Caste in injustice

If you do no more than use the word that Gandhiji used, ‘Harijan’, and not the one that has been coined as a weapon in the politics of grievance-mongering, and to justify norm-less conduct—‘Dalits’—you are a Manuvadi, and, therefore, an oppressor who secretly wants millions to be made untouchables again.

If you point to the truth about reservations: that they are a sleight of hand of the politician—instead of working to ensure better education, better hostel facilities, superior tuition for the disadvantaged, he gets posts ‘reserved’, and proclaims that he has brought boons for them; that these are ‘boons’ in the most stagnant part of our society—namely, government service; that they have led to a perverse race, a jostling to get one’s group declared ‘backward’; that in several states, the ‘reservations’ are being cornered by a few sub-castes; that the proportions of jobs that are now being reserved far exceed even the illustrative proportions that had been stated in the Constituent Assembly by Dr Ambedkar himself—if you request even that these apprehensions be examined, you are part of the oppressor-regime.

Initially all sorts of aggression was justified in the name of ‘class’. While it successfully silenced the rich, while it got the literati to start parroting the same verbiage, Communists and socialists soon found that ‘class’ rhetoric was not enlarging their base. The way forward was out-and-out caste politics. But how were these progressives to adopt such a retrograde category? Hence, the breakthrough formulation: ‘‘In India caste is class’’!

Since then ‘social justice’ has been the great rationalisation for every step to pander to sections, in particular to castes and ‘minorities’. Bosses who control such groups are, ex-officio, exempt from all norms. Their vulgarity is authenticity. Their ignorance of affairs of state that are put in their hands is precisely what makes them like the people. Whosoever talks of exactions by them and their relatives does so only because they are from the lower castes, and he can’t stand their being heads of government! Today no officer, even if he has conclusive proof of wrong-doing by an officer who got in through the reservation route, dare say so even in the annual CR lest he himself be charged with ‘‘hostile attitude towards SCs/STs’’.

There cannot be any doubt at all that those who are disadvantaged must be helped. But today all that is being done is to pander to groups to buy votes, and to dress this pandering up as ‘social justice’. That moment when, frightened of a rally, a politician—one whom his closest associates did not remember having so much as talked of the matter earlier—lunged for Mandal is the true symbol of the times. As is the avalanche sent hurling down on the minutest effort to deport illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators.

‘Social justice’ has thus resulted in a moral and mental paralysis. Labour laws? Dare not touch them as you would be injuring poor workers—even though organised labour is the aristocracy of the Indian working class: specially so the workers in public sector units, their pay and allowances being higher than those of workers in private units! Subsidies? Dare not question them as you would be kicking the stomachs of the poor—even though the Planning Commission itself has said how those below the poverty line would automatically be lifted above it if all the anti-poverty programmes and subsidies were scrapped and they were sent the amounts by money-order! Free power? Dare not say anything against it as you would then be against the poor farmer—even though the poor farmer is not the one who gets such power as reaches the village, even though farmers are willing to pay for power if only they get reliable power. Minimum Support Prices? You dare not question them as you would then be anti-farmer—even though these prices are benefiting farmers in just four states, even though even in these states they are keeping the farmers from diversifying into higher-value crops. PSU corpses kept on artificial respiration? You dare not say anything about them—for then you are against hard-working labourers who, with their blood, sweat and tears, have built the ‘‘temples of modern India’’—never mind how the country, and therefore the workers themselves, would be so much better off if the resources that are locked up in these units were put to more productive use. Sugar subsidies? You dare not touch them—even though they perpetuate the growing of this water-intensive crop in drought-prone areas of Maharashtra, even though the subsidy benefits the mills and keeps them inefficient to boot, rather than the cane-growers. Fertiliser subsidies? You dare not reduce them—even though times without number it has been shown that they are being cornered by mills and not being passed on to farmers, even though we are encouraging farming practices that harm our soil, that poison our food. Locating industries in uneconomic sites? You dare not question the policy for then you would be against the development of backward regions—even though the concessions are exploited by unscrupulous elements to escape taxes, even though in the long run the units are not able to compete because the location remains inappropriate…

