Caste Matters in Public Policy: Issues & Perspectives 2023 PDF

CASTE MATTERS IN PUBLIC POLICY Caste in India, despite its historical resilience, has been undergoing transforma- tion since independence. If caste as a system of rigid stratification has been on the decline, castes as autonomous interest-serving groups have been on ascendance. This book critically engages with the changing notions of caste and its intersection with public policy in India. It discusses key issues such as social security, internal reservation, the idea of Most Backward Classes, caste issues among non-Hindu religious communities, caste in census, caste in market, and service castes and urban planning. Drawing on in-depth case studies from states including Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Karnataka, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and West Bengal, the volume explores the cyclical process of how caste drives policies, and how policies in turn shape the reality of caste in India. It looks at the impact of factors like protective discrimination, adult franchise and democratic decentralisation, horizontal and ver- tical mobilisation, land reforms, and religious conversion on social mobility, and traditional hierarchy in India. Empirically rich and analytically rigorous, this book will be an excellent refer- ence for scholars and researchers of public policy, public administration, sociology, exclusion studies, social work, law, history, economics, political science, develop- ment studies, social anthropology, and political sociology. It will also be of interest to public policy and development practitioners. Rahul Choragudi is Assistant Professor at the School of Development, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, India. Sony Pellissery is Professor at the Institute of Public Policy, National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, India. N. Jayaram is Visiting Professor at the Institute of Public Policy, National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, India. CASTE MATTERS IN PUBLIC POLICY Issues and Perspectives Edited by Rahul Choragudi, Sony Pellissery, and N. Jayaram First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Institute of Public Policy; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Rahul Choragudi, Sony Pellissery, and N. Jayaram to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Choragudi, Rahul, editor. | Pellissery, Sony, 1972- editor. | Jayaram, N., 1950- editor. Title: Caste matters in public policy : issues and perspectives / edited by Rahul Choragudi, Sony Pellissery, and N. Jayaram. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: "Caste in India, despite its historical resilience, has been undergoing transformation since independence. If caste as a system of rigid stratification has been on the decline, castes as autonomous interest-serving groups have been on ascendance. This book critically engages with the changing notions of caste and its intersection with public policy in India. It discusses key issues such as social security, internal reservation, the idea of Most Backward Classes, caste issues among non-Hindu religious communities, caste in census, caste in market, and service castes and urban planning. Drawing on in-depth case studies from states including Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Karnataka, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and West Bengal, the volume explores the cyclical process of how caste drives policies, and how policies in turn shape the reality of caste in India. It looks at the impact of factors like protective discrimination, adult franchise and democratic decentralization, horizontal and vertical mobilisation, land reforms, and religious conversion on social mobility, and traditional hierarchy in India. Empirically rich and analytically rigorous, this book will be an excellent reference for scholars and researchers of public policy, public administration, sociology, exclusion studies, social work, law, history, economics, political science, development studies, social anthropology, and political sociology. It will also be of interest to public policy and development practitioners"-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022021443 | ISBN 9780367544522 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367612672 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003104919 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Caste--Government policy--India. | Caste--Political aspects--India. | India--Politics and government--1947- | India--Social conditions--1947- Classification: LCC HT720.C4727 2023 | DDC 305.5/1220954--dc23/eng/20220601 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022021443 ISBN: 978-0-367-54452-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-61267-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-10491-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003104919 Typeset in Bembo by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive) To Babu Mathew, friend and colleague CONTENTS List of illustrations ix Notes on contributors x Prefacexi Introduction: The career of caste in public policy 1 Rahul Choragudi, Sony Pellissery, and N. Jayaram PART I The national scenario 23 1 Caste in and out of place: State, market, and culture 25 Stig Toft Madsen 2 Enumerating caste in the census: Is it useful for public policy? 47 N. Jayaram PART II Perspectives from the states 61 3 Awareness and access to social security among the unorganised worker households: A study of scheduled caste sub-plan and tribal sub-plan in Karnataka 63 D. Rajasekhar and R. Manjula viii Contents 4 Addressing graded inequality among the scheduled castes: Internal reservation as a strategy 81 Arvind Narrain and Basawa Prasad Kunale 5 Caste and politics: Reservation policy in Tamil Nadu 98 R. Saravana Raja 6 Economic prospects, protective discrimination, and the changing hierarchy: An ethnographic study in a coastal village in Andhra Pradesh 120 Rahul Choragudi 7 Caste and public policy: The case of West Bengal 137 Antara Ray 8 Development policies and marginal groups: Case study of dhobis in Delhi 152 Subhadra Mitra Channa PART III Caste beyond Hinduism 165 9 Despite equality: Sikhs and the caste issue 167 Paramjit S. Judge 10 Caste and caste discrimination among Christians and Muslims: A case for revisiting the ambit of protective discrimination policy 182 Gaurang R. Sahay Epilogue: Caste in public policy analysis: Rediscovering public sphere through institutionalist lens 202 Sony Pellissery Index223 ILLUSTRATIONS Figures 3.1 Scheme-wise proportion of eligible households. 