Markandey Katju argued in a serious of two articles in the Hindu on 8th and 9th January 2009. He argued the caste system is shading in structure through the mirror of modern development and technology and social change in behaviour mainly in purchasing power and the end result is its domination is no longer exist.
However, S. Gurumurthy says in the same news paper but in the opposite side not only in the print page but also in the entire argument.
See he says “contemporary writers and modern minds like Gurcharan Das and Swaminathan Ankilesaria Aiyar in India did not miss that out what Fukuyama had. They perceive caste as a potential engine of growth and development. Swaminathan Aiyar saw it as the social capital of India. That Justice Katju seems to be unaware of the empirical evidence of caste as a development vehicle in economics is evident from his remark that “a scientific study’ on caste ’is yet to be done.”
Further he adds that “Caste is a very strong bond. While individuals are related by families, castes link the families. Castes transcended the local limits and networked the people across. This has prevented the disturbance that industrialism caused to neighbourhood societies in the West, resulting in unbridled individualism and acute atomisation. In independent India, a contradiction has developed between the individualism-centric Constitution and caste collectives. Caste-based politics has actually helped to harmonise this contradiction between the formal Constitution and the non-formal social architecture. In a sense, caste-based politics mediates between traditional society and the modern state in India. Yet it can still be argued that the caste element in politics is not desirable. But caste in economics is a positive drive of development…”
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