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EDITORIAL:
THE RESERVATIONS
CONTROVERSY
You would think the world was coming to an end. The furore in India over the government’s decision to back reservations for the underprivileged created the sort of turmoil that echoed the violent Mandal Commission protests in the 1980s that brought down the government of V.P. Singh.

One can sympathize with the students; after all, the bottom line is that there are woefully few spots for a top-class technical education for anyone in India, and getting in is murderously competitive. Many of these protesting students and doctors have worked hard to get in, and many were raised in ordinary middle class homes.

But take a closer look, and you are bound to begin to have some qualms. To many of us, student life is a time of idealism, a time of selfless commitment to causes larger than oneself.

What we are seeing here? If anything, it’s a total self-absorption that is appalling in its selfishness. These guys think they are the smartest folks, and they own the world, and the rest of the world can go take a hike. You have to wonder: If this is what they are like when they are students, what are they going to be like when they enter the professional world?

Alas, you don’t have to look very far for the answer. In India, unfortunately, it’s everywhere. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that any system that allows less than 10 percent of its population — that’s a rough estimate of the size of the upper castes — to hog 90 percent or more of top jobs anywhere is simply out of whack.

When (upper caste) students fail to recognize this simple fact, you have to wonder what on earth they mean by merit.

Of course, this is not a popular viewpoint. Expatriate Indians, the bulk of them upper caste, have shown a unanimous solidarity with the students that would do the Nazis proud. Added to arrogance is the sanctimonious claim that politicians are playing identity politics.

Time for a reality check: Reservations are not about politicians. It’s about a government panel’s well-considered deliberations made 25 years ago that have withstood court challenges to be endorsed by the Indian Supreme Court. In principle, reservations are enshrined in the Indian Constitution.

The terrible wrongs of millennial oppression cannot be redressed without causing some pain. It behooves on those who have enjoyed an outrageously large share of society’s benefits for generations to make way for those who haven’t, with a modicum of grace if not with pleasure.

Our editorial stand is obvious, and our cover story reinforces it. However, we also include a dissenting view from a Bay area group that backs the (read upper caste) student movement to roll back reservations.

Now on to something more pleasant. We would be the first to admit that a fashion show is not the most cerebral of pursuits, but Dil’s San Francisco chapter’s ideal is lofty enough to draw both our respect and affection. DIL is primarily an effort by women to help less fortunate, future women, and it targets low female literacy rates in Pakistan and focuses its efforts on educating girl-children in the poorest and most backward areas of the country. The nonprofit Development in Literacy raised over $75,000 towards education of underprivileged girl children, and honestly, we cannot think of a more heartwarming, substantive gesture towards changing an underprivileged part of society.

A literate girl today means a literate mom tomorrow. That means you have set in motion a process of literacy that has profound implications for the future. The dreadful female literacy rate in Pakistan and many other Muslim countries is nothing short of a disgrace. For the generous, compassionate organizers of the DIL San Francisco chapter, we offer our warm wishes for setting an example.

Dil’s gesture has a broader lesson that’s well worth reflecting upon. Their work reflects the ability to look beyond oneself, to reach out and look upon others not an immediate part of one’s lives with empathy, compassion and concern. This stellar mindset alone can not only ameliorate social turmoil to a considerable degree, it can make this world, which, for all its flaws we love so dearly, a much better place to live. DIL echoes the message of an old African American spiritual song: “We’re in the same boat brother/ If you tip one end, you’re going to rock the other/ We’re in the same boat brother.”

Do drop us a line with ideas and comments about how we can make Siliconeer better serve you.
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COVER STORY:
The Furore Over Reservations: A Primer
Students from some of the elite Indian institutions have been on a rampage in a protest against the government decision to implement a recommendation that 27 percent of seats in higher educational institutions be reserved for a group of disadvantaged people who are officially labeled “Other Backward Classes.”

Rallying under such names as “Youths for Equality,” protesters would have you believe that this is a ploy by politicians to grab the vote banks of backward castes, giving merit short shrift. Many commentators and analysts have joined the bandwagon.

Is it coincidental that pretty much every protester belongs to the upper castes, a thin sliver of the Indian polity that has a virtual stranglehold of top jobs?