70 3.2 Number of schemes accessed by the sample households. 73 3.3 The number of schemes accessed by households belonging to different caste/social groups. 76 Tables 3.1 Profile of the sample households 68 3.2 Social security schemes 69 3.3 Caste-/social group-wise distribution of sample households and the number of schemes they are aware of 71 3.4 Awareness of social security schemes among eligible households belonging to different caste/social groups 72 3.5 Access to social security schemes among eligible households belonging to different caste/social groups 74 3.6 Average number of social security schemes accessed by different caste/social groups 75 9.1 Population of Punjab province and of Sikhs and the percentage increase/decrease in various censuses (1881–1931) 170 9.2 Percentage increase or decrease in the population of some Sikh castes between 1921 and 1931 170 E1 Framework to use caste as an analytical category in policy processes and policy outcomes 209 CONTRIBUTORS Subhadra Mitra Channa was Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Delhi, India. Paramjit S. Judge was Professor at the Department of Sociology, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, India. Stig Toft Madsen is affiliated to the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Copenhagen, Denmark. R. Manjula is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Decentralisation and Development, Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru, India. Arvind Narrain is a founding member of the Alternative Law Forum and a Hon. Professor of Practice at the Institute for Public Policy, National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, India. Basawa Prasad Kunale is an Advocate at the Alternative Law Forum, Bengaluru, India. D. Rajasekhar is Professor at the Centre for Decentralisation and Development, Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru, India. Antara Ray is Assistant Professor at the Presidency University, Kolkata. Gaurang R. Sahay was Professor at the School of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. R. Saravana Raja is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, Pondicherry University, Puducherry, India. PREFACE In India, academic programmes on public policy are heavily influenced by liter- ature produced by the Western scholars. This literature is based on the principle of rationality in decision-making and regards individuals as atomised social units. It leaves little or no scope for the significant role that primordial institutions play in both the formulation of policies and the implementation of programmes. The incongruity between the Western literature and social reality in a country like India invariably poses problems for both teachers and students in their classroom interac- tion and the fieldwork that the latter do as part of their coursework. The teachers are frequently called upon to respond to the issues in which primordial institutions and processes appear in the public sphere significantly. One such primordial insti- tution which we as teachers at the Institute of Public Policy, National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru, have been required to engage with is the protean socio-cultural institution of caste. Academically, caste is often considered as a privileged subject of study by social anthropologists and sociologists. Public policy scholars, no doubt, invoke the soci- ological knowledge on caste, but seldom engage with it with the seriousness that it deserves. On their part, sociologists studying caste do not specialise in its role in public policy. The interface between caste and public policy has often been the subject of discussion between sociologists and policy analysts at the Institute. In one such discussion was mooted the idea of a seminar on the theme; the Institute of Public Policy endorsed this idea and gave the necessary academic and administrative support to organise the seminar. A two-day international seminar on ‘Primordial Institutions and Public Policy: Re-examining Caste in the 21st Century’ was organised in December 2018. The seminar participants were drawn from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds – anthropology, development studies, economics, history, law, political science, public xii Preface policy, social work, and sociology. They were briefed in advance that the seminar did not wish to deal with the historical, ethnographic, or ideological dimensions of caste per se, unless these lent themselves to an understanding of the seminar theme: the interface of caste and public policy. Expectedly, they brought their disciplinary proclivities into the discussion, which benefitted from their insights. The present volume showcases some of the presentations at the seminar. We are grateful to the six contributors who graciously committed themselves to revise their presentations keeping in view the discussions at the seminar and the editorial feed- back. To complete the volume, we commissioned four chapters anew, and our spe- cial thanks to their authors. Sony Pellissery contributed the Epilogue to provide the framework for incorporating caste in the study of public policy. Professor Staffan Lindberg, who had presented an insightful paper, passed on a few months after the seminar, and Professor Gaurang R. Sahay, who contributed an invited chapter, suc- cumbed to the COVID-19 pandemic recently. We miss them both. In organising the seminar and putting together this volume, we have incurred a great debt of gratitude. Apart from the contributors to the volume, we would like to thank all the participants in the