CDE
May 2012
HATE CRIMES IN INDIA: AN ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF VIOLENCE
AND ATROCITIES AGAINST SCHEDULED
CASTES AND SCHEDULED TRIBES
SMRITI SHARMA
Email: smriti@econdse.org
Department of Economics
Delhi School of Economics
Working Paper No. 213
Centre for Development Economics
Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics
Hate Crimes in India: An Economic
Analysis of Violence and Atrocities against
Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes
Smriti Sharma
∗
Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics
December, 2013
Abstract
Crimes against the historically marginalized Scheduled Castes and Scheduled
Tribes (SC/ST) by the upper castes in India represent an extreme form of prejudice
and discrimination. In this paper, we investigate the effect of changes in relative
material standards of living between the SC/STs and upper castes - as measured
by the ratio of consumption expenditures of SC/STs to that of upper castes -
on changes in the incidence of crimes against SC/STs. Based on the hierarchical
social structure implied by the caste system, we posit that an improvement in the
economic position of lower castes relative to the upper castes is positively correlated
with the incidence of crimes committed by the upper castes against the lower castes.
Using official district level crime data for the period 2001-10, we find a positive
association between crimes and expenditure of SC/ST vis-`a-vis the upper castes
such that a widening of the economic gap between groups is associated with a
decrease in caste-based crimes. Moreover, this effect is driven by changes in the
upper castes’ economic well-being rather than changes in the economic position of
the lower castes and tribes.
JEL classification: J15, K42
Keywords: Hate Crimes, Castes, India
∗
Email: smriti@econdse.org. Address for correspondence: Department of Economics, Delhi School
of Economics, University of Delhi, Delhi-110007. I am grateful to my advisors Ashwini Deshpande and
Parikshit Ghosh for their excellent guidance. Thanks are also due to Deepti Goel, Jeffrey Nugent, J.V.
Meenakshi, Abhiroop Mukhopadhyay, Jared Rubin, Saurabh Singhal, Willa Friedman and participants
at the PacDev 2013, IRES 2012 Workshop, ISNIE 2012, WEAI 2012, Delhi School of Economics, Indian
Statistical Institute and Jawaharlal Nehru University for their comments, and to officials at the National
Crimes Records Bureau for providing the data and clarifying my queries. All remaining errors are mine.
1 Introduction
In India, ex-untouchable castes and several tribal groups continue to be subjected to
discrimination, economic and social exclusion and a stigmatized identity (e.g. Thorat
1979; Deshpande 2011; Navsarjan Trust 2010). Additionally, similar to hate crimes in
other parts of the world, these groups have been victims of bias-motivated crimes and
atrocities at the hands of the upper castes. Atrocities against lower castes routinely take
the form of rape of women, abuse by police personnel, harassment of lower caste vil-
lage council heads, illegal land encroachments, forced evictions and so on (Human Rights
Watch, 1999). These instances are in blatant violation of the Indian constitution that
abolished untouchability and upholds the ideal of equality among all citizens. Subse-
quently, there have been other provisions such as the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled
Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, which specifically target such hate crimes.
In 2006, acknowledging the gravity of the problem, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh equated the practice of untouchability to that of apartheid.
1
In this paper, we analyze crimes against the historically disadvantaged Scheduled
Castes and Scheduled Tribes (ex-untouchables and marginalized tribes, SCs and STs
respectively) by the upper castes to understand the mechanisms that cause crimes based
on group identity to occur repeatedly. The objective of this study is to analyze whether
regional variations in the incidence of violence by the upper castes against the lower castes
are systematically linked to variations in relative group economic outcomes of lower castes
and tribes and upper castes. Based on the hierarchical social structure implied by the
caste system such that the upper castes have traditionally been economically better-off
than the lower castes with resulting social dominance, we posit that an improvement in
the economic position of lower castes relative to the upper castes is positively correlated
with the incidence of crimes committed by the upper castes against the lower castes.
Theoretically, an improvement in the relative economic status of SCs and STs as
compared to upper castes could lead to either a decrease or an increase in the incidence
of caste-based crimes. It could lead to a decrease in caste-based crimes on account of
various factors. One, an improvement in the relative economic position of lower castes
could result in an increased ability to defend themselves against physical harm by the
upper castes by investing in better security measures. Two, it could lend them greater
confidence to report crimes to the police which could lead to a reduction in future crimes.
2
1
Rahman, M. “Indian Leader Likens Caste System to Apartheid Regime”. The Guardian, Dec. 28,
2006.
2
Iyer et al. (2012) find that the political empowerment of women by way of higher mandated repre-
sentation at local government levels induces strong positive and significant effects on reporting of crimes
by women.
