Caste-Based Reservations and the Sociology of “Merit”

It was a hot day in Chennai, May, 2002. I checked into an internet café to see the results of the IAS exam, the interview for which I had attended the previous month at Delhi. I was in a state of nervous apprehension, as I had not only spent the previous five years of my life for this exam but had also jeopardized my software job in the process of preparing for this exam. The results showed that I had got an All India Rank of 260. Some of my friends, who had got lower ranks than me got through to elite services like the Foreign Service, IPS etc because they were in OBC/SC category, while I did not get any service as I was in the general category. So, whatever is being written hereafter is not written out of self-interest.

There is a view even amongst many well-meaning people that caste-based reservations dilute “merit”, “equality of opportunity” etc. A small minority of them are against reservations as that would rob them of their status which they had hitherto enjoyed. But this article is for the majority of the people who are against reservations because they don’t simply understand the logic behind reservation itself. They cannot be faulted when respected former directors of elite educational institutions write articles in newspapers against reservations. With due respects, an understanding of the logic behind reservation needs a basic grounding in social science which unfortunately, an education system heavily tilted towards professional-skills does not prepare most Indian youth for.

We’ll go through a set of myths behind the opposition to caste-based reservation.

Myth No.1: Reservation should be based on economic criteria and not on social criteria like caste

This is the biggest myth of all. Reservations have nothing to do with making the poor rich though that might be an upshot of reservation. The preamble to our constitution promises to secure to the citizens of India, a Tri-Dimensional notion of Justice, viz, Social, Economic and Political. Reservation is aimed squarely at this notion of Social Justice.

The concept of self-esteem is central to the essence of the human-being as man is not a bread-seeking animal. The dignity that is needed for human existence is something that may not come with money per se. “Social status” becomes a central aspect of securing that dignity. And in a semi-feudal country like India, the social status comes with education, government jobs etc is tremendous. If a school teacher is earning 8000/- pm and a small-time trader peddling animal feed is also earning 8000/- pm, the social status differential between both will be definitely huge indeed, a differential which will reflect on the life-chances of their respective off-springs.

Myth No: 2: Upper castes are more meritorious than lower castes because they deserve it

Without taking its name, let us take the example of a prominent private management school in India. It does not have any reservation policy. Empirically, it has been found out that, out of the students who manage to join the institute, 90% are from the upper castes while the proportion of the upper castes in the Indian population is just about 15%. What is the reason? Why are only a certain set of castes able to get access to institutions of higher learning while others are not able to? Does this mean that the upper castes have a higher IQ while the lower castes don’t have that much IQ? If we endorse this kind of a simplistic reasoning, we run the risk of justifying the natural inequality of mankind based on which ideologies like fascism thrive.

So, we have to accept that all human beings have equal intellectual endowments at birth. Then how does only a certain set of castes able to prove themselves to be more intelligent and capable while others castes are not able to?. The reason has got to do with a concept with the name of “Cultural capital”. What we fail to understand is that upper castes are endowed with a certain kind of a “cultural capital” which lower castes might not have. Example of traits of “cultural capital” could be, the attitude towards education per se, knowing what to study, where to study, how to study, how to use education for self-advancement, how to use their existing networks of power and prestige etc. The fact of the matter is, this cultural capital has been usurped and monopolized by upper castes in India over a period of thousands of years by systematically excluding the lower castes through the legitimizing ideology of “Varnashrama Dharma”.

Myth No.3: Candidates who have availed the benefit of reservation need to feel guilty vis-à-vis the general candidates as they are enjoying a privilege which they don’t deserve in the first place.

Firstly, there are other huge structural imperfections in the system of education, job prospects based on education. With due respects to all braches of knowledge, anyone who has gone through courses like engineering would realize the kind of effort that one needs to put in to get admission and go through a good engineering course. But say, after an MBA course, an engineer might be regarded as an equal in terms of career prospects to an arts/commerce graduate who has also done his MBA and who might have put only a fraction of the effort that this engineer has put in for his graduation. So, if we assume that a person who has got an undeserved career prospect needs to feel “guilt”, does this mean that this arts/commerce graduate with an MBA needs to feel guilty vis-à-vis this engineer with an MBA? In a system with such huge imperfections, why should a candidate from reserved category feel guilty vis-à-vis the “meritorious” candidates just because he/she has got a few percentage points less?

More importantly, if we assume that candidates who have availed the benefit of reservation need to feel guilty, then the majority of humankind needs to feel guilty. Why should a software engineer get 50 times more salary than a manual scavenger when his job is far less de-humanizing than the job of a manual scavenger? There are so many of us who are enjoying so many benefits vis-à-vis so many others, which we don’t deserve in the first place. So if we all start feeling guilty, then half of humankind has to die of guilt before a single candidate who has to availed the benefits of reservation starts feeling a niggle of guilt vis-à-vis the “meritorious” candidates. So, nobody needs to feel “guilty”.

Myth No.4: Reservations will dilute “Merit”

This is the most interesting of all such myths. Here we need to delve deep into the sociology of “merit”. What is “merit”? Is it something that is decided by some percentile point difference in some competitive exams? Has humankind ever been able to devise perfect competitive exams which separate the wheat from the chaff? Can a person who has faced a competitive exam at one point in her life be branded a meritorious person or a dull person for the rest of her life? I know quite a few people who got such poor grades in their school leaving exams and did not manage to get admission in a full-time UG program. So they took up some clerical jobs and had to do their graduation through some correspondence program. But later on, they got enough motivation to prove themselves and became IAS exam toppers. Again there are so many competitive exams in which success or failure depends on whether one attended the proper coaching class rather than whether one is “meritorious”.

