10% EWS quota: opportunistic politics or annihilation of caste?
It was a regular day at work, settling into my chair post lunch, when a news notification popped up on my work dashboard and it read “Cabinet approves 10% reservation for economically weaker upper castes”.
The headlines didn’t fail to have the intended impact- I was perplexed, appalled, and livid, all at once. The only question in my head was: Why do upper castes need reservation in the first place?
But the opinions at my own workplace were divided. Someone believed that the spontaneous declaration was a step towards more equitable distribution of seats and that the reservation system in its current form was unfair to the general category. I failed to understand.
The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s petition against the order in the Madras High Court resonated strongly with my first thoughts.
The DMK claimed that reservation is not a poverty alleviation programme, but is more in the nature of social justice to uplift communities that have not had access to education or employment for centuries. I wondered how reservation to upper castes could be justified since their economic backwardness was not a subset of their caste position.
It also didn’t help that a day ago, Maharashtra Chief Minister and BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis had highlighted the limited effectiveness of reservation when he said, “Government can give 25 thousand jobs per year and this is equivalent to the number of those who are longing for jobs in a single tehsil. Reservation is not a solution to the problem. When people will get an opportunity in various sectors, the importance of reservation will slowly fade away. Then only those who really deserve will get the reservation.”
That his own ruling party at the Centre rolled out a reservation policy in jobs and higher education was disconcerting. The move was clearly aimed at regaining the support of upper castes that had begun to elude the BJP close to the Lok Sabha elections.
Part of my job at UnFound is to ensure the readers are presented with a well-rounded view of topics in the news, with a wide range of opinions. The in-house AI assists me with the same, by curating answers sourced from credible news sources across the Internet. As I worked to incorporate the same about the Constitution (124th Amendment) Bill, I was led to certain pieces by the AI (most of which have been cited here) and also came across perspectives and opinions which helped me look at the Bill with a broader outlook. The AI pointed me to an interesting piece on Rightlog.in. It said,
The historic amendment would be in line with the Modi government’s policy of doing away with caste-based appeasement.
This was confusing! Wasn’t the very idea of the then-proposed amendment rooted in appeasing upper castes?
My disapproval did not seem to be shared by many, though. Not enough people seemed to be criticizing the scheme that I expected the Left, especially DBA activists, to revolt against. Surely then, it had some merits that weren’t visible to me.
I found my answer in an analysis by The Indian Express,
The proposal has one small silver lining. One unintended thing it will do is remove the stigma of reservation itself. Reservation has historically been associated with caste. And often in our imagination, there was a stigma that the upper caste put on those who had come through the reservation. By including upper castes under the sign of reservation, it dissociates caste and the stigma of reservation. Upper castes can no longer resent Dalits and others for reservation. Dalit groups have been arguing this for a while; hence their support for this policy.
That doesn’t take away from the tokenistic nature of the move since the reservation pie in government jobs is shrinking and share of public sector jobs in organized sector employment has sharply declined since liberalization in the 1990s, as pointed out by Hindustan Times.
What must be acknowledged though is that the BJP has delivered a political masterstroke by proposing the reservation, considering the fact that if opposition political parties vote against 10% quota for economically weaker ‘upper castes’ then they risk losing votes of a member belonging to upper castes. If they support the bill proposing the amendment then it’s the BJP which will get the credit.
It wasn’t surprising then that the Bill was passed in both the houses of Parliament and also received the President’s assent with little trouble. The Bill has now become the Constitution (103rd Amendment) Act, 2019 and has already been implemented by a few states. What remains to be seen is if it lives up to the expectations or fails to deliver.
But as Times of India pointed out, it wouldn’t hurt to be optimistic.
“The new quota for ‘the poor among forwards’ faces a stiff test in the Supreme Court with various interests, including those that feel it dilutes existing reservations, challenging its constitutional validity. But it can also break fresh ground, potentially providing the salve for a bitter quota-non-quota divide. Till now, attempts at the inclusion of non-OBC, non-SC/ST categories in existing quotas or carving fresh ones ran into the constitutional provision that backwardness is judged solely on social and educational grounds. An economic criterion seeks to vault over this barrier and create a quota accessible to all faiths and castes outside the purview of reservation.”
[Contributed by Snigdha Bansal, Editor at UnFound.news]
