The recent majority verdict of the Supreme Court in the case of the EWS quota has taken the nation by storm. The policy of granting reservation quota to the poor of the dominant caste only has taken care of a group that is impacted by modern forces such as class, as opposed to the traditional forces of caste.
With this new reservation, a few questions demand attention. 1. Who is included in the EWS category? 2. What is the genesis of reservation policy in India, and will it change for good? 3. What are the ramifications for the future of social welfare and redistribution mechanism? 4. Is this the first step to annul caste-based protection? 5. Who decides from the pulpit about the future of marginalised communities and diversity in the judicial system?
To begin with, the Supreme Court bench comprising non-SC, ST, and OBC members to deliver a judgment on the quota as a new constitutional law is an irony.
Narendra Modi’s government announced a reservation for the EWS in 2018, which required an amendment to the Constitution of India. This proposal was cleared in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha on January 8 and January 9, 2019, within a span of a day. However, the law received a challenge in February. The Supreme Court declined to stay the EWS quota in February 2019. A bench is then constituted by the CJI UU Lalit to hear the appeals in September 2022. On November 7, 2022, the Supreme Court, by a majority of 3-2, upheld the validity of the said amendment by providing a 10% reservation to EWS.
While the new amendment was challenged in court, the EWS quota was filled in 2019. This shows that the solidarity of the castes is more prominent than the class validity it is based upon.
The Supreme Court had put a ceiling of 50% in the Indra Sawhney case upholding the judgments of the Balaji case of 1962. This, in effect, created a casualty in the other backward classes whose position is not dissimilar to those gaining a profile in EWS. However, unlike those in the EWS, OBCs were relegated to a lower social position. Often, the OBC group is conflated with those landowning shudra, whom I call, neo Baniyas in my book Caste Matters. Their position in the OBC quota is equated with the majority of the OBC demography.
In the EWS category, one cannot get a complete picture of which caste will benefit from the provenance. The poverty index is humiliated by increasing the limitation to Rs 8 lakh. In a country where poverty metrics are mournfully lower, having a ceiling of 8 lakh as a poverty indicator is an added blemish to the majority poor.
Now that the EWS category is put forth, can one expect solidarity with the poor dominant castes and SCs, STs, and OBCs? Will it create a process for establishing social democracy? Looking at the evidence, it seems that the beneficiaries of the EWS will be used to channel further hatred towards the SCs, STs, and OBCs as incompetent and undeserving of the caste-based reservation. With the new precedent, the next generation will be put on the defensive where class will take prominence and caste-certificate carrying children will be doubly bullied and shamed for demanding their rightful share.
The ones who oppose caste-based reservation but want to avail of the class reservation have nefarious objectives to get away with caste reservation. When quotas are offered for women, defence personnel, management seats, transgender, Kashmiri Pandits, PWD, regional, and linguistic quotas, in addition to the samaj institutions offering explicit admissions to their own religious/caste groups (for example, the Catholic institutions of India), the sore eye for caste quota is evidence of the hostility for the outcastes and marginalised, preventing their rise to the level of equality.
Something similar can be seen in the affirmative action verdict of the Supreme Court in America. The verdict suggested that diversity can be achieved without explicitly focusing on race. The dissenters on the Supreme Court panel wanted to know the exact timeline for when the race-based admission quota would end.
With such an anti-social justice model in place, granting benefits to groups already protected by the system they have created reduces the experience of the oppressed. The oppressed will now be asked to prove their case through the lens of the minority beneficiaries drawn in the new policies.
