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Caste-based Reservation and the Sociology of ‘Merit’

T. Kumar, FPRM

It was a hot day in Chennai in May 2002. I went to an Internet café to see the results of the IAS exam, the interview for which I had attended the previous month in Delhi. I was in a state of nervous excitement. I had not only spent the previous five years of my life preparing for this exam but had also jeopardised my job as a software engineer in the pursuit of this dream. The results showed that I had got an all-India rank of 260. Some of my friends who had got lower ranks than me had nevertheless got through to elite services like the Indian Foreign Service and the Indian Police Service because they belonged to the OBC/SC category, while I did not get any service as I was in the general category. So whatever the views expressed below, readers should note that they have not been written out of self-interest.

There is a view even among many well-meaning people that caste-based reservation dilutes ‘merit’ and denies ‘equality of opportunity’. A small minority of such people are against reservation on the ground that this would rob them of the social status and privileges that they have traditionally enjoyed. This article is meant for the majority of the people who are against reservation because they simply don’t understand the logic behind the system. They cannot be faulted when respected former directors of elite educational institutions write articles in newspapers against reservation. With due respect to such people, a proper understanding of the logic behind reservation needs a basic grounding in the social sciences, which, unfortunately, an educational system heavily tilted towards professional courses does not provide most Indian students.
Let us examine a set of myths behind the opposition to caste-based reservation and their validity.
Myth No. 1: Reservation should be based on economic criteria, and not on social criteria like caste.
This is the biggest myth of all. Reservation has nothing to do with making the poor rich, although that might be one of the upshots of this measure. The preamble to the Indian Constitution promises to secure to the citizens of India justice in three areas, viz. social, economic, and political. Reservation is aimed squarely at achieving social justice for all citizens.
Self-esteem is central to human identity and well-being, because man does not live by bread alone. Humans also need a sense of dignity, self-respect, and self-worth, and this may not come from only the possession of money or material goods. Our social status and the regard of our fellows are central to our sense of self-esteem. In a semi-feudal country like India, the social status that comes with higher education and government jobs is tremendous. If a schoolteacher is earning Rs 8,000 per month and a small-time trader peddling animal feed is also earning Rs 8,000 per month, the social status differential between the two will be definitely huge, a differential that will be seen clearly in the life chances for success of their respective children.
Myth No. 2: The upper castes are more meritorious than the lower castes, and hence more deserving of reservation.
Without taking its name, let us take the example of a prominent private management school in India. It does not have a reservation policy. It has been found that out of the students who gain admission to the institute, 90 per cent are from the upper castes, while the proportion of the upper castes in the Indian population is only about 15 per cent. What is the reason for this? Why are only people of certain castes able to gain admission to institutions of higher learning while others belonging to certain other castes are unable to do so? Does this mean that upper-caste people have a higher IQ than lower-caste people? If we were to endorse this kind of simplistic reasoning, we run the risk of justifying the notion of the natural inequality of mankind based on which ideologies like fascism thrive.
So we have to accept that all human beings have an equal intellectual endowment at birth. Then how do only members of certain castes get to prove themselves more intelligent and more capable while members of certain other castes are not able to do so? We can explain this gap in achievement with the help of a concept called cultural capital. Cultural capital means the attitude of a social group towards education, knowing what to study, where to study, how to study, how to use education for self-advancement, and how to use the group’s existing network to gain more power and prestige. We need to understand that the upper castes possess a certain kind of cultural capital that the lower castes might not have. Cultural capital has been monopolised by the upper castes in India for thousands of years by systematically excluding the lower castes through the legitimising ideology of varnashrama dharma.
Myth No. 3: Candidates who have availed the benefit of reservation in the civil services examinations should feel guilty vis-à-vis the general candidates because they are enjoying a privilege that they don’t deserve in the first place.
First, we must recognise the existence of huge structural imperfections in the system of education; these weaknesses and flaws have an enormous impact in a country where job prospects are based on educational attainment or degrees.
