28 February 2014, 01:32 PM IST
Are political parties having reservations – or second thoughts – about caste-based reservations, or quotas, in jobs and educational institutions?
In what has been described as a 'bombshell', a BJP spokesman, a former minister in the NDA government and a scheduled caste morcha chief, Sanjay Paswan, has said that if voted into office in the forthcoming elections, his party was "actively considering" having a re-look at the reservation policy for SC/STs which has been in place ever since Independence.
One of the proposals being considered is that no member of a dalit family with a monthly income of Rs 1 lakh and above will be eligible for a government job on the basis of reserved quotas. Children whose parents both have Class II government jobs, and children one of whose parents has a Class I sarkari job will not be eligible for government employment through the quota system.
The BJP is reportedly also planning to produce a white paper on the status of dalits over the past 60 years. While a few have benefited thanks to the reservation policy – creating what have come to be called self-perpetuating 'creamy layers' among the lowest castes – many dalits, particularly in the rural areas, are still subject to brutal social and economic oppression by upper castes. Violence against dalits, particularly sexual violence against dalit women, remains a deep-rooted stigma on Indian society.
Affirmative action is still very much needed, not only for dalits but for all persecuted minorities, of which there are far too many in the country. But as shown by the increasingly glaring inequalities which are obvious within the dalit community, the current reservations policy has to be radically reformulated, by bringing class – economic status – as well as caste into the equation.
However, linking class and caste has long been anathema in mainstream Indian politics. When senior Congressman Janardan Dwivedi recently suggested that perhaps it was time that reservations were based on economic criteria instead of only caste, his unorthodox views was dismissed by the party as being his 'personal opinion' and not reflective of the official Congress line.
Indeed the Congress has sponsored a scheme by which dalits entrepreneurs will be favoured in the bestowing of government contracts, and is also seeking to make SC/ST reservations mandatory in the private sector.
The Congress's take on this issue – as on other related issues on poverty alleviation and social uplift – seems to be hopelessly behind the times. There is a huge internal diaspora taking place as people – particularly young people – are moving out of caste-stratified rural areas into urban environments, where class – economic status – matters much more than caste.
In the melting pot of urban India, the millennia-old Indian reality of caste identity is swiftly giving way to class, or economic, status. A BPO employee earning Rs 30,000 a month is, in terms of social discrimination, no longer a dalit – or a Yadav, or a Brahmin, or any other caste.
Increasingly, voters particularly young, urban voters, want politicians to give priority to growth and job creation rather than play the caste card by promising populist freebies based on caste distinctions, which only further Mandalise our already caste-divided polity.
The BJP's reported proposal to reformulate the reservations policy, giving greater weightage to economic factors, is a welcome and bold breakthrough. Will such an initiative help eventually to break the stranglehold that caste continues to have on Indian politics? That can only happen when elections can be made to break free from the stranglehold of vote bank politics. And that depends not on our politicians, but on us as voters, who should cast our votes on the basis not of caste but of merit.
jug.suraiya@timesgroup.com
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