The Political Use of Caste and the Problems of Reservation

Insisting on caste censuses, our politicians promise to do what the colonials failed to achieve, which is to break the country into innumerable factions fighting each other. The biggest failure of our political-academic-intellectual combination after independence was continuing the colonial narratives. Caste is one such important idea for which our “colonial consciousness” (a near-permanent alteration of our intellectual frameworks and a term framed by Dr. SN Balagangadhara at the University of Ghent) refuses to give up on colonial ideas.

Intellectual and academic laziness ensures that we do not even want to evaluate what “varṇa” and “jāti,” our indigenous systems, actually mean and how they correlate to the word “caste,” an alien word imported from the Portuguese world. The word “caste” has no equivalent in the Indian scriptures, and yet we have extraordinarily superimposed caste on all our indigenous social systems, and achieved a breakdown of the country that the colonials could only have dreamt of.

Problematically, we ignored thinkers like Śrī Aurobindo and Ananda Coomaraswamy, who had a far greater grip on the nature of Indian culture. They felt that the strongest point of India, which allowed it to withstand constant attacks on our civilisation for centuries, was the “three quartets”—the four varṇas, the four āśramas (brahmacarya, gṛhastha, saṃnyāsa, and vānaprastha), and the four puruṣārthas (dharma, artha, kāma, and mokṣa). The framework of our civilization and culture was this deeply interlinked group of four, and the ultimate ideal for the individual and the nation was “mokṣa.” Mokṣa was possible for any individual who stayed true to the boundaries of varṇa and āśrama. To study each of the three quartets in isolation would only lead to distortion, fissuring, and strife, as is happening in society today.

Do We Have an Indigenous Theory of Varṇa?

Indian scriptures never developed a theory of varṇa like modern writers. The latter, along with a huge body of Indologists, conveniently ignore that the hierarchical nature of varṇas has many times undergone a reversal with śūdras on top. The scriptures were hardly consistent in the hierarchical ordering of the varṇas. It was likely that the varṇas were “categories” without the kind of strict hierarchy constructed by the colonials and missionaries.

The negative idea of being a śūdra is perhaps the greatest divisive narrative in our textbooks. Indian reality shows that the most powerful communities—politically, socially, economically, and culturally—belong to the śūdra varṇa across the country. Many of the jātis at the top of the social hierarchy belong to the śūdra varṇa, with the simple explanation that they are not brāhmaṇas, kṣatriyas, or vaiśyas as popularly understood. This fact seems to be lost on most of our textbook writers; and Marxist historians, who fill our textbooks with ideas of the exploitation and deprivation of this category by the other three (brāhmaṇa, kṣatriya, and vaiśya).

The Scheduled Castes

“Scheduled” castes were an unfortunate colonial legacy of the 20th century, as Jakob de Roover explains clearly in his essay, ‘Scheduled Castes vs. Caste Hindus: About a Colonial Distinction and Its Legal Impact’. We still use the colonial way of thinking when we put 65 million people, and 1200 jātis with widely different cultural practices, into the same Scheduled Caste category, using the vague term “ex-untouchability.” Untouchability, as a preconceived notion against members of a particular jāti, was detestable and indeed a weed in Indian social systems. It is now illegal, and all our outstanding thinkers and social reformers worked hard to remove it from Indian society.

However, on what empirical grounds has the government transformed more than one thousand two hundred communities into a single category of Scheduled Castes? The decisive factors are not social or economic backwardness, age, income, or disability; but a single characteristic of ​​untouchability.​ As the most important criterion, untouchability should have strict and clear definitions set by competent authorities. The Constituent Assembly, largely reproducing British legislation, never clearly defined ‘untouchability’, despite its decisive role in formulating caste legislation. The term referred to a varied series of practices and situations.