Did you know that the government is merely implementing a policy that was recommended way back in 1980 by the Mandal Commission? Who are the Other Backward Classes?

Get the facts in the following primer on the reservations debate that has India in turmoil.

The primer is the collective effort of Girish Agrawal, Shalini Gera, Sanjeev Mahajan, Anu Mandavilli, Ra Ravishankar, Ramkumar Sridharan and Raja Swamy, on behalf of Friends of South Asia.

A rally in Delhi in support of reservations.

Who are the OBCs?

OBC stands for Other Backward Classes. A community is classified as “OBC” if it qualifies as “backward” based on a complex set of social, economic and educational criteria, as specified by the National Commission on Backward Classes (NCBC)1 “The OBCs comprise, by and large, the lower rungs of the Sudras who, in the past, suffered from varying degrees of ritual prohibitions applied to the a-dvijas (literally, those not twice-born) and remain till today socially and occupationally disadvantaged.”2

Do Reservations Work? The SC/ST Experience Though much of the debate around reservations in India has focused on the OBC category, it is instructive to recognize the positive impact of reservation policies in regards to the impact on the most socially and economically disadvantaged groups in Indian society — Dalits and Adivasis (Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes). SC and ST reservations have been in place since 1950 (at 15 percent and 7 percent respectively), and the results of this policy have been found to be generally positive by researchers. For instance, in a study of the impact of reservations on SC/ST access to higher education, researchers note that the overall effect has been to “both redistribute SC and ST students upward in the university quality hierarchy and attract into universities significant numbers of SC and ST students who would not otherwise pursue higher education.”1 The gaps between performance in entrance examinations of SC/ST students and general category students has also been closing, in large part due to the generational improvement of access to secondary education and preparation for highly competitive entrance examinations. Similarly SC/ST graduates from elite universities tend to obtain and excel in responsible and well-paid positions, with the gap between their performance and that of non-SC/ST graduates tending to narrow. In other words, affirmative action policies have resulted in positive trends that have benefited SC/ST communities by opening up spaces for educational and hence economic empowerment. 1. Thomas E. WeissKopf, “Impact of Reservations on Higher Education in India” http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root =2004&leaf=09&filename=7728&filetype=html

“OBCs, by profession, being small cultivators, agricultural laborers, artisans and also being engaged in weaving, fishing, construction work etc. and these occupations being common to SCs and OBCs, the status of OBCs cannot be treated as very much different from that of SCs. …OBCs constitute a majority of poor and backward population which produces a variety of goods and provides a variety of services, but on terms and conditions unfair to them.3

“In absolute size, the OBC poor outnumber SC as well as ST poor population and account for more than half the poor population in the category of (residual non-SC, non-ST) others in both the rural and the urban areas and 31.5 percent (rural) and 38.2 percent (urban) of entire poor population.”4
Specifically in terms of defining OBCs in the context of reservations, one of the key observations of the Mandal Commission was that quantifying social, educational and social levels of each and every community in India would be a logistical nightmare and would invite large-scale corruption. The commission pointed out that many empirical studies indicate that there is a strong correlation between social, educational, and economic backwardness and membership in certain lower castes. So the commission suggested that instead of evaluating all the communities, it would be more practical to consider such castes as potential candidates for being classified as OBC. Once this has been done, one can then look at these castes more closely and determine if their social, economic and educational levels are below a certain predefined threshold.

Defined thus, OBC is a dynamic notion. For instance, if a community X improves dramatically in social, economic and educational indicators, it ceases to be classified as OBC. Note that this implies that evaluation of a community’s backwardness should be done periodically to determine if it still qualifies as being OBC. For a candidate to qualify for an OBC reserved seat, it is necessary that they belong to an OBC community, but such membership in an OBC community is not a sufficient condition. The candidate would also then have to show that her family’s economic and/or educational levels are also not too high, in order to avoid the “creamy-layer” exception.

But are the OBCs really discriminated against? Don’t they already hold a significant amount political power?

The answer to the previous question should also provide an answer to this question. Since OBC communities are by definition those communities that have dramatically low social, economic, and educational levels, one can plausibly argue that their dismal state is a consequence of systemic discrimination. As for political power, yes, lower castes are in power in the states of both U.P. and Bihar, but most of the administrative machinery including the police force is under the control of upper castes.

