How many Dalits equal one Hindu?

A train is going full speed down a railway line A kilometre or so down an elderly Hindu Brahmin is stuck on the tracks after falling down and snagging his dhoti on a rivet He lies there helpless and unable to move as the train barrels towards him As luck would have it you are standing not very far away next to a turnout where a second railway track branches away If you pulled the lever the oncoming train would be diverted to the second track and the Hindu Brahmin would be savedRight then you notice that four jobless migrant workers are sitting smoking cigarettes on the second track They would certainly be run over by the train if you were to divert itWhat would you do Sacrifice one life to save four others Or sacrifice four bums to save one Brahmin Whether you act or do nothing theres going to be deathThe questions original version famous as the trolley problem was asked by moral philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson who was exploring the ethics of sacrificing one person to save many Googles software engineers thought about the trolley problem a lot while designing their driverless car They had to figure out how to programme the car to make a choice between two inevitable unavoidable accidents both involving loss of life For instance if the car swerved to avoid an old lady crossing the road it would run over two young beggarsWhat should the driverless car do forced to use its algorithm to decide whose life has greater value a senior citizen whose days are nearly over but whose grandchildren adore her or two two pavementdwelling beggars who contribute nothing to society mdash but who could perhaps be reformed into productive citizensIf you had been driving that car and had not been Salman Khan what would you have doneAs I grow older it seems to me that one of our leading hypocrisies is claiming to believe that all humans are created equal Youre shaking your head but perhaps youre protesting too much Take that Jharkhand housemaid who sweeps your floor and does your dishes This evening could she be your guest for dinner sitting at the same table with your family and being served by you Even she might recoil at the thought It has been deeply ingrained into her that she is less than you But if horrors that were actually true then how many housemaids do you think would equal one memsahibWould a Bengali consider a Jat security guard as equal to a revered Bengali poet How many Bihari construction workers would an Iyer consider the equivalent of a single godmoulded Tamizhan If your plane would go down unless a single passenger were jettisoned how would you decide whose life mattered leastThese sound like silly questions but human history is full of these calculations done secretly in the shadowsAround 1808 American lawmakers concluded after days of debate that one black would be counted as threefifths of a white The higher a states population the more representatives it was allowed to have in the House of Representatives White slave owners wanted their slaves to be counted so that they could show a larger population mdash but how could a nonvoting lowly black slave be counted as a complete human being equal to his owner The threefifths compromise said that five slaves equalled three slaveownersThe COVID19 pandemic has brought front and centre the question of whose lives are not worth saving when hospitals struggle with limited capacity in beds and ICUs but demand is surging exponentially A certain number will not get their beds or ventilators and go home to die gasping But who should be turned awayThe young thought more likely to surviveThe elderly whom our culture says should be respectedThose without underlying conditionsShould Hindus get automatic preference over MuslimsIs an Ambani worth saving more than his sweeperThe most egregious example of overvaluing some lives over others came from Bill Clintons government during the genocide in Rwanda America had looked the other way throughout choosing to distract the world with airfilled discussions about how many deaths exactly constituted a genocide But finally with 2000 Rwandan refugees dying daily from hunger and cholera 4000 US troops were dispatched mdash only for humanitarian purposes it was quickly clarified not for peacekeeping or confronting killersRomeo Dallaire the valiant Canadian major general who commanded UN peacekeepers received a call from an unknown American official in Washington At the Pentagon Dallaire was told they had finished their ethnographic calculations and reached an accurate estimate of the value of American lifeAn individual American soldier the official said is worth about 85000 Rwandan dead Make sure not even one of our boysHere viewed from there C Y Gopinath in Bangkok throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai the city that raised him You can reach him at cygopigmailcomSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individuals and dont represent those of the paperKeep scrolling to read more 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