As Jakob de Roover explains, sometimes it was banning entry into temples, sometimes it was refusing to take water from some groups, sometimes it was the custom of providing separate cups for different groups, sometimes it was taking a bath after physical contact, and sometimes it was cleaning the house after some member of a group entered the house. It could also indicate the fact that a group lived in separate quarters at the borders of a village. The list was never considered exhaustive as new practices were constantly added. During the censuses and in the committee reports, it turned out that some such practices existed in certain parts of India but not in other parts.

The Parliament debates which occurred after independence had severe difficulties. The situation became even more complicated, considering that practices labelled “untouchability” were also visible in the interactions among the jātis internally, in the broad categories of “high-caste Hindus,” “low-caste Hindus,” or even the scheduled castes. Essentially, the claim asserts that when one individual refrains from touching or approaching another, it transforms into caste-based untouchability, particularly when the former belongs to the Hindu caste and the latter to the Untouchable Castes. And how can one identify these untouchable castes? Well, they are the ones that are subject to caste-based untouchability.

This approach creates a vicious cycle.

Towards the end of the Assembly’s work, Parliament members sharply asserted that the term “scheduled castes” is a fabrication and acknowledged the impossibility of providing a precise definition of untouchability. This later evolved into a common indication of ‘an internal feeling of odium’ expressed in a variety of practices, different in different parts of India, which show that these castes could not enjoy their political rights. ‘An internal feeling of odium’ that expresses itself externally opens another set of problems due to its vague nature.

The notion of untouchability was obscure and challenging to define, as it has many connotations far beyond the linear understandings in the popular narrative. A lady doing her pooja does not touch any family members, and there was a huge untouchability phenomenon going on in the Corona pandemic. In some societies, even some brāhmaṇas were the object of practices deemed as untouchability, as Sudha Mohan has shown¹.

Is There Data Showing Huge Discrimination?

Today, due to many reasons, which include academia, politics, and the media, the only identification of India nationally and internationally is through the Dalit prism, despite the absence of statistical evidence that Dalits face more discrimination than the rest of society. It is a peculiar aspect of our crime recording, like that of the NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau), that “caste atrocity” occurs only when the victim belongs to the Scheduled Communities. Hence, the only comparison of atrocities against scheduled communities, is with the rest of society - since atrocities against individual jātis or varṇas are not part of the recording. Surprisingly, as Pathan and Jalki show² , compared with the rest of the population, the scheduled castes in fact face almost 30 times less violence.

Nihar Sashittal³ disproves the almost “given” conclusion about “widespread and disproportionate violence” against the Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) people. Sashittal points out that serious conceptual fallacies and distorted statistics — cherry-picking, data illiteracy, floating numerators, and intuitive statistics — are to blame for this widespread notion that permeates all academic-political-legal-media discussions and international monitoring agencies.

As per the UN criteria, atrocity refers to three legally defined international crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Strangely, in the present Indian legal language, Sashittal shows how atrocity has undergone a “semantic expansion,” referring to not only heinous crimes but all offences like coercion, intimidation, trespass, harassment, cheating, forgery, insults or humiliations, disrespect for icons, and so on.

“Concept creep,” both “horizontally” capturing qualitatively new phenomena and “vertically” capturing quantitatively lesser phenomena, increases the scope of atrocity crimes.

The semantic expansion gives it a split character. There is a dilated definition (that includes all crimes, irrespective of the motives or severity) for collecting statistics on crimes and a constricted definition for interpretation, giving the sense that these crimes refer to the most heinous and are necessarily motivated by caste.

Statistics showing crimes only committed by non-SCs and non-STs against SCs and STs and not against any other group gave the impression that these crimes only happen to SCs and STs, or happen too often against them. As ad hoc adjustments in defining crime, since 2016, the records have started excluding crimes against SCs where STs are perpetrators and against STs where SCs are perpetrators.

The Prevention of Atrocities Act of 1989 (POA) defined a range of new offences that did not require establishing caste as a motive, but in which the victim belonged to the scheduled community. Gradually, “atrocity” became arbitrarily conflated with “hate crimes.”. The alleged offenders do not just belong to any one particular religion, yet the popular discourse pins the blame on the “Hindu caste system.”

