ANTI-RESERVATION PROTEST: SHORING UP PRIVILEGE:
DR BADRI RAINA
Dr. Badri Raina is a professor of English at University of
Delhi. He has extensive publications and has contributed to
all leading dailies/journals on politics/culture over the last
three decades and is also the author of Dickens and the Dialectic
of Growth, Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1986.
This article was recently published in Economic and Political
Weekly, May 20, 2006. p.1957
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While in neighboring Nepal
an unrelenting democratic movement spearheaded by the countrys
youth, most of them students, has brought an anachronistic and repressive
monarchy to the knees, setting in motion the founding of a republic,
upper-caste metropolitan medical graduates in Indias State-run
or aided institutions are out on the streets protesting the governments
intention to implement 27% reservation for Indias Other Backward
Classes in institutions of higher learning. It is of no concern to them
that such reservations have the sanction of the Indian Constitution
and of Parliament.
The current protests are being held under the banner Youth for
Equality. What the protesters really desire, though, is not equality
but a continuance of entrenched social privilege cloaked as merit,
and a denial of equality to communities who comprise some 80% of Indias
population. Shamelessly enough, these beneficiaries of Indias
inequitous social order emblematise their impending doom by carrying
brooms in hand, connoting their threatened descent to the lowest order
of street-sweepers. The irony escapes them that their so-called pursuit
of equality ought in fact to enjoin that they took time
out to do some real-time sweeping, just to feel how those others
feel. As well as to go live in the hinterland or among urban slums in
order to experience how life without clout, very next to islands of
obscene prosperity, both deadens and angers the soul. Such an experience
would also bring home with a thud how merit is more often
than not a mere social construct and a function of the arrangement and
control of both physical resources, including nutrition, and enabling
institutional practices.
On raucous television shows these days, these elite protesters exhibit
their high merit by answering substantial questions of fact and history
with shrieks and howlsa cultural attribute they routinely ascribe
to the Backwards. For example, they simply drown out the terse truth
that those among them who routinely obtain admission to medical colleges
despite forgettably abysmal percentages at school-leaving examinations
as quid pro quo to hefty capitation moneys are indeed beneficiaries
of a system of reservations available only to the imbecile rich. That
such a practice has never occasioned protest among them goes without
saying. Likewise, they have never taken to the streets to push the State
to enhance its total allocation to education (which now, sixty years
after independence, stays at a miserable 3.5%--one of the lowest even
in the developing world, whereas the prestigious Kothari Commission
had stipulated a minimum of 6% as far back as 1966). Nor are they persuaded
that the simple measure of increasing the total number of seats to institutions
of specialised learning could sort out the problem, if only a sustained
movement was conducted on the issue. When the State makes mandatory
provisions of employment for Indias relegated social groups, our
metropolitan mascots argue that the right thing is to make educational
opportunities available to these groups. And when the State does precisely
that, up goes the cry that India is going to sink to the depths of oblivion.
Nor will they answer the question as to why it is that despite six decades
of upper-caste hegemony in all professional and administrative sectors,
all full of merit, the country remains at number 127 on
the worlds human development index, cannot provide drinking water
to more than half its citizens, leaves an equal number in the dark without
electricity, rural infrastructure, health care, or basic education.
The simple and unedifying fact is that unlike educated youth elsewherein
France just recently they led a movement as redolent as the one in 1968
to defeat the conservative governments market-friendly policy
to allow companies to hire and fire employees between the
ages of 18 and 26Indias parasitical metropolitans reserve
their primary concern for themselves. That even self-interest should
be socially enlightened is not a thesis they buy. Often accusing, through
snide and snigger, the Backwards of being lawless, uncouth (because
of negligible proficiency in English) and violent, these English-speaking
beneficiaries of Indias glaringly inequitous development
think nothing of flying lawlessly, uncouthly, and violently in the face
of the Constitution and the Parliament at the least hint of any curtailment
to the privilege they are born into.
In barely-concealed class empathy with these warriors in defence privilege,
the bulk of Indias mainstream print and electronic
media carry daily doses of saturation coverage of their meritorious
exploits. The same media that under normal circumstances berates doctors
for declaring strike action, carrying repeated and heart-wrenching visuals
of poor patients languishing on pavements, today project these striking
medicos as the wounded vanguards of the nations future. Often,
again, highly deferential to the pronouncements of Indias Supreme
Court as the noble corrective to national political aberrations, this
same media remains silent on the fact that this same Supreme Court allows
the State to institute reservations up to 50%. It is to be noted that
such a provision, even if dutifully implemented, still leaves the rest
of the 50% available to some 20% of the population. But, of course,
the parasitical elite want all, failing which they promptly forget about
national wellbeing and the need for merit and seek for avenues
either in the New World or in Old Britain. Or, worst come to worst,
in some lucrative Arab land.
Another thing the current protest against reservations is almost
wholly a north-Indian phenomenon with no resonance in the southern states.