seminar, whether they presented a paper or not, and whether their presentations are included in this volume or not, for giving us the benefit of their time and ideas. But for their active participation in the seminar, the idea of this volume could not have been conceived. We would thank Professor R. Venkata Rao, former Vice-Chancellor of NLSIU for his support to the seminar. We are also thankful to the University Grants Commission-funded Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy at NLSIU, which has been studying the impact of caste on policy and law, for its support to the seminar. We like to acknowledge the collaborative project with the Department of Social Policy of Oxford University on Human Dignity in Public Policy, which provided financial support to the seminar. We wonder how we would have conducted the seminar without the unstinted administrative support extended by Ms Shashikala. She shouldered the responsibil- ity with a charming smile. We thank her very much. We are also thankful to Mr Mohan for taking care of the seminar guests during their stay on the campus. Finally, our colleague and friend Professor Babu Mathew has been supportive of our academic endeavours at the Institute through his constructive criticism and sage counsel. In appreciation of his contribution to the public policy programme at NLSIU, we dedicate this volume to him. Rahul Choragudi Sony Pellissery N. Jayaram Bengaluru May 2021 INTRODUCTION The career of caste in public policy Rahul Choragudi, Sony Pellissery, and N. Jayaram Public policy, as an instrument of state intervention in economy, polity, and soci- ety, focuses on systems rather than ‘lifeworld’.1 In this sense, it is important to understand how the logics of ‘lifeworld’ contribute to the creation and shaping of a system. Most of the policy models and logics of policy making address the ‘system question’ without taking into account the ‘lifeworld’ as an important constituent element of the system. It is the failure to understand the role of the ‘life world’ in the policy sphere that makes India a flailing state – a nation state in which the head, that is the elite institutions at the national (and in some states) level remain sound and functional but that this head is no longer reliably connected via nerves and sinews to its own limbs. (Pritchett 2009: 4) An important element of the ‘lifeworld’ in India is the protean phenomenon of caste. The neglect of the socio-cultural reality of caste in public policy discourses and analysis has contributed to misinformed or ill-conceived policy interventions. This volume is intended to fill this gap by initiating a discussion on how the dynam- ics of caste informs the formulation of public policy and the implementation of interventionist programmes. The changing avatar of caste Caste is one of the oldest and most resilient socio-cultural institutions in the Indian subcontinent. Associated with Hinduism and deriving its ideological support from it, caste has survived waves of ruthless conquests and colonial rule and conversions to Christianity and Islam. However, it has not remained rigid or immutable; it has adapted to the unfolding situations and shown extraordinary resilience in the face DOI: 10.4324/9781003104919-1 2 Rahul Choragudi et al. of forces apparently hostile to it. Its changing avatar (see Srinivas 1996) makes it difficult to understand it definitively, let alone factor it in policy formulation. For centuries past, the amorphous Hindu religious doctrines and rituals pro- vided legitimacy to the caste system and the practices associated with it. However, since independence, the traditional social hierarchy defined by this system, which privileged a few caste groups and rendered many others marginalised based on ascribed identities, has recast itself thanks to the transformative constitutionalism and the state policies. The introduction of universal adult suffrage and participatory democracy gave agency to the indigent caste groups – the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) – to exercise choice in political representa- tion and opportunity to compete for political offices at all levels of governance (see Rudolph and Rudolph 1960; Béteille 1962; Shah 2002; Kothari 2010; Gundimeda 2013). Distributive justice through protective discrimination2 provided relaxa- tions in qualification and reservations in admission to educational institutions and employment in government jobs (see Galanter 1961, 1984, 1986; Jaffrelot 2003; Deshpande 2006; Mosse 2018; Subramanian 2019). Conversion to other religions has theoretically meant a marginal decrease in the percentage of Hindu population3 subscribing to systemic hierarchy (see Jayaram 2004; Robinson and Clarke 2007). However, the most important factor that has changed the nature of caste system and has had implications on all these three factors during the past three decades has been the neo-liberal economic reforms (Basu 2004; Damodaran 2008; Thorat and Newman 2010; Jodhka and Manor 2018; Munshi 2016, 2019; Mosse 2018). Continued to be attributed typically to the rural hinterlands and assumed to be limited only to the discussions on reservation policy and electoral politics, caste has mutated and diversified during the past three decades. Today, its presence is visible in urban housing, its markets and businesses, higher educational institutions, and public sector offices as well as the private sector working spaces, which were pro- jected to be secular and privilege class over caste, and the various socio-economic and political institutions that interface with everyday lived experiences. M. N. Srinivas observes that caste in its twentieth-century avatar has segued4 into interest-serving corporate groups. These interest groups, the caste cartels, that utilise the primordial identity of jati have assumed greater proportions in the twenty-first century and thereby have far-reaching implications for public policy in the country. Historically, these formations and formulations can be attributed to three legal and public policy phenomena that were administered over the last century-and-half. Today, these