As Sashittal shows, according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), less than 40% of crimes against SCs and STs under the Indian Penal Code are “violent,” and less than 30% of crimes against them under all three laws (IPC, POA of 1989, and Protection of Civil Liberties of 1995) are “violent.” A significant proportion of lesser offences are not necessarily violent but are more susceptible to variations in reporting levels.

Sashittal’s analyzes in detail the statistical data of six major crimes (murder, rape, arson, kidnapping and abduction, dacoity, and robbery), with “hurt” being the seventh for the period between the mid-1970s and 2019, for crimes against SCs and STs. He shows that for each of the violent crimes, the rates for crimes against SCs and STs are significantly lower than the average rates of these crimes in the overall population in India. Contrary to popular opinion, the pendency times in courts have also been lower for major crimes where the SCs and STs are victims.

Tribes

The same is true for the classification of people into tribes. The concepts of race and tribe have been relegated to the dustbin of social sciences academia, due to their difficult definition and widespread and indiscriminate usage. “Tribe” is an important but out-of-date idea from the early days of anthropology, when it was used for colonial, administrative, and ideological reasons to label local groups as “primitive” or “backward.”

‘Hindu’ traditions and the ‘tribal’ traditions are similar in their multiple gods, all equal, which are varied divine forms and living aspects of the one Infinite Reality. As Śrī Aurobindo writes in The Foundations of Indian Culture, “But to the logical European mind monotheism, polytheism, pantheism are irreconcilable warring dogmas; oneness, many-ness, all-ness are not and cannot be different but concordant aspects of the eternal Infinite.” Śrī Aurobindo further writes:

Indian religion founded itself on the conception of a timeless, nameless and formless Supreme, but it did not feel called upon like the narrower and more ignorant monotheisms of the younger races, to deny or abolish all intermediary forms and names and powers and personalities of the Eternal and Infinite. A colourless monism or a pale vague transcendental Theism was not its beginning, its middle and its end. The one Godhead is worshipped as the All, for all in the universe is he or made out of his being or his nature. But Indian religion is not therefore pantheism; for beyond this universality it recognises the supracosmic Eternal. Indian polytheism is not the popular polytheism of ancient Europe; for here the worshipper of many gods still knows that all his divinities are forms, names, personalities and powers of the One; his gods proceed from the one Purusha, his goddesses are energies of the one divine Force.

Similar is the “paganistic” nature which deifies the feminine, nature, and animals. These make the Hindu and tribal traditions clearly distinct from the prophetic-monotheistic religions. There are a lot of similarities between the tribal traditions and other “mainstream” Vaidika-Sāṃskrita traditions. Why? They either share ancient roots or have elements of both. As Balagangadhara Rao says, strangely, anthropologists spent decades trying to get rid of a pernicious and incoherent concept like “tribe” only to see it sneak back in, via Indology and other social sciences, into the Indian Constitution, Indian legislation, and its administration.

Reservations and Disrupting of Social Fabric

In his illuminating book, ‘Affirmative Action Across the World,’ American philosopher Thomas Sowell takes a deep look at reservations around the world. Most of us might be unaware, but group preferences and quotas under many names exist in Britain, India, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Malaysia, Indonesia, Israel, China, Australia, Brazil, Fiji, Canada, Pakistan, New Zealand, and the successor states of the Soviet Union. Sowell writes that, though projected as “temporary” to address inequality, especially of the economic variety, these measures not only persist but tend to grow. This is evident in India, where the Constitution writers after independence, including Dr. Ambedkar, wanted reservations as a temporary measure for at most ten to fifteen years.

