The fifth pillar of caste, according to Isabel Wilkerson, author of “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents” is the division of labour based on one’s place in the hierarchy. We are very well aware of the reality in India, where we still find a majority of the lower caste people employed in low-skill, labour intensive jobs, and the situation is no different in America, where the range of occupations for the blacks still remains very narrow. But where she brings new insight into the process of systematic and institutional prejudice is in the next pillar, dehumanisation and stigmatisation of the people belonging to the out-groups ~ Dalits, Blacks, Jews.

Underlying this is the belief that an ordinary human ~ even a soldier obeying his orders ~ cannot inflict unspeakable atro cities on another being he considers a human like him. But then Nazis, Whites and dominant castes have inflicted such atrocities upon millions of humans without a shred of guilt. For that they had to dehumanise them first, not as individuals but as a group ~ to reduce each to a nameless, identity-less, undifferentiated member of a group carrying a permanent, indelible stigma. Once the group is dehumanised and thus quarantined from all others, every individual in it is automatically dehumanised. Thus, in the Nazi concentration camps, individuals were no longer individuals, but a number, all of them similarly dressed, heads shaved, their every distinguishing feature like a moustache ruthlessly removed. Stripped of their clothing and all accoutrements of their former lives, they were no longer humans one needed to engage with, no different from a herd of animals on which any atrocity can be inflicted without remorse. In America, enslaved Africans were given new names by their masters and made to forget their own, thus stripping them of their past identities.

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In India, untouchables were given surnames that would remind themselves of their lowly status. Once dehumanised thus, they can be subjected to any cruelty. So, horrific medical experiments can be conducted on them, and public lynching and violence against them often served the purpose of amusement and entertainment of the dominant castes. It was also a way also to desensitise the less inclined ones among the dominant castes against such cruelty so that it seemed mundane and harmless for everybody. Cruelty can easily be used as a means of control, which is what constituted the seventh pillar of castes, according to Ms. Wilkerson.

In America, the whip was the most common instrument of control for breaking the caste rules that demanded that the lowest caste was to remain low in every way at all times, that “submission is required of the Slave, not to the will of the Master only, but to the will of all other White Persons”, and that “They must obey at all times, and under all circumstances, cheerfully and with alacrity.” Slavery has long been over, but the rules and the consequences for breaking them remain little changed. John Dollard, a white anthropologist from Yale, went south to the Mississippi Delta in 1935 for researching into the Jim Crow caste system there and was rather surprised to notice how subservient and docile the black people were, stepping aside for him, taking their hats off, and calling him “sir” even if they were much older. When he told his driver that Negroes there were so polite, the reply he got was “They have to be.” In another incident described by her, in the early 1970s, in a small town in East Texas, a black family had moved in and their daughter was admitted to a public school that had just opened its door to black students. The principal was vexed with the girl and was questioning her.

At the end he said, “I knew you weren’t from around here. Know how I know? You looked me in the eye when I was talking. Coloured folks from around here know better than to do that.” Ms Wilkerson described many instances of personal humiliation she had to suffer in public just because she was black. This inherent superiority of the upper castes against the inherent inferiority of the lower ones is the eighth pillar of caste. The low caste people are constantly reminded of their position of inferiority and servility at every station ~ while travelling, at work, in restaurants, in seminars and conferences, by the attitudes of the dominant caste members. In a town in Alabama, in 1961, a white man won the Mayoral race just by paying a black man to shake the hand of his opponent, another white, in public as a photographer laid in wait, and having the handshake photo splashed in the newspapers. Caste is a structure that reinforces its fixed boundaries in incidents like this to reinforce that subordination is the place where the Negro belongs. Just like in 21st century India, in the USA also, “Caste is a living, breathing entity”.

Caste and race are so interwoven in America that it is hard to separate the two. When a country has developed and perfected such an elaborate system of segregation and discrimination against a large group of its own people, it is only natural that another regime seeking such marginalisation against another group would draw lessons from it. In the early days of the Third Reich, in June 1934, Franz Gürtner, the Reich minister of justice was chairing a meeting of 17 legal luminaries to finalise a legal framework to turn their ideology into law for an Aryan nation, something that would eventually turn out as the Nuremberg Laws. The first item on their agenda was what they could learn from the United States in this regard. They discussed threadbare the American purity laws governing intermarriage and immigration and “how to institutionalize racism in the Third Reich,” for which, as the Yale historian James Whitman wrote, “they began by asking how the Americans did it.”

They copied the American system of segregating children in the schools and adults elsewhere, “in waiting rooms, train cars, sleeping cars, street cars, buses, steamboats and even in prisons and jails.” Thus came “The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour” announced by Hitler in September that year, banning intermarriages between Germans and Jews, and Germans working for the Jews. The laws would be expanded in ever-tightening restrictions against the Jews, stripping them of their citizenship and finally deporting them lawfully to their deaths in the Nazi concentration camps. As another historian wrote, “Ame rican laws were the main foreign precedents for such legislation.” The Nazi system also imbibed all the eight pillars of castes. Both India and USA have abolished the laws that defined their caste systems or untouchability and framed their constitutions that guarantee equality and justice to every citizen.

Both have taken positive steps to correct the historical wrongs through “affirmative action” in the USA and “reservations” in India. But in both the countries, as Ms, Wilkerson contends, “caste systems live on in hearts and habits, institutions and infrastructures. Both countries still live with the residue of codes that prevailed for far longer than they have not. In both countries and at the same time, the lowest castes toiled for their masters – African-Americans in the tobacco fields along the Chesapeake or in the cotton fields of Mississippi, Dalits plucking tea in Kerala and cotton in Nandurbar.” Constitutional and legal remedies have proved inadequate to address the existing discriminations, and political rights have proved ineffective to stop the brutalisation of Dalits by upper castes in India and of African-Americans by the white police in the USA. Governments in both the countries have not done, and are not doing, enough to correct the distortions, discriminations and humiliations that dominant castes heap on the subordinate castes through words, actions and attitudes on a daily basis.

It is a wonder of wonders that still a few somehow manage to escape the clutches of a system designed ruthlessly to keep its boundaries sacrosanct and unbreachable by the lower castes. “Caste is not a physical object like a wall of bricks or a line of barbed wire,” Dr Ambedkar had said. No one escapes from its clutches. It imprints into our subconscious the unambiguous message that some will always be more equal and more deserving than the others. That is a script handed over to us by history, like a computer program that “has been installed into the subconscious of every one of us. And, high or low, without interv – ention or reprogramming, we act out the script we were handed.” During the First World War, in 1918, American troops were sent to fight for the French who were badly in need of reinforcements. There the white soldiers refused to fight in the same trenches as black soldiers or to salute their black superiors.

The American military asked the French commanders not to develop camaraderie with them and not to “commend too highly the black American troops, particularly in the presence of (white) Americans.” If at all they have to be praised, it must be only “in moderate terms”. In hiring black teachers for segregated schools during the Jim Crow era in southern US states, the principle applied was to “take the less competent” of the Negro teachers who had applied. A hundred years have since passed, but the mind-set remains much the same, without even a small dent. If it was not, we would have a casteless society by now. Ms. Wilkerson says in the end that “A world without caste would set everyone free”, but it is not our fate to see that world anytime soon, not before I die.

(The writer is a commentator, author and academic. Opinions expressed are personal)