New inequalities in India are major advances over our old ones.

Many attractive policies adopted in the wake of Independence, including agrarian reform and positive discrimination, have had unintended consequences. Doubtless, this will happen in the future as well. We have not learnt very well from the unintended consequences of past social and economic policy. One can only hope that much more heed will be paid to our failures in the past while designing policies for the future.

We have had no dramatic successes or failures in the last 50 years, and I doubt that we will encounter either miracles or catastrophes. Democratic societies change, but they change slowly through the path of reform rather than revolution. It is unlikely that India will go through the kind of revolutions that swept Russia and China.

In 1947, the leaders of the nation had hoped to build a "casteless and classless society''. Caste is still with us, although we should not disregard the many small changes in society that have led to a decline in its rigour. The close association between caste and occupation has weakened. Inter-caste marriages, though still rather infrequent, do not attract the same penalties as before.

The rules of purity and pollution, which was the cement of the traditional Indian hierarchy, have been discredited to a large extent. This has been to the advantages of the lower castes and of women. A significant change is the slow but steady increase in the age at marriage for women in practically all classes and all communities. In all probability these trends will increase in momentum.

Whereas the ritual aspects of the caste system have been weakened, its political aspects have been strengthened. It is unlikely that political leaders will give up taking advantage of the loyalties of caste and community for mobilising support in elections. Ironically, caste identities have been strengthened by policies in the name of equity and social justice. The caste system will continue to be a drag on the development and modernisation in the years to come.

The decline of inequalities based on caste will not bring inequality as such to an end. New inequalities based on education, occupation and income are emerging within the middle class and within the working class as well as between them. These inequalities will act as some kind of antidote to the old hierarchies of caste and gender.

The new inequalities permit individual mobility, and are in that sense, a major advance over the old ones. Individual mobility will drastically increase in the future, but we must not forget that it includes both upward and downward mobility.

It is true that economic liberalisation creates new job opportunities, but it also creates insecurity among the well-off. In a democracy support for the system from those who gain tends to be weaker than opposition to it from those who lose, even where the gainers outnumber the losers by a wide margin. So it will be idle to hope that the political turbulence through which we are now passing will suddenly come to a grinding halt.