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Development and the Other: On the Bearing of Egalitarian Sensibility on Development

Siby K George

Inequities in society can be countered, it is usually argued, through an agency-centric approach of democratic political participation. While not denying the pertinence of such an approach, this paper contends, from a development ethics perspective with reference to India, that an ethos of egalitarian sensibility across the whole spectrum of society is fundamental to equitable development. Through the lens of Levinas notion of the other but equal, and Rawls rejection of moral deserts in the case of human natural endowments as basic to social cooperation, an egalitarian sensibility is viewed as the moral-sensual assertion of the others egality and dignity. Transformative education, civil society activism and cultural dynamism, the paper argues, are central to acquiring an egalitarian sensibility.

iscontent with development practice was instrumental in the birth and modest growth of the interdisciplinary eld of study called development ethics in the second half of the 20th century. Early critics of modernisation such as Mahatma Gandhi paved the way for the consolidating efforts of Denis Goulet (1931-2006)1 and to a humanising rethinking of the development concept by Amartya Sen and others. Development ethics critiques development ideology, assumptions, processes and the results or benets, and attempts to suggest more ethical alternatives. Its aim is to assist the unfolding of a less dilemmatic development because even intended change for developments sake produces unintended consequences (Goulet 1978: 108). This paper engages with the development experiences of India from a development ethics perspective, and reassesses how i nherited inequalities and inequities thrown up by development processes can be dealt with. It is argued that together with assertive political participation, the fostering of an egalitarian s ensibility is fundamental to countering the problem of inequities in society.

Development and Distress

A remarkable feature of the 20th century development debate is the morally loaded agreement that its authentic end is human development, rather than any essentially economistic goal. A host of issues with moral import sustainability, concern for the environment, peace, human security, freedom(s), and equity entered the development discourse in an essential sense. However, the goals of freedom and equity can often produce mutually conicting results. This is not an altogether surprising consequence since freedom is the most uncompromising value for modern democratic societies. We want to argue that the uncritical extolling of freedom churns out undesirable consequences like glaring inequities in society and that any serious moral e ngagement with development involves some noble and free r estraint on freedom itself. This is the concern Charles Taylor raises when he laments that the democratic ethos has both attened and narrowed our lives. The recognition that all individuals are equal has the spin-off that they are therefore free to be what they want to be, concentrate on their own lives and be less concerned with others or society (Taylor 2003: 4). If we rethink morality from the perspective of human sociality, as we shall do further down this paper, equality should yield fraternity and limit freedoms impetuosity. The same democratic ethos which grants the individual freedom to design her or his life and goals, even more primarily a ssumes the egality of all. This egality is one of the grounds for

The comments of an anonymous referee on an earlier version of this paper are gratefully acknowledged. Siby K George (kgsiby@iitb.ac.in) is at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.
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freedom it is because they are equal that they are free to pursue their own lives. Development, understood as freedom in Sens well-known formulation, assumes such egalitarianism in a f oundational sense. That is, development as freedom is a goal for e veryone and is a promise towards alleviating pain through the balancing of outcomes in favour of all rather than some. S imilarly, Goulet observes that the concerns of development are those of existence itself: to provide all men with the opportunity to live full human lives (1978: x; italics added). What is more, development policy and practice are keenly aware of such e galitarianism. Every report, plan and proposal is compelled to assert develop ment for all as its objective. Still, the practices and outcomes of development do not seem to have equity as a central concern. Rather, development practice comes across as a killer of ideas d ifferent from economic orthodoxy. This amounts to handing over human agency to market forces, and bereft of agency, h umans stand and wait at the banquet hall of development for crumbs that fall off the table. Increasing inequity, the morally and sensually abhorrent coexistence of abundance and wretched scarcity, is the avoidable fallout of what goes on in the name of development. Thus, the most distressing aspect of contemporary prosperity is the inhuman tolerance of acute indigence alongside. It is believed that the type of wealth humanity is now in possession of can wipe out destitution from every corner of the planet (UNDP 2005: 1).2

Gainers and Losers

The case of India is glaring when it comes to the parallel existence of excessive wealth and extreme want. This situation is not uniquely Indian and there is no denying that change is on the horizon. Yet, two faces of this situation are ethically signicant. First, there is the inequity of the gains of a small section of the population from what is happening in the name of national d evelopment. Second, there is the inequity of irreparable loss and pain suffered by voiceless minorities in the name of development of the nation. Both these are issues concerning justice. As for the rst, despite immense international attention on, and national hype over, Indias progressive strides (see Pana gariya 2008), great want and great wealth have been bedfellows here for long. Shantaram (2003), a novel based on the author Gregory David Roberts experiences with the Mumbai underworld, opens with its narrators disbelief on getting out of M umbai airport into the immensity of the slum societies.
As the kilometres wound past, as the hundreds of people in those slums became thousands, and tens of thousands, my spirit writhed. I felt deled by my own health and the money in my pockets. If you feel it at all, its a lacerating guilt, that rst confrontation with the wretched of the earth...(Roberts 2003: 7).

