New caste equations

Empowerment must go beyond quotas

Eleven months after the V P Singh government announced its intent to implement the Mandal Commission report in August 1990, which enabled quotas for the Other Backward Classes (OBC), the P V Narasimha Rao government took the first steps to liberalise the Indian economy. Employment opportunities in the private sector boomed, and government jobs were no longer the primary vehicle for social and economic mobility. Indeed, economic liberalisation also helped increase government revenue, facilitating the central and state governments to allocate more funds for social welfare. The current government, for example, maintains that the beneficiaries of several of its welfare schemes, such as the Mudra Yojana, are OBCs, Dalits, and women. Economic liberalisation also generated skill-based jobs for the OBCs and Scheduled Castes.

The Mandal Commission report heralded the dawn of an increased presence of OBC leaders in the top echelons of the various avatars of the erstwhile socialist parties. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) showed better footwork than the Congress in embracing the change. Mandal transformed politics in northern and western India, a process that southern Indian states had witnessed since the 1960s. However, the gains of the Mandal Commission accrued mainly to the dominant castes among the OBCs, and the poor state of India’s education system meant the marginalised among these castes didn’t acquire the skills to take advantage of the fruits of economic liberalisation. The state and central lists of the OBCs, meanwhile, have increased since the 1990s, while several intermediate castes, such as the Marathas, took to the streets in recent decades, demanding that they be included in the list. Politicians advocating social justice have demanded that reservations should extend to the private sector or that the time has come to breach the 50 per cent Supreme Court-mandated reservation ceiling. In fact, in 2017, the Centre established the Justice G Rohini Commission to examine the reservation formula afresh and recommend sub-categorisation of the OBCs. But the absence of reliable data on the OBC population hampered policy decisions.

The 1931 census was the last caste headcount, with the Mandal Commission extrapolating that data to put the country’s OBC population at 52 per cent. The Bihar caste survey fills that gap and is likely to be replicated in other states or extended to a caste census. The Bihar caste survey has revealed that the backward castes comprise 63 per cent of its population. More significantly, it has found that the Extremely Backward Classes (EBC), dozens of fragmented small castes, comprise 36 per cent. The Muslims comprise 12.9 per cent of the backward castes and 4.8 per cent of the 15.52 per cent general category. Politically, there is a real risk that caste fault lines can lead to greater polarisation with long-term consequences. However, over time, as post-Mandal politics showed, all parties, including the BJP and Congress, will have to tailor their political strategies to suit the new scenario.

In this context, the cumulative 50 per cent ceiling on caste-based quotas will surely be contested now. Castes that have not benefited from Mandalisation will demand their share in the pie. But as India’s history shows, real progress can occur only with rapid economic growth and much-needed investment in education and technology to harness the demographic dividend. The political class should not thus only focus on empowerment through reservations. The real empowerment of backward classes will happen only when the state is able to provide quality education and create gainful employment. Caste surveys or higher reservations cannot be an end in themselves.