“Begin at the beginning, the king said, very gravely, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
For millenniums, caste has been cast in stone in the Indian psyche. Ironically, the legacy of discrimination was carried forward when India became a democracy, muddying the pristine playground of liberation. The social pyramid was turned on its head and generous generations scrambled up the ladder of power as a genetic journey to pelf. It also allowed uninterrupted caste-led parivarvaad to thrive without facing challenges.
The legacy of the bloodlines of India’s rich and powerful in politics and bureaucracy sustains the system. However, a Supreme Court ruling last week could derail the gravy train. The current katzenjammer on caste—in parliament, elections and institutions—agitated a seven-member Constitution bench of the top court. Four of them led by Justice B R Gavai felt that caste-based reservations are meritocratic, nor bureaucratic or plutocratic.
Gavai, who could be the chief justice next year, wrote: “The State must evolve a policy for identifying the creamy layer even from the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes so as to exclude them from the benefit of affirmative action. In my view, only this and this alone can achieve the real equality as enshrined under the Constitution... The question that will have to be posed is whether equal treatment to unequals in the category of Scheduled Castes would advance the constitutional objective of equality or would thwart it. Can a child of an IAS, IPS or Civil Service officers be equated with a child of a disadvantaged member belonging to the Scheduled Castes studying in a gram panchayat or zilla parishad school in a village?”
If the Bhagavad Gita is the soul of India, caste is its curse. What began millenniums ago as professional identification was perverted through the ages to create a parti pris paradigm to win elections. Caste-based reservations began almost 125 years ago. Considering the plight of Scheduled Castes and Tribes, the Constitution-smiths added affirmative clauses for proportionate representation of underprivileged castes in the executive and the legislature—a temporary provision for just a decade.
Indian politics revels in status quo and subverts change into stasis. No party has altered the clause or dropped it. So it’s discussion over. Instead, they’ve reserved the weltschmerz-laden caste system for election manifestos. Reservations were meant to raise the social and economic status of India’s first post-independence generation’s underclasses. Instead, it has filtered down as a third-generation prerogative. Reservation was meant as an equaliser. Now it is a combo of oligopoly and monopoly of the social elite. By their sheer control over their part of the establishment, Dalit and backward monarchs constructed a fortress-like exclusive armature that denied right of entry to those who were at the bottom of the pyramid.
While the establishment has sedulously secured the advantages for itself, the constitutional principle of checks and balance has come into play. Making a powerful case for creaming the creamy layer, Justice Gavai felt, “It is also commonly known that disparities and social discrimination, which is highly prevalent in the rural areas, start diminishing when one travels to the urban and metropolitan areas. I have no hesitation to hold that putting a child studying in St Paul’s High School and St Stephen’s College and a child studying in a small village in the backward and remote area of the country in the same bracket would obliviate the equality principle enshrined in the Constitution.”
Gavai wasn’t alone in his views. Justice Pankaj Mithal added, “Reservation, if any, has to be limited only for the first generation or one generation, and if any generation in the family has taken advantage of the reservation and have achieved higher status, the benefit of reservation would not be logically available to the second generation.” If the judicial stand is accepted by the states and the Centre, a Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe family will lose reservation status if any member has availed it in the past. The Supreme Court has diluted the quota enjoyed by subjectively- and selectively-listed castes by making it inclusive: bringing in more deserving sub-castes that were left out.
The creamy layer was already eligible for OBC reservation. It excludes people whose family income exceeds Rs 8 lakh a month. The unfairness lies in agricultural income not being included in the total income. Hence, the landed backward-class peasantry enjoys reservation’s benefits.
Politicians are unlikely to heed the judicial advice. Since the categorising of reservations falls under the legislature, it is highly improbable that the political and bureaucratic nexus will yield to fair play. Rural India is still an area of darkness—a Naipaulian nightmare of unpunished humiliation, bondage, rape and murder. In the past three decades, politics, civil services and business have become hereditary institutions. Successive successors continue to replace powerful progenitors. Caste-based reservations are grossly misused by caste leaders, too.
Though no official data exists about the number of SC and ST youth entering the IAS, IPS, IFS or IRS, a sample of current legislators in the states and the Centre reveals every fourth member got his or her seat from their parents. Over the past two decades, the kin of at least 20 percent of services officers were from the same Cosy Cub Club. Recently, a few youngsters from poor backgrounds made the cut, but the overwhelming majority of the marginalised classes don’t have access to good education or skill development that will empower them to compete with upper-caste spawn.
V P Singh, prime minister during 1989-90, wanted to restrict senior government jobs to one person per family, irrespective of their caste. He felt that the recruitment mechanism heavily favoured the affluent. The joke doing the rounds in the power circles then was about the unsaid convention of children of senior officers appearing before a panel of UPSC interviewers made up of ‘uncles and aunties’.
At one stage, around 20 IAS officers were closely related to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s principal secretary. His view was that the dynastic monopoly of the services shouldn’t thrive on rigid rules. He offered to drop the Mandal Commission if all political parties unanimously agreed to the ‘One Family, One Post’ principle. His social justice formula was jinxed by conspiratorial silence, because parties banded together to protect their clan, class and caste calculus. Singh retaliated by igniting the inferno of caste that engulfed the entire nation.
With over 3,000 castes and sub-castes included in the Scheduled category, a caste cartel arose led by family fiefdoms. Swami Vivekananda said in Oakland in 1900: “This caste system had grown by the practice of the son always following the business of the father.” About a century and a quarter later, powerful parents continue to pass the caste and class torch to their progeny. There is no end of the beginning in sight.
prabhu chawla
prabhuchawla@newindianexpress.com
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