People's Democracy

THE ANTI-RESERVATION AGITATION 

The Wages of Longstanding Caste Oppression And Decades of Neoliberalism 

Venkatesh Athreya 

ONE is frankly horrified by the degree of caste prejudice among the upper castes in our country, and the absurdly simplistic (and , no doubt, self-serving, even if unintendedly so) equating of "merit" with marks on an entrance examination. In a society where substantial sections of the people have been denied access to education for centuries on the basis of birth, it is axiomatic that democracy would be meaningless for vast sections of the people without a serious effort to address this historically evolved inequality. There is no evidence, either, going by the record of a state like Tamilnadu where reservations have existed for a long time, to suggest that the use of reservations in educational admissions lowers quality in any way. Even logically, admission only provides entrance. Criteria for award of a diploma or degree are certainly not caste-differentiated. My own experience in over thirty years of teaching and research at the university level is that students who enter on account of the space provided by reservations, often from very disadvantaged backgrounds, perform no worse than other students. The presumed inverse relationship between reservations and ‘merit’ is an entirely spurious construction.   

It is certainly true that, under a system of caste-based reservations of seats in educational institutions, the students from the upper castes will face discrimination in the sense that a non-upper caste student with a lower entrance score could gain admission while the upper caste student does not. But this cannot be equated with the much larger, macro social and historical injustice of denial of opportunity to the 'lower' castes. Of course, it is true that this is poor consolation for the individual upper caste student, and that the student is certainly not personally responsible for the historical fact of caste discrimination. But that does not change the fact that of the two competing equalities (a term that Marc Gallanter uses in his book Competing Equalities), the broader one of redressing historical injustice is of far greater urgency and legitimacy. The advantages of class/caste that upper caste students generally enjoy in acquisition of education and the learning environment from childhood onwards also need to be kept in mind when using examination scores as an index of merit. 
  
The argument that caste-based reservations should benefit the poorer sections among the OBCs has certainly some weight and relevance (although it should be recognised that, unlike in the case of many OBC segments, centuries of domination by the upper castes have enabled them to build networks and contacts in the upper echelons of the bureaucracy in both public and private sectors that confer advantages of power). Some method for excluding the 'creamy layer' of OBCs from the benefits of reservations, with the proviso that such exclusion must benefit the poor among the OBCs, needs to be worked out. Finally, the poor among the upper castes also deserve consideration, and some arrangements can be arrived at in this regard, without too much difficulty, if there is genuine willingness to recognise the justice of reservations. 
  
But the intransigence of sections of the well-heeled upper caste students, backed by the electronic and print media (especially but not exclusively the English language media) and both upper caste-based forces and parties such as the RSS and BJP and the corporate sector, is a key stumbling block to an amicable and just solution. It is amazing that not a word in defence of 'merit' is heard from these worthies when seats are openly sold by "self-financing" (itself a misnomer, it should read parents-financed) professional colleges in medicine, engineering or management. 
  
The new-found concern of these worthies with the quality of school education, and of how that is pre-requisite to enabling weaker sections to get admission into 'institutions of excellence' is unfortunately not matched by a willingness to pay higher (or even the existing) taxes so as to enable public support for making quality education both available and accessible to the poor. 
  
The level of the 'debate' over reservations is distressing in so far as it has brought out both the deep-seated caste prejudices and the uncaring and callous attitude towards the disadvantaged sections of our people engendered by the neoliberal economic policies of the last two decades. The ethos of neoliberalism, with its implicit social Darwinism, provides the soil for opposing reservations in yet another way, in so far as all state intervention is deemed as unwarranted interference with the ‘natural’ (read ‘market’) order of things.   
The legitimate struggle for caste-based reservations-not as an end in itself, but as a means, along with wider struggles for a less unequal ownership distribution of productive assets, to promote democracy and equal opportunity-naturally finds itself in opposition to both caste oppression and neoliberalism.