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Far too many concessions are made in our country in the name of the "people". People have passions, people have primordial commitments from birth, people have their own horizons of meaning, and a whole host of other la-di-da sops that violate the fundaments of a liberal democratic state. It is not enough to be Independent, we have to be democratic as well, and that is the tough part. Alladi Ayyar, B.N. Rau and Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, amongst others, kept warning their colleagues in the Constituent Assembly that the exceptions should not eat up the rule. But this is exactly what happened and its effects can be seen most blatantly in the various Constitutional amendments on caste. Reservations have now been extended to include OBCs along caste lines, the roster for promotions in government jobs are caste based, and even the minimum qualifications required for reserved categories to enter institutions of learning are so low that it would be nearly impossible not to make the grade. It is not as if one is bemoaning the fall in standards and the downgrading of merit. That too is there, but in many ways this decline in quality started well before the idea of reservations became a holy cow that was rapidly and immaculately reproducing itself. After the initial burst of enthusiasm for making India into a knowledge-state as well, we quickly ran out of stamina. There are no new IITs, or AIIMS like institutions for the last 50 years or so. Reservations have nothing to do with this loss of will to keep India at the helm while combing knowledge horizons. For the founding figures of our Constitution, most notably Dr Ambedkar, Reservations were designed only for the Scheduled Castes so that they could gain socially valuable assets after centuries of deprivation. Dr Ambedkar and others believed that once members of Scheduled Castes attained a measure of self-respect and dignity they would take the fight against untouchability forward and finally extirpate caste from its roots. Reservations were never meant to be a resource to be flogged in perpetuity. Its specific intent was, in fact, to make itself irrelevant, over time, by removing its raison d’etre from our everyday lives. This was the citizenship manifesto that Ambedkar was putting forward. Like most of his other colleagues in the Constituent Assembly, he too believed that reservations were not to be seen as a blunt instrument, but needed to be constantly finessed keeping in mind its most important final objective, viz., to rid India of the hated institution of caste. For Ambedkar there was no half-way house. Caste had to go, or else, as he eloquently argued time and again, how would we ever make room for fraternity and citizenship in a substantive sense? Today, reservations have taken on a new character. This provision is no longer aimed at rooting out caste but in representing them. This is a wholly new optic and needs to be understood as such. The unwillingness to nuance the provisions for Scheduled Castes and, particularly, the reluctance to scoop out the creamy layer from among them prepared the ground work for the Mandal-inspired OBC reservations. The manner in which the scheme for OBC reservations gives points for denoting backwardness effectively shields the educationally and economically well-off sections from scrutiny. Mandal made the OBCs monochromatic, which is far from the truth. Yet Mandal was greeted by a wide variety of supporters. The calculation behind such an endorsement was clear. It is strategically much easier and more expedient for the government to yield to caste leaders than to pay attention to the secular needs of citizens. It is much harder work to actually roll up one’s political sleeves and deliver to the needy and the powerless. Promoting fraternity by creating resemblances between citizens requires the zeal of an Ambedkar and not the covert machinations of a Mandal! So, rather than attend to how the poorest can become citizens by giving them access to public goods, like education and health, concessions were made to caste leaders in the name of satisfying sentiments of the "people". The assumption, of course, is that the everyday voter is as much a professional casteist as the political leaders are. Soon this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy till somebody like Mayawati, unwittingly perhaps, bells the OBC cats. By converting the rationale for reservations from banishing caste distinctions to representing them, citizenship has taken a hit. No modern liberal democratic state can accept that its citizens be perpetually divided on the basis of the accidents of birth. Non-discriminatory clauses are very different from using the caste tag as a badge of honour so that generations can flog it for sectional advantage. The many escape clauses in the Constitution have been used to overcome the qualification that OBCs stand for "classes" and not "castes". This tells us how things can go terribly wrong if we insist upon "people" and lose sight of "citizens". Can India go ahead in this century if the huge majority of its citizens have yet to experience what quality health and education mean? How can we tap a rich source of talent if we look away from potential pools of excellence and let caste and ethnic charlatans have their way? We must return to the original meaning of reservations where the intent was to end the caste order and not pander to it. Only then do we have a fair chance of being a quality knowledge-state. Let us take a quick look at the logic of caste politics and realise the basic flaws within it that are papered over by caste-oriented politicians. First, there