On the question of caste based reservations

Note: Neither you nor me have the legislative power(atleast as of now) to bring about changes(if any) .. so .. take lite and don’t write emotional comments (if there is an award for meaningless hyperlinking .. this one would win :P)

Of late i have been doing a bit of reading on “Sociology” and i came across some interesting stuff on reservations and caste in that process. So, i thought i’d rather blog about it so that atleast i’d have a record of what i am reading. Now, the choice of “Sociology” is a bit weird… the first question people ask me is .. Are you preparing for UPSC? . Well, fact is that at one point of time in 2010 that definitely did cross my mind. Now, i have given up on it due to paucity of time and lack of motivation lets say. But i do like to read sociology ..  this partly also is because of the fact that anything that is unrelated to course/academic work somehow always seems interesting. Infact in 2010 (again :P) i also considered joining the M.A.Sociology program in UoH or JNU .. i remember getting the application forms as well :P .. So i think i do have this thing for the subject anyway ;)

It is the stuff about the first commission on the question of backward castes.. The Kalelkar Commission that interested me. I had read a bit about the Mandal Commission when the reservation fiasco triggered by Arjun Singh some years ago was happening but don’t remember reading in detail about this one. What is interesting about the Kalelkar commission’s recommendations is that w.r.t representation in government and local body services the Commission recommended the reservation of 25% of Class I vacancies, 33% of Class II vacancies and 40% of Class III and IV vacancies for the OBCs. This was over and above that given for SCs and STs. In the case of Class I and Class II  it was recommended that “the backward classes will stand to gain both morally and materially, if they do not demand a reservation percentage in vacancies… They should demand greatest facilities for training and education in order to fit themselves for the highest jobs, as speedily as possible“ .

Very interesting to note that a government commission in the 1950s had the guts to say something against reservation at the highest level so openly.Personally i believe that reservations are necessary (atleast for the time being). But it should be a bottom up approach as mentioned above. It should get thinner and thinner as we go closer to the top. (Btw Kalelkar commission recommends a 70% reservation in professional colleges. So i am not entirely in agreement with all the numbers in the commission report ofcourse ;) )

What followed is even more interesting. Apparently the central government then initiated talks with some state governments  to identify the castes which could be included in the list of backward classes and below are snippets from that.

(i) Some states expressed the view that is better to identify “backward areas” rather than backward castes/classes.

(ii) Some states expressed the fear that the attempts to classify people either in the name of  caste or class would not only damage the unity of the nation but also encourage divisive forces sych as caste.

(iii) Some states felt that more than caste, economic factor should be the main criterion

(iv) Some expressed the view that the attempts to prepare such a list of backward classes is against the principles of secular,classless democratic socialist society. Hence, it must be dropped once and for all.

Again it is very interesting to see that there were some genuine concerns on the negative aspects of reservations. Roughly 50-60yrs after these comments were made by the states i think we can safely say that their concerns weren’t entirely misplaced… some damage did happen. Ofcourse, some good also did happen :) .

The central government apparently decided not to go ahead with the Kalelkar commission report on the OBC aspect specifically and much later another commission called the Mandal commission was formed for the same. This part is anyway far too well known. I think it was P.V.N.Rao government that  tried to include a 10% quota for the economically backward ones in the forward castes as well but this change apparently didn’t make the cut. One of the reasons for this as per my understanding is that a economically backward person from the forward caste is considered socially and educationally forward and hence as per this logic he doesn’t need reservation.Atleast that is what i understand by the weightage scheme followed by the Mandal commission ( this scheme makes a good read btw).

Also, another reason for writing this post on reservations now is .. i happened to read this recent frontline  (Sep 10-23 2011) article about “historic correction on the OBC reservations by the Supreme Court” . Secondly, i also happened to watch “Aarakshan” some weeks ago (I felt that it over simplified  the problem and the solution both). And finally, there was some discussion in one of the elective classes today on this topic. So i thought this is just about the right time to blog about this.

PS1: http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/newsletters.html This link has many interesting articles. Worth a bookmark i’d say.

PS2: Also happened to read about various famous sociologists from India and quite a lot of them had worked at Department of Sociology in  Lucknow University .. Interesting again :)

PS3: This piece about provincial government in Sindh, Pakistan making the teaching of mandarin compulsory is both scary and surprising at the same time.

PS4: Sir Charles Chaplin’s “The Circus” is a must watch !.. Ditto for “Fire in Babylon” and “The Lodger” by Alfred Hitchcock. Maheshbabu’s Dookudu isn’t worth the hype though… just another dinchak dinchak movie. Ofcourse, salman khan will make a remake anyway and i think mostly it will rake in 100+ crores yet again :P

PS5: The literature course made me read the following till now … “Siddartha” by Herman Hesse, Parts of Machiavelli’s “The Prince” and “Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho .. Not bad .. not bad :) . Particularly happy that i finally managed to finish Alchemist.. i tried to read through it  atleast thrice to date :).

PS6: I had put this up on fb as well.. M.N.Roy is one gem of a man. I fell in love with his “New Humanism”

PS7: Btw the Sociology text referred to here is “Sociology of Indian Society” by S.Chand Group ;)

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