RESERVATIONS
The politics of reservations
The BJP-led Government's decision to include the Jats of Rajasthan in the backward classes list has caused the first breach in the covenant that the enumeration arrived at by the Mandal Commission and various States would not be seriously modified.
SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN
in New Delhi
FROM the moment the Mandal Commission recommendations were implemented it was foretold that an immediate consequence would be an unseemly rush among various communities for the appellation of backwardness. Clearly, all sections that might have feared being left behind in the race for status and power had reason to covet the relative privileges assured to those who met the criteria of social and educational backwardness.
Part of the challenge of running an effective programme of affirmative action lay in resisting sectional pressure for the benefits that are associated with the tag of backwardness. There was, in other words, a tacit premise of restraint underlying the programme - a political compact that the enumeration of backward classes arrived at by the Mandal Commission and the periodically updated lists of the State governments would not be seriously modified.
Shortly after taking office on October 13, the Atal Behari Vajpayee Government committed the first breach in this covenant. Although a formal notification is yet to be issued, it is reliably learnt that the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Government has delivered with extreme alacrity on its campaign pledge to confer the backward class status on the Jats of Rajasthan. It was a demand that had loomed large over the election campaign, though its precise impact is still debatable.
Indications are that the BJP did succeed in winning over a large section of the Jat community from their traditional allegiance to the Congress(I) by assuring them that the demand for backward class status would be met. Yet, despite a substantial desertion of a traditional constituency, the Congress(I) did not really suffer a serious erosion in its share of the popular vote. Evidently, the defection of the Jat vote was made good by an accretion of other social constituencies to the ranks of the Congress(I). The BJP's sweeping triumph in Rajasthan is in this reckoning attributable less to the Jat factor than to the recruitment to its cause of voters who had remained uncommitted in the 1998 Assembly elections.
In the moment of its triumph, though, the BJP did not stop to ponder over these subtleties. It had under consideration a report by the National Commission on Backward Classes (NCBC), dating back to November 1997, which had recommended that the Jats of Rajasthan did merit the benefits of the special protections available under the Mandal Commission recommendations. This was one among the many advisories submitted by the NCBC, recommending the inclusion of 372 distinct communities in the backward classes list. Since the political motivation behind accepting the recommendation on the Rajasthan Jats alone would have been obvious, the Government, it is reliably learnt, has decided to ratify the NCBC findings in respect of 130 communities. As for the rest, they are understood to be still "under consideration".
GOPAL SUNGER
At a rally of the Jat Mahasabha in Jaipur in August.
Section 9(2) of the Act of Parliament setting up the NCBC stipulates that the recommendations of the Commission shall "ordinarily" be binding on the Central Government. This effectively removes the scope for selective implementation of the NCBC's recommendations, though it does still allow for delays. The pace of the Government's deliberations could in each case be carefully calibrated to a calculation of the political dividend that could be earned from cultivating a particular community.
Obviously unnerved by the election outcome and the Central Government's alacrity, the Rajasthan State Government led by Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot lost little time in announcing its intention to bring Jats into the State list of backward classes. This really is the more substantive achievement for the sustained campaign that the community has run for the last one year. The Mandal Commission recommendations only pertain to the stagnant pool of employment opportunities in the Central Government sector. But the State Government list has a bearing on the crucial area of reservations in local bodies.
Panchayat institutions were once an important locus for the projection of Jat power. But once reservations for the backward classes became an element of official policy, Jats found themselves isolated from the positions of dominance in local bodies. More than access to public employment, this was the crucial factor impelling the Rajasthan Jats towards the path of militancy in their quest for the backward status.
In quickly giving in to the demand after an adverse electoral outcome, the Congress(I) may have undermined its own longer-term strategy of cultivating other social constituencies to substitute for the Jat desertions. The capitulation also serves notice that the policy of affirmative action is susceptible to lobbying pressures and power politics. The Central Government had the shroud of legitimacy for its decision in the recommendation of the NCBC, while the State Government had none. In fact, the growing politicisation of a judicial function recently had a casualty in the resignation of the Chairman of the Rajasthan State Backward Classes Commission, Justice R.S. Verma. His grievance was simple: when he was engaged in the elaborate process of adjudication over the Jats' claim for inclusion in the backward classes list, Prime Minister Vajpayee had during election campaign in Sikar, Rajasthan, seemingly already settled the question in favour of the petitioners.