With due respect to all branches of knowledge, anyone who has gone through a difficult and demanding course of study like engineering will realise the kind of effort required for gaining admission into an engineering programme and then going through it and earning the degree. But the job prospects of an engineer who in addition to the engineering degree also has an MBA degree might be regarded as being equal to those of an arts/commerce graduate who also has an MBA degree, but who may have put in only a fraction of the effort that this engineer has invested in earning his engineering degree. If we believe that a person with an undeserved edge in the job market should feel guilty, does this mean that this arts/commerce graduate with an MBA should also feel guilty vis-à-vis this engineer with an MBA? In a system with such glaring imperfections, why should a candidate from a reserved category feel guilty vis-à-vis the ‘meritorious’ candidates just because he or she has got a few percentage points less in the competitive exams but has nevertheless still bagged the job?
More importantly, if we believe that the candidates who have availed the benefit of reservation should feel guilty, then the majority of humankind should also feel guilty. Why should a software engineer get a salary that is fifty times more than the salary of a manual scavenger when the work of the former is far less dehumanising than the work of the latter? Many of us enjoy many benefits compared to others that we don’t deserve in the first place. If we all were to start feeling guilty, then half of humankind would have to die of guilt before a single candidate who has availed the benefits of reservation starts feeling even a twinge of guilt vis-à-vis the ‘meritorious’ candidates. So nobody needs to feel ‘guilty’.
Myth No. 4: Reservation will dilute ‘merit’. This is the most interesting of all such myths. Here we need to delve deep into the sociology of ‘merit’. What is ‘merit’? Is it something that is decided on the basis of a percentile point difference in the marks attained by various candidates in some competitive exam? Have we ever been able to devise a perfect competitive exam, which separates the wheat from the chaff? Can a person who has taken a competitive exam at one point in her life be branded a meritorious person or a dull person for the rest of her life? I know many people who got poor grades in their school-leaving exams and hence did not get admission to a full-time undergraduate degree programme. So they took up a clerical or other job and pursued an undergraduate degree through a correspondence course. But later on, they gained enough motivation to prove themselves, and took the civil services exams and became IAS exam toppers. Again, it is important to remind ourselves that in many competitive exams success or failure depends on whether one has attended the proper coaching classes rather than on whether one is ‘meritorious’.
The harsh reality is that the ‘merit’ argument is more of a chimera than anything else, which provides a superb basis for legitimising an ideational framework that justifies the various privileges that the elite in our society have traditionally enjoyed.
Myth No. 5: It is power-hungry, corrupt politicians who introduce and popularise concepts like caste-based reservation for the sake of getting votes.
It has become fashionable in Indian middle-class circles to blame politicians for all the ills plaguing society. First, we have to define a politician and understand what he or she does. In a liberal democracy like ours, politicians basically represent the interests of the different sections of society. So if the lower castes marshal the political strength to press for their demands, then the politician will represent their interests and also further his or her own career in the process. This is a very natural process in a democracy, and there is no evil manipulation of the masses by the politician in this kind of a process.
In a country like India, where there are crores of children out of school, we, the members of the Indian middle class, don’t have a problem if politicians earmark half the central budget for higher education for the IITs and the IIMs, and nor do we protest if the products of these institutions go abroad or join MNCs. But when the very same politicians press for reservation for the lower castes in these institutions, then the very same middle-class people accuse the politicians of playing ‘vote-bank politics’, of diluting ‘merit’, and of encroaching on the ‘professional autonomy’ of academic institutions.
Myth No. 6: In critical sectors like health care, there should be no reservation as this will endanger the public good.
Let us take the example of a public hospital. Let us assume that all the doctors in the hospital are ‘meritorious’ upper-caste people who have not availed of the benefit of reservation. In this scenario, a poor lower-caste person may not even get access to the hospital services. In a country like India, where personal ‘contacts’ are essential for getting access to many essential services, it might be very difficult for a poor lower-caste person to get even simple access to the services of a public hospital. But in a scenario where reservation exists as a matter of policy, it is possible that the lower-caste person may have a relative or friend who works as a doctor at this very same hospital and through whom he can gain access to the services of the hospital.