Of course, gradually, as their sheer ubiquity wore down my foreigners pieties, the narrators fury at the system that allows such suffering recedes, and he gets used to what he sees. To the native eye, the sight is all too banal and bereft of any sense of i ncredulity. Other than such evidence shown by the undeceiving eye, there are also dismal social indices.3 The point is not really that nothing ever is happening in favour of the poor and the

m arginalised, but that development could happen differently and be fairer to its own egalitarian ethos. Sen observes, When there are gains from cooperation, there can be many possible arrangements...the central issue in general is not whether a particular arrangement is better for everyone than no cooperation at all would be, but whether that is a fair d ivision of the benets (2002). The view that the poor are indolent and growth targets should not wait for them is appalling when one considers what Goulet diagnoses as the vulnerability of the poor in the face of development processes (1978: 44). Overemphasising growth as a target seriously jeopardises the ends that growth is meant to achieve (Nussbaum 2006: 32). If unidimensional growth increases the vulnerability of the poor, it is a moral imperative to look for other arrangements, more equitable o ptions, even if they compromise growth targets in some way. Second, locating the majority, the poor and the powerless, at the receiving end of the development process is not a question of injustice done to the majority, but a question of injustice itself. Whether done to a majority or minority, injustice does not have another name. There are those who make sacrices and bear the cost of development and others who reap the rewards (see Gasper 2005: 84-113). Sacricing the weak for the sake of the strong is a disgusting form of muscle exing and is possible only when the social ethos is grossly inegalitarian. Noting that history has been a burial ground of the pains of the weak, Peter Berger insists that social policy should seek to avoid the iniction of pain, and when this is not possible, there is the imperative of justication in terms of moral rather than technical necessity (1977: 165). Perhaps the most prominent resistance in India to sacricing the voiceless at the altar of the common good has been the movement against the Sardar Sarovar project. The question of ethnic otherness is striking in this case since the overwhelming m ajority of the displaced are adivasis and dalits. As Arundhati Roy remarks, Someone else pays the bills. People from another country. Another world. Indias poorest people are subsidising the lifestyles of her richest (2002: 62). When we are persuaded by the greater common good or national interest in such cases, Roy insists, we are not being any different from the colonisers and oppressors of the past; we only believe what it benets us to believe (2002: 65). Drze and Sen see the Narmada movement as a victory of the power and vigour of organised popular resistance against the might of the nation and its supposed interest, and call it the most politically active and best organised in I ndia, which is a source of much inspiration elsewhere in the world (2005: 358). So, justice that reaches out to every section of society should be the starting point of social a rrangements and the outing of this principle is to be resisted through all morally permissible means and force.

Salvaging Agency
The blame game that goes on around the phenomenon of disenchantment with the inequities of development is not altogether without its share of problems. Inequitable development is seldom something somebody does to someone; there are layers and
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l ayers of processes, consciousnesses and cultural attitudes that lie low beneath what appears as the nal outcome. Much of it is the result of a forsaking of agency, of merely standing and staring listlessly, of a utilitarian fancy for gigantic results that will somehow come to be and make everybody happy thereafter. Hence, blame should centre more on the guilt of omission enough is not being done to make the situation work for everyone. A forsaking of agency anaesthetises the spontaneous human sense of shock at the dehumanised condition of another, and the being that was always concerned learns to look away disinterestedly. Apathy dictates the disposition of social numbness things cannot be d ifferent and whatever happens, happens. But development ethics cannot be unconcerned with inequity in its myriad forms. We can see two sets of responses to inequities in society transforming social structures through democratic action, and bringing about a gradual transformation of sensibilities. Of these, certainly, the rst response is widely discussed. Nussbaum pertinently suggests that politics should rst decide what it wants to pursue for each citizen in her or his h umanity rather than rst decide on economic change. In social reection, questions of justice take precedence and should constrain economic choices (2006: 33). Not ones to surrender h uman agency, Drze and Sen observe, Achieving greater e quity in Indian s ociety depends crucially on political action and the practice of democracy (2005: 357). Democracy being essentially participative and egalitarian, the thought that d evelopment is not possible the fair way, besides its inherent inhumanity, is undemocratic at its core. Hence, the obvious thrust of the rst response to inequity demand equity through democratic institutions and practices. This response also aims at reclaiming fraternity, which is usurped by negative freedom and formal equality, as one of the foundations of democracy (Rawls 2005: 105-07).