The economic consequences of such pandering are very important in themselves—and would certainly have troubled an observer like Mr Palkhivala. The other consequences are just as injurious. When a polity once accepts that this is the way to ‘‘look after the interests of the poor’’—that is, by diluting standards, by making special concessions regarding outcomes to a group—it just has to go on extending the ambit of dilutions and concessions. And no segment of the polity, no political party for instance, can resist the pressure to go on a hunt of its own for groups for which it will wrest concessions. Even in that pusillanimous judgement, Indira Sawhney vs Union of India, the Supreme Court provided six or seven apertures through which to roll back the excesses in which the reservations race had ended. But such are the compulsions of vote bank politics that whips were issued, and Bills to amend the Constitution and thereby plug the apertures were passed unanimously—with only one solitary member, Cho Ramaswamy, in the Rajya Sabha dissenting. But even short of whips, the pressures that such blind worship of a chimera like ‘social justice’ engenders silence the one who might venture to state the truth.

In April 1992, while responding to a discussion in the state Assembly, the then chief minister of Assam, Hiteshwar Saikia, admitted that there were 30 lakh illegal Bangladeshi immigrants in the state. Unless he withdraws that statement within 48 hours, thundered the head of the Muslim United Front, his government would be brought down. Saikia immediately declared that he had never made the statement—though he had made it on the floor of the Assembly itself. Last year, Mr A K Antony, one of the most upright of recent chief ministers, warned that minorities were exacting too much in the form of benefits, that their organising themselves into vote banks was bound to create a backlash. That statement cost him the chief ministership.

Today, ‘social justice’ is taken to mean that the state must guarantee equality of outcomes to all, indeed in many instances that it guarantee particular outcomes to members of particular groups independently of whether or not they make the effort that is mandated for that outcome—witness the way qualifying marks are lowered, sometimes to near nothing, for candidates from particular castes. As one group after another is able to get on to the Schedule or wrest the label ‘backward’, the spheres in which the state must intervene become larger and larger: witness the proposals today that reservations be extended to private enterprises. You would have noticed a curiosity: the very persons who habitually denounce the state as it seeks powers to maintain law and order, to fight terrorism, say, are the ones who demand that it discharge more and more functions to ‘‘abolish poverty’’, to deliver ‘‘social justice’’. Now, these demands are being heaped on the state at a time when it is able to deliver less and less. Indeed, almost the only thing that is putting a limit to the concessions that political parties are ready to make to sectional demands is that the resources at the command of the state are limited: witness the second thoughts on the Employment Guarantee Bill, witness the way the promise of free power is being scaled down in Andhra. The consequences are certain. Tugged and pushed, the state will lurch from one concession to another. As there are many groups that can claim that they deserve ‘social justice’, and as their claims often conflict with each other, the state will often be paralysed—witness what has happened to administration and development projects in UP as a result of the conflict between Mayawati’s Dalits and Mulayam Singh’s backwards.

All this while, there is the myth of democracy—that what is being done is ‘‘the will of the people’’, that the rulers have ‘‘the mandate’’ to do what they are doing. High on ‘social justice’, there are legions of legitimisers—servants ever so civil to whoever happens to be in office; legislators; lawyers; alas, many a journalist too. Even courts are not immune from such rhetoric. Injustices are exaggerated to legitimise what the politician has, for other reasons, found convenient. Indira Sawhney itself constitutes a particularly egregious example of the genre.

The advances that have been made, that are daily being made are stoutly ignored. Worse, norms that are absolutely essential for us to hold our own in the fiercely competitive world of today are thrown out of the window—and that too on the say-so of an opportunist of a politician. Trying to justify what he had done V P Singh had told Parliament in August 1990, ‘‘We talk about merit. What is the merit of the system itself? That the section which is 52 per cent of the population gets 12.55 per cent in government employment. What is the merit of the system? That in Class I employees of the government it gets only 4.69 per cent, for 52 per cent of the population in decision-making at the top echelons it is not even one-tenth of the population of the country; in the power structure it is hardly 4.69 per cent. I want to challenge first the merit of the system itself before we come and question on the merit, whether on merit to reject this individual or that. And we want to change the structure basically, consciously, with open eyes. And I know when changing the structures comes, there will be resistance…What I want to convey is that treating unequals as equals is the greatest injustice. And, correction of this injustice is very important and that is what I want to convey…’’

All the cliches are there: ‘‘the poor’’, ‘‘fighting for their honour’’, ‘‘involving the poorest in the power structure’’…But I don’t have to trouble you to find out why none of this had occurred to the leader till his recently expelled deputy prime minister announced that a rally would be held in Delhi; nor to trouble you to find what the leader had done till then or indeed has done since then to ‘‘involve the poorest in the power structure’’.

