It is a mere coincidence that the Narasimha Rao government’s decision on job reservations for ‘other backward castes’ and the poor among the ‘forward castes’ has come in the wake of dramatic moves by it to liberate the country’s economy from the stranglehold of the permit-license Raj. But it is an interesting coincidence.
On the face of it, the two developments speak of a schizoid government pushing the country in two contrary directions. For, it can legitimately be argued that while the new economic policy seeks to lay the ghost of Nehruvian socialism, the reservation decision harks back to the discredited Leninist-Stalinist concept which requires the state to engage in ‘social engineering’ in order to promote ‘equality’.
In reality, the two sets of decisions represent a break from the past, though in different ways. If the new economic policy will reduce substantially the powers of the bureaucracy, reservations of over 60% jobs in government and government-controlled institutions will weaken, fragment and discredit the bureaucracy.
The government cannot, of course, be either unduly praised for the new economic policy or blamed for the reservation decision. It has not opted voluntarily for either. In the first case, it has been pushed by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other creditors, and in the second by the compulsion to define its position in the cases pending before the Supreme Court and to woo powerful groups in the light of as many as 17 crucial by-elections next month.
The Prime Minister would almost certainly have preferred to move slowly if only the circumstances had permitted this. By temperament, PV Narasimha Rao is a cautious person inclined to lead from behind rather than from the front. But the country would have faced bankruptcy if he had not yielded to the IMF and the World Bank, and the Congress would have run into heavy weather in the by-elections if he had parried on the reservation issue. In any event, he could not have kept the Supreme Court waiting for a statement on the government’s stand indefinitely.
Be that as it may, however, it speaks for the quality of our democracy that all political parties have welcomed the reservations decision. On the face of it, this welcome on the part of organisations other than the VP Singh-led Janata Dal has been made possible by the government’s move to introduce the economic criterion in the recommendation of the Mandal Commission and to provide for the poor among the ‘forward castes’. In fact, this is so much hogwash.
VP Singh’s principal lieutenants, Ram Vilas Paswan and Sharad Yadav, have alleged that the present government has resorted to this ‘stratagem’ in order to get the former Janata Dal government’s decision to implement the Mandal Commission report thrown out by the Supreme Court on the ground that there is no provision for the economic criterion in the Constitution. But that is only one aspect of the matter.
Other and more pertinent aspects of the decision are that it is virtually impossible to implement the economic criterion in the case of either the ‘other backward castes’ or the ‘forward castes’, that an effort to do so will lead to widespread corruption since the candidates will try and buy false certificates, and that standards will need to be further lowered if the truly poor are to be accommodated since they have the least access to education.
It is argued that the remedy lies in extending and upgrading educational facilities for the backward and the poor. This is again so much hogwash. While it is certainly possible to continue to open ‘schools’ and ‘colleges’ ad infinitum, it is an uphill task to raise the quality of education. The experience so far has been that the more thinly we have spread resources, human and material, the lower has been the quality of education. We can only repeat this experience if we persist in our old ways. Education, unlike literacy, can spread only slowly.
Again, it has been, and is, argued that the quality of administration in South Indian states, where the policy of reservations has been in force for decades, is no worse than in North Indian states. This plea ignores the earlier much higher quality of the administration in South India and the deterioration in it in recent decades, and it evades the fact that Central services, which have held the country together, will be victims of reservations on the basis of caste. There is a real danger that the whole of India may become one vast Bihar.
Between 1967, when the Congress lost power to inchoate opposition parties in all North Indian states and 1969, when the party split, the Indian political community lost whatever capacity for self-correction it might have possessed. Since then, Indian political life has been an endless and reckless competition in populism. The result could not have been different from what it has been by way of the threat of economic bankruptcy, widespread breakdown of law and order and near-collapse of public morality.
In such a context, it is as fair or unfair to blame VP Singh for his reckless decision to implement the Mandal Commission report in 1989 as it was to blame Indira Gandhi alone for the gradual degradation of institutions of the state. The rot had set in much earlier.
The Mandal Commission, it may be recalled on the authority of the experts associated with it, disregarded every suggestion they made for defining ‘backwardness’. The report is a monstrosity perhaps without parallel in India’s history. But that is not particularly relevant in terms of realpolitik. The supporters of the report are certainly not interested in questions of objectivity and fairness. Their concern is different. It is power, and they are in a position to have their way.
The rise of peasant groups such as the Jats, Yadavs, Kurmis and Koeris in North India, and of their counterparts in other parts of the country, has influenced India’s politics more than any other factor, especially since the mid-60s. Their pressure led to the establishment of the Mandal Commission and their aspirations determined the ‘procedure’ it followed and the report it produced.
As is natural in such cases, the aspirations have grown as their economic clout has increased as a result of heavy investment in agriculture and other development activities in the countryside, and with it their political clout. This helps explain at least partly the Congress debacle in 1967 and Indira Gandhi’s resort to radical populism in 1969-71.
In India, factionalism is as much a fact of life in every village and in every significant caste as caste itself. This permits competition for support among the OBCs. Interestingly enough, however, this competition has helped increase rather than diminish the power of these communities. Thus, despite the frequent changes of parties in office, their representation in legislatures has steadily increased in the past two decades. We have had many more Yadav MLAs in UP and Bihar, for example, than their numbers warrant.
Their economic and political gains have not been matched by a rise in their representation in the top administration. This has not been so because they have been discriminated against in any way, but because they have not been in a position to compete successfully. But rather than seek to overcome those handicaps in respect of education in a legitimate manner, they have been determined to force their way on the strength of their political clout, and they have finally done so. They have terrorized all parties into surrendering to them.
Inevitably, this lends great significance to the verdict of the Supreme Court. On it will depend the quality of Indian democracy, indeed, in whether India will be a democracy, as liberal thinkers have defined that for centuries, or whether it will be a crude exercise in head counting, that too under the steadily lengthening shadow of the gun.
Sunday Mail, 6 October 1991