Before Agency
All glaring inequities are not products of liberalisation-induced afuence. There is the baggage of inherited inequality and the consequent lack of a social ethos of egality. Ethos is the very h uman dwelling (Derrida 2001a: 16-17; Heidegger 1993: 258). If the ethics of egality is not breathed within the ethos, before agency is reclaimed and democratically worked out, the hope that agency will bear fruit is bleak. More institutional change, more political action and more deliberative democracy are solutions, but interiorising change and reform is slow and inadequate because there is still the deep divide that separates those who feel entitled to self-worth and those others who feel deprived of dignity. Even if income and other tangible inequalities are wiped out as if by a magic wand, there would still remain the inegality that hides within the sensual apprehension of the other person as unequal to the self and morally less deserving of the benets of the social system. This is certainly more than and prior to the actual inegality in society of having less or more, of staking claims to resources and opportunities, of feeling powerless and inadequate, of being favoured or discriminated against. It comes before distribution, law and governance. Sensual apprehension of inegality of the other being not the selfs equal in an
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e ssentially moral sense colours thought and reason, and invests i njustice with morally deceiving articulacy. So the plight of the underclass or the indignity of the outcaste does not shock the eye that sees; the wailing of the poor does not strike the ear that hears, for there are good reasons for this state of affairs and reasonable justications for its continuance. The moral impulse is smothered as soon as it is born at the site of sociality. A pre-cognitive apprehension of socialitys asymmetry in a profoundly un-ethical manner insulates the conscience from the very genesis of the ethical. From this is born the un-ethics that the other person is less deserving than the self and its social identity. Needless to say, before laws operate, resources are allocated, and people in a polity are governed, justications for inequality rush up on stage and defend their ground. The peculiar sight, which is thus acquired, limits and disgures law and the scared precepts of democracy. There are laws and reasonably sound ones, but they fail because they are apprehended, interpreted and implemented from the stance of the banality of u nethics. The rst fact of sociality is the summoning of the self by the other to take a moral audit of otherness a silent command that grounds ethics in its bare illogical extremity. Ethics is like the ocean waves that relentlessly beat the rocky shore of stubborn, unrelenting sensual inegality. You can punish and discipline reason, but sensibilities are more obstinate. Democracies should also launch the more difcult war on sensibilities. The social failing of good and humane laws is a humdrum fact. Nussbaum, in her study of womens development with reference to India, writes that although Indias Constitution is a very w oman-friendly document, at every step women face obstacles to fully equal citizenship (2006: 24-30). There is a law prohibiting inhuman practices like untouchability and, unlike the US constitution, a positive law favouring preferential treatment of the disadvantaged is written into the Constitution one of the rst such cases in the world (Drze and Sen 2005: 357). The vision of the Constitution is clear and noble a free people, unencumbered by what birth imposed on them, marching ahead and taking advantage of wholesome and reasonable opportunities to achieve their aims in life. But the achievement of equality has been a cumbersome, slow and disparate process. The rst obstruction is the crippling lack of an egalitarian sensibility. Government schemes to help the poor fail; they are taken advantage of by the already better off. There is acrimonious ill-will and social disquiet about preferential treatment, and caste politics further muddles and v itiates the tenuous social fabric. When the beneciaries of preferential treatment programmes do not speak up in their own defence, the usual assumption is their guilt and shame their lack of conviction of its morality. But it is a awed interpretation because lack of boldness is an expression of vulnerability experienced by those who depend on the largesse of those who matter and have voice. When those preferentially treated are continuously reminded of what they receive out of the bounty of the rst citizens, they lose their speech and with it the primal war on sensibilities the grossly inegalitarian commonsense. When the underclass is the theme of art, most recently in the movie Slumdog Millionaire, there is the disbelief and exasperation of a pleasant dream spoiled by an unwelcome

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wake-up call. Cries are heard of conspiracy and spiteful publicity. Reality bites. Reality is different. The moral assertion of otherness demands a calling into question of the concept my freedom. Because individual f reedom founds democracy, a more equitable development is its acid test as an idea, the ever-elusive political compulsion. My freedom is limited in the very sensual assertion of the other as an equal.

Other but Equal

Sensing another person as unequal and thus othering her or him to the extent of morally disallowing her or his dignity and the moral deserts of benets is a product of not recognising the moral potential of interpersonal relations, which are rst of all asymmetrical. This insight comes most powerfully in the writings of Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995). Sensing the other as i nherently unequal to the self arises from a sense of moral primacy of the self, which Levinas relentlessly attacks. He does not start from an equality thesis but inassimilable otherness or absolute alterity a metaphysical un-equality between the self and the other.4 For him, equality as such is a political notion, and politics is inherently violent (1991: 21). Ethics is born before politics in the selfs encountering of the other in her or his transcen dence and should inform politics and rationality. Violence and un-ethics arise from a process of saming reducing the other to the same, whether the other is an individual or a community. This process of saming is called totalising, which, in other words, is a claim of comprehension of what or who the other is an impossible claim for Levinas. Alterity, the others resistance to saming. grounds ethics as a non-totalising relation. Levinas reminds his readers that their encounter with objects of the world and people have a key difference. While objects of the world do not resist representational cognitive activity of the subject; her or his immediate eagerness to satiate the senses and enjoy their objects, the other resists both the subjects enjoyment and its representational enterprise, and slips away. Further, the other addresses the subject and summons her or him from the enjoyment of subjective freedom to the demands of innite r esponsibility. The other, in this encounter, is the face The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me (Levinas 1991: 50; italics in original) which in language and speech, and all that it entails, summons the self and makes its freedom accountable. That is where Levinas locates the origin of the ethical command. I may respond positively or negatively, but never neutrally, for I am summoned and called to r esponsibility. The ground of equality is the moral primacy of the other. The equality of all is borne by my inequality, the surplus of my duties over my rights. The forgetting of self moves justice (Levinas 1981: 159). Within the self, there is the movement of a desire for transcendence, which is never completely satiated but is questioned by the summons of the other. Transcendence is religion; religion is ethics. All nobility and goodness, whatever little that is there in a contingent world, is possible on this count. Ethics originates not from a divine command, a categorical imperative, a social contract or the measurement of happiness, but from the asymmetry of human sociality, which weighs the subject down

