Disclaimer — I’m not against reservation. This article is an idea to make reservations work better for the nation and spread out the benefit to more people within the reserved %. Don’t troll me or put me in a casteist mould. This disclaimer could have been put at the end of the article, but we’ve kind of lost the ability to read till the end. We just read a bit and judge. So there.
Reservation has been around for a generation now and we no longer can visualise how we would have fared if those %s wouldn’t have been around. I am from the first generation of reservation affected people. Honestly, my life is just fine and I have never faced any real hurdles that matter in the long run, because of reservations going against me. Friends who got lower ranks got into IIT, classmates who didn’t do very well at school today have high ranking government jobs. And only when they got those seats did we (as kids in school), wonder how; and got introduced to the concept of caste. Till then, we honestly did not know what caste our friends belonged to. There is no real reason to have known! And once the bug gets into our thought process, instantly it takes root, and never really goes away after that. But no complaints really. Since I did not study in a top-rated institution, or have ever applied for a Govt job, personally it didn’t really matter to me. And this article is not about the haves vs the have-nots. It is not to talk about the merits and demerits of the mandal commission and the subsequent changes to the act. It is not to comment on the %s assigned and the basis on which they are allotted. This article is to offer a practical amendment.
With age comes maturity and an ability to see things without blinkers and emotion (or rather, it should). It is a fact that the concept of caste is being kept alive, fuelled, and stoked because of reservations. If one would spend a bit of time to look at what reservations looked like when they first became the law a couple of decades ago, and what they look like now, one would realise that we’ve taken it to a whole different level, and not in a good way. Politicians have always used emotion and found most of our population gullible and swayed by promises. Each election, since it was first introduced, the reservations bill has become more and more complex. Especially since the %s in departments under state purview are decided by the states, it has become a competition based on the how many voters can be swayed by additional %s for a particular caste. It is a open and dirty road our leadership takes every five years. It doesn’t change. And since the generation of people who did not have reservations in their lives has almost passed, only those who take it for granted remain. We want more, we lobby for it, blackmail our leaders with our votes, and each election, every caste digs itself deeper into their trench to fight from.
Just this morning, our current government has announced this —
The hearing is from a petition challenging a Supreme Court verdict from 2008. It clearly says ‘against quota in promotions for creamy layer’. And our Attorney General today is arguing that ‘since SC/STs have suffered social inequalities for years, for the purpose of quotas in promotions, it should be presumed that they are backward even now. The ‘creamy layer’, mind you, should still be ‘presumed to be backward even now’ — after all these years. If the ‘creamy layer’ is backward, what about those who reservations were supposed to actually benefit?!
Most of us reading this article would be familiar with the recent caste-based agitations in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh. We have all seen ‘agitations’ where humungous rallies were conducted with swanky imported cars. It is quite obvious that these are the ‘creamy layer’ our Supreme Court spoke about in that said petition. But our Attorney General himself is arguing on behalf of the government that they should be ‘presumed backward even now’. Those driving to the rally in Mercedes cars, BMWs, and Audis don’t even pretend to be ‘backward’. For them, reservation is not primarily for college seats or government jobs. It is about power. Our politicians have mastered that equation, and their single-minded agenda is about a ‘vote-base’.
If you would spend a bit of time to read about the original recommendations of Mandal Commission, it is quite different from what we see in action today. Most important finding from that recommendation (and what forms the crux of this blog post), is this —
In the very first page of the report submitted to the government, the commission chairman B P Mandal mentioned that L R Naik did not sign the recommendation because of the above reason. Boy, was Mr Naik right or what!! There is no real way to study if the real beneficiaries of the reservation bill — the most backward classes — are getting what they should be. When the same % of reserved seats / jobs have to be spread out between all those registered under a particular caste, is the benefit reaching the real downtrodden? If an entrance exam were conducted in which the son of that BMW driving Ahmedabad businessman (who studied in the city’s fanciest school) and the son of a farm labourer of the same caste (who barely passed his government school exam), who will score more, and who’ll get that seat under quota? This is but an example of what Mr Naik rightly opined while making recommendations for the Mandal Commission report, which formed the basis for all our reservation %s across the country today.
