviour related to these situations and of beliefs and attitudes concerning on individual's own group and various other groups which are relevant to him. It is hardly startling to say that the best way to predict whether a person will harbour hostile or aggressive attitudes towards a particular group and what will be the content of these attitudes is to find out how he understands the intergroup situation. They lose the adaptive capability and soberness as soon as they confront human groups other than their own and in these situations alone that most of their so-called traits of attitude, simplicity, modes of thinking are no more than powerless and pale projections of instinctive or unconscious drives.
According to Klineberg (1968) the English term prejudice and its equivalent in many other European languages refer primarily to a prejudgement or a preconcept reached before the relevant information has been collected or examined and therefore leased on inadequate or even imaginary evidence.
The etiology of intergroup relations can't be understood without having the idea of their cognitive aspects and it also requires understanding of motivational and instinctive aspect of behaviour. We all live in a social environment that is in a state of flux. Much of what impact's us is related to the activities of groups to which we do or do not belong and changing equation of relations between these groups requires our understanding of what happens and constant causal attributions about the why and how of the changing conditions of our life. These attributions are mainly based on three processes of categorization assimilation and search for coherence.
Categorisation
In each relevant situation we try to achieve as much stereotyped simplification as we can without doing unnecessary violence to the facts. There is ample amount of evidence that even when facts do turn against us, we still find ways to preseive the general content of our categories. First order of categorisation can be done on mere physical characteristics. Second order categorisation can be done with support of cultural experience and tradition discussions such as all Ambedkar College
There are two inferences that results from this kind of situation. One is that in many social situations which present notorious ambiguities of interpretation, it is easier to find supporting evidence from assumed class characteristics of an individual than to find contradictory evidence.
Secondly when we are confronted with the need to interpret the behaviour enmasse of the members of a particular group, there is bound to be very little clear negative feedback following the ascription of this behaviour to the assumed class characteristics.
The third order of categorisation represents to two consequences of the tendency to simplify hi order to cope. If a man is prejudiced, he has an emotional investment in preserving the differentiation between his own group and that of others. Preservation of these judgements is self-rewarding and this is particularly so when prejudiced judgments are made in a social context strongly supportive of hostile attitudes towards a particular group, we are also confronted with spiral effect in which existence of prejudice manifests itself in form of rewarding the hostile judgement's and thereby removing the possibility of cross-checking reality for these judgement's giving rise to creation of social myths. Same is the true for creation of powerful social myths in the organizations we work with.
Assimilation
Assimilation of social information and transmission of' social identity and image to the individual member's of society is guided by factor of autonomy of cognitive functioning in attitudes towards other groups through preferences and balance that occurs early in life.
Search for coherence
An individual should try to understand the causal attributions to adjust himself to the process of social change. An individual can he a member of so many social groups at the same time and important among them are intragroup and intergroup affiliations. The effects of social change of intrgroup or intergroup type can either increase the intensity of affiliation with the group or it may decrease. But in both cases causal attribution is necessary and the determinants of social change may be attributed either to actions of individuals or actions of his own or other groups. It is well assumed psychological phenomena that unless situational explanations are available actions of others are explained in terms of permanent characteristics causal attributions to group characteristics are often made on non-psychological characteristics of a group such as historical superiority in terms of caste, creed, economic wealth, skin colour and so on.
The questions of untouchability of the depressed classes was one of the major issues highlighted by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar in which they were being treated as aliens despite the fact that in order to qualify as a common group or community there should be broader similarities hi aims, beliefs/attitudes, customs and rituals.
This differeritial categorisation of the depressed classes was riot only limited to community or group status of untouchabilities and Hindus but it was also there in terms of political and civil rights of citizen's having far-reaching consequences on the growth of personality.
How prejudice and stereotype enlarged the differences between depressed classes and Hindu's can be understood with the help of Dr. Ambedkar's remark's at his initial level intervention in first Round Table Conference in 1930's "we feel that no body can remove our grievances as well as we can and we can't remove them unless we get political power in our own hands. No share of political power can evidently came to us so long as the British government remained as it is only in Swaraj Constitution that we stand any chance of getting power Into our own hands, without which we cannot bring salvation to our people.