The stark reality is that, “Merit” is more of a chimera that provides a superb basis for legitimizing an ideational framework that justifies the various privileges which the elite of our society enjoy.

Myth No: 5: It is power-hungry, corrupt politicians who bring in concepts like caste-based reservations for the sake of getting votes

It has become fashionable in Indian middle-class circles to blame politicians for all the ills plaguing society. First we have to understand the definition of a “politician”. In a liberal democracy like ours, politicians basically represent the interests of the different sections of the society. So, if lower castes marshal the political strength to press for their demands, then the politician will represent their interests and further his own career in the process. This is a very natural process in a democracy and there is no evil manipulation of the masses by the politician in this kind of a process.

In a country like India where there are crores of children out of school, we, the members of the Indian middle class don’t have a problem if politicians earmark half the central budget for higher education for IITs & IIMs and the products of these institutions go abroad or join MNCs. But when the very same politicians press for reservation for the lower castes in these institutions, then the very same middle classes accuse the politicians of playing “vote-bank politics”, diluting “merit”, encroaching on the “professional autonomy” of academic institutes etc.

Myth No: 6: In critical sectors like health etc, there should not be any reservation as it will endanger the public

Let us take the example of a public hospital. Let us assume that all the doctors in the hospital are “meritorious” upper-caste people who have not availed of the benefit of reservation. In this scenario, a poor lower caste person may not even get access to the hospital services. In a country like India, without any personal “contacts”, it might be very difficult for a poor lower caste person to get even simple access to the services of a public hospital. But in a scenario wherein reservations are there, probably the lower caste person may have a distant relative or a friend who is working as a doctor in the very same hospital using whom he can gain access to the services of the hospital.

Myth No.7: Reservations benefit only the already well-off sections within the lower castes and hence should not be given.
While this may be true to some extent because of some procedural imperfections, the “creamy layer” concept is meant to rectify this problem. Much of the opposition to reservation from seductively named groups claiming to be for “Equality” voice this view and hence argue against reservations. If these very same people launch a campaign for ensuring that the fruits of reservation reach the really deserving sections amongst the lower castes, then the whole of India will be behind them. But it seems that their real worry is not that the deserving sections amongst the lower castes are not getting the fruits of reservation but that they themselves might lose the privileges that they have been enjoying so far.

Myth No: 8: Caste based reservations will make society more “casteist”

This kind of an argument will be tenable if there was nothing like “caste” in Indian society and caste based reservations will introduce an evil element called as “caste” into the Indian social fabric. I’ll recount an anecdote. One day, on the lawns of the IRMA mess, I was talking with the father of a PRM (the PG program in IRMA) girl who happens to be my friend. He is an upper caste person and a person whom I like and respect a lot at a personal level. He was saying that he would be happy if his daughter did not join up for a plum corporate job and instead joined a NGO for a low pay in a rural setting. Very few Indian parents will be as liberal and as spiritually evolved as him. But he also said something else. He said that he will disown his daughter if she married a scheduled caste person. The point over here is that even such an evolved and liberal person like him is not able to think beyond caste. We cannot blame him. The feudal prejudices which we have all imbibed over the last three thousand years cannot be changed in a generation or two. This goes to prove what Ambedkar said a long time back – only when caste becomes a non-issue in the matter of all marriages in India, then only can we accept that caste has been eradicated from the Indian social fabric.

If caste doesn’t exist, then why is it so that almost all of the one million strong manual scavengers in India are from the scheduled castes and almost none of them are from the upper castes? If any upper caste person checked the caste identities of all of her/his friends, she/he will find that they all are mostly from the upper castes. Why is this so? Not because we consciously avoid befriending other castes but because the social spaces and networks in which we have lived from our birth like neighbourhood, school and other such institutionalized spaces are more or less structured around broad caste based lines. For thousands of years, caste has been an oppressive part of the system in which you and I live in. So, what is wrong if the very same caste identity is made use of to fight caste-based oppression?

Myth No: 9: Instead of reservation, we should concentrate on making our public education system better so that all castes can come to an equal footing

Over here, we have to understand that caste based reservation is not mutually exclusive with making our public education system better. Nobody is saying that we should not have excellent educational systems for all of India’s children. Even if we start stupendous efforts in that direction, that alone may not suffice and so caste-based reservations become a necessity.

Myth No: 10: In the Indian constitution, Caste based reservations were envisaged only for 10 years initially and hence should not be continued.

Here we have to understand one thing. The Indian constitution is meant to be understood and followed in both the letter and the spirit. The spirit behind the caste based reservation envisaged in the constitution was to erase caste-based discrimination through reservation within 10 years, after which all castes will be brought on the same footing. 60 years after independence, has that purpose been achieved? No!. Even now, in all government jobs, avenues for higher education and in all kinds of elite jobs, the lower caste representation is below their proportion in the population. So, till the representation of lower castes becomes equal to their proportion in the population, we need to have caste-based reservations.
And once the oppression-based differential between the different castes vanish, then one day in the not-so-distant future, caste as an institution will wither away as it will have no more relevance. And in my humble opinion, till that golden day, we need to have caste-based reservations.