Would a poor upper-caste person be able to avail of reservations? Why isn’t the criterion for determining who benefits from reservations purely economic?

The suggestion of using only economic criteria to address caste-based inequality is like saying that we should not address gender discrimination as an issue primarily concerning women, since men are also sometimes oppressed. While it is true that there are poor people among the upper castes too, reservations are specifically intended to address massive, systemic, historical subjugation of entire communities. Reservations are not meant as a tool for eliminating economic disparities across the board.

That said, economics do play an important factor in determining which communities are OBC and deserve reservation. As stated earlier, OBC stands for “Other Backward Classes,” and in accordance with the Mandal Commission recommendations, for a community to be classified as OBC, it must meet a complex set of social, economic and educational criteria. While this cannot ensure that every single individual who qualifies for reservation is truly “oppressed,” the procedures are designed to ensure that the bulk of the beneficiaries are socially as well as economically backward. The fact that most OBCs also happen to be lower castes is simply a reflection of how the upper castes control a disproportionate share of the nation’s resources.

Why should the son of an IAS officer benefit from reservations? In general, why should the “creamy layer”, or the well-to-do members of OBC communities get reservations?

As we pointed out in the answer to the first question, membership in a community identified as OBC is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition to qualify for the OBC quota. Specifically, the National Commission of Backward Classes provides a list of persons/sections who are excluded from reservation because they constitute the “creamy layer” of the society.5 Sons/daughters of individuals who are classified as falling under the “creamy layer” cannot be considered eligible for reservation. The “creamy layer” spans various categories, including constitutional posts (president/vice president, supreme court/high court judges, etc), Class I/II officers (in Indian central and state government services), certain employees in public sector undertakings, high-ranking armed force officials, doctors, engineers and other professionals who possess a high level of income/wealth, property owners, and others whose income/wealth is above a certain level.

Mandal Commission: A Brief History Constituted in 1978 by the Janata Party government, the Mandal Commission’s mandate was to identify sections of the population that could be classified as socially and economically disadvantaged, and recommend affirmative action measures to redress their situation. The commission utilized eleven social, educational and economic indicators to arrive at estimates of the proportion of the population under the category of OBC – Other Backward Classes — which is distinct from SC (Scheduled Castes) and ST (Scheduled Tribes), categories that roughly correspond to Dalits and Adivasis. OBCs largely correspond to the Sudra caste in the four-fold Hindu caste system, and also include Muslims and Christians who may be considered economically and socially backward. A large and heterogeneous group, OBCs, at 52 percent, constitute the majority of the Indian population. In 1980 the Mandal Commission recommended that 27 percent of public sector jobs and services run by the central government, as well as 27 percent seats in institutions of higher education be reserved for the OBCs. This did not apply to states like Tamil Nadu that already had in place over fifty percent reservations for OBCs. For almost a decade after the recommendations, succeeding governments led by the Congress party did nothing about it, and it was the V.P. Singh-led government in 1990 that attempted to implement these recommendations. However this effort failed in the face of an upper-caste backlash led by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its allies which used violent agitations against reservations. The recommendations proposed by the Mandal Commission are consistent in letter and spirit with the Constitution of India, which calls for the “provision for the reservation of appointments or posts in favor of any backward class of citizens which, in the opinion of the State, is not adequately represented in the services under the State.” In November 1992, in a landmark case, the Supreme Court upheld the implementation of Mandal recommendations for 27 percent reservations for OBCs and called on the government to proceed with implementation. The government at the time went ahead with reservations in employment but not education. The current effort by the Indian government to implement the recommendations is therefore more than a decade if not fifty years overdue. A false charge against the Mandal Commission is that its recommendations are based solely on caste. While it is recognized that the lines of social and economic status correspond largely with the lines of caste, neither the commission nor its institutional affiliates reduced the former to the latter. In fact the National Commission for Backward Classes, instituted in 1993 after the Supreme Court’s Mandal decision of the previous year, has set up highly detailed guidelines for inclusion within the OBC category after “studying the criteria/indicators framed by the Mandal Commission and the commissions set up in the past by different state Governments and other relevant materials.” The criteria are exhaustive and include social, economic, and educational factors relevant to maintaining a current list of OBCs. The information has also been publicly available contrary to the claims made by some opponents about a lack of transparency.