with a non-reciprocal, innite and never-to-be-complete responsibility for the other. The political ideal of equality is not the starting point of ethics, but its result. First of all, the relation between me and the other commences in the inequality of terms (Levinas 1991: 251; italics in original). The other is situated in a dimension of height and of abasement he has the face of the poor, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, and at the same time, of the master called to i nvest and justify my freedom (Levinas 1991: 251). A third party, who is outside this face-to-face relation, does not apprehend this positive inequality, sensing the other person as completely other to me but demanding of me my responsibility for her or him. Leivnas suggests that this ethical responsibility for the other is the condition for equality itself (1991: 64). It is on the welcoming of the face that equality is founded (1991: 214); so also fraternity and humanity. Ethics, then, is unconditional welcome and hospitality welcome offered to the stranger, the other (Levinas 1991: 27; Derrida 1999: 19-20, 2001a: 17). It is in the responsibility for the other that the human race is united, and not in any project of saming. Certainly, Levinas wants to underline the fact that all projects of saming, whether done in the name of race or caste, religion or language, responds to the other without responsibility. There is only one fraternity the fraternity of humanity as such, a fraternity that arises from face-to-face relation and not from any mark of resemblance. The epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity...The poor one, the stranger, presents himself as an equal (Levinas 1991: 213). Levinas relentlessly pursues this notion of fraternity and equality, and proclaims such an ethics as the core of religion over and beyond dogmas of faith. If morality must truly exclude violence, a profound link must join reason, language and morality. If religion is to coincide with spiritual life, it must be essentially ethical (1997: 7). The inhumanity of othering ends in murder. Levinas writings are spurred by the inconceivability of violence as they originate from intimate experiences of the Holocaust and its replications; the same hatred of the other man, the same anti-semitism (1981: v).

Morality, Not Similarity

In our construal of an egalitarian sensibility, these insights of Levinas are central. Egalitarian sensibility is the immediate sensual assertion of the other persons total otherness (I can never fathom her or his self in any holistic manner; she or he transcends my idea of her or him; I cannot totalise her or him), and her or his entitlement to equality amidst the plurality of b eings called human. An egalitarian sensibility is a pleasant, spontaneous, sensual awareness of the presence of the human as an equal of the self, though inassimilably different from it, b efore rational ordering dawns in thought-imposed frames. R esemblance is not the basis of this egality but morality, which has an element of immediacy because of the directness of the e xperience of otherness. Generalising, categorising and assimilating lead to inegality. But, if the other is inassimilable and totally other, how do we explain her or his equality with the self? Otherness is a formal structure on which equality is projected. If equality were to be
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among beings radically similar, it would have been effortlessly achievable, for it would then be merely identity. It is precisely here that the moral problem of a lack of egalitarian sensibility arises. Egality founded on resemblance and identity proceeds to othering and searching for inegality to justify the egality of the identical and the resembled. Hence the ethical fact is we are radically different but equal. Cultures and colours, tongues and tastes, and a host of discriminating categories separate us. However, before all articially imposed structures of difference, there lies a primal difference between us the others alterity, which neutralises all other arbitrary factors of separation. Since alterity demands responsibility, it is morally arbitrary to impose inegality on the other. An egalitarian sensibility is an awareness of the others egality as a human person within the whole human f raternity, in spite of her or his complete otherness to me. If a national consciousness is inegalitarian in a basic way, if sensual assertion of inegality in the social sphere is pervasive, there is then an avoidable hurdle to the moral evolution of a p eoples interpersonal consciousness. The moral question is not the uniqueness of it; rather, it is the overcoming of the situation. Such an ambitious goal is already asserted in Indias C onstitution in response to a particular context, culture and conscience. In the Constitution, we have set our eyes on the good by an act of social and political will. Other than this intrinsic point, instrumental reasoning in the context of development ethics is of equal i mportance. A pervasive pre-cognitive sensual assertion of i negality is a grave hurdle to development a hurdle to progress understood as an overcoming of unfreedoms. The equal one is wanted, and is nurtured. The equal one has development as right and e ntitlement. But the unequal is denied the entitlement, the right; the unequal is neither wanted nor is nurtured or recognised. Indifference is the name of the response towards the unequal, but in such indifference we are responding unethically, for ethics calls us to responsibility. The other who questions my freedom and summons me to respond to her or him in responsibility is unethically dispensed with. Treating the other person as u nequal is an infringement on the ethical in us because, as Levinas reiterates, our rst sensual contacts with the other gives birth to ethics and we never build a ground of sufcient reason in any morally imaginable way to accuse the other as unequal. It is not that treating someone as a subordinate or aide is indefensible. Inequality in such relationships is merely a functional c ategory and not moral. Inegality becomes a moral category when the grounds for indignity of the other are arbitrary and i nhuman alibis.

