Terms of Trade | Bahujans against Bahujans
SC judgment is likely to encourage politics which seeks sub-stratification of political loyalties in name of sub-stratification of affirmative action benefits
All Bahujans are deprived. But some Bahujans are more deprived than others. This crude paraphrasing of George Orwell is a good description of the ongoing churn in India’s social justice and overall politics today.
Thursday’s constitution bench judgment of the Supreme Court which has ratified the sub-classification of reservations for Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) communities by states has given a judicial sanctity to this principle. The judgment is likely to encourage politics which seeks sub-stratification of political loyalties in the name of sub-stratification of affirmative action benefits. To be sure, there are multiple examples of this kind of politics across states in the past. Whether or not the BJP finally bites the bullet on this question, the court’s judgment has also given a firm legal footing to its work in progress to sub-stratify the existing 27% reservation for OBCs via the Justice Rohini Commission. It is supposed to be its proverbial nuclear option against Mandal parties.
Is there anything fundamentally wrong with this logic? From a strictly empirical perspective, perhaps not. There is widespread statistical evidence of intra-group inequalities within the ranks of SC, ST and Other Backward Classes (OBC) groups in India. Because we actually have sub-caste-wise data for the first two groups in the census, the evidence is likely to be more robust for them than the OBCs for whom sub-caste-wise data exists only from private surveys except in the case of Bihar which conducted and published a caste census last year.
Lest there is any confusion, almost all data also shows that a large part of the SC-ST-OBC population continues to face material and educational deprivation. There is more than enough anecdotal evidence to show that the first two groups are also victims of caste discrimination not just from the proverbial upper castes but even dominant OBCs. The latter fact is a strong justification to guard against the introduction of a creamy layer in giving reservations to SC-ST groups.
All of these inequalities and acts of discrimination should be anathema to a civilised democratic society. Will the political and legal push for the sub-stratification of affirmative action benefits for these groups solve this problem? There is good reason to argue that they will not. The simple reason is that this is a policy which amounts to nothing but a second-order division of an already shrinking cake of (reserved) government jobs in the Indian economy. Many credible economists believe India would need to generate between seven to ten million jobs every year to solve its employment challenge. How many of them can be expected to come from the public sector? Not even a million a year.
None of this is unknown to either politicians or advocates of such policies. What explains the growing popularity of such sub-stratification then? Answering this question requires a digression from judicial or constitutional debates on social inequality. Praxis of affirmative action in democracies has an organic link with wider politics. This intersection can produce outcomes which range from revolutionary to retrograde. The present of this dialectic is also a result of how it has evolved in the past.
The revolt of first-generation social reformers such as B R Ambedkar was nothing short of a revolution in Indian society. Ambedkar’s rise and assertion forced the then-hegemonic Congress to concede political (and eventually economic) representation to Dalits in a compromise (Poona Pact) which was actually seen as a loss for Ambedkar back then. It is difficult to even imagine what India’s society and politics would have been without the emancipatory agenda which Ambedkar and our first-generation social reformers brought to the table.
This generation’s victories notwithstanding, the battle for actual political agency for the socially discriminated is still a work in progress. The biggest advances in this battle came from regional political actors who politically weaponized the struggle for social equality. From a Karpoori Thakur in Bihar to the communists in Bengal, a lot of politics, especially until the 1970s was actually in the nature of class and caste struggle by the socially and economically deprived sections against benefactors of the old political, economic and essentially feudal order in large parts of India. Even though the clarion call prioritized only one of these fault lines at times, the actual struggle on the ground was strongly linked with each other.
Ironical as it sounds, the success of this politics laid the seeds of its destruction too. The cause, as in the case of the nascent post-colonial State’s failure to achieve a meaningful economic transformation, was the same. The vanguard of the movement became more interested in usurping the gains of the project rather than advancing the project itself. What followed was a low-level equilibrium trap in the economy along with an oligopolic hold on politics. In places like Bihar, the culprit was a clique or a person representing the dominant OBC caste group, while in places like Bengal, the Communist Party became more interested in retaining political power than furthering the cause of either the economic or democratic revolution.
Even as these struggles were being fought and tables were being turned, the larger economic canvas started changing after the economic reforms of 1991. What three decades of economic reforms have done to the country is created a very small enclave of prosperity within the formal sector and a large amorphous mass of labour which keeps moving within agriculture as well as informal non-agricultural occupations. It is the market which is exploiting this precariat more today than the caste-ridden feudal order which was the exploiter in chief when the likes of Ambedkar fought their battles.
Politics has reacted to this complex economic problem by taking a turn towards seeking fractures in the so-called Bahujan base to game the first-past-the-post system for retaining or capturing political power and expanding the net of fiscal palliatives to keep it from exploding economically. From a larger socio-economic transformation perspective, both of these are anything but radical or progressive ideas. What is worse is they actually create divisions within the large base of social and economic have-nots rather than uniting them for a meaningful struggle against the overall exploitative top-heavy economic regime and its capture of overall politics. Seen from this perspective the so-called agenda of making social justice more egalitarian is making it less effective when it comes to achieving its long-term goals and nudging it to fight battles, which were lost in the past rather than preparing it for the ones that need to be fought in the future.
Roshan Kishore, HT's Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country's economy and its political fall out, and vice-versa
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