Quotas losing out in the battle of castes as ‘Reservation’ is diluted to the point of irrelevance

Caste based reservation in government jobs and public institutions is at the centre of a hot but often ill-informed debate. One reason is the absolute lack of data related to caste. No caste census has taken place since 1931 which formed the basis of even the Mandal Commission’s recommendations almost 40 years later in 1989. We are still struck there 90 years after the last caste census. We have little or no data related to castes and what little data was available before 2014 have now been put away.

But what is clear is that caste discrimination and caste-based atrocities have not come down. What is also clear is that Government jobs are shrinking and more and more castes are competing for fewer jobs in the government sector. The so-called upper castes genuinely believe they are being persecuted because ‘we cannot go forward unless we are backward’.

The government has introduced a ‘quota within the quota’, reserving 10% of the jobs for the poor among the upper castes and not to all, which is perceived by experts as unconstitutional but a challenge remains pending before the Supreme Court. This is also perceived widely as the first step towards abolishing caste-based reservations. A growing number of states are announcing ‘reservation’ for ‘locals’ or the sons of the soil. Haryana is the latest to join the club, extending reservation for locals to the private sector for jobs paying up to 50 thousand Rupees per month.

Dalits, tribals and Other Backward Classes complain they have been systematically kept out of reserved jobs and seats—a complaint which is supported by data. Movements for ending caste-based reservation on the one hand and a parallel movement for extending such reservation to the private sector have both been gathering steam.

Meanwhile the central government hotly maintains it has no plan to do away with ‘reservation’. But by outsourcing jobs to contractors and contractual employees, by encouraging lateral entries into the bureaucracy, by reducing the number of employees and because of privatization of the Railways and Public Sector Undertakings, the government is seen to be eroding caste-based reservation ‘silently but effectively’.

What is the future of caste-based reservation then and has it been reduced to a mere political plank to mobilise castes and use them as vote banks? Are we truly witnessing a backlash to Mandalisation, described often as the revenge of the elite? Is such reservation now meaningless because the government has fewer jobs to offer?

Even as the subject is debated with increasing intensity, caste discrimination persists. Inequality has grown and the marginalized are even more marginalized today because of economic slowdown, privatization of health and education and the pandemic. But that has not prevented the politically powerful and relatively better off Patidars in Gujarat, Gujjars in Rajasthan, Jats in Haryana and UP, Marathas in Maharashtra or Lingayats in Karnataka to demand reservation for themselves.

The quota system was first introduced a century ago in 1920 by Justice Party in the Madras Presidency. In 1943, even before India’s Independence, Dr BR Ambedkar as member of the Viceroy’s Council proposed introducing the quota at the national level. But while the quota guaranteed by the Indian Constitution to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes was historic and the world’s oldest affirmative action programme, the jury is still out on how it has fared and how much it has helped those it was meant to assist.

It is instructive to remember that only seven percent of Indians work in the organized sector with an even smaller percentage employed by the Government. The total number of ‘reserved’ jobs in the country do not exceed some millions and the overwhelming majority of government employees continue to belong to the ‘general category’.

In July, 2020 the apex court observed that ‘Reservation’ was not a fundamental right. In February, 2021 the Supreme Court ruled that reservation in job promotions was not a fundamental right. In March in a case related to local bodies in Maharashtra, the court again ruled that reservation is a statutory and not constitutional right.

Earlier, while striking down the decision to include Jats in the OBC list, the court observed that ‘the state should not go by the "perception of the self-proclaimed socially backward class or advanced classes" on whether they deserved to be categorised among the "less fortunates". While acknowledging that caste remained a prominent cause of injustice, it held that caste could not be the ‘sole determinant’ of the backwardness of a class. It called for "new practices, methods and yardsticks" to determine backwardness.

In 2019 the government initiated calculation of reserved posts department-wise in universities. Subsequently a report by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment revealed that in the teaching posts advertised by 11 central universities, only 2.5 per cent posts were reserved for SCs, none for STs and 8 per cent for OBCs.

Since 2017, under the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, OBCs have not been provided the 27 per cent quota on all-India seats. This loss has been estimated to be 10,000 seats in three years, which were transferred to the general category. In the education budget of the central government, scholarship funds were cut so drastically that economist and former University Grants Commission chairman S K Thorat calculated that nearly five million Dalit students were affected by the reduction and delays in payment.

