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Mon, Jun 18 Caste away Indian pasts By IE Monday June 18, 02:19 AM The Meena-Gurjjar episode has focused concern on the possibly extreme consequences of our affirmative action programme. How does a sensitive Indian react to such agitations? The reaction that it was only a law and order problem would be infantile. It is difficult to fathom the terrible aftermath of large communities being in hostile rampage against each other. This is particularly so when they are as numerically dominant, as civilised, as disciplined and as important to Rajasthan's social fabric as the Gurjjars and Meenas are. I went to college in Jaipur, have worked half my life in north India, and vouchsafe for that. Now that the situation has calmed down, we should share experiences about such problems, so that next time round confrontation can be avoided. The Gurjjars and Meenas are substantially rural and semi-urban communities. It would be naive to link their attitudes and aspirations to their economic condition in a mechanical way. Yet widespread growth does create an environment in which violent protest becomes relatively unlikely. The slowing of agricultural and rural growth is not irrelevant as a background. In the 1990s, when the OBC issue was raised there were alternative visions being debated, one which talked of widespread agro-based and rural growth and focused on limited positive discrimination and the other so-called radical one which ignored growth and widened only the distribution framework. We will come back to this. But it is time to realise that a formulaic emphasis on GDP growth can have severe social consequences. It is difficult to recognise that actual distributional outcomes need patient design and that sweeping schemes generally fail. In the mid-nineties, Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University designed a scheme of deprivation points for admissions. Tens of thousands of students apply for about a thousand places in a transparent and intensively competitive test. Reservation for the SC and ST students has been there. The idea was to accommodate poor OBC candidates. The university placed resources with the student's union for an extensive debate to develop a workable system. In early discussions it was agreed that the system must actually serve its objectives and not permit cheating or just be a tool for sloganeering. Incidentally, some of the participants included UGC chairman, Y.S.P. Thorat, as well as Left leaders, Sitaram Yechury and Prakash Karat, both former JNU student union presidents. Ultimately a system of deprivation points was designed. Points were given on the basis of the location of the college of the last degree, advantage given to those who graduated from the poorest quarter of districts in India, gender and BPL status. If you were a girl, belonged to an OBC category, had graduated from Bastar, and your father was below the poverty line, you got nine deprivation points. A non-BPL OBC boy from Delhi got three. In the first year, only five applicants made it on this count. It is not easy to actually help the poor in a big way. Real social change is gradual, since five out of a thousand is half of 1 per cent. But those five did make it. In the OBC debate in Parliament, it was argued by the then leader of the Opposition in 1991 that the OBCs' livelihood depended on farming, tending herds, and such activities in India. A broad-based scheme of agricultural and rural growth based on the resource endowments of the regions they lived in with an emphasis on employment would help them, more than access to non-existing and declining government jobs. Some of us believed in this passionately and got it argued in Parliament, but we were destined to lose our leader and the game, and the country fell into the trap of a leadership which explicitly argued that growth was not an objective and, in any case, did not believe in strategies for backward regions, since decentralisation was all that was needed. As government jobs kept decreasing, the pressure became greater. There was another more compelling reason. By now global research was showing that expanding the affirmative action base was not a plus-plus equitable game, because the sections just above the poor knew best how to monopolise the benefits. But concern for equality was becoming passe in the silly globaliser's mindset. To argue that only the poor should be the target in a poor society, to argue for redistribution, was not fashionable any more. Neither was the idea that growth based on your own resources in the back of beyond was necessary or possible in a big way in a liberalising world. It would be good to get back again to a world where intense redistribution focus is on the poor and the process of growth is designed for the needy who are not that poor. I argue in these columns for a newer scheme of entitlements as compared to that which emerges from the poverty line I recommended in another era, now gone. Finally, I personally hold a radical belief not very amenable to reason. I believe that caste brings out the worst in the culture of which I am an integral part. It is inequitable because it excludes. All cultures exclude. However, the caste system justifies exclusion. There is no shame in it. My country has the dubious distinction of having an ideology which aims to make the exploited accept exploitation as the condition of man. As the great French anthropologist, Louis Dumont, said in half admiration, Homo Hierarchicus, the only society which justified the hierarchy of man, by birth. It has to change. The writer is chairman, Institute of Rural Management
