A Passive Resistance To Equality
By Mritiunjoy Mohanty
13 July, 2007
Economic TimesThe decision of the Supreme Court to stay the implementation of the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Act, 2006 is of a piece in the long tradition of the Indian judiciary to oppose reservations that favour OBCs.
In 1963, the Supreme Court in the Balaji decision struck down OBC quotas in the then Mysore state on the grounds that caste was an insufficient basis for positive discrimination and that an overall quota of more than 50% went against the spirit of the Constitution.
The Balaji ruling was overturned in 1992 in the Indira Sawhney case, where the Supreme Court for the first time accepted that caste was a reasonable basis for a policy of positive discrimination and, therefore, implementation of the Mandal recommendations was in keeping with both the letter and spirit of the Indian Constitution. The stay, therefore, is in the Balaji tradition with a small nod at Sawhney.
The use of the 1931 Census by the government of India was unfortunate because it handed a convenient escape route for the learned bench. It is, after all, reasonable to argue that a 2007 policy can hardly be based on information gathered in 1931. Unfortunate also because the NSSO has reasonably reliable estimates of the OBC population for periods as recent as 1999-2000 and 2004-5.
Perhaps equally important — in an effort to stay within the overall limit of 50% stipulated by the Supreme Court — the suggested quota of 27% is significantly lower than the share of OBCs in the overall population. This is not to argue that more detailed information should not be collected. This is simply to suggest that there exists sufficient and recent information on the basis of which to implement the Act.
Underlying the stay is the belief that merit is being sacrificed for political expediency. Leaving aside exceptional talent such as the C V Ramans and Lata Mangeshkars of this world, what is called 'merit' is to a significant degree also influenced by an individual's socio-economic position and/or opportunities gained by virtue of family and social connections.
In societies like ours characterised by deep-rooted social inequalities, using 'merit' as a means of access impedes mobility and tends to reproduce the same inequalities. Despite protestations to the contrary, it is therefore neither democratic nor egalitarian, unless there are countervailing tendencies.
One has argued elsewhere (Social Inequality, Labour Market Dynamics and Reservation, EPW, 2 September 2006) that changing labour market dynamics and privileged access to high quality tertiary education has meant upper-caste Hindus (UCH) in the last decade or so have dominated access to the best jobs in the urban economy. As a result, in the urban economy, SCs, STs and OBCs are similarly situated and at a great and growing distance from the UCH.
More than anything else, it is the changing labour market dynamics that necessitates widening the ambit of reservations in institutions of higher learning to include OBCs. In obstructing this process the Supreme Court runs the risk of being perceived as being both unfair and partisan.
But then UCH elite have long used their domination of the judiciary and the bureaucracy as mechanisms of passive resistance in their continuing battle to retain control over socio-economic levers of power. Consider two examples of radical public policy initiatives, the successful implementation of which might have altered the trajectory of India's socio-economic growth: the implementation of land reform and the SC/ST quota both of which were a part of the socio-economic compact that led to the birth of the Indian republic in 1950. Whereas zamindari was successfully abolished, the distribution of land declared surplus (beyond legally permissible holdings) was effectively stymied as land transfer got caught up a maze of litigation, bureaucratic obfuscation and lack of political will.
Similarly as a response to Ambedkar's mobilization and Gandhi's insistence, the UCH elite acceded to constitutionally guaranteed quotas for SCs and STs. However by ensuring that these quotas did not get filled, particularly in the higher echelons of the bureaucracy, judiciary and the public sector (including colleges and universities), the UCH elite ensured that any transformative potential was snuffed out. And rather than a debate why quotas remain unfilled, UCH elites, under the garb of equality, removed the 'creamy layer' from within the purview of the quota, effectively snuffing out the possibility of the formation of a countervailing elite.
OBC quotas have been resisted much more strenuously, in part because UCH elites have always seen OBCs, as compared with the SCs and STs, as being a much more serious threat to the continued control over the socio-economic levers of power. UCH elites have been successful in using passive resistance as a blocking strategy because there was insufficient grass-roots political mobilization around these issues. It can hardly be a coincidence that the states where land reforms (e.g., Kerala and West Bengal) or SC/ST/OBC quotas (e.g., Tamil Nadu) have been successfully implemented are states where there has been political mobilization around these issues.
But successful blocking strategies and elite resistance have also resulted in growing lower caste political mobilization. One of the outcomes of UCH elite resistance to Mandal was the re-drawing of the political map of India with a politically assertive lower caste mobilization. Therefore if, on the one hand, changing labour market dynamics and continued UCH domination of the most dynamic segments of the urban economy as a result of privileged access to institutions of higher learning necessitate an expansion of reservations in favour of OBCs, then on the other, UCH elite blocking strategies become politically counter-productive and socially expensive, as institutional and social energy is spent in coming up with effective strategies of exclusion, rather than devising strategies of inclusion and building a consensus around which to take this old society forward.
The author teaches economics at Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, Kolkata, India and can be reached at [email protected]
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