is no caste in this country which has a clear majority in any constituency, even Assembly size. The closest are some castes like the Marathas in Maharashtra that make up about 30 per cent of the population but are internally fractionated along political lines, as it should be. Elsewhere, in the vast subcontinent, the so-called dominant OBCs like the Yadavs, Jats, Gujars, Lodhs, etc., barely climb up to 15 per cent of the population. Usually they are around 10 per cent in those areas where it is said that they have a strong political presence. It must also be kept in mind that there is no such thing as a natural affinity between castes. Jats and Gujars may come together politically, but they heartily despise each other and have elaborate origin tales that justify their mutual animosities. "Mutual repulsion" has always been a cardinal feature of caste and it has withstood the test of time. The truth is that no caste sees any virtue in any other caste. This is why caste politics can be so damaging to the cause of citizenship. All caste alliances are ephemeral and self-serving. How else can one imagine such wild combinations that bring the Muslim with the Kshatriyas as in KHAM alliance, or the Ahir with the Rajputs, as in the AJGAR combine? All this is well known, and yet the caste bogey is successfully set in motion by all variety of politicians, and, sad to say, intellectuals too. Given this simple demographic fact, it has to be more than just caste for a person to win an election. Once this is accepted the unavoidable conclusion is that voters cannot vote along caste lines even if they wanted to. Why then do they elect these caste virtuosos? The answer simply is that an ordinary, garden variety electorate has to choose from what is available. One cannot vote for a dream candidate: but only from among those that are in the political market place. This means the market place needs to be scrutinized because the political vendors here have converted elections into caste festivals and we, the voters, have little choice in the matter. Second, the idea that certain parties enjoy a kind of political "zamindari", or stronghold, in particular areas needs revision. Rae Bareilly type situations are rare for in the bulk of this country, the dusty BIMARI bowls included, no party has an assured position in any region of India. Even in the latest UP elections where Mayawati and BSP have triumphed, they had to win fresh territory as they were largely dispossessed of their 2002 seats. Again, not in every Scheduled Caste reserved constituency has the BSP won, nor in every Yadav dominated region (with about 15 per cent of the population) has Samajwadi won. Even so, intellectuals, psephologists and politicians have spread the canard that in India people vote along caste lines. Can we afford this kind of politics if we want to be a modern, liberal democratic state where the citizen comes first? Clearly not! It is not just a question of merit being downgraded — one could probably live with that — but it is the citizen that is being shown the door. This kind of political fractures that caste identity generates will separate our population into "peoples" on an enduring basis, effectively shutting out Ambedkar’s vision of creating citizens with a minimum set of resemblances. Though it may appear counterfactual, the evidence points that caste identities get stronger with the first flush of urbanisation. This can be easily explained by the widely recognised factoid that people need moorings and the urban world temporarily displaces one’s sense of belonging. But this alienation only lasts for a generation or two. In India, at least, the first generation urban migrants often pack in caste and ethnic identities, like toiletries, in their travel bag. But as urban depth grows this post-rural angst gradually attenuates and the trend towards cosmopolitanism slowly consolidates itself. Urbanisation and the breakdown of the village economy have already undermined some of the well-known features that traditionally characterised caste. Rules of inter-dining and occupational segregation can no longer be easily implemented. The one caste trait that has endured is that of marrying within one’s community. Today, this is the most powerful expression of the principle of "mutual repulsion", already alluded to .But once this marriage rule snaps then, as Ambedkar had noticed much earlier, the backbone of caste is irrevocably broken. The caste system may have fallen apart, but it will be a while before caste identities disappear. It is no longer the case that members of the "upper caste" people can at will command the so-called ‘lower castes" to do their bidding. The old fashioned "vote banks" are no longer quite valid. And yet because the practice of marrying within one’s own caste still remains, identity assertions retain a certain charisma. Urbanisation puts this lingering feature of caste under stress, but after a few generations of urban experience. Salman Rushdie once said that a true cosmopolitan lifestyle emerges when it is impossible to determine who one’s neighbour is going to be. We can probably go a step further and say that true cosmopolitanism comes into being when you cannot be sure who your son-in-law is going to be. Sadly, one has to wait for the long duration of urbanisation to undermine castes. If only we had used the wand of citizenship more thoroughly in our Constitution and more consistently in our political practice then we might have seen the back of caste much sooner. The writer is Professor, Centre for the Study of Social Systems, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi |
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