New Signals from Gujarat : Reservation is a Problem, Not a Solution

What does a 50% reservation of jobs with governments and seats in college courses, in favour of persons of several caste groups, achieve - when better-scoring and more qualified contenders from excluded caste groups are denied those slots? If you are in India, your answer would be: Nothing.

Across India there is now a fresh debate on reservation, in the backdrop of the current agitation in Gujarat spearheaded by a young Hardik Patel demanding inclusion of the Patidar community for reservation benefits.  The Hindu quotes him as saying, “Either free the country from reservation or make everybody the slave of reservation”.  Here I am talking generally about reservation, not on his agitation.

In post-independent India reservation began to be implemented on a medium scale, no doubt with good objectives.  In 1993 the central government gave effect to an extra 27% reservation for newly included caste groups.  Presently reservation goes upto nearly 50% of vacancies in government and semi-government jobs and of prized college admissions, at centre and state levels.

All these years, reservation has been lulling innocent people in the reserved groups into a false belief that the government is doing a huge favour to their groups. On the other side, non-performing politicians running governments have been feeling glad they did not have to answer much for their unimaginative thinking and poor governing skills in managing and improving the economy of the country or any of its regions.  Why does mere reservation not work and what does it lead to?

Reservation must have been thought of as an antidote to the casteist outlook and behavior of ‘upper’ caste men and women looking down on people of ‘lower’ castes. That mindset and its manifestation are prevalent to a high degree in villages or rural areas (home for 69% of India’s population) where tradition rules, where people stick with their caste groups and cling to their caste identities and where there is less of open-minded interaction among different communities. Colleges, especially engineering and medical colleges, and government offices with large numbers of employees are mostly in cities, more of them in bigger cities – places that witness much less of caste consciousness or casteist tendencies.

The contrast in the two locations is also reflected in the spectacle of caste conflicts or skirmishes emanating from rural areas, not from cities - with very rare exceptions if any.  Just look at the size of the population in cities like New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad or Hyderabad and the number of persons livings in any place which reports caste atrocities or showdowns, and you know that dominant casteist forces operate only in the smaller places, mostly villages - that too not in every village.  In this scenario, you find that the malady of casteism is present on one location where we are not able to administer any medicine, while a strong medicine of 50% reservation is applied on another location, a healthy one, which only produces symptoms of a wrong drug, and sometimes strong reactions too.  What we do in India is just one step short of enforcing – if that would be possible to do – reservations within and among Indian origin persons in college courses and government employments in the United States, a location where immigrant Indians would harbor or display no casteist outlook at all.

 

By the way, let us also be clear – anyone following some traditions and customs generally prevalent in a caste, without wanting to undermine people of other castes, is not ‘casteist’ and he or she is not a problem to others.

Take two developed countries, Singapore and United States. India is far below their rank when you think of food, clothing, shelter, security and incomes for its people.   Neither of them provided for reservation like India does, and the US, the democratic one of the two, had a far more hateful division and degrading relationship among its population – between whites and African Americans – than India had ever seen.  That nation has developed its economy and promoted the welfare of its population, including the once-slaving African Americans, through sheer hard work and merit-based open competition for all – no reservation and no discrimination. 

If the US could so maximize the general economic well-being of all its citizens, why cannot India do it and bring more prosperity to all its citizens without reservation?  The reason why an Indian government cannot is, our political class as a whole have been finding it much easier to keep reservation in place and give it to more people as much as possible, than to think hard for the nation, work more for its people and get results through the sweat and agony of thinking and doing. 

 

The presumed advantage of reservation is that it economically uplifts some groups of people by providing them with jobs and incomes that come along.  But that does not happen with bad economic policies working in the background.  To understand this in another way, look at Pakistan which mismanages its economy far worse and whose people have far lower standards of living and security compared to Indians.  As per available data, 95 to 98% of Pakistan’s population comprises Muslims.

Though not by legal compulsion, it happens by circumstance that nearly 100% of all jobs in Pakistan, government or non-government, go to Muslims.  Assuming – merely assuming, so we clearly see some other picture – that 20% of Pakistan’s population consists of men and women following other religions, and further assuming that, by some enforced reservation, still all jobs with the government go only to Muslims, the mere exclusion of that 20% of its population from government jobs would not raise the prosperity levels for Pakistani Muslims.  To improve the lot of Muslims in Pakistan the government of the country has to address its economy and allied issues, and so merely giving all government jobs to Muslims over there will not uplift them.  The Indian situation – with 50% reservation of jobs put in place by laws – is similar and no better.

The obvious things reservation may do is to get college admissions, give jobs and secure incomes to a tiny few among various groups of people, but it has failed as a state policy on many fronts. To implement reservation on the ground, the central and state governments in India have documented and listed all castes and sub-castes to be eligible for benefits of that policy. Publicised official records name over 5,000 castes in a central list of 'other backward classes', over 1,100 castes as 'scheduled castes' and over 740 tribes as 'scheduled tribes'.  Persons not covered in these lists are widely and unofficially mentioned as 'forward castes'.  So when the state itself draws thick caste outlines on the profiles of its citizens for all time to come, divisions among the people along those lines get hardened and there is no hope of caste consciousness receding or dying out when people spread out and mingle.

Education is a good means to let the mind flower and broaden one’s outlook, and to make us understand that fellowship with others around – and surely with people of other castes - is necessary and profitable in today’s inter-connected world.  Is it not jarring that, in the field of education itself, reservation compels young men and women to remember their caste identities and use them as a passport, if they are part of any reserved group, to secure admissions for themselves in preferred courses ejecting other better-performing candidates?  Here, unwittingly the law is festering an old wound and is keeping people apart. This is the biggest tragedy of reservation.

All active politicians should know that reservation is creating unintended mischief, but any one of them cannot, even if he is inclined, say it out openly because he would then lose his vote bank.  As long as the law allows reservation they have to play music to it to survive.  But if all major political parties agree to do away with the law of reservation - perhaps limiting it for the present to scheduled castes and scheduled tribes alone, to a maximum of 20% of the vacancies, and also freezing the present lists of scheduled castes and scheduled tribes – no political party would stand to lose since all will have a level-playing filed on reservation.  If any major political party blocks that idea, it gets no special advantage because then the other parties would say that they also want reservation to continue, and then the honours will remain equally shared. 
     

So it is time to watch our politicians, without giving up our prayers.   If de-reservation begins, our people can gradually bring out the best in themselves for the good of the nation and for their own good.  If African Americans could do it in the US with a neutral law talking tough on strict equality, Indians can surely do it in India if we have also the right law to back it, helped by  astute governments  and a responsible Opposition in building bridges with people.

        Indians and their progeny in vast numbers have already shown they can live happily without reservation, and proof lies in a bit of statistics and a few facts anyone knows. First, you will note from a website of the Indian central government that over 25 million people of Indian origin are living outside India, in more than 200 countries.  They should belong to different caste groups of India.  We know that a great majority of them lead a better life abroad, and that is why they are still there. Wherever they are they live in good fellowship with many Indian origin persons. And, you will also note, certainly they don't think about not getting reservation in securing college admissions or government jobs in those territories, especially in the advanced countries.  We have a clear message.

 

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Copyright © R. Veera Raghavan 2015