In his new book ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us: The Psychology of Indians’, Indian columnist Manu Joseph poses a question that sounds fictional but cuts deep.
He is curious to understand why the poor in India, after decades of humiliation and deprivation, do not rise against those who hoard privilege. His answer is not economic but psychological. Inequality, he argues, survives not through coercion or law but through habits of the mind. People learn to live with injustice by dressing it as aspiration or fate.
Joseph’s perspective is challenging because it shifts the debate from corrupt institutions to the silent complicity of everyday life. The poor endure because they are offered crumbs of hope. They are given just enough visibility and rhetoric of inclusion to sustain belief in a system that rarely delivers. The rich, meanwhile, are protected not only by their guards and gated colonies but also by the poor’s faith that the existing order, however unfair, is natural.
His focus differs from what economists describe as elite capture. It also differs from what in Africa is known as ‘necropolitics’ – the use of power to decide whose lives are protected and whose are expendable. The standard development view explains how powerful groups manipulate institutions to divert public goods, avoid taxes and preserve wealth. It is about policy design and access.
Joseph, on the contrary, is less interested in how the rich rig the system and more in how the poor come to accept it. He finds his answers in small rituals. Servants eat from separate utensils. Guards greet their employers with practised deference. Token welfare schemes generate gratitude instead of resentment. Indian society remains stable, he argues, because the poor are conditioned to see indignity as normal. The elites, in turn, have learned to disguise privilege as merit.
To me, there is also a deeper sociological layer beyond conditioning. Individuals carry insecurities about dignity, recognition and opportunity. Alone, these may remain private wounds. But when many feel similarly vulnerable, they seek collective belonging to soothe that fear. I have repeatedly argued, especially in my work, ‘Social Dimensions of Food Insecurity’, that insecurity breeds insecurities.
My view is that when individual insecurity interacts with a collective identity crisis – whether ethnic, sectarian, provincial or class-based – it gradually turns into a clash between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. Personal anxiety becomes shared grievance. The poor may not revolt as a class, but they contest inequality through collective identity.
This brings us back to Joseph’s question. If so many people carry this shared sense of grievance, why does society not erupt in revolt? The answer lies in the intersection between psychology and power. This is where his ‘moral psychology’ meets political economy. A person’s sense of humiliation merges into a group narrative of victimhood. That narrative legitimises antagonism toward others perceived, rightly or wrongly, as privileged. The result is a society where emotions of injustice are genuine but misdirected. Anger flows sideways instead of upward. The poor turn on one another while power remains intact.
Joseph’s thesis about India feels familiar across South Asia. Our countries are unequal yet continue to function because inequality is normalised. Patronage, fatalism and fragmentation play their parts. The poor do not rebel because they are psychologically tamed. Patronage ensures loyalty. Sectarian and ethnic divides fracture solidarity. The welfare state dispenses just enough relief to preserve order.
To me, this is not only found in India; fatalism across South Asia is one of the reasons the poor are silent about their situation. Many accept inequality as destiny rather than policy failure. The belief that ‘this is how the world works’ or ‘life is never meant to be fair’, replaces anger with endurance. A moral economy of deference, reinforced by clerics, media and family elders, sustains order while hiding the structure of exploitation. Power in our part of the world operates through personal favours, land allocations, signatures or small grants that create dependency rather than rights.
Joseph’s line that ‘the poor are not one people’ applies equally in Pakistan. In India, caste divides the dispossessed. In our case, sect and ethnicity do. The competition among poor constituencies (poor Mohajirs versus poor Sindhis, poor Baloch versus poor Punjabis, and poor Shias versus poor Sunnis, etc) ensures that resentment moves horizontally, not vertically.
A sense of exclusion from state resources turns into an identity-based grievance. Each group builds its own story of deprivation and political entrepreneurs nurture it. Elites no longer suppress dissent; they manage it. As long as resentment stays fragmented, it can be absorbed and traded. This is why Pakistan’s upheavals are identity-based rather than class-based. Ethnic movements, sectarian violence and regional populism share the same root. They grow out of insecurity that is filtered through collective identity. Such movements may express real pain but rarely challenge the deeper architecture of privilege.
Joseph ends his book without offering blueprints. He reminds readers that the rich live in fragile safety, protected less by justice than by the illusions of those below them. Here, however, illusion alone is not enough to explain the durability of privilege. Our institutions actively reproduce inequality. As a result, the fragmented poor are thus doubly excluded. Even when symbolically pacified, they are fiscally exploited. They are taught to be grateful for cash transfers financed by their own consumption taxes.
This dual structure, moral consent combined with institutional capture, explains why inequality persists despite repeated waves of reform rhetoric. Every few years, a movement promises to change the system. Every few years, the system absorbs it, and the poor keep waiting for the day when their fate will change. The cycle endures because discontent finds no moral language to challenge power.
That is what makes Joseph’s book relevant beyond India. He sets out to explain why the poor in his country tolerate inequality. Pakistan’s answer is not very different. The Indian instruments of control are more embedded in the caste structure (Dalits and Other Scheduled Castes), whereas ours are more institutionalised. Yet, his lens of moral psychology helps reveal what our policy debates often ignore. We tend to forget that obedience is not only enforced from above but also internalised from below. Many call it pragmatism or faith, but it is often fear disguised as patience.
What Joseph leaves unsaid – and what matters for Pakistan – is that belief can break not through anger but through awareness. When people begin to see unfairness as a collective cost rather than individual misfortune, the silence that shields privilege starts to weaken. Real reform begins when citizens stop confusing favours with fairness and relief with rights.
Like India, the poor in Pakistan do not turn on the rich. They don’t need to wage a war against the rich. However, they need to stop believing that endurance is virtue and that dependency is destiny. Once that illusion fades, the question will no longer be why the poor don’t rebel, but why they believed for so long that they shouldn’t.
The writer heads SDPI, chairs the board of the National
Disaster Risk Management Fund, and serves on the ADBI’s Advisory Board. He posts on LinkedIn Abidsuleri