Moral Deserts and Native Gifts

The injustice of sensing the other as unequal is not a theme unique to originary ethics such as that of Levinas. Contractarian political thought has much to contribute in this regard. John Rawls (1921-2002) speaks of a common alibi for ignoring unjust social arrangements in section 17 of his well known work A Theory of Justice (1971). People are so different in their natural e ndowments and social circumstances that all human arrangements will necessarily reect this natural order; hence, this social
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fact is to be accepted gracefully rather than found fault with so argue those who want to ignore the inequities found in society. Rawls does not accept this position because, for him, natural o rder is neutral and it is the way we deal with it that is just or u njust. Further, a society should not resign itself to what nature has bestowed on it, the contingencies birth imposes on its individuals; social order can be transformed for the sake of humane goals through human action and control, and in a just and open society men agree to share one anothers fate (Rawls 2005: 102). Aristocratic and caste-based societies are unjust because they make these contingencies the ascriptive basis for belonging to more or less enclosed and privileged social classes. The basic structure of these societies incorporates the arbitrariness found in nature (Rawls 2005: 102). Rawls proposes that his two principles of the theory of justice (2005: 60-65) are an attempt to meet the a rbitrariness of fortune, which people contrive to make their rational foundation of inegality. It is true that an unbounded ethics such as that of Levinas d emands more than a limited contractarian political ethics such as that of Rawls, but the problem with unlimited ethics is that its demands are so pervasive and boundless that they become very unspecic for practice the very thing that ethics is called to be. However, both Levinas and Derrida never deny the necessity of laws and limits on the unbounded original ethical call to responsibility. They recognise that ethics is not primarily a theory but a practice.5 From a Levinasian perspective, forgetting natural e ndowments is denitely inclusive of the original interpersonal moment of the ethical. The other is different already as the face but equal on account of human fraternity. Rawls works out the phenomenological site of the other but equal in terms of a theory of social justice. He provides reasonable ethical justications so that sensing the equal other is not lost sight of in the routine power brokering of socio-political engagements. For Rawls, the natural order of society needs to be changed in terms of justice because no one, neither the better endowed nor the worse off, morally deserve their natural position. It is when we assign moral deserts to natural endowments that problems arise. So, the naturally gifted person has no claim of moral deserts on the cultivation of her or his gifts in any absolute sense. For natural gifts and fortunes per se, one cannot claim credit, and so ones claim of deserts should centre only on what one has creditably achieved, and even that is not an absolute claim since what one achieves is also in some way determined by what one has or is. This reasoning is foundational to Rawls theory of justice. It seems to be one of the xed points of our considered judgments that no one deserves his place in the distribution of native endowments, any more than one deserves ones initial starting place in society (Rawls 2005: 104). Perpetuating the notion of deserts about social origins is problematic because if one thinks she or he deserves her or his naturally endowed privileged p osition say, the accidental of being in a superior social group within a certain social stratication one tends to think the other person, who is in a naturally endowed underprivileged position, also deserves her or his fate. Such xtures of consciousness, when a pplied on an expansive scale as in a whole society, or even when applied to an individual case, can perpetuate incredible

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i nhumanity. Hence, the level playing eld no one deserves the accidentals inherited at birth.

Difference Principle
Rawls proposes that instead of eliminating these contingencies, they should be arranged to work for the benet of the least a dvantaged, which is the rationale behind his difference prin ciple. Instead of an absolutist notion of deserts, the advantaged have a claim of legitimate expectation from society to promote their special gifts, provided that they assume society to be a system of cooperation and seek the promotion of their talents only on terms that improve the situation of those who have lost out (2005: 101). Rawls also observes that modern democratic theory is obsessed with the principles of liberty and equality, and nearly forgets the third principle of fraternity. He claims that the difference principle can account for fraternity, civic friendship and s ocial solidarity. Fraternity in this interpretation means not wanting to have greater advantages unless this is to the benet of others who are less well off, as in a family, and disallowing a meritocratic society aiming merely at economic prosperity and political domination (2005: 106). Rawls envisages his three j ustice principles the liberty principle, opportunity principle and difference principle to stand respectively for the three traditional values of democracy liberty, equality and fraternity. An unqualied opportunity principle would mean that when individuals struggle for limited opportunities, the less fortunate are left behind, and so Rawls invokes the difference principle to the aid of justice. Hence, in a just social system the condent sense of their own worth should be sought for the least favoured and this limits the forms of hierarchy and the degrees of inequality that justice permits (2005: 107). We have characterised an egalitarian sensibility from two d ivergent philosophical stances, which, we believe, have a meeting point a humane recognition of the other and fostering her or his development. If development is indeed the overcoming of unfreedoms, cultivating what we have called an egalitarian sensibility is the prerequisite for letting authentic, ungrudging development take place. Structures are gradually being laid out for development to unfold such as the blooming of businesses, the making of roads, the passing of laws, the enabling of panchayats, and the like. But nally all structures and laws receive meaning when human agents act on them. Laws are dead things. Human engagement with them give them life and value. If, despite structures for equitable development, inequalities are abundant in s ociety, it is probably a sign that an egalitarian sensibility, which is the very precondition for empathy, the willingness to enter a nothers world and the sense of giving to the other, is wanting. If empathy, openness and gifts are not driven merely by show manship and calculative rationality, they have such a sensibility as their starting point.

Nameless Inequities
However, much a social system may endeavour to be just and fair in accordance with formal socio-political principles and institutions, there are unnameable aspects of the inegality of the other, which such formal structures cannot adequately address. But