The situation in Rajasthan today is replete with anomalies. The State Backward Classes Commission is considering applications from a diversity of communities, including Bishnois, Meos, Kayamkanis and Sindhi Muslims. In their agitational phase, Jats had sought to make common cause with these other communities that seemed to have a somewhat better case for inclusion in the list of backward classes. But political volubility ensured that the Jat case gained acceptance, while all the others languish in neglect. When asked about this situation, Gehlot reaffirmed his resolve to have a speedy consideration of these cases by the Backward Classes Commission. Of course, this required at the minimum that the Chairman of the Commission would withdraw his resignation. Failing that, a new chairman would have to be nominated and the work of the commission begun all over again.
R.V. MOORTHY
Justice P.K. Shyam Sundar, Chairman of the National Commission on Backward Classes.
Justice P.K. Shyam Sundar, Chairman of the NCBC, insists on retaining the confidentiality of his advisory opinions until they are actually implemented. This, he says, is a minimum requirement of administrative propriety. And since his advice on the Jats has not yet been formally implemented, the premises and assumptions on which it has been based are yet unknown. Shyam Sundar did reveal, though, that the relative social inequities that the Jats of Rajasthan confronted were a decisive factor in moulding his opinion. It is not so much the actual condition of the community that was critical, but its relative social position in relation to dominant communities such as Brahmins and Rajputs.
This is one among many criteria that have been used in the past to determine the degree of social debility that a community faces. The reality of affirmative action in India today is of a multiplicity of concepts contending for influence in the categorisation of social classes. The four southern States and Maharashtra have adopted a taxonomic pattern that is rather expansive in its coverage. Further, since backward class movements and compensatory reservations have a relatively long genealogy in these States, they all have fairly stable and well-accepted enumerations of the beneficiary groups.
In stark contrast are the Hindi-speaking States in the west, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, and the eastern States of West Bengal and Orissa - where the term "backward classes" has had no significant role in state policy. The Mandal Commission brought this category to the forefront, but its taxonomy of classes was unfortunately based on the economic conditions of households as reported in the 1931 Census. This was a rather dubious recourse that the Commission had to take, because the Central Government effectively outlawed caste as a census category in 1951. Though the census enumeration in 1951 did collect data on caste and its social and economic correlates, it was not analysed in terms of these parameters on account of an aversion to caste in the early Nehruvian years.
The first Backward Classes Commission headed by Kaka Kalelkar confronted this rather ambivalent situation with an excess of bravery: "In the absence of reliable facts and figures, the only course open to us was to rely on the statistics available from the various Governments and the previous census reports, and to go by the general impressions of Government officers, leaders of public opinion and social workers." In certain cases, the Commission had no data at all and was compelled to take a decision on "the strength of the name of the community only, on the principle of giving the benefit of the doubt". And though the Kalelkar Commission shared prevalent reservations about utilising caste and community as markers of social distinctions, it was absolutely clear that it would be "difficult to avoid caste in the present prevailing conditions".
GOPAL SUNGER
Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot.
The Kalelkar report was tabled in Parliament in 1956 and it was accompanied by a scathing official note from the Government deprecating the use of caste as a category. The Government noted that caste was "the greatest hindrance in the way of our progress toward an egalitarian society" and warned that the "recognition of specified castes as backward may serve to maintain and perpetuate the existing distinctions on the basis of caste". The Government said that the criteria evolved by the Commission, when they were not exclusively dependent on caste, were "obviously vague".
The Kalelkar report was summarily thrown out of court with the observation that "further investigations will have to be undertaken so that the deficiencies that have been noticed in the findings of the Commission are made good and the problem is solved..." There was, in other words, a tacit recognition that a problem existed which called for solution.
The Mandal Commission, which submitted its report in 1980, was the next attempt at the Central level to address this problem. But the data base that it used was as infirm and uncertain as ever. In clearing the way for the implementation of the Mandal recommendations in 1992, the Supreme Court ruled in the historic case of Indira Sawhney versus the Union of India, that the Central government and all State governments should set up permanent commissions to review the list of beneficiaries continually. As Justice T.K. Thommen put it: "Identification of backwardness is an ever-continuing process of inclusion and exclusion. Classes of citizens entitled to the constitutional protection of reservations must be constantly and periodically identified for their inclusion and for the exclusion of those who do not qualify. To allow the undeserved to benefit by reservation is to deny protection to those who are meant to be protected."
The proposed commissions were envisaged as quasi-judicial bodies which would conduct their deliberations in an environment free of political influence - a condition unlikely to be met in the best of circumstances. Further, the Supreme Court did not seem to give much attention to the possibility of a conflict between Central- and State-level assessments. This is an infirmity which has been reinforced by the default of successive Ministries at the Centre on the fundamental obligation to define norms for identifying backward classes. The recent decisions of the BJP-led Government show how in the growing crisis of ambiguity that shrouds reservations policy, expediency is likely to triumph finally.
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