Here was self-serving rhetoric at its worst, here was the moment’s compulsion made into a matter of principle, a moment’s panic transformed into the great struggle to set right humiliation and suffering of thousands of years. Well, what can one expect of a politician, you may say. But the surprise was that passages such as these were quoted with manifest approbation in the judgement of the Supreme Court itself! What more would a wrecker want after he has this seal from the highest court?

Therefore,

• We should be alert to the way catch expressions—‘the poor’, ‘the backwards’, ‘social justice’—are being used to undermine standards, to flout norms, to put institutions to work—not for the millions in those categories but for the ones who have fooled those millions too with the same catch phrases.

• Subject every claim—whether it is made in the name of ‘the poor’, ‘the backward’, whosoever—to rational examination.

• After it has been in effect for a while, subject every concession to empirical evidence.

• Shift from equality of outcomes to equality of opportunities.

• And in striving towards that, nudge politicians to move away from the easy option—of just decreeing some reservations, etc—to doing the detailed and continuous work that positive help requires, the assistance that the disadvantaged need for availing of equal opportunities.

• Be alert to the way never-never goals like ‘social justice’ over-extend and eventually undermine the state. Shift the debate from ‘a large state vs a small state’ to a state that performs.

• Bear in mind that if the majority disregards smaller sections in the community, it drives them to rebellion. Equally, if their leaders stoke the smaller sections into aggressive behaviour, if they wrest concession after concession, if they are welded into blocs for votes etc, there will be a backlash from the majority.

Refashion policies of state on truly secular and liberal principles:

• The individual, and not the group should be the unit of state policy.

• Never concede to one group—for instance, one religion—what you will deny to another group—for instance, another religion.

• Never concede to a caste or religious group what you will deny to a secular group.

I remember saying all this at the time Bhindranwale was being patronised. I was denounced as a communalist. What transpired exceeded my apprehension. I remember saying the same thing when concessions were being extracted, and given in the name of secularism at the time of the Shah Bano case. I was denounced as a communalist. The backlash exceeded my apprehension. I sense the same cycle of pandering begin again. The denouement will be no different. There will be little point in moaning about freedom then.

DISCOURSE

Intellect has been driven out of discourse in India.

By intimidation, as we have seen.

By superficiality—debate seldom goes beyond the slogan.

By superciliousness—in the month that Manipur was on fire, the two great questions that gripped Delhi’s two largest papers were why liquor vends should not remain open till midnight, and why citizens of Delhi should not have the convenience of shopping round the clock.

By ‘balanced journalism’—‘‘Murli Manohar Joshi says…Arjun Singh says…’’ So that, if tomorrow June 25 were to occur again, The Times of India would have, as it does on other issues, two editorials—one pro, one con. Though I confess that would be a vast improvement over what it had on that June 25: led as it was by very progressive intellectuals then, it endorsed Emergency out and out!

It may be that once poison enters the body, one just has to wait for it to work its way out of the entire body—that we will just have to wait till a modernising, increasingly intertwined economy will be so stymied by an inefficient state apparatus that it will bring to bear sufficient pressure for reform. That may imply that remedying the basic ills that we have encountered above may be beyond our reach. But even if that were indeed the case, and even in regard to those basic ills, there is much we can do to ‘‘give history a helping hand’’. We can explore alternative constitutional arrangements. We can inject those alternatives into public discourse. We can puncture the falsehoods by which standards are being diluted, institutions suborned. Each of us can each take up an institution and work to making it run better, to make it more accountable. The fulcrum of reform, discourse, is within the grasp of each of us.

Freedom has many pre-requisites, but none more fundamental than free speech—for by that alone can the usurpers’ assertions be punctured. But for speech to be valued enough by the people so that they would not permit the usurper to stamp it out, it must be reasoned, it must inform through cogent argument, it must deliver evidence. Let each of us select one issue of public importance, study it thoroughly, and on that issue be the alternative to the ones who today dominate and debase public discourse.

That way we would strengthen freedom. We would pay tribute, true and proper, to the memory of that great and exemplary citizen, Nani Palkhivala.

Concluded

The writer is BJP MP and former disinvestment minister

PART I

PART II

PART III