they still are to be addressed since not addressing them amounts to the accumulation of inequities, although structures of development are open and available to all. Development is achieved in a social network and in many reciprocal acts of giving and taking. If an egalitarian sensibility is not experienced, there is the a bsence of exchange, and one sticks to spheres where one can make exchanges among equals. Social enclosures thus open up. Without an egalitarian ethos, the poor experience tremendous vulnerability and helplessness when they go to a bank or a govern ment ofce, when they are wrongly accused in the village, when they are at whatever work they get to do. Inegality not only takes away the opportunity and the facilitating of development, but also the targeted persons sense of self-worth and dignity. That is a dark world lonely and forlorn. Even if those who are thus made to feel forlorn were to organise and come together to stake their claim, they would still be a group of forlorns. Their war is against sensibility. There is so much feeling of repugnance in the forsaking of an egalitarian sensibility. When she or he produces repugnance in another, it is as though the world ends for her or him. The e f fect left by repugnance is very different from the effect of h atred. H atred can be fought; repugnance has to be borne. If you are hated, you can hate in return, but the victim of disgust turns i nward, accuses the self and disrobes it of worth. There is at least an imagined or real cause for hatred. For repugnance, there is only the presence or thought of the other that is its cause; it is unprovoked. In The God of Small Things (1997), Roy depicts Baby Kochammas feeling of repugnance on hearing of the fatal r omantic escapade of Ammu and her untouchable fianc, Ve lutha, the god of small things. She shuddered her schoolgirl shudder and said to Ammus mother, How could she stand the smell? Havent you noticed? They have a particular smell, these Paravans. On her part, Ammus mother also thought, His particular Paravan smell...She had deled generations of breeding (Roy 1997: 257-58; italics in original). Disgust, a loathing repulsion that is what repugnance is. But, if beings called human have inalienable dignity, while one human may for a variety of reasons invite h atred from another, it really is not conceivable how repugnance can be so invited. The r epugnance in one human for the other is circumscribed by the complete lack of an egalitarian sensibility not a tinge or shadow. To the repulsed other, the network of d evelopment is closed to a great extent. A primary and radically human structure for making equality real is spiritual. But spiritual only in the sense of a capacity for transcending the immediate and the given, the mundane and the unethical, for the sake of the realm of the ethical. Ethics is transcendence, and as transcendence, it goes beyond the mundane towards the noble and the good. This spiritual structure is primary because even if other structures make equitable development happen and limit expressions of inequality, they do not r emove the sensing of unequal beings. The documentary India Untouched: Stories of a People Apart (2007) vividly portrays how outlawed untouchability is still visibly manifest in some pockets of India and how its stubborn prejudices have survived over time.6 It is one thing to master the technique and craft of
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d evelopment and supercially exhibit a certain advance, it is another to interiorise change and new values.

Unlearning a Rationality
Can a sensibility be learnt? Are they not natural, and do they not come without effort? What is natural to sensibility is the inescapable response that the face demands, which founds ethics. That response is ethical if, in answer to the call of the other, the subject accepts responsibility in a non-totalising relation that recognises the equality and dignity of the other. The relinquishing of an egalitarian sensibility is not articial, but a disowning of the primal ethical sensibility by way of a cultivated sense of entitlement arising out of a notion of moral deserts, which, as we have shown, is untenable at its very human foundation. The project of cultivating an egalitarian sensibility is not a cultivating; it is a learning to forget and unlearning the perverted notion of entitlement. We shall argue that rather than the legislative way, the e ducational way is open and conducive to the achievement of this aim. Drze and Sen observe that while reduction of inequalities in income is a difcult challenge, reducing other forms of inequalities such as gender and caste discrimination, educational disadvantages, and the like, should not be a huge hurdle (2005: 357). There is genuine surprise about why India has done so poorly in basic education (Nussbaum 2003: 27). Our point here is that even if basic education were achieved, if education is to create an e nlightened consciousness and an egalitarian sensibility, it has to do much more than what it is now doing. A nation can take its destiny in its own hands and dene its possibilities for the future by facing its history and heritage truthfully. Paulo Freire observes that Brazils cultural history did not prepare it for the democratic ideals of political and social solidarity. So Brazil, according to Freire, should appeal to education as a cultural action by means of which the Brazilian people could learn, in place of the old passivity, new attitudes and habits of participation and intervention (2005: 34). This need to reap the transformative power of education is a lesson for India as well. It is by harnessing the transformative power of education that India can fully tackle, say, problems such as the question of missing girls an apparently cultural phenomenon (Save the Children 2008: 10). The third estate has occasionally lashed out at the institution of education calling it a prejudiced socio cultural m atrix and accused popular culture of not challenging the prevailing social ethic (The Times of India, 9 May 2008). Rightly, the education system and popular culture need not remain socially ineffective tools for development. As Nussbaum points out in her work on education,
Becoming an educated citizen means learning a lot of facts and m astering techniques of reasoning. But it means something more. It means learning how to be a human being capable of love and imagination. We may continue to produce narrow citizens who have difculty u nderstanding people different from themselves, whose imaginations rarely venture beyond their local setting...But we have the opportunity to do better, and now we are beginning to seize that opportunity. That is not political c orrectness; that is the cultivation of humanity ( 2003: 14).

formal channels. Education, the awakening of consciousness to its full potential and to an egalitarian sensibility, is achieved through societys formal and informal channels of learning, and there is no doubt that the whole of society needs to be galvanised to achieve this aim. Education in this country is very much under the control of the state, a state subject, whereas the same is not true of popular culture. The media goes by what sells. Multiple examples can be pointed out of the explicit cinematic portrayal of caste and gender prejudices. Sometimes this is for the sake of r ealism in art. Maybe we need more idealism in art for genera ting its transformative power. However, whether art is a transformative medium is a debatable question, for some would consider it solely an aesthetic medium and ercely protect and b argain for the freedom of artistic expression. But, such is not the case with education. It denitely is a transformative, empowering and enlightening medium, and should be tailored to that purpose. Education opens the human person to a larger horizon, to the other. How this can be achieved is a normative and policy question, which is outside the scope of this paper.7

Social Mission
To reap the transformative power of education through formal channels, their lessons themselves need to change, but con currently the words and demeanours, attitudes and assumptions of teachers also need to change. Elitist education lls the mind with information and techniques, and the hand with skills, but sadly alienates the student from humane sensibilities (Deresiewicz 2008). There is a profound ambiguity regarding the states role in education whether it wants to culturalise and politicise it, or whether it wants to humanise it. The state and its organs may short-sightedly compromise the latter but do so only at their own peril, for democracies are propped up by humanistic values. When it comes to the imbibing of an egalitarian sensibility, the teachings and culture of the family, immediate social group and other social institutions are of vital importance. The very language of the human abode the said and the unsaid, gestures and habits, customs and attitudes, the feel and the spirit exerts a power on the young mind that is unparalleled, and leaves an indelible mark on the human psyche. So much depends on simple limits of toleration a family sets on a childs random behaviours and attitudes like dealing with a family helper.

