INDIA: ‘Positive Discrimination’ Makes Space for ‘Untouchables’

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, May 19 2003 (IPS) - Mayawati, the chief minister of northern Uttar Pradesh, India’s biggest state, is making good on an election vow to reserve up to 50 percent of key jobs for ‘dalits’ or members of the ‘untouchable’ castes in Hindu social hierarchy.

Earlier this month, Mayawati (one name), sprung on an unsuspecting public an order that would ensure that her quota policy would be first be implemented in labour courts. All new appointments in industrial tribunals would also be made from among ‘dalit’ groups until the 50 percent limit is reached.

People like Ram Jethmalani, one of India’s leading lawyers and till a year ago union law minister in the cabinet, sees retributive justice in Mayawati’s move, given the discrimination against the ‘dalits’ today in many parts of this country of one billion people.

”The modern generation has to make penance for the wrongs of the past 2,000 to 3,000 years,” he said.

"The vacant posts in labour courts and industrial tribunals will be filled up by scheduled caste, scheduled tribe and other backward caste nominees within two weeks, as the government has extended reservation up to 50 percent,” Mayawati’s Minister of State for Labour Dharam Pal announced on May 7.

The next day, she ordered similar reservations in the executive boards that govern educational institutions and universities in Uttar Pradesh, which has population of 180 million people and is considered the political crucible of India.

Caste-based reservations in government jobs and in educational institutions is a politically contentious issue in India. It is a direct challenge to the monopoly traditionally enjoyed by the better educated and privileged upper castes formed of people who were historically priests, warriors or traders.

However, democratic politics in India that depends on ”vote banks” rather than ideology have begun to ensure a place in the sun for the ‘dalits’ who continue to suffer from social discrimination in many parts of India. Mayawati herself has been a direct beneficiary of this phenomenon by becoming chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.

Ironically, Mayawat’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which espouses the cause of ‘dalit’ advancement, is dependent on support from Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), which is identified with the interests of upper caste groups and India’s elites.

In Uttar Pradesh, political parties that represent people at either end of the caste ladder have joined hands to keep at bay the Samajwadi Party – which represents powerful peasant castes and landowners that are now led by Mayawati’s arch rival and former chief minister, Mulayam Singh Yadav.

But caste-bank politics apart, there are those who consider what some call ‘positive discrimination’ the only way forward to empower large sections of the population who have for millennia been excluded from a say in the public affairs of the country and lived lives akin to slavery.

Although many believe that investment in better education for ‘dalits’ would be better than reserving jobs and places in educational institutions for them, the fact is that social discrimination dogs ‘dalit’ children from the time they begin schooling.

For example, the ‘India Education Report’ released this month by the National Institute of Education and Planning (NIEP) finds the non-attendance and drop-out levels among ‘dalit’ children far higher than that of children from the general population.

”Teachers refuse to touch SC (scheduled caste) children and they are also special targets of verbal abuse and physical punishment by teachers,” says the report.

According to the report, around 11 million girls in the six to 11 age group are not enrolled in school, which accounts for 88 percent of all such children from the same age group. The corresponding figure for the 11 to 14 age group is around 16 million girls, constituting 58 percent of all children out of school.

Mayawati’s reservation policies have met with surprisingly little resistance considering that the policy of expanding reservations to the 50 percent limit, when first introduced 12 years ago, caused widespread agitations that led to the fall of the government of then prime minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh.

Succeeding governments, including the present one led by the BJP, have been careful to strike a balance between enlarging reservations, necessary to retain the support the numerically large lower caste groups, while taking care to ensure that the interests of upper-caste groups are protected.

According to Justice A S Anand, chairman of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), a statutory body, discrimination against ‘dalits’ is a fact of life. They continue to be prevented from entering temples and using public water sources such as wells and ponds. ”They need legal protection,” he pointed out.

But Anand, who earlier served as India’s chief justice, says is equally important to prepare India’s traditional society for social change first. ”The law cannot be self-applied. It needs to be accepted by society with the resolve for bringing about a change,” he said.