The creamy layer of Tamil Nadu politics couldn’t have been happier with the SC verdict. The state where party politics revolves around the two cogs of Dravidian identity and social justice, there are no parties opposing reservation for the oppressed. To set the record straight, Tamil Nadu was the first among states to put in a system of reservation and successive regimes only increased the allocation—till it touched 69 per cent 28 years ago. As early as 1921, the Madras Presidency introduced ‘Communal GO’ that granted reservations of 44 per cent for non-Brahmins, 16 per cent each for Brahmins, Muslims, Christians/Anglo Indians, and eight per cent for SCs. It was implemented six years later and stayed in force for the next two decades. When the Supreme Court upheld a Madras High Court verdict that struck down the GO, Dravidar Kazhagam founder and one of the biggest thinker-reformer from the state, Periyar E.V. Ramasami, was in the forefront of the agitation against the verdict.According to social commentators, quota was an extension of the anti-upper class movement that gripped the state in the early part of the 20th century. To start with, the word ‘backward class’ lost its innate backwardness and assumed a significant clout in the social and political arena and reservations followed naturally. To his credit, it was Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi who set up the Tamil Nadu State Backward Classes Commission in 1969.Based on the Commission’s study, the then DMK government increased reservation for backward castes to 31 per cent and 18 per cent for SCs and STs. The following government, headed by AIADMK chief minister M.G. Ramachandran, increased the BC quota to 50 per cent. Since then, the magic figure has been 69 per cent, with 30 for BCs, 20 for MBCs/denotified communities, 18 for SCs and one per cent for STs. Accordingly, the number of backward classes in the state has grown from 11 in 1883 to 288 (as per the Mandal Commission report). Though there has been opposition against this large quantum being allocated on casteist lines, pro-reservation activists point out that the progress made by the backward class in Tamil Nadu is unprecedented and unparalleled. Education, they say, is the only way of uplifting a community that is burdened by centuries of exclusion and superstitions. With the history of identity politics that is attached to the issue, it is hardly surprising that there are not many who openly oppose the quota regime, the highest the country.
