Opinion Dear Editor, I disagree: Caste is a system, not a classification
Without a caste census, reckoning with broader inequality, debate on sub-classification of SCs ends up making Dalits pay the price for the plight of the more oppressed among them
There is no denying the fact that there are communities among SCs who have a minimal presence in higher education and public sector employment. 
Few issues can be debated without nuance, least of all matters of constitutional morality. Any policy that expands social justice — including the Supreme Court’s verdict on sub classification within the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes categories vis-a-vis reservation benefits — is welcome. This newspaper’s editorial, (‘Deepening justice’, IE, August 2), does so. However, in light of the apex court’s judgment, some notions must be clarified to understand the larger “circumstances of social justice” — to borrow a phrase from political theorist David Miller — for SCs and STs.
A set of institutions dispensing social and economic goods, and a state committed to social change, together constitute the conditions which are indispensable for social justice to become substantive. In simpler words, Dalits, Adivasis and numerous other marginalised communities are at a historical disadvantage, which continues to play out to this day, despite India being in its 75th year as a constitutional republic. The state’s abysmal failure in removing caste stigma, ending caste-based violence and the general apathy of the people towards the marginalised all speak to the failure of social justice measures to address the matrix of socioeconomic deprivation that we owe to the caste system.
The first — and necessary — step to meaningfully address the glaring social inequalities in India is to carry out a comprehensive caste census across the country. This must not be limited to disadvantaged groups alone — it must be include all the sections of society
This requires some elaboration.
There is no denying the fact that there are communities among SCs who have a minimal presence in higher education and public sector employment. (It bears repeating that the collective share of Scheduled Castes as a whole is significantly low in these sectors, despite reservation). Caste data from the 2011 national Census — and there has been no Census since — which enumerates SCs and STs, does provide a basic picture of the internal socioeconomic differentiation within these categories. There is a case for doing more here, so that underrepresented communities can be brought into the net of reservation. However, the explanations for the glaring inequalities vis-à-vis accessing reservation isn’t in the perceived discrimination of “better off” SCs against “worse off” SCs. There are several other reasons. Let me just go into two of them.
First, while the privileged castes, due to their social positioning, are conspicuous by their presence in almost all the important public institutions of higher education and public sector employment, the underprivileged, particularly Dalits, have seen significant improvement in their access to higher education only after the promulgation of the Constitution of India. The constitutional republic became a possibility because of the social and political movements that has preceded it, and laid down the rules for social and political representation essential for a democratic polity. This politics of representation imbued with the larger philosophy of social justice has been the at the heart of Dalit politics ever since.
Dalits have been striving hard to build a socially just country, in which they participate as equals as envisaged by Ambedkar. That a vast section could only claim their rights because of their empowerment through politics — and one of the most important preconditions of such a politics was to leave their caste occupation and embrace the world of protest, change and emancipation through learning. Effectively then, social mobility among the Scheduled Castes is directly proportional to their untethering from the stigmatised caste occupation. The section that lags behind in their access to reservation is chiefly because of their indifference to this politics of empowerment embedded in Ambedkar’s philosophy of a socially, economically and politically just society.
Secondly, and this is connected to the first, the reason for the under-representation of certain sub-castes within SCs is due to their general backwardness arising from low education and income levels, as professor Sukhadeo Thorat, among others, have argued recently. The under-representation of these subcastes owes to truncated capabilities among them — a direct result of the lack of politicisation – and not due to the discrimination at the hands of other Scheduled Castes. The impression that the underrepresented among SCs owe their condition to the better-represented presumes that these social groups are a standalone, singular grouping, isolated from the larger scheme of graded inequality inherent in the caste system. This diverts attention from the inhuman caste system, and creates an impression that it’s Dalits who must bear the responsibility and culpability for those among them who have the least. In reality, their collective disempowered social status is due to the ideology of the caste system as a whole.
We cannot remain oblivious to caste — some even deny its existence as an axis of inequality — when it comes to the sometimes deplorable behaviour of upper castes while at the same time becoming a consociation society with concerns about extending reservation benefits for neediest when it comes to Dalits.
I am sure there is a possibility of sub-classification among the upper castes as well. After all, they too are not a homogenous group of marauding oppressors — there does indeed exist an enlightened sub-set within them that is anti-caste.
The writer teaches at the School of Development Studies, Dr B R Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD)
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