Today, reservations are almost a permanent political policy, with all parties and at all levels promising to only increase it. Sowell makes a significant claim that the concept of “when and where there is economic inequality” encompasses virtually the entire world and virtually the entire history of humanity. Sowell characterises a “temporary” policy, defined by the goal of achieving something unprecedented in the world as eternal. We may achieve equality of opportunity within a feasible time frame, but this is entirely distinct from eliminating inequalities in results.

Sowell writes that all multi-ethnic societies exhibit a tendency for ethnic groups to engage in different occupations, have different levels and types of education, receive different incomes, and occupy a different place in the social hierarchy. He says, for example, that most military services do not reflect the composition of multiethnic societies. In Czarist Russia, for example, 40 percent of the army’s high command came from the German ethnic minority, constituting only 1 percent of the country’s population.

Gross disparities in ethnic representation in occupations, industries, and institutions exist in all countries across time.

Even when all things are equal, many other local, regional, familial, cultural, and ethnic factors determine the choice of profession, or the excellence achieved. Sowell gives the example of Blacks dominating basketball and Whites dominating baseball, respectively, in the US. Any particular group’s dominance in a particular domain does not necessarily indicate discrimination against the others.

Affirmative Action, Positive Discrimination, or Reservations: The Problems

Empirical studies have noted that reservation policies only benefit a select few sub-groups within the larger group, perpetuating a cycle of conflict. Sowell notes how reservations have disrupted the social fabric of India, causing anger instead of promoting harmony between the various groups. Communities frequently attempt to integrate with the “other backward classes” in order to gain access to the associated incentives. The spread of benefits to many groups leads to dilution, especially when more than half the population of the state or country becomes entitled to them, as in both India and the United States. Sowell also notes that altering the terms of the competition can worsen the initial beneficiaries’ situation.

Another problem, as he notes, is that the advancement of one preferred group tends to create more tension between structural neighbours in this hierarchy than between the top and the bottom. In the 1990s, there were violent clashes in several Indian states, more common among competing poorer groups than between these groups and the more elite castes. In Tamil Nadu, for example, the highest of the “backward classes’’ legally entitled to preferences, constituting 11 percent of the total “backward classes’’ population in that state, received almost half of all jobs and university admissions set aside for the total class.

A major sociocultural disruption occurs when incentives modify the behaviours and attitudes of both preferred and non-preferred groups.

In the preferred groups, some sub-groups with additional complementary factors tend to take full advantage, while those without such factors often feel less motivated to acquire them now that entitlements are available as substitutes for achievements. For example, there may be a de-emphasis on the development of job skills, which affects the country as a whole.

Regarding the non-preferred groups, Sowell cites examples of the exodus of the Chinese from Malaysia, Indians from Fiji, Russians from Central Asia, Jews from much of prewar Europe, and Huguenots from 17th-century France in response to discrimination that drained all these countries of much-needed skills and talents. Thus, preferential policies can represent a net loss, as both groups respond by contributing less than they could to society as a whole.

Importantly, group preferences in policy compromise the cooperation and collaboration that are important in a variety of occupations, from scholars to policemen. There can be serious intergroup resentments between the preferred and the non-preferred groups. According to Sowell, minor transfers of benefits can cause major resentments among far more people than those who have actually lost anything.

Does Progress Happen Only Through Affirmative Action?

Significantly, Sowell writes that though statistical data shows progress of groups with preferential treatment, it remains a challenge to determine how much of that progress was due to preferential policies rather than to other factors. In the United States, the proportion of the Black population going to college doubled in the two decades preceding the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, and this was reflected in the occupational rise of Blacks. The resentments and their questioning why Blacks cannot advance themselves like other groups are an outcome of misperception, because that is what most Blacks have done.

Political discussions about these policies often overlook both the incentives and the consequences, focusing on their justifications and presumed benefits while ignoring actual empirical results, according to Sowell. In many countries, affirmative action has led to the deterioration of intergroup relations and the disruption of the social fabric, a phenomenon that is clearly visible in India. Equality of opportunity is achievable in a shorter time and has the potential to cause far less distress to society than equality of results, which is perhaps an unending, ever-increasing project leading to more fissures in society.