What happens when a caste/ community classified as OBC advances socially, economically and educationally?

As described earlier, OBC is a dynamic notion. The evaluation of whether given communities qualify to be designated OBC is to be done periodically6 and if a community advances such that its socio-economic and educational levels are on par with state or district average, it ceases to be classified as OBC. The Supreme Court has mandated that a revision of this list needs to take place at least once every 10 years.7

As envisaged by the Mandal Commission, and as proposed to be implemented now, the policy of reservations is not the blunt instrument that it is falsely portrayed to be. It is a fine-grained program that will not result in an ever-increasing number of ‘reserved’ places at the table, but will more than likely always stay below the target threshold of 27 percent because it is designed to use overlapping measures of social and economic deprivation and fluid notions of identity and group belonging — dynamic measures that are subject to continual readjustments to minimize economic and social disparities as society changes.

Are reservations the best way to ensure better representation of socially disadvantaged groups? Are there studies showing their efficacy?

Yes, it is true that the disadvantaged should have access to high quality primary education. Yes, imaginative solutions should be found to overcome the centuries-old practice of caste-based discrimination, but none of this precludes reservation as a corrective measure.

Reservations cannot take the place of comprehensive societal changes, but they constitute a very important, necessary step in the process of compensating for centuries of discrimination. Reservations promote integration in the upper strata of society — by increasing the access of highly disadvantaged and under-represented communities to elite occupations and decision-making positions. In this manner, reservations result in greater empowerment of hitherto disadvantaged communities.

A study on the impact of three decades of reservations in higher education for the SC/ST community in India8 shows that “reservation policies at all levels of higher education both redistribute SC and ST students upward in the university quality hierarchy and attract into universities significant numbers of SC and ST students who would not otherwise pursue higher education.” This study also found that while such reservations were mostly availed of by the more well-off section of the SC/ST population, this was not surprising due to the immense challenges faced by the poorest of the poor in persisting through school in order to reach higher education. In addition, the average socio-economic status of the SC/ST students was significantly lower than that of other students, thus suggesting that reservation policy did not benefit well-off SC/ST students at the expense of less-well-off applicants from the rest of the population.

How about relying on merit to determine admissions? Is that not a neutral criterion?

Reservations or U.S.-style Affirmative Action? India’s socio-political and constitutional drive for equality has enough superficial similarities to that of the United States that it is tempting for commentators in the media to compare and confuse the two. In the current debate over the proposed reservations in higher education, some say that instead of “quotas,” India needs to have U.S.-style affirmative action. Although attractive, this argument has crucial flaws. First, although India’s constitutional requirement of equal protection for all is similar to that found in the U.S. Constitution, the Constitution of India contains explicit exceptions. Where U.S. jurisprudence and social policy over the last three decades has devolved into mere equality of opportunity, India has embraced the idea of substantive equality, which requires preferential treatment to overcome the historic disadvantages suffered by groups. The Indian Supreme Court said 30 years ago in State of Kerala v. Thomas: “Equality means parity of treatment under parity of conditions. Equality of opportunity for unequals can only mean aggravation of inequality. Thus equality of opportunity can be gauged only by equality in result.” Despite movement towards substantive equality following Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that desegregated U.S. schools, the U.S. Supreme Court changed course with Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) by rejecting arguments for using quotas to increase medical school admissions from racial minority groups. The Indian Supreme Court, on the other hand, has explicitly approved the use of quotas in multiple decisions, most importantly in its decision in Indira Sawhney vs. Union of India (1993), the so-called Mandal case. Second, India does not rely on discrete markers such as race or gender as the U.S. does for affirmative action, but constructs compensatory policies using multiple, overlapping measures of subordination and disadvantage for entire groups. Affirmative action at best only deals with equality of opportunity for individuals. Caste is such a potent force in India, and is embedded so deeply in the national psyche, that it is hard to get away from the fact that caste hierarchies continue to define how various forms of power, such as educational, economic and judicial, are distributed in India. Hence, even Indian-style reservations must be understood as only a way of breaking the stranglehold of upper castes on the levers of power, not as a way to bring equality. If those who argue against reservations in India sincerely wish to see “quotas” discarded as a way to empower the historically marginalized, then they must work to put in place effective, functional institutional structures to ensure that caste hierarchies do not work to shut out entire segments of the population from access to education and jobs.