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How is cultivation of humanity through education possible? We are not restricting education here to what is achieved through
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Transformative education, an education for change, is a social mission and cannot be achieved like the learning of numerals. But formal institutions have an important part to play; the c aprice of informal institutions should be made up for in them to whatever extent possible. Otherwise, an uncultivated child placed in unfortunate surroundings would miss her or his right to an e nlightened mind. Educational institutions, from that perspective, have an important mediatory role and can authentically e xercise their transformative power. The non-formal channels of education media, mass education channels and adult education programmes, continuing education in general have an essential role in continuously sensitising the minds of people. In this r egard, the many victories, celebrated as well as silent, of non-governmental and voluntary organisations, of several local, u nsung, humble, collective efforts are praiseworthy. Formal channels need to reassess their learning resources continuously as is sometimes done for the sake of gender equity for opening their users minds to welcome the other as the selfs equal. The unlearning of inegality is to be located, above all, in society at large the civil society; the consciousness of the people as such; the social space that ever so nebulously resides between the state and the economy; in fact, the voice of the nations conscience. Here there is no beginning and end, and the self- transformative process is continuously on. Voices mix and merge, and hopefully, sensibilities of egality are continuously fostered in

a sometimes feeble, sometimes solid rhythm. The robustness of a polity is comprehensively determined by the virtuous circle of education feeding the civil society with power and voice, and the civil society, in turn, interrogating and nurturing education with its content. An egalitarian sensibility sustains itself within this relational whole, and ruptures within it, dent and disgure the sensibility. It is difcult to see how sensibilities of egality can be appropriately nurtured if the civil society does not appropriate this agenda and withdraws from creating an egalitarian pulse in society.

Conclusions
National hopes for inclusive growth and holistic development, human transformation, and catering for the ambitions of a people set apart can be seriously jeopardised with the breeding of inegality. In their efforts to salvage this sensibility, education and civil society activism have to be grounded in a dynamic understanding of culture. A static and xed worldview cannot take charge of a peoples destiny. Sen pleads for a non-sectarian and non-parochial school education so that smallness is not thrust upon the young, whose lives lie ahead of them (2006: 119). A certain leaving of the past behind is pertinent for forging ahead into the future. This is in no way suggesting that salvation lies in blind imitation of strange habits and unowned values. H owever, it should not be the sad case that a people cling on to what should change, and let go what they should cherish. It is a

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moral certainty that what the future has in store for a people may be best harvested through the cultivation of humanity the egalitarian sensibility. Development of a nation owes much to the ideas its people have about each other. As image-weaving beings, if people hold ennobling egalitarian images of others in society, the ground for development is already set. An egalitarian sensibility opens up that difcult space of willingness to let others grow and be. A h ierarchically stratied society may indeed develop and progress in social patches and in terms of socially blind economistic goals, but may relentlessly increase inequalities within itself. In such societies, political processes and struggles may be looked at as the only door open to address the problem of inequality. This is so
Notes
1 For a useful overview of Goulets work, see Gasper (2008). For Goulets brief introduction to the s ubject matter of development ethics, see Goulet (1997). For an annotated bibliography of development ethics, see Crocker and Schwenge (2005: 31-38). For a more comprehensive bibliography, see Gasper (2005: 231-46). 2 HDR 2005 has an enlightening discussion on the signicance of achieving equity. See its Chapter 2: Inequality and Human Development (UNDP 2005: 49-72). 3 When the report of Save the Children, State of the Worlds Mothers 2008, was made public, Times of India called Indias healthcare record shameful, highlighting the rift between the countrys abysmal social indices and its world power aspirations riding only on claims of robust growth (9 May 2008). For a treatment of social inequalities, see Drze and Sen (2005), Chapter 10, The Practice of Democracy, pp 347-79. 4 Derrida questions this absolute, stable, positive, innite alterity of the other. He writes, As soon as one attempts to think Innity as a positive plenitude...the other becomes unthinkable, impossible, unutterable But it must not be possible either to think or state this call (Derrida 2001b: 142-43; for more on Derridas critique, see Derrida 2001b). 5 Levinas notes that his work is about that which stands behind practical morality...the extraordinary relation between a man and his neighbour... Indeed, if there were only two of us in the world, I and one other, there would be no problem. The other would be completely my responsibility. But in the real world there are many others. When others enter, each of them external to myself, problems arise...Legal justice is required. There is need for a state. But, he emphasises the need to investigate and decide whether a state and laws are required because man is a beast to his neighbour or because I am responsible for my fellow (2007: 247; see also 1981: 159-60). Similarly, D errida writes that without the conditional laws of a right to hospitality... The unconditional Law of hospitality would be in danger of remaining a p ious and irresponsible desire, without form and without potency, and of even being perverted at any moment (2001a: 22-23). 6 The lm captures on camera peoples perspectives on untouchability and caste prejudice, and actual practices like an untouchable person taking off his sandals to walk barefoot while crossing a high-caste village. In interviews with ordinary people and religious and community leaders, the camera captures some arrogant arguments in f avour of the practice. More importantly, it busts the myth that such prejudices are religion- s p eci c, for Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians and Sikhs are engulfed by these biases. The documentary was available on www.youtube. com in April 2009.