Myth No. 7: Reservation benefits only the already well-off sections of the lower castes and hence should not be given or extended.
This may be true to some extent because of some procedural imperfections in the system. The concept of the ‘creamy layer’ is meant to rectify this problem. Much of the opposition to reservation emanates from seductively named groups claiming to be for ‘equality’, and hence they argue against reservation. If these very same people were to launch a campaign for ensuring that the fruits of reservation reach the truly deserving sections among the lower castes, then the whole of India will be behind them. But it seems that their real worry is not that the deserving sections among the lower castes are not getting the fruits of reservation but that they themselves might lose the privileges that they have been enjoying so far.
Myth No. 8: Caste-based reservation will make Indian society even more ‘casteist’.
This kind of an argument would be tenable if there were nothing like ‘caste’ in Indian society and if caste-based reservation were likely to introduce an evil element called ‘caste’ into Indian society.
I will recount an anecdote here. One day, on the lawns of the IRMA mess, I was talking with the father of a female student of PRM (the postgraduate programme at IRMA), who happens to be a friend. The father belongs to an upper caste. I like and respect him a lot at a personal level. He said that he would be happy if his daughter did not take up a plum corporate job and instead joined an NGO for low pay and worked in a rural setting. Very few Indian parents are as liberal and spiritually evolved as this father. But he also said something else that was significant. He said that he would disown his daughter if she married a scheduled-caste person. The point here is that even such an evolved and liberal person like this man is not able to think beyond caste. We cannot blame him. The feudal prejudices that we have all imbibed over the last 3,000 years cannot be changed in a generation or two. This goes to prove the validity of what Ambedkar said a long time back—that it is only when caste becomes a non-issue in the matter of all marriages in India that we can say truthfully that caste has been eradicated from Indian society.
If caste doesn’t exist, then why is it that the overwhelming majority of manual scavengers in India (who number more than one million) are from the scheduled castes, and almost none of them are from the upper castes? If any upper-caste person were to check the caste identities of all her/his friends, she/he would find that they are mostly from the upper castes. Why is this so? This is not because we consciously avoid befriending people of other castes but because the social spaces and networks in which we have lived since our birth (such as our neighbourhoods, schools and colleges, and other institutionalised spaces) are more or less structured around broad caste-based lines. For thousands of years, caste has been an oppressive part of the system in which you and I live. So what is wrong if the very same caste identity is made use of in fighting caste-based oppression?
Myth No. 9: Instead of implementing the system of reservation, we should concentrate on improving and widening our system of public education so that all castes can be on an equal footing.
Here, we have to understand that caste-based reservation and attempts to improve our system of public education are not mutually exclusive endeavours. Nobody is saying that we should not have an excellent educational system for all children in India. Even if we were to undertake stupendous efforts in this direction, that step alone may not suffice. Hence caste-based reservation becomes a necessity.
Myth No. 10: Under the Indian Constitution, caste-based reservation was envisaged as being in place only for a period of ten years initially, and hence should not be continued.
Here we have to understand one thing. The Indian Constitution is meant to be understood and followed in both the letter and the spirit. The spirit behind caste- based reservation as envisaged in the Constitution was to erase caste-based discrimination through reservation within ten years, after which all castes were to be brought on the same footing. Sixty years after independence, has that goal been achieved? No! Even now, in all government jobs, institutions of higher education, and in all kinds of elite jobs, the representation of the lower castes is less than the proportion of these groups in the population. So until the representation of the lower castes in these arenas of public life becomes equal to their proportion in the population, we need to have caste-based reservation. And once the oppression-based differential between the different castes vanishes, then one day in the not-so-distant future, caste as an institution will wither away because it will no longer have any relevance in Indian society. In my humble opinion, until that golden day arrives, we need to have caste-based reservation.
T Kumar can be reached at  f032@irma.ac.in