Merit is the product of socio-economic conditions and is intrinsically tied to financial advantages and social support systems enjoyed by students in communities of privilege. Given the vast and dramatic differences between students of upper and lower castes in terms of their access to good schools, tutoring facilities, financial support, and other forms of social capital, we cannot but evolve policies of compensatory preference. Relying exclusively on “merit” based assessments will have the result of favoring the status quo and shutting out students whose inherited socio-economic environments do not facilitate academic achievement in the same way as that of upper caste students, with whom they are nevertheless expected to compete.

Further, it is a false claim that students who enter universities through the reserved category are undeserving or unqualified compared to those coming through the general category. Students who make it through the reserved category still have to meet rigorous qualification criteria. Reservations only play a role in determining which subset of qualified people get access to the limited number of available seats.

It is also a little odd to assume that someone who was admitted into, say, a medical college under a reserved category and completes the requirements for his or her degree would not make a good doctor. Because degrees are granted only after students successfully fulfill all academic requirements of the program, it is hardly relevant whether someone initially gained admission through reservations or not.

Don’t caste-based reservations result in further promoting casteism?

Reservations do not enforce or promote casteism. Rather, they are an acknowledgement of its brutal reality, and attempt to provide corrective measures to compensate for the centuries of oppression faced by lower castes, and the resultant inequalities of contemporary society. Opposing caste-based reservations for the sake of “equality” is disingenuous, since this argument is in denial of the fact that caste-based inequality already exists. Very much like apartheid in South Africa, slavery in the United States and post-Civil War segregation and exploitation of blacks, the caste system not only drastically exploited Dalits and other lower caste groups, it also concentrated advantage in the three upper-caste groups. Despite accounting for only around 10 percent of the population, upper castes in India control virtually everything. Nearly sixty years after independence from British rule, upper-caste individuals continue to hold an overwhelming majority of academic, administrative and executive positions, including over 95 percent of the appellate judicial positions. The upper castes also control more than two-thirds of the nation’s wealth. Even within the upper caste groups, Brahmins, less than three percent of the population, occupy nearly all the upper rungs of federal administrative structure and most of the senior academic positions. To question this extremely lopsided distribution of power is the ethical responsibility of all Indians, but in particular that of all upper-caste Indians.

During the civil rights movement in the deep South, the white racists argued that the movement was creating schisms between blacks and whites, and that the violent reaction of whites was essentially a result of agitators from the North creating dissatisfaction among blacks who were otherwise quite happy with their situation. Protests by upper-caste Indians (who constitute less than 15 percent of Indian population) against the attempts of Indian government to make elite educational institutions accessible to people who have suffered under the millennia-old tyrannical and brutal caste system are also equally disingenuous.

Is not the government pandering to vote bank politics by announcing these reservations? Instead, would it not be better if the government worked for the national interest?

This question involves a clarification of what constitutes a democracy. A democratically elected government is necessarily accountable to the people who elected it. In so far as the OBCs constitute a sizeable portion of Indian society, reservations that are meant to ameliorate their socio-economic condition do serve the greater common good. If the accusation is that the government announced 27 percent quota for OBCs to get re-elected, then the government is guilty as accused. Of course, every elected government wants to get re-elected. That is what democratic politics is all about.

As for the national interest, this concept has mostly been used to further whatever is in the best interests of the country’s elite, and unless one defines precisely what it is supposed to mean in a more substantive way, one cannot build a reservation policy based upon it. .

We are talking about reservations for the OBCs in particular. What percentage of the Indian population is OBC?

The best estimate is about 52 percent of the population. That translates to almost 600 million people. While different surveys have shown variations (as low as 40 percent and as high as 65 percent), the Mandal Commission compiled the most comprehensive data base and estimated the OBC population as about 50 percent. The Mandal statistics have also withstood extensive scrutiny.

