“Every man who repeats the dogma of [John Stuart] Mill that one country is not fit to rule another country must admit that one class is not fit to rule another class.” These were the words of the father of the Indian constitution, B R Ambedkar.
Social justice in India is a vast and ancient topic. In much of the world, the politics of a nation is governed by class, but in India politics is governed by caste. It’s a sad reality but it’s true.
Manu, one of the earliest thinkers of the Hindu religion, is credited with writing a book named Manusmriti, regarded as the law book of Hindus. It is the source of the caste system that dividing society into four categories: Brahmins (priests or intellectuals), Kshatriyas (kings), Vaishyas (businessmen), and Shudras (untouchables or Scheduled Castes), according to their occupation.
Caste is a system that divides Hindus into rigid hierarchical groups based on their karma (work) and dharma (religion). Brahmins and Kshatriyas are upper castes, while the Vaishyas are referred to as Other Backward Castes and Shudras are lower castes.
It is one of the ugliest things in existence, where a person’s occupation or identity is decided by his birth and not by his actions or his qualifications. So only a Brahmin son will be a priest, a king’s son will be king, and so forth. It is the root of dynastic politics in India.
Elsewhere in the world, there are classes, and politics is based on class struggle. So a person in a lower class can work hard and earn enough money to get into the middle or rich class. He will get due respect from society for his hard work.
But in India, a person born in a lower caste will not move into a higher caste irrespective of his intelligence, success, or fame. He will not earn the respect of society, irrespective of his achievements. Respect is reserved for a certain section of society, even if they don’t have any achievement.
The Other Backward Caste Hindus such as Vaishyas and lower-caste Shudras were denied education and growth for thousands of years, because of which one-fourth of Hindus suffered a long period of slavery, exploitation, and humiliation by fellow Hindus. This was deliberately done so that lower-caste Hindus never questioned the priests or the kings.
Thus in the social spectrum of India, it is clear that one’s caste decides one’s social status, not wealth or achievement.
Reservation: A tool for rights to equality
In this regard, the colonial British government did a commendable job, introducing various measures to lift the social order of the lower castes, and the idea of reservations came to the forefront, quite similar to the affirmative action practiced in the United States.
On August 16, 1932, British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald accepted Ambedkar’s demand that it was necessary for the “Depressed Classes” to have separate representation in the central and provincial legislatures to protect their interests from upper (Brahmin and Kshatriya) or dominant castes.
After independence, the governments of independent India took serious measures for the protection and welfare of Depressed Classes. Reservation is a system that provides historically disadvantaged groups representation in education, employment, and government schemes.
In Hindu communities, reservation is given to four groups, Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST), Other Backward Castes (OBC), and now the Economically Weaker Section (EWS) of upper castes (Brahmins and Kshtariyas).
Based on provisions in the constitution of India, this system allows the federal government and the states to set reserved quotas or seats, which lower the qualifications needed in exams, job openings, university admission, scholarships, and promotions for socially and educationally backward citizens.
The Kaka Kalelkar Commission appointed in 1953 was the first in independent India to study the issues of backward classes. When the Janata party came to power, it appointed a second backward class commission in 1978 under the chairmanship of B P Mandal.
That commission reported that 52% of the country’s population was made up of OBCs. It recommended 27% reservation in public services for government services to OBC as 22.5% was already reserved for SCs (Scheduled Castes) and ST (Scheduled Tribes).
In 1990, then-prime minister V P Singh announced in Parliament that the recommendations of the Mandal Commission would be implemented. Protests erupted across India, especially from upper-caste Hindus. But Mandal 1.0 social reforms followed by 1992’s economic reforms helped the country create one of the largest affluent middle classes in the world.
New caste census needed
In the campaign for the 2014 Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament) elections, Narendra Modi, as the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime-ministerial candidate, declared his caste as OBC (Other Backward Class) for the first time. He got the support of the OBC, but on the contrary, he never works for the backward and oppressed castes.
During his tenure as prime minister, crimes against Scheduled Castes or Dalits have increased. More than 130,000 cases of crime against Dalits have been reported since 2018, according to the Home Ministry. Apart from that, the Modi cabinet’s decision in 2019 to approve a 10% reservation for Economically Weaker Sections of upper-caste Hindus is a clear testimony to his vision to restore Brahmanical hegemony.
Modi himself came from an organization that has Brahmanical background, which taught him that reservations are anti-merit. The privatization of the economy through the disinvestment of many public-sector companies is a clear attempt to restrict the influence of backward castes and reservations for depressed classes.
According to a paper published by the World Inequality Database titled “Wealth Inequality, Class and Caste in India” in 2018, among upper-caste groups, Brahmins earned 48% above the national average, while non-Brahmin upper castes earned 45%, OBC groups earned 8% less than the national average, while the Scheduled Tribe and Scheduled Castes earned 34% and 21% less than the national average respectively.
In terms of total (national) assets, the highest 41% is owned by upper-caste Hindus followed by 31% by OBC groups, whereas the lowest among STs and SCs, each owning 3.7% and 7.6% of the total assets, respectively, while the OBC and SC/ST constitute more than 60% of India population.
Regional parties in India have recently called for a caste-based census to determine whether the country has truly eliminated social evil or merely hidden it. India runs its welfare-based program on caste-based reservations. The absence of fresh caste census data means that the caste estimates of 1931 are being projected for formulating welfare policies in 2022.
When the BJP was in opposition in 2010, the party backed the demand for a caste-based census, but now that the time to undertake the important task has arrived, the Narendra Modi-led government seems to be reluctant. The administration worries that a caste-based census may jeopardize its efforts to promote “Hindu unity,” or Modi’s Hindutva ideology. But such fears are just obsolete.
Mandal 1.0 was based on the participation of India’s OBC in the public sector and led to the creation of the world’s largest middle class. A fresh caste-based census will help policymakers to evaluate a policy that helps in the proper distribution of wealth including weaker sections of upper-caste Hindus.
Social reforms followed by economic reforms led to the rise of India on the global stage during the 1990s. Mandal 1.0 helped India create a strong labor force, but Mandal 2.0 will help India became a mighty economic power. India cannot prosper if its people at the bottom are not given the opportunity to prosper.
Such a reform would create much-needed demand in the economy, which is lacking because of low purchasing power capacity of the majority of the population.