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Journalism of Courage
In announcing Professor S. Thorat8217;s appointment as chairman of the University Grants Commission, every newspaper made it a point to announce that he was a dalit. In contrast, nobody inquired what the caste of the earlier chairman was when he was appointed. Poor Thorat! He will not be judged for his scholarship or administrative acumen; he will be judged as a dalit.
The country can be described as mature only when dalits rising to high positions becomes so commonplace that nobody notices it. In a way, Thorat is better equipped to take the country in that direction than others from a different background. Just as Nixon could open a dialogue with China, or Vajpayee make concessions to Pakistan, Thorat can strike a new path, even encourage the dalit community to introspect, without arousing hostility.
The reservation policy needs an alternative because it has given politicians an excuse to evade their responsibility. Across the spectrum, all political parties have used the reservation policy as a sop to build vote banks, not to ameliorate the sad condition of dalits. For example, SC/ST legislators get nearly Rs 1,000 crore a year for constituency development. There is no record of their using this largesse for the benefit of the poor of their own community.
It sounds churlish to say so, but it is not in the self-interest of politicians to cure the backwardness disease: uneducated dalits are a vote bank; educated ones are not. Barely 10 per cent of the student cohort study in universities. As most colleges are academically defunct, even that number is exaggerated. Possibly not more than one per cent of the cohort gets any education worth describing as 8220;higher8221;. Within that one per cent restricted to select high-quality institutions, few dalits qualify. Why dalits remain under represented even two or three generations after the reservations policy came in, is as much an academic problem as it is a political or management issue. We have been so obsessed with numbers, we have overlooked the basic issue why so few qualify from these communities. It is easy to dismiss the question by asserting that dalits are born inferior. That assertion overlooks the fact that less than one per cent of brahmins and banias qualify for institutions like the IITs 8212; that is, 99 per cent children of these 8220;forward8221; communities too are not good enough.
Neither does it take into account the fact that intelligence is not inherited the same manner physical features are. In nature, intelligence regresses to the mean. That is, children of very intelligent parents tend to be less intelligent than their parents and children of dull parents tend to be more intelligent than their parents. On the whole, at the time of conception, a dalit child is likely to have as much a chance of being intelligent as one born in a brahmin household. Later on, regrettably, poverty and malnutrition become serious negatives. Lack of choices and absence of opportunity become fatal drawbacks. But these handicaps can be corrected.
Whatever the community, high intelligence is rare. Tautologically, only one per cent of any group can be at the top one per cent intelligent level. Even though social activists want every child to get a university education, the top one per cent should be of special concern to the UGC. I postulate that inherently such talent is distributed uniformly among all communities and that disparity emerges only because of a faulty environment. In any case, reservation does not nurture the talent available among backward castes. It8217;s probably done the opposite by giving an excuse to politicians to neglect nurturing vulnerable children at a formative stage. There is a need, then, to discover ways of identifying and nurturing great talent and at the earliest stage possible.
Precisely because Thorat is categorised as a dalit above everything else, he can overcome such resistance better than anyone else.
The writer is a former director of IIT, Chennai