And for a reason. In the southern states, thanks to memorable peoples
movements during the early years of the twentieth century, reservations
have been in place since 1920. The result: the vast majority of the
meritorious professionals in the southern states come from backward
communities, including in the best medical institutions. And, by common
consent, the southern states also happen to be some of Indias
best administered regions. But, if you thought these historical facts
would make a dent in the breast-beating about the prospects of damage
to merit among our northern knights, think again. History
does not matter, and they do not read anyway, except of course the occasional
latest best-seller.
Occasionally, one or two among these upper-caste Galahads declare that
they are all for socially enabling state action, but so long as the
benefits thereof do not go to the creamy layer among the
Backwards. The thought that they themselves are the creamy progeny of
a creamy layer that has millennia of social and cultural history to
it, and consequent economic appropriation as well, does not occur to
them. Remember now that the upper-castes were anyway ordained by the
god of gods to rule, since they issued out of Brahmas head and
shoulders, leaving the low-castes to crawl out of his feet and lower
limbs to do them service.
Furthermore, in tune with the world-wide depoliticisation of elites
in the wake of the Washington Consensus and the apparently
ideology-neutral market-mantra, our youthful protesters raise the cry
that the government means to pursue vote-bank politics.
The natural assumption here is that policies that enhance
the interests of the top 20% are ipso facto in the national interest,
whereas policies that address centuries of inequity among the dispossessed
are grossly political and ideological. Does it matter that democracies
are democracies precisely because they are meant to respond to the needs
and aspirations of the widest spectrum of citizens, inorder that the
republican ideals of equality and fraternity are realised.
It does not; it is a dangerously ugly fact that the current protests
are unleashed by segments that have little care for democratic principles,
and are routinely contemptuous of its slow processes and grinds. Give
them a strongman who would guarantee their prosperous isolation and
keep them safe from the rabble, and they will junk both the Constitution
and the Parliament without a second thought. It is hardly surprising
that while Indias poor millions trudge religiously to cast their
vote, these meritorious scions of Indias world-power aspirations
vote but in tiny dribbles. And for good reason: it hardly matters which
centrist (read reformist) party comes to power so long as
it does. Their entrenched clout makes it possible to get any job done,
often over the phone. So, where is the need to suffer the discomfort
and the socially levelling effects of standing in line at the booth?
The propensities of this class are best represented by a thing called
the knowledge commission. Although just an advisory body
of some seven or nine technicians, with two honourable exceptions, and
no statutory standing, it took upon itself the other day to pronounce
its opposition to the proposed reservations as a bad idea for globalising
India. Deriding political interference in Indias global advance,
it chose to make one of the most grossly unctuous political interventions
without the least locus standii in the context. But the prompt rebuff
it has received from the minister in-charge of educational policy-making
must go down as a high point of democratic corrective: if the knowledge
commission is so ignorant of Indias Constitution, the minister
said, it has rather small reason to call itself a knowledge commission.
Well said indeed!
When expedient times arrive, upper-caste elites make another disingenuous
argument. They allege that such policies as instituting reservations
on social considerations threaten to divide India. The inescapable
historical fact that the division they speak of has been the consequence
of millennia of institutionalized social apartheid within the Hindu
community, sanctioned by them and by the scriptures they follow either
escapes them altogether (since most read or reflect but little anyway),
or is held up as something divinely ordained. The casteism
of the upper-castes is simply regarded as the operation of nature;
but, hang on, when the lower castes seek to further their unity of purpose,
breast-beating about casteism rends the elite stratosphere.
Nor does it seem odd that these naturals advertise everyday
in the national dailies for matrimonial alliances purely and explicitly
along the axis of caste affinity! When did we say that merit
needs to be grounded in the least capacity to think, or then to think
honestly?
In the current agitation, one of the chief allies of the marauding medicos
is of course Indias business class. Suddenly these manufacturers
of private profit are riven with anxiety that a dispensation of reservations
will not but spell doom for their global competitiveness. You well might
wonder look who is talking. These captains of industry were of course
the beneficiaries of the most ruthless protectionism kept in place by
a friendly State till four decades or more after independence. That
was the time when their chief demand was that foreign competition must
be kept out till their indigenous capacities had properly matured. Nor
do they seem to recall that for all those decades they were also the
beneficiaries of core raw materials (oil, coal, steel, cement) at subsidised
rates through the munificence of Indias much-maligned public
sector. How times change! What never changes is the ability of
Indias vested classes to invent arguments that shore up their
privilege and keep out the underdog.
Equally obvious, however, should be the fact that the days for such
brazenly self-serving privilege to succeed seem nearing the end. Indian
democracy over the last six decades has, however grudgingly or lugubriously,
released a historical dynamic which is not about to be turned back by
barefaced assertion alone. That is a fat thought that they could well
ponder, if nothing else.
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