Race to the bottom

Not for nothing has it been said that as you sow, so shall you reap. Vasundhara Raje Scindia, the chief minister of Rajasthan, must be ruing the day she promised the Gujjars of the state that she would get them scheduled tribe status, as she did during the 2004 election campaign. A little earlier, the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had similarly wooed the Jats and got for them Other Backward Caste status. Similar things have been happening in other states also. Ms Scindia should have known that she was playing with fire, risking the conflagration that engulfed V P Singh's government 17 years ago when he tried to play the politics of caste. Nor has her handling of the agitation, in which 40 people are reported to have been killed in police firings, been what it should be. What can anyone say of a chief minister who took off to the US for an extended period of time""for an award ceremony, if you will""when the issue was coming to a boil?

The debate that has been kindled by the week-long Gujjar agitation has several dimensions, including the demographic (can the BJP alienate the more numerous Meenas in order to placate the Gujjars?). But sensible people should concern themselves with two things only, one short-term and the other long-term. The first is the immediate danger of inter-caste violence as some caste groups seek to acquire privileges via state patronage and others seek to retain them (as already seen with the Meena vs Gujjar face-off in Rajasthan). There is a body called the Gujjar Mahasabha and another called the Gujjar Arakshan Sangarsh Samiti, for example. Tamil Nadu is a step ahead with such bodies already having become political parties. With the supply of state patronage limited, it is natural that rival claimants should see it all in a zero-sum game perspective, that is, one caste can gain only at the expense of the other. That is what leads to violence, and the immediate challenge therefore is to cool passions.

The longer-term issue is whether the categorisation of communities for the purpose of reservations can be made a politically neutral exercise. Specific guidelines already exist for defining the various groups, but in practice these have been malleable in the face of some immediate political purpose or another. This has to be corrected if there is to be any sanctity to fitting one community into one docket, and another into a different one. The solution has to be the rejuvenation of the commission that exists for this purpose, and to find effective safeguards to ring-fence the commission's decisions so that politics does not become an exercise in micro identities as each sub-caste or jati seeks to maximise its share of state-sponsored patronage. The country seems to be failing to integrate two primary identities: the communal or religious, and, among the Hindus, that of caste. For these substantial failures, the politicians are to blame. The least that must be hoped now is that the Congress will see the dangers and desist from introducing a communal angle to reservations by having a separate category for Muslims, for the fat could then be well and truly in the fire.