2
Three, an improvement in their bargaining power could lead to the upper castes having
greater respect for the low castes. On the other hand, the economic empowerment of
historically marginalized SCs and STs could increase the incidence of caste-based crimes
in the following ways: one, they could be perceived as more attractive targets for violence
especially where the motivation is to extract some form of economic surplus; two, they
may be perceived as a threat to the established social, economic and political position of
the upper castes. This could lead to greater incidence of crimes against lower castes by
the upper castes as a means of asserting their superiority and expressing their frustration
at the shift in status quo. Therefore, which of these effects dominate constitutes an
interesting empirical question.
While there is literature from India exploring the relationship between murders and
female-male ratios (Dreze and Khera, 2000), crime and inequality (Sharma, 2011), effect
of economic reforms on murders (Prasad, 2012), natural disasters and crime (Roy, 2010),
effect of female political representation on crimes against women (Iyer et al., 2012) and
the effect of rainfall shocks on domestic violence and dowry deaths (Sekhri and Storey-
gard, 2013), crimes against SCs and STs remain under-researched. This paper is among
the first to analyze data on crimes committed against SCs and STs. This is largely fa-
cilitated by the fact that starting 2001, official data on such crimes became available at
the level of the district. To the best of my knowledge, the only other existing piece of
research studying crimes against SC/ST groups is Bros and Couttenier (2012). Using
cross-sectional district-level crime data for 2001, they find crimes against SC/ST groups
to be higher in districts that have greater commonality of water sources. Common water
sources imply water sharing between castes which is considered ritually polluting for the
upper castes- more so in rural areas- and is often countered with acts of violence against
the lower castes.
3
Our study investigates a different hypothesis and exploits the panel
structure of the data through which fixed unobservable factors can be controlled.
Our paper can be considered closest in terms of motivation to Mitra and Ray (2013)
inasmuch as they too consider the relationship between group-wise economic progress and
inter-group conflict. Using Hindu-Muslim riots data for India, they find that an improve-
ment in Muslims’ well-being leads to an increase in Hindu-Muslim riots while Hindus’
well-being has no significant effect. However, there are two crucial differences between
the two studies. Firstly, they analyze communal riots, which represent violence involv-
ing a large group of people, while we study individually targeted caste-based violence.
3
The Economic and Political Weekly regularly features incident reports about caste-based violence.
A common theme in all such reports is that the source of aggression lies in the fact that lower castes
frequently access sites such as tea stalls, cinema halls, places of worship and other common spaces that
were earlier the domain of only the dominant castes. Please see Section 5 for some such references.
3
Secondly, and more importantly, their data do not allow separation of perpetrators and
victims by religion, except by inference, whereas in our data, the identification between
victims (SC/ST) and offenders (non-SC/ST) is clear from the start. Thus, our study
is a new contribution to the discussion of group-based violence in the Indian context.
However, there is an extensive social science literature from the United States that has
studied racial violence and this paper builds on that literature.
Using district level official data on crimes against SCs/STs and per capita expenditures
as a proxy for material standard of living, we find that the incidence of caste violence
is positively correlated with the ratio of expenditures of lower castes and tribes to that
of upper castes. Dividing the crimes into predominantly violent crimes and non-violent
crimes, we find that changes in relative material standards of living between groups lead to
changes in violent crimes aimed at extracting some form of economic surplus or property
from the victims. Moreover, this effect is driven by changes in the upper castes’ economic
well-being rather than changes in the economic position of the lower castes and tribes.
Although discrimination has largely been discussed in the context of labour markets
and access to public goods, this is among the first studies to quantitatively analyze
the phenomenon of crimes targeted at the SC/ST groups. Since crimes committed by
individuals belonging to non-scheduled groups against SC/ST individuals fall under the
broad category of hate crimes, this paper will be nested in that literature while also
drawing from the general crime literature.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides a background
of the existing inequalities on account of the caste system and a review of the hate
crimes literature. Section 3 describes the dataset, summary statistics and the empirical
framework. Section 4 presents the results and Section 5 discusses and concludes.
2 Related Literature
2.1 The Indian Caste System
The ‘caste system’ is an arrangement of the Hindu population into several thousand
groups called ‘jatis’ (castes). These groups have emerged from the ancient varna system
(also translated as caste) according to which society was divided into initially four, later
five, hereditary, endogamous, mutually exclusive and occupation-specific groups. At the
top of the varna system were the ‘Brahmins’ (priests and teachers) and the ‘Kshatriyas’
(warriors and royalty), followed by ‘Vaishyas’ (traders, merchants and moneylenders) and
finally the ‘Shudras’ (engaged in menial labour and low-end jobs). Over time, the Shudras
4