because cultivation of an egalitarian sensibility is not perceived as an achievable goal. How does this suspicion manifest? While there is a lot of visibility, clarity and sureness of purpose about political action to remove inequality, there is little that is done to address these i ssues at other forums that form individual convictions and have a more truly transformational potential. Discussing gender or caste discrimination in a school or college is considered a taboo, and such issues are branded too personal or too sensitive and set aside. But, as we have suggested, this is a defeatist approach and a mere convenient looking away from real issues. A programme of action is an idea before it becomes an agenda for a ction. If sensibilities win, then the action carries not only meaning but also attraction and acceptance.
from Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964) (New York: HarperCollins). Levinas, Emmanuel (1981): Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence (trans), Alphonso Lingis ( Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers). (1991): Totality and Innity: An Essay on Exteriority (trans), Alphonso Lingis Kluwer (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Academic Publishers). (1997): Difcult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (trans), Sen Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). (2007): Ideology and Idealism (trans), Sanford Ames and Arthur Lesley, pp 235-48 in The Levinas Reader, (ed.) Sen Hand (Maldon: Blackwell P ublishing). Nussbaum, Martha C (2003): Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defence of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press). (2006): Women and Human Development: The C apabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Panagariya, Arvind (2008): India: The Emerging Giant (New York: Oxford University Press). Rawls, John (2005): A Theory of Justice: Original E dition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). Roberts, Gregory David (2003): Shantaram (London: Abacus). Roy, Arundhati (1997): The God of Small Things (New Delhi: IndiaInk). (2002): The Greater Common Good in The Algebra of Innite Justice (New Delhi: P enguin Books), pp 43-142. Save the Children (2008): State of the Worlds Mothers 2008: Closing the Survival Gap for Children u nder 5, Save the Children, London, http://www.savethe children.org/campaigns/state-of-the-worlds-mothers -report/2008/, accessed on 21 April 2009. Sen, Amartya (2002): How to Judge Globalism, The American Prospect, 13 (1), http://www.prospect. org/cs/ articles;jsessionid=aANKBjqs1QsfqaP73 N?article= how_to_ judge_globalism, accessed on 21 April 2009. (2006): Identity and Violence: The Illusion of D e stiny (London: Penguin Books/Allen Lane). (2008): Development as Freedom (New Delhi: O x ford University Press). Taylor, Charles (2003): The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press). Times of India (2008): Editorial: Child, Interrupted, 9 May, http://timesondia.indiatimes.com/ article show/3023090.cms, Accessed on 21 April 2009. UNDP (2005): Human Development Report 2005 I nternational Cooperation at a Crossroads: Aid, Trade and Security in an Unequal World, UNDP, New York, http://hdr.undp.org/en/ reports/ global/hdr2005/, accessed on 21 April 2009.

7 An anonymous reviewer of this paper had rightly pointed out that it falls short of suggesting practically how an egalitarian sensibility can be cultiva ted. It does not engage with the question of education deeply enough, the reviewer remarked. While this is true, we want to leave that plainly normative question to those who can do justice there. Still, thanks to the reviewers suggestion, we shall e ngage a bit more on a comprehensive view of education, instead of seeing it merely as formal training. We are most grateful to the r eviewer.

References
Berger, Peter (1977): Pyramids of Sacrice (London: Penguin Books). Crocker, David and Stephen Schwenge (2005): The Relevance of Development Ethics for USAID, Management Systems International, Washington DC, http://pdf.dec.org/pdf_docs/PNADD048.pdf, a ccessed on 21 April 2009. Deresiewicz, William (2008): The Disadvantages of an Elite Education, The American Scholar.org, Summer, http://www.theamericanscholar.org/ the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/, accessed on 21 April 2009. Derrida, Jacques (1999): Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, (trans) Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: University Press Stanford). (2001a): On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, (trans) Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (New York: Routledge). (2001b): Violence and Metaphysics in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (trans), Alan Bass (New York: Routledge). Drze, Jean and Amartya Sen (2005): India: Development and Participation (New Delhi: Oxford U niversity Press). Freire, Paulo (2005): Education for Critical Consciousness (trans), Myra Bergman Ramos, Continuum, London. Gasper, Des (2005): The Ethics of Development: From Economism to Human Development (New Delhi: Vistaar Publications). (2008): Denis Goulet and the Project of Development Ethics: Choices in Methodology, Focus and Organisation, Working Paper, No 456, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, http://biblio.iss. nl/opac/uploads/wp/wp456.pdf, accessed on 21 April 2009. Goulet, Denis (1978): The Cruel Choice: A New Concept in the Theory of Development, Atheneum, New York. (1997): Development Ethics: A New Discipline, International Journal of Social Economics, 24(11): pp 1160-71. Heidegger, Martin (1993): Letter on Humanism (trans), Frank A Capuzzi and J Glenn Gray, pp 217-65 in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings

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