A
way of helping a historically disadvantaged group in India is to get them well-
educated and enhance their efficiency levels so they deserve jobs on
their own worth. Doing it is the dharma
of any government in India. But our
governments don’t do it. Their way is to
relax eligibility standards for the Reserved Group – by raising upper age
limits for their entry, allowing them to apply with lesser school or university
scores and loosening evaluation standards for them like treating their average
performance in a proficiency test on par with others’ good performance. And of course governments give them 50% or
more quotas.
Like
commenting on these two ways, Justice Viswanatha Sastri of the Madras High
Court wrote in 1950 about a process of levelling up and a process of levelling
down. But levelling up works for the
lasting good of a disadvantaged group, as seen in USA, while levelling down
does not truly and permanently help and it backfires too, as India
witnesses.
So
if we also change our setting in India the real latent talents of many among the
Reserved Group and the Non-reserved Group will steadily emerge (yes, now both
groups do not get fair and best opportunities in India). The change must begin at the basic education
level and spread to higher education later.
Also, improving educational standards must go hand in hand with managing
our economy wisely and multiplying employment opportunities.
If
you want to see proof of the beneficial effects of a good educational setting
on Indians, look at the success stories that followed their studying and working
abroad in reputed institutions. As we
noticed, four India-born individuals stand out among them, winning Nobel Prizes
– Har Gobind Khorana, Physiology or Medicine (shared), 1968; Subramanyan
Chandrasekar, Physics (shared), 1983; Amartya Sen, Economics, 1998; and
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Chemistry (shared), 2009. Several other Indians have done quite well in
the US in non-academic fields and distinguished themselves. If you guess they can’t do it in India you
would be right. If you ask in what large
numbers Indians emigrate out of India for quality higher education and better
living, the answer has some divinity – in such huge numbers that in the US
alone they have built about 180 Hindu temples.
US
government service and judiciary too have attracted Indian talent. Many persons of Indian origin have made
themselves outstanding in their jobs with governments in that country, and the
US public sector is benefiting and helping itself most. Indian governments and those who run them
have some lessons here. At the same time
let us salute the extraordinary men and women still found among India’s public
servants – they do things harder to do and against great odds, unlike their
counterparts in the US who work in welcome surroundings.
Since
1993 the Central government in India periodically declares, for each State or
Union Territory, groups of people referring to them usually by their caste
names, as belonging to ‘backward classes’. These groups of people are broadly
called as ‘Other Backward Classes (OBC)’.
They are different from groups the Centre has identified (much of it in
1950), on the basis of their caste or race as ‘scheduled castes’ and on the
basis of their tribal identity as ‘scheduled tribes’. But again, for reservation of jobs scheduled
castes and scheduled tribes are also considered under the term ‘backward
classes’.
Let
me say this without a lengthy reference to government records or sources. As of
today at least 66% of India’s population is officially considered ‘backward’ by
the Central government (i.e., scheduled castes 16.6%, scheduled tribes 8.6% and
OBC’s 41%), with the balance 34% counted as ‘Others’ – for purposes of reservation
by the Central government. As for the
States in India, each State separately
identifies groups of people within its borders, mostly naming them on caste
basis, whom it considers ‘backward’ and coming under OBC’s – for reservation in
jobs and admissions to educational institutions.
So
the all-India minimum percentage of ‘backward classes’ is 66%, chosen and fixed
by the Centre. It should be higher in
each State because a State government declares more groups of people within its
territories to be coming under OBC’s than what the Centre does for that State.
Many
Indians would feel that the Centre declaring a high 66% of their country’s
population – and the States going even higher for their regional population –
is simply artificial and self-degrading, though legally passable. I hope no one will laughably suggest that if
for some reason all the ‘Others’ who make up 34% or less of India’s population go
out of India, the country will then have no ‘oppressor-people’, it may do away
with reservation and that all its remaining citizens – whom India presently
calls ‘backward’ – will then reach higher standards of living quicker. The
truth is, the higher the percentage of ‘backward classes’ a government fixes
among its citizens or the longer that definition stays as policy, the greater
is government’s guilt in not doing anything worthwhile for its citizens to lift
them out of ‘backwardness’, whatever its governmental definition.
Look
at it another way. Assume that a nation
is in abysmal poverty. Should a
government work real measures to remove poverty or just go on declaring more
and more sections of the population as officially poor? The government may keep
telling its poor people that those declarations are a great welfare measure
because some of them will get doles and government jobs based on those declarations. But that means nothing - even without such
declarations a government is bound to create jobs for all and improve the
financial condition of all its people, not just of a small percentage of those large
sections officially designated as poor.
Likewise, merely including more and more sections of the Indian
population in any list of ‘backward classes’ without doing them real good is
hoodwinking.
You
have watched the clamour among more and more groups of people wanting to be
recognized as ‘backward’ and the willingness of political parties to say yes to
it. Political parties are always keen to
give out the message “We are for you” to various groups of people, with many
overtones. Sensing it many groups of
people put out their anticipatory demands, reasonable or not. Here is an instance of such unspoken
alliance. The Chairman of the Backward
Classes Commission of a State recommended that 29 ‘forward’ communities be
included in the State’s list of ‘backward classes’ and 34 communities be
deleted from that list. The State
government took action, but in this way. It included the recommended 29
communities in its ‘backward classes’ list but did not make any of the
recommended deletions.
The
scene across India clearly hints there is something wrong with the way we look
at ‘backwardness’ and why we do it. In the name of a public policy India is
hurting itself grievously – by institutionalizing caste and fanning caste
consciousness, marking and deepening divisions among its people on caste lines
and turning its back on merit to a bulk of entrants in colleges and in public sector
service. These are too huge a price we
pay for short-term benefits for a few while making a large talent pool lose
heart on India. Looking at my country, I
wonder in what context the University of Pennsylvania, one of the famed Ivy
League institutions, coined its motto Leges
sine moribus vanae. The Latin phrase
means “Laws without morals are useless”.
Who
are the persons still holding us away from a clean solution to the thorny issue
of reservation – a solution that will put India on the way out of stagnation
and lift its people? Surely, India’s
politicians who have not risen to the occasion should take the moral
blame. If they maintain and encourage
differences between two or more groups, or just refuse to look at and work on a
fair solution, it helps their parochial cause.
They can quietly play one group against the other and thrive on the
support of the group to which they play the role of saviors – that would be
like the policy pursued by the colonial British long ago when they wanted to
stay put in India, a policy of divide and rule.
If independent India has a new set of rulers who divide and rule the
country’s citizens, may we also get another Mahatma Gandhi to lead us to yet
another liberation – liberation of the minds of Indians?
(Concluded)
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Copyright
© R. Veera Raghavan 2015
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