The Hindu : Justifying affirmative action

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Jun 04, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Justifying affirmative action

By Neera Chandhoke

Reservation is a poor substitute for social justice. But expanding reservation is not about social justice; it is about the games that politicians play when they want to outmanoeuvre their opponents and thereby garner votes.

DEMOCRACY HAS proved attractive to scholars and political practitioners for a number of reasons. The main reason is that it is only democracy that allots an equal moral standing to each individual. Inequalities of wealth, status, gender or caste, are seen as morally irrelevant when it comes to citizenship.

However, right-thinking democrats also recognise that since the constituency of democracy is unequally structured, some exceptions have to be made to the rule of formal equality. For instance, people who have been denied their rightful due in history have to be treated with special care and consideration. The point is that exceptions to the rule of equality have to be carefully and consistently defended on normative grounds. This is essential simply because the rest of society has to be convinced that such exceptions are needed in order to fulfil the pre-suppositions of democracy itself, that is equality. Or that every rule that treats a particular group with special care has to be legitimised in the public realm both through reasoned arguments and on moral grounds.

This was the precise case when it came to affirmative action policies for the Dalit community. It was recognised by the first generation leadership in independent India that Dalits are doubly disprivileged, because in and through history they have been discriminated against both on the grounds of class and caste. Affirmative action policies were accordingly designed to give Dalits their rightful due. Meant initially to be a short-term venture, affirmative action policies have become an enduring feature of our polity for one very good reason: reservation for Dalits has fetched mixed results.

Twenty-seven years ago, I. P. Desai presented the findings of his research on the practice of untouchability in rural Gujarat. In public arenas that were governed by law such as schools and post offices, he told us, untouchability was least practised. Only one school in 59 villages had separate seating arrangements for Dalit children, and only 4 per cent of the post offices practised discrimination in their transactions with Dalits.

When it came to the private sphere of social transactions, however, matters were different. In 90 per cent of the villages that he surveyed, Desai found that Dalits were not allowed to enter the houses of caste Hindus. Barbers, shopkeepers, and potters kept their distance from Dalits who were continued to be thought of as polluting. They were prohibited from entering temples frequented by caste Hindus. In 10 per cent of the villages that were surveyed, Dalits were not allowed direct access to common water sources. They were dependent on caste Hindus for access to water. Other villages had created separate wells from where the Dalits could draw water. Though discrimination could be found in seating arrangements in the public arena of village panchayats, it was really in the private sphere that untouchability continued to be practised seriously. The world of Dalits has advanced in the sphere of public transactions that are governed by law; but not in the sphere of private relationships — friendship, intimacy, dining together, visiting each other — which lie outside the ambit of the law.

One would have thought that matters would be different today. After all, the last two-and-a-half decades have witnessed the Dalit movement and Dalit parties moving to the centre-stage of Indian politics. The caste question was fore-grounded in public consciousness through the Mandalisation of politics in the 1990s. The Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, the largest State in the country, is a Dalit, and the previous President of India was a Dalit. Widely respected Dalit intellectuals have aggressively fought out the caste issue in political and intellectual circles. The Dalit movement has raised, and continues to raise, vexing issues of caste discrimination publicly. Activists have brought those who violate provisions that are meant to ensure the wellbeing of the Dalit community to court, as well as to the Scheduled Castes Commission. A Dalit university has been set up in the country. Prominent Indian literary figures writing in English invariably have a Dalit protagonist as the linchpin of their story. No election can be fought without reference to the caste issue. And Dalit politics has finally generated a politically correct vocabulary in at least the public domain.

Have the Dalits finally come into their own as equal citizens of India? Perhaps yes, and this despite all odds. A more troubling question follows: have the Dalits finally come into their own as agents who possess equal moral standing in the public as well as in the private sphere?

The response to this question is mixed but on the whole pessimistic. For, even today research tells us that despite affirmative action policies in the public sphere, the attitude of caste Hindus has not changed. Whereas all of the Dalit respondents in one recent study were eager to do away with caste stigmatising identity, they felt deeply that they continued to be discriminated against. And while 80.5 per cent of the Dalits expected that their relationship with caste Hindus would be based on equality, the latter did not respond in terms of inviting Dalits to their homes, dining with them or entering into other social relationships. Sixty-six per cent of the respondents reported that they continued to feel humiliated and discriminated against.

This by itself is reason enough for affirmative action policies to continue as far as the Dalit community is concerned. Perhaps the gains of the public will filter into the private realm. There are, of course, ways in which the agenda of affirmative action can be reworked in the light of experience. For instance, we need to turn our attention to intra-Dalit inequalities.

It is time the benefits of affirmative action policies trickled down from those who have already benefited to those who have not benefited at all. These are matters that need to be sorted out, but on the whole a fairly strong normative case can be made for continuing affirmative action for Dalits. And such justification is needed for, if there is one fact of Indian politics that breeds resentment in society it is that of reservation. Our public discourse of restitution for historical wrongs has to constantly legitimise Dalit reservation through careful reasoning and moral persuasion.

But justification becomes difficult when it comes to the kind of politics that is practised by our leadership. Look at for instance the decision of the Rajasthan Government to allot reservation to the economically backward among the forward castes. Certainly, the materially deprived have to be looked after, but this can be done through other means, through distributing to the needy a social minimum for instance.

Why resort to reservation when other ways of dealing with poverty can be conceptualised — land redistribution, income generating schemes, free education and health? But that would require the taking of hard decisions, whereas reservation in a rapidly privatising educational system and a shrinking government sector proves a soft option. Reservation is actually a poor substitute for social justice. But then, expanding reservation is not about social justice; it is about the games that politicians play when they want to outmanoeuvre their opponents and thereby garner votes.

Affirmative action in other words has no longer anything to do with giving people what is due to them, or giving to them what has been denied to them by history and by politics. The politics of affirmative action in the Rajasthan case can neither be defended on normative grounds nor on common sense. Reservations arguably are going to become even more contentious than they are today.

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