“Other Backward Classes” comprises mostly lower castes, a few upper-caste communities and some religious minorities (yes, socially and educationally backward segments of the Christian or Muslim communities, for example, do qualify for OBC classification). To put things in perspective, let’s look at India’s overall population distribution:

Lower Castes (Sudras): 42-44 percent (≈ 475 million)
Dalits (“SC”s): 16-18 percent (≈ 190 million)
Upper Castes: 12-14 percent (≈ 145 million)
Muslims: 12-13 percent (≈ 140 million)
Adivasis (“ST”s):7-8 percent (≈ 80 million)
Christians: 2 percent (≈ 22 million)
Sikhs: 2 percent (≈ 22 million)
Others (Jains, Parsis, Buddhists, Jews, etc.): 2 percent (≈ 22 million)

The numbers do not add up to 100 percent partly because they are best estimates, and partly because there is some overlap between various categories. Note that lower castes, Dalits and Adivasis, when taken together, number about 750 million, almost 70 percent of India’s population.

What does the Indian Constitution have to say in regard to reservations?
Reservations are constitutionally mandated in India. Article 14 requires equal protection of the laws, while Articles 15 and 16 prohibit discrimination by the state or by private persons in public accommodations and employment. These articles provide explicit exceptions to the Article 14 mandate of formal equality to allow for special measures for upliftment of backward sectors in society. Article 15 states: “Nothing in this article … shall prevent the State from making any special provision for the advancement of any socially and educationally backward classes of citizens or for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes.”

Similarly, the Ninety-Third Amendment to the Constitution of India came into force on January 20, 2006, and allows the government to make special provisions for the admission “of any socially and educationally backward classes of citizens” to “educational institutions including private educational institutions, whether aided or unaided by the State[.]”

Are quota-based reservations the best way to go? What about other models of positive discrimination?
Reservations are one way of ensuring that traditionally underrepresented communities get access to higher education. However, many other alternative models of positive discrimination have also been proposed such as the Yogendra Yadav and Satish Deshpande model9 or the Purushottam Aggarwal model.10 Many opponents of reservation have claimed that they are in favor of “affirmative action” and have proposed one of these alternative models as a possible solution.

The quota system and the afore-mentioned models of positive discrimination converge on many vital aspects. In the quota system, some communities are determined on the basis of socio-economic and educational parameters to be “backward” and their members (other than those excluded in the “creamy layer”) are all given the benefit of being put in a separate category (“reserved” category) where they only have to compete with other backward class members. In these other positive discrimination models, a handicap is awarded to each individual on the basis of different socio-economic, educational and gender based factors.

The main difference between the two is that the quota-system is a constitutional mandate to have a certain representation of backward classes in the institutions of higher education, while the handicap-based models of positive discrimination are not. It is possible that even with the handicap, the disparities in the forward and backward castes remain. Since the main purpose of having reservations is to ensure a certain representation of the underprivileged OBCs in the educational institutions, the handicap based models can only do the job if the handicap is adjusted so that at least 27 percent and 22.5 percent of the seats in higher education institutes are indeed occupied by OBCs and SC/STs respectively.

The other main difference is that the quota system treats the entire community as a whole (sans the creamy layer), while in the handicap based models, the unit is the individual. So, in the former case, a community as a whole is determined to be “backward” or not, on the basis of some parameters, while in the latter, individual handicaps vary from person to person even within the same community. In this respect, the handicap method allows for a greater fine-tuning of the measurement of “backwardness” but also increases the burden on each individual to show his or her qualification for a certain level of “backwardness.” We believe that the quota-based reservation model is a simpler model in administrative terms and has clearly been shown to work well in increasing the representation of SC/STs at elite institutions. We are, however, open to the suggestion that other positive discrimination models can also bring about similar or better representations of underprivileged communities in equal or lesser time.

Further Information Here are some Web links on reservations and caste: http://www.socialjustice.in/ http://socialjustice.ekduniya.net/ http://www.ambedkar.org/ http://www.dalits.org/ http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/caste/ http://www.theotherindia.org/

We find, though, that the claim by anti-reservation groups that they are only looking for better models for decreasing inequality to be quite disingenuous. If that is indeed the case, then we urge them to take a public stance in favor of positive discrimination, so that the public debate is limited only to the debate of which is the best model for doing so. On the other hand, we fear that the use of these alternative models in the discourse of groups such as Youth 4 Equality is merely to stall the discussion of any kind of positive discrimination from going forward.