Similarly, in central civil services and public sector enterprises, recruitment has slowed down. Between 2014 and 2018 the annual intake of civil service candidates shortlisted by the UPSC dropped by 40% from 1,236 to 759. In 2003, central government employees numbered 32.69 lakh. The number fell to 26.30 lakh in 2012. In the central public sector enterprises also the number of jobs fell sharply from 18.1 lakh in 2011 to 14.86 lakh in 2014. Not surprisingly, the number of Dalits in the central government fell to 4.55 lakh in 2012. It is expected to have fallen even lower since then.

Lateral entries in the government from the private sector have also affected reserved categories. In February 2019, 89 applicants were short listed (out of 6,000 candidates from the private sector) for filling up 10 posts of Joint Secretaries. The quotas did not apply and since then the process has accelerated.

Critics have questioned it on grounds of both Constitutionality and morality. Media scholar and a former Editor with India Today Prof Dilip Mandal pointed out in a discussion that nowhere in the world is there such a hybrid system of bureaucracy. Bringing in so-called domain experts from the private sector, who will effectively represent industry interests, would lead to avoidable confusion and chaos, he believes. He also points out that these domain experts would have little accountability unlike career bureaucrats and will go back to the private sector after influencing public policy.

Officially, the Government’s position is similar to its stand on the Minimum Support Price (MSP) of agriculture produce: MSP tha, MSP hai aur MSP Rahega! Similarly, on paper ‘Reservation hai, Reservation tha aur Reservation Rahega’(Reservation was there, is there and will be there) is the government’s position. But the Government in Parliament has begun to use the American term ‘Affirmative Action’!

Not surprisingly, there is a growing clamour for extending reservation to the private sector. The UPA, points out Member of Parliament Udit Raj, had included this in its manifesto in 2004. The UPA Government had then constituted a Group of Ministers (GOM) to study the issue. The Government was petitioned by industry bodies like ASSOCHAM, CII and FICCI for allowing the private sector to tackle the issue differently. A coordination committee of officers was set up in 2006 and in a reply to the Rajya Sabha in 2019, the Government informed that the committee had met eight times since then and had recommended that voluntary action by the private sector was the best course available.

Industry bodies had offered to give scholarships, vocational training and conduct entrepreneurship development programs for Dalits, tribals and OBCs. While the number of beneficiaries is furnished to the Government every year by these bodies, it is not known how many of them end up getting appropriate jobs in the private sector. Driven by profit, the private sector is expected to make use of automation, robotics and Artificial Intelligence to replace manpower.

Writer and activist Anil Chamaria is not surprisingly sceptical. When Constitutional guarantees have failed to ensure ‘Reservation’ in the Government sector, what hope is there for reservation in the private sector, he questions. Reservation has been diluted systematically, he points out. “The Constitution nowhere mentions restricting Reservation but an artificial ceiling has been imposed saying that reservations cannot exceed certain percentage. Upper castes comprising 16% of the population, he quips, can corner 50, 60 or 70 percent of the seats and jobs but Dalits and OBCs cannot get even the quota guaranteed to them.

Denial of reservation, he says, has had a debilitating effect on Dalits and OBCs. Many of them believe there is no point in getting educated because there are no government jobs, and in any case even if they qualify and apply for jobs they would be discriminated against and denied their due.

Ironically, while the Government has been diluting and shrinking quotas for Dalits, BJP garnered 33.5% of the Dalit votes and 44 % of the ST votes in the 2019 general election, according to Lokniti-CSDS studies. Poorer Dalits and non-Yadav OBCs in Uttar Pradesh also voted for the BJP in greater numbers. This despite the BJP introducing a 10% ‘quota within the general quota’ exclusively for the poor among the upper castes, fielding more upper caste candidates and Uttar Pradesh government including 17 OBC castes in the SC list, forcing Dalits to compete with people better placed than them, a plan that was eventually read down by the High Court.

Christoffe Jaffrelot explains this by pointing out that instead of uniting the Dalits, the ‘Quota’ system has actually divided them and caused resentment. Some Dalit and OBC ‘jatis’, he says, have disproportionately benefitted from the quota system, causing frustration among others. Mutual rivalry and jealousy among the Dalits and the OBCs made making a common cause impossible. BJP appeared to have exploited this resentment by courting non-Yadav OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits in Uttar Pradesh.

The politics of identity and polarization on religious lines also rallied the Dalits and OBCs. Siding with the BJP ‘appeared’ to make the Dalits and OBCs ‘better’ Hindus and improved their self-esteem and social standing. So, while poorer Dalits and OBCs voted for the BJP because they resented the dominance of Jatavs and Yadavs respectively, the better off among them rallied to the BJP to flaunt their privilege.

Despite flip-flops necessitated by elections, BJP and the RSS have been wedded to the idea of doing away with caste-based reservation, no matter what the ministers say. How long they will wait is the question.