The desirability and efficacy of affirmative actions
in the form of caste-based reservations, in
educational institutions at various levels and job
opportunities, has again come to occupy the
centre-stage of our social discourse.
So far as the government of India is concerned, two
moves are underway.
One, extend reservation to the OBCs even in the
portals of higher education including the "institutes
of excellence". While this is partly a new initiative,
it is partly also to offset the earlier Supreme Court
verdict drastically curtailing the scope for such
caste-based reservations, by doing away with the same
in the private institutions, and upholding/promoting
money-power based reservations - just not implicitly,
but also explicitly by validating management/NRI
quota.
There is also another move to extend job reservations
to the organised private sectors.
So far as the reservation in the field of education is
concerned, South Indian states are already having
systems in place, which are far more radical than the
one now proposed by the MoHRD.
Interestingly the ongoing student agitation led almost
exclusively by the medical students has so far failed
to cause any visible impact in the southern states.
The aim of the current agitation, even if it appears
to lie beyond the realm of feasibility, is just not to
scuttle the new move granting the OBCs special quota
in the domain of higher, or tertiary, education but to
reverse and scrap the present system as well catering
principally to the SCs and STs.
The agitating (upper caste) students must also be
having the contemplated job reservation in the private
sectors on their minds.
The anti-reservationists in the main put forward the
argument of ’merit’ over ’equity’. They also challenge
that reservation promotes equity.
Now in so far as the ’merit’ argument is concerned,
the anti-reservationists are evidently on a weak
wicket.
These self-styled champions of ’merit’ have nothing to
say against various quotas, in the (mainly private)
educational institutions, explicitly linked to payment
of (much) larger than usual amount of money - in terms
of capitation fess, higher tuition fees etc. (There is
no murmur against the continually rising cost of
education at all levels. In fact, it is even welcomed
as a system which would help filtering out the
‘non-meritorious’. Money, in this case, is considered
coterminous with ‘merit’.)
The fact that acquiring of ’merit’, to be established
through various competitive exams, also calls for
expensive tutorials - not excluding purchase of
question papers etc., apart from education in premier
institutes entailing heavy expenses is simply ignored.
The highly non-level playing field that a student from
the disadvantaged and discriminated against castes is
compelled to face in terms of highly asymmetrical
distribution of accumulated cultural capital, apart
from economic conditions etc., is hardly ever
acknowledged.
The affirmative actions, on the other hand, apart from
promoting social equity and thereby integration,
actively facilitate enlarging the social base/pool of
the ‘meritorious’ by providing opportunities to come
up in life to the members of those disadvantaged and
traditionally oppressed ‘majorities’, at the
lower/lowest rungs of the social ladder, who’d have
been otherwise excluded.
Hence the affirmative actions actually help to raise
the level of the ‘merit’ of the society taken as a
whole.
But the question how, or rather to what extent,
reservations actualise its intended objectives and
whether it effectively preempts other positive
measures, arguably far more fundamental, imperative
for radical restructuring of the social hierarchy and
democratisation of all spheres of life, of course, is
a much trickier one and calls for a far closer and
dispassionate look into the whole set of related
issues.
But this is hardly possible in an atmosphere charged
with irrational emotions where the narrow
self-interests of a rather thin slice of the incumbent
elite is tried to be blatantly and aggressively sold
and foisted upon the rest of the society in the name
of ‘merit’ and all that.