Due to space restrictions, we could not present some statistical tables that provide graphic evidence of upper caste hegemony. These tables and more information on the reservation debate are available at the Friends of South Asia Web site at: www.friendsofsouthasia.org/caste/reservations

Notes

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PROTEST:
Are Reservations A Good Idea?
No, Do a Study First
The Indian government’s decision to implement an additional 27 percent caste-based reservations in higher educational institutions is not backed by facts or figures but instead motivated by caste-based vote politics, writes Manish Lohani on behalf of Bay Area Indians for Equality.

Some of the 500 Indian American protesters who gathered at the Fair Oaks Park in Sunnyvale, Calif., to protest the indian government’s decision to implement a 1980 panel recommendation to reserve 27 seats in higher educational institutions for Other Backward Classes.

The Indian government has recently decided to implement an additional 27 percent caste-based reservations in all higher educational institutions in the country. While we all have our personal opinions on whether reservation in any form is good or bad, we believe that the current policy and implementation is wrong, because it is not backed by facts or figures but instead motivated by caste-based vote politics.

Let us be clear: We believe in affirmative action. What we are saying to the Indian government is this: Show us the evidence that it has done proper study/analysis of the problem and the current policy will solve the problem. If it has not already done this study, then it should first do it and only then implement whatever is the recommendation of such an analysis.

The fact that the government does not want to study the problem before implementing it suggests that its motive is not really solving the problem but to divide people on the basis of caste. We reject caste-based politics outright and do not believe that it will help us build a casteless society. If by spending a few months on the problem, we can build a general consensus for a solution and avoid caste-based politics, it will only strengthen the social fabric and be more beneficial to the disadvantaged.

Various organizations and individuals have urged the government to justify its move and provide more transparency on this policy intervention, which is going to directly affect many people and influence the social and economic future of the country. Lack of any response from the government on the above demands has raised concerns that the policy may be motivated by personal agenda rather than national interest.

The goal of our group, Bay Area Indians for Equality, is to unite together and send a strong signal to the Indian government that in a democracy, people want more transparency in decision making. Our aim is to urge the government to justify whatever policy it comes up with, and to back it with facts and figures.

We demand that:

An expert committee be formed comprising apolitical eminent experts of repute to review the current caste-based reservation policy of the government. The objective of such a committee will be to explore various approaches to affirmative action not limited to reservations.

Till such a committee comes out with its recommendations, the implementation of the current caste-based reservation policy be put on hold.

The recommendations and analysis of such a committee be made available to public.

A lot of us are not directly affected by the current reservation policy by the government. It is precisely why we should take a stand. Being non-resident Indians, we have a unique perspective on the issue. We need to become a voice for the interest of the country since the government does not seem to be working for it.

This issue is relevant to every Indian who has any stake in the future of India. So, if you have family/social /business/cultural ties to India, this issue is relevant to you.
Specifically, this issue is relevant to you if:

• If you are a technology entrepreneur, with a development centre in India.
  
• If you are an employee of a company with an India office.
  
• If you are a businessman who has family/friends in India.
  
• If you are a potential/current investor.
  
• If you are an alum/faculty of any educational institute that will be affected by the upcoming reservation policy.
  
• If you have family/friends in India who will be directly affected by the reservation policy.
  

While the Indian government has set up a review committee to oversee the implementation of the current policy of 27 percent reservation for OBCs in central educational institutes, it has no intention as of now to review the policy itself.

The Supreme Court of India has asked the Indian government to justify how it arrived at the 27 percent number. This is a step in the right direction. However, it still does not question caste as a basis of reservation and does not directly question the government on whether it has done any recent study/analysis/review of the problem.

While medical students have quit their strike at the order of the Indian Supreme Court, the issue is still alive. The Indian government is planning to bring in a bill in Parliament in the monsoon session.

More information on Bay Area Indians for Equality is available at the group’s Web site at: www.bayarea4equality.org.

- Manish Lohani is a Bay Area-based professional and
a volunteer for Bay Area Indians for Equality

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