Depressed by the government, suppressed by the Hindu and disregarded by the Muslim, we are left in a most intolerable position of utter helplessness to which I am sure there is no parallel to which I was bound to call attention (Baws 1982, Vol. 2: 506-7).
These ideas of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar clearly speaks high of his understanding of social psychological processes of prejudice, stereotype, differential categorisation, ingroup-outgroup differentiation, discrimination which became major topics- of social science research at a much later date.
The stereotype- that.existed in the past and that continue to exist in the present Indian social milieu was well articulated by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar by his becoming of chairman of Drafting Committee of constituent assembly on 23 December 1947 in which he had highlighted the provisions for safeguarding the interest of SC's in particular and other marginalized sections.
It would be appropriate to highlight the concept of stereotype "which is an over simplified mental image of (usually) some category of person, institution or event which is shared in essential features by large numbers of people. The categories may be broad (jews, white men, black men) or narrow. Stereotypes are commonly but not necessarily accompanied by prejudice i.e. by a favourable or unfavourable predisposition towards any member of the category in question (Oliver Stallybrass, Co-editor, The Fantana Dictionary of Modern Thought, 1977).
It is noteworthy to mention mat analysis of individual's behaviour he they cognitive or motivational is essential for understanding social behaviour. In case of social stereotypes, social context refers that stereotypes held by large number of people are derived through relations between social groups. Value differentials associated with social categorisation played a crucial role in creating stereotyped image of different caste categories of Indian social context. Value-loaded classifications continued to describe people of schedule caste's in particular and other backward classes to some extent leading to exaggerated erroneous images of these classes was manufactured owing to such psychological processes.
This strong value differential got reinforcements from social, religious, cultural and most irripdrtantly from the" government machinery as we'll.
Identification in ambiguous conditions of members of disliked social categories Bruner et al. (1956, Chapter 7) presented that individuals will commit errors of over inclusion or over-exclusion in their labelling of ambiguous items into one of two categories which are available for labelling. The first of these errors consists of including into a category a label on some specific ground which does not belong to it and excluding a label which does belong.
The enormity of differences in assigning negativity to a category for the protection of existing value system has continued in Indian social system and the functioning of social stereotypes percolated the similar attitude in the legislature of this country. This differential attitude and value resulted in prejudiced notions towards the people of Schedule Castes and mass-hatred extrapolated from individual displacement or re-direction of aggression to targe scale instances of social aggression or violence being reported all over this country and Khairlanji is a case in news in past few days.
The social psychological research can try to (i) diagnose the contents of caste prejudice and social stereotypes (ii) try to understand the large-scale stressful and planned aggressions against this socially marginalised groups of Scheduled Castes and class (iii) Try to understand the cognitive aspects of individual's of various social groups adopting discriminatory practices (iv) Understanding this artificial divide of humans based on social psychological processes of attribution . and try to, discover the forces behind mamtaining these negative group images with support of religious, cultural, social and political practices.
Reflections from these researches can be applied to find out the congruence perceived as common to all caste groups in terms of beliefs, attitude, and behaviour. Some faithful reflections are urgently required to restrict this divide which is being nurtured by raw materials of individuals and the social context in which we live today.
Legislations alone can't be a panacea to these problems that threaten Indian society at large and a strong positive correlation of behaviour can be expected in true psycho-social researches are carried out to diagnose the bluntness of our discriminatory collective and individual thought processes.
Future research in social psychology may ponder over questions of group functions of social causality justification and differentiation to the individual functions of cognitive structuring and value orientation. The efforts may also be made to identify group rigidity boundary turning to cohesive and flexible aspects of inter-group living.
As a student of psychology I clearly hold the view that enough of legislation and government action has failed to achieve to remove this discrimination in our society and more psychological based interventions programmes' at the community level be encouraged to achieve our goal of egalitarian society. Healthy realities of intergroup relation can be discovered with our sincere understanding of the subject. Inter-individuality of all as an Indian needs to be understood in an all encompassing manner. Hazy blueprint for future will not solve our problems and study of tough realities of our social context is the need of the time.
This will be a real tribute to the works of Baba Saheb Bhim Rao Ambedkar and my effort is merely the tip of Iceberg of this magnamatic crusader and the torch hearer of India
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