Concluding Remarks

At a meta-level, our understanding of the word “caste” itself is faulty. Caste and sub-caste grew in western contexts; varṇa and jātis grew in Indian contexts. It’s possible that the imposition of caste on Indian social systems is causing significant harm to our cultural understanding. Prof. Bhikhu Parekh, in an incisive essay, ‘Nehru and The Political Philosophy of India’, writes that typically, we view justice as an individualistic concept, the due for an individual’s efforts. Clearly, we need to redefine justice within a group context. There have been no studies determining the nature of present and past oppressors and oppressed or how the present preferred groups have a moral right to access reservations in view of the evils of the previous generations of the non-preferred groups. A new understanding of jāti, varṇa,, caste, reservations, and even biradari is urgently required.

Political and legal decisions appear only as temporary fixes if we fail to address the underlying causes of the issue. We have simply continued with a colonial understanding of our country in terms of its religions and social structures. Understanding fixed hierarchies, exploitation, and discrimination strongly shapes our narratives and understandings while being validated by dubious data. There is no denial of the problems in Indian society. However, they are also evident across the world in different cultures. Therefore, it is intellectual dishonesty, according to SN Balagangadhara, to blame a single “caste system” as the root of all problems and to see it nowhere else.

In many influential intellectual circles, the equation firmly remains Sanātana Dharma = Hinduism = Caste = Untouchability, and the solution to the last is to dismantle the first completely. There has been a severe failure after independence to understand each of the terms in the equation. Despite an economic upswing over the past nearly eight decades, the social fissures have unfortunately continued to deepen. Our social sciences, our political leaders, and the intelligentsia have failed us somehow in this regard, where instead of unity, there is only disunity, anger, strife, and hate for all the wrong reasons.

Initially, there were a few jātis (fifty described in Manusmṛti), and now they have expanded to almost 4000. The focus of caste scholarship has never been on the jātis and how they have originated, evolved, or interacted with each other, leading to a social system that is flexible, absorbing, and yet firm at the same time. Varṇa is a meta-ideal explanation with more important concepts like guṇa, karma, rebirth, and dharma playing a role. All studies solely focus on the class structure of the four varṇas, where there is continuous exploitation and discrimination against one by the other.

The correlation of jātis to varṇas has been one of the most dubious exercises.

We do not have clarity on what constitutes the fundamental unit of caste: varṇa or jāti. Weird categories like caste, sub-caste, and sub-sub-caste now apply to the various jātis. The political strategies across India to divide the people into various segments and then apply appeasement policies catering to each of the narrow groups would not lead to happy outcomes. As Thomas Sowell shows in his book, Affirmative Action Across the World, the principle of “equality of outcomes” and “proportional representation” in all areas instead of “equality of opportunities” would lead to a social disaster in the years to come.

The “caste system” should undergo annihilation, no doubt, but we should first understand what it even means. The governments are perpetuating an ill-understood system by further distorting it, creating abnormal categories and hierarchies, and increasing social strife in the country. The only way to destroy the caste system is to truly understand what the varṇa, jāti, and kula actually meant in the indigenous Indian understanding. Otherwise, we are definitely on a downward path, as one great culture and civilisation is breaking into hundreds of infighting divisions on grounds that do not even exist.

References

1. Sivasya Kulam: Decoding Caste, Untouchability, and White Man’s Burden. Sudha Mohan.
2. Western Foundations of the Caste System. Martin Fárek, Dunkin Jalki, Sufiya Pathan, and Prakash Shah.
3. The Enigma of Caste Atrocities. Nihar Sashittal.
4. Affirmative Action Across the World. Thomas Sowell.
5. Nehru and The Political Philosophy of India. Bhikhu Parekh.
6. The Foundations of Indian Culture. Śrī Aurobindo.