To use words from the earlier quoted Supreme Court petition, ‘creamy layer’ will keep walking away with most of the benefits of reservation while the marginalised will continue to remain marginalised. The basis for reservations was that people from certain castes were oppressed by people from the so-called ‘upper classes’, and that they needed a bolster to catch up. Instead, what we managed to do was to replace these ‘upper classes’ with ‘creamy layer’ from their own castes, thereby dealing in a double whammy — one to the people who genuinely should have been benefiting from reservation, and second to those now bunched into the ‘open category’ because their ancestors did not appreciate equality a few hundred years before these poor chaps were even born. Lets counter reservation with reverse reservation 💪🏼.
Talking about the merits and demerits of this reservation is moot today. It is a part of our society and we cannot do away with it. In fact, we shouldn’t do away with it yet since it has not served the purpose it has set out to achieve. So here’s what i’ve been trying to lead up to.
Would it be radical to suggest one change in the law for the good of all concerned? Let the reservation card be used once for education and once for employment. Let it expire after one use. For every person. Aadhaar has every detail. Link it there. Like we track PDS and the number of subsidised LPG cylinders and other Govt scheme benefits. Let its use be limited. Used once, it cannot be reused for education. So if an engineering seat was got through a reserved quota, a foreign scholarship for a masters degree couldn’t be applied for again since one use for education is done. A Masters degree entrance for our prime institutions would also have to be got on merit if reservation was already used at Bachelor’s degree level. If one got through the IIT entrance applying under the reserved category, she wouldn’t be allowed to appear for UPSC entrance under reserved. She’d have to apply in the open category and compete with the rest. Same for a job. If a candidate uses his reservation to get a job in one company, and if he wants to change his job, let him apply in open category and face full competition. This has anyway been the case where reserved seats are few. But now lets make it mandatory. Once it has been used, it can’t be reused again. Do a study, change the reservation %s based on single-use for education, and single use for jobs, since the number of applicants will be lower than what it currently is.
It is quite fair IMO. A student has been given a reserved seat ahead of the competition to study in a good college. Then he’s been given a chance to leapfrog the competition yet again in a job interview. Enough! The concept of reservation was to help uplift the otherwise marginalised sections of our society. Caste was considered to be an acceptable factor while trying to understand how to identify these weaker sections. It has not been successful in its current form. The same candidates keep cornering all the benefits assigned to their community as a whole, and the student from a small village, who this % was actually supposed to have helped, continues to languish at the bottom of the pyramid. If there is 5% reservation for a certain community, and if the same people keep using up all the 5%, how can reservation claim to have benefit the entire community? If 10000 people are eligible from a community for that 5% and if 2000 of them have used reservation to get into a bachelor’s degree, only the remaining 8000 should be eligible to use it at masters. Give more people a chance within that 5% of reserved category seats! And remove the concept of applying reservations yet again for promotions. A candidate who has gotten into a good college and then a good job on the basis of reservation has already spent several years ahead of where he would otherwise have been. If he couldn’t use that time to better himself and become eligible for promotion on the basis of merit, he doesn’t deserve it! Looking at it from the other side, it is painfully obvious that simply because he knows he can fight it in a court of law, he knows he doesn’t need to perform as well as he otherwise should have, to be eligible for promotion on merit. We’re grooming mediocrity. Especially in crucial areas like education and health.
In 25 years, the competition graph should have become flatter. Instead, it has become even more skewed. Making this change won’t incite Mandal commission style riots again, since it is not pitting caste against caste for a limited number of seats / jobs. It is flattening out the system to give more opportunity within a particular caste so that more people will atleast have benefitted once in their lifetime! It will allow the caste-based budgets (which are spiralling out of control every election) to be reined in, and will allow more money to be allotted for development rather than for appeasement. Most important of all, it will allow those at the bottom of the pyramid to actually benefit from a law which was made for their benefit!
The % offered to reservation is more or less fixed. That cannot be changed. If an attempt is made to do that, it’ll cause the nation to burn yet again. Instead, what our politicians do each election is promise to include various castes into the reserved category, or promise an OBC caste to be given SC status. They’ll do anything for votes. But at the end of the day, isn’t the system becoming more skewed? Can we bring up statistics wherein reservations have successfully ‘uplifted’ even a single caste like they should have? Afterall, its been close to three decades now. Or is it even possible that some years later, some castes will be moved from the reserved category to unreserved since they have ‘developed’ enough? That isn’t going to happen anyway. Its a one-way journey. Making the slightest noise about removing or reducing reservations will mark the end of whichever political party makes that noise. Atleast lets give those its supposed to benefit a greater degree of equality.
