Affirming the need for quotas, but fine-tuning them

This book is an essential read for the middle and upper class (rather, the upper castes) who see “Mandal” as the biggest blight in their lives.

With the number of reserved seats going up to 50 per cent or more in Government jobs after the ‘Mandal' or Indra Sawhney vs Union of India case, the upper castes feel short-changed. How could the ‘merit' in them have been bypassed for an undeserving rabble? They see the all-India implementation of Mandal as a cynical political exercise to win the votes of the other backward castes (OBCs). The Census puts the number of OBCs at about half the population.

93rd Amendment

The ghost of Mandal reared its head again in 2005-06, when Parliament passed the 93rd Amendment to the Constitution, extending OBC reservations to higher education, Government and private. As in 1991-92, righteous students flowed out on Delhi's streets, demanding that IITs, IIMs and medical colleges be kept out of quotas so that they remain as centres of “excellence.” The media largely backed their fight for “justice,” as did Dr P. Venugopal, who was then the Director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences.

This book is a collection of papers by social scientists, philosophers and lawyers, presented at a seminar organised by the Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Chicago in March 2008. It makes a sound case for “positive discrimination” in unequal, diverse societies such as India and South Africa.

On “affirmative action” in the US, the essayists suspect that it does not go as far as the laws in India and South Africa permit. They rightly feel that the use of the term in the Indian context smacks of a campaign to dilute reservations, and instead replace them with a fuzzier set of benefits.

Economist Prabhat Patnaik argues that, contrary to what even the supporters of quotas accept, reservations do not entail a loss of economic efficiency.

“Since talent is equally distributed across social groups, making the group-wise composition of recruitment approximate the group-wise composition of the population as a whole ensures an efficiency ‘gain', not an efficiency ‘loss',” he says. If reservations were to cause inefficiency, the Southern states, which have been implementing 50 per cent-plus reservations for decades, should have lagged behind the North.

Martha Nassbaum says that the “opposition to affirmative action typically focuses narrowly on economic benefits, both to individuals and to the nation. When education's goals are conceived more inclusively, the case for affirmative action becomes far stronger.” She outlines these goals as “(a) human development…(b) preparation for (responsible, well-rounded) citizenship and political activity (c) understanding diversity (d) correcting historical injustice and (e) creating a fairer distribution of social advantage…”

‘creamy layer'

A useful paper by Thomas E Weisskopf addresses the demand to exclude the “creamy layer,” or the well-off among the backwards, from quotas, also voiced in recent court rulings. He argues that the integration of elites among the disadvantaged into the mainstream will lend a voice to their communities, if the communities concerned have a sense of solidarity.

Creamy layer exclusion can perhaps be justified in the case of OBCs where such a sense of solidarity or cohesion is absent, he concedes. But he adds a caveat that class-based discrimination cannot be effectively implemented in a situation where incomes can be fudged.

Both, Weisskopf and D. Parthasarathy discuss the use of teaching techniques and assessment methods, both before and after admissions, to bring out the potential of socially disadvantaged students. They need help through “bridge programmes” to make up for years, if not generations, of being in an inferior learning environment.

Speaking of the IITs, Parthasarathy says that such students are up against a biased faculty and student community. This can perhaps only be addressed if teachers, too, are drawn from all sections of society – a point that, surprisingly, does not find mention in the book.

Satish Deshpande argues that reservations have reached the “end of the road.” “Rapid privatisation has changed the entire landscape, and it cannot be assumed that policies focused solely on reservation will be adequate…”

One may add here (not stated in the book) that Deshpande and political scientist Yogendra Yadav have mooted a concept of quotas based on class, caste, rural-urban differences and gender, with different weightages ascribed to each category. That could be a way forward. To that, whether religion should be added is a matter of controversy, with the Sachar Committee, as pointed out by Zoya Hasan, pointing to the particularly disadvantaged condition of Muslims.

In all, the book makes a reasoned case for continuing with quotas, but it is also important to fine-tune them to match changing socio-economic realities.

Reservations are inevitable in a political system dominated by the lower castes. However, with the upper castes still holding sway in major spheres of public life, a lot of equalising, or democratisation, remains to be done.

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