phenomena have collectively essentialised caste and its expression in the social and political spheres. Law, and public policy and the dynamics of caste Caste and the colonial census If there was one area where British colonialism had impacted the colonised the most, it will have to be the colonial census policy that enumerated caste and religion Introduction 3 in the Indian subcontinent in the nineteenth century (see Chapter 2 by Jayaram in this volume). This was a direct consequence of the Great Rebellion of 1857, which left the British rulers shamefaced and exposed the poverty of their knowledge of the subjects they governed. The exercise of generating knowledge of the colonised, similar in method but smaller in scope, had already begun in the early 1800s in the Bengal, Bombay, and Madras presidencies for administrative purposes and to satisfy the colonial intellectual curiosity. These were published as district gazettes and manuals in several volumes. Such statistically informed knowledge, the colonial state assumed, would help them better regulate and govern the finances, taxes, food supplies, public health, legal, police arrangements, education, revenue, agriculture, industry, commerce, armies, etc. (Cohn 1990; Dirks 2003). The problem, how- ever, lay in the administrative inability and methodological ambiguity to arrive at a definitive unit of enquiry in such a widely drawn exercise. With every localised and regional attempt at enumeration, the confusion escalated where the units – woman, man, girl, boy, household, family, occupation, agriculturalists, village – were con- stantly refined and redefined (Cohn 1990: 235–239). Such was the ambivalence that occasionally the discretion to define the unit was left to the individual collector of the census. Such subjective attempts at enumeration of the population proved counterproductive and yielded dubious results. It worsened when caste was brought into the mix. C. J. Christian, reporting on the census of the North-West Provinces in 1853, opined that the solution to the ‘knotty questions of occupational categories in the Indian census’ vis-à-vis the agriculturalists was to tie caste with occupation so as to eliminate the non-agricultural classes (quoted in Cohn 1990: 237–238), which later became the template. However, the organising principle to enumerate caste in the 1871–1872 Census was varna instead of the localised jati. This inadvertently meant a homogenisation, and reification, of the jatis into varna clusters irrespective of their occupational status. For example, all Brahmins were culturally assumed and categorised as priest, despite the fact there were Brahmins who worked with gold and those engaged in carpentry. Sanskrit scholars such as Rajendra Lal Mitra were consulted by the Lieutenant Governor to list out the castes that would act as a ref- erence for the enumerators. Mitra felt it was not the responsibility of the census to deal with claims for higher social positions. The responsibility of the census was ‘clearly to follow the textbooks of the Hindus and not to decide on particular claims’ (quoted in ibid.: 245). These claims of superior status were just the beginning, as G. S. Ghurye notes, of the ‘livening up of the caste-spirit’ (quoted in ibid.: 241) and, for the people, the census marked the transference of power to the colonial rulers, from the Indian rulers, and the census reports became the ‘equivalent of traditional copper-plate grants declaring the status, rank and privileges of a particular caste or castes’ (Srinivas 2009: 101). For the lower and backward castes, the census presented an opportunity to move upwards in the social order. Srinivas notes, ‘an indication of the widespread desire for mobility among the backward castes comes from an unusual source, namely, the census operations’ (ibid.: 100). By the time Herbert H. Risley had moved on to the anthropometric tools and ethnological methods of enumerating 4 Rahul Choragudi et al. castes at the beginning of the new century, the first census had already influenced not just the colonial minds and administration but also the Indian (Dirks 2003). In fact, Bernard Cohn says, ‘It would not be an exaggeration to say that down until 1950 scholars’ and scientists’ views on the nature, structure, and functioning of the Indian caste system were shaped mainly by the data and conceptions growing out of the census operation’ (Cohn 1990: 242). Furthermore, ‘much of the basic scholarly apparatus, which continues to be used today for both administrative and scholarly activity, is founded on the work done on caste and related subjects as part of the census operations’ (ibid.). Srinivas notes, in 1911, Hundreds of petitions were received from different castes … requesting that they might be known by a new name, be placed higher up in the order of precedence, be recog- nized as Kshatriya and Vaishya, etc. Many castes were aggrieved at the position assigned them, and complained that it lowered them in public estimation. (2009: 101; emphasis original) Another inadvertent offshoot of the census operations was the rise of caste associ- ations – sabhas or sanghams – across the country in the early 1900s, indicating that castes had begun mobilising themselves for the benefit of their members. These associations established institutions and organisations to provide for the educational, social, political, health, and social and religious needs of their respective caste fel- lows. By 1954, there were close to 1,700 registered caste organisations in Bombay (now Mumbai) (Shah 2002: 19). Caste, constitution, and protective discrimination Independent India’s policy of protective discrimination in favour of the depressed classes5 in her population has been a matter of debate, contention, agitation, and public and private distress since inception. This policy, envisioned in several arti- cles in the Constitution, is phrased eloquently in the Directive Principles of State Policy: ‘to promote the educational and economic needs and to protect from social injustices and exploitation’ (Article 46 (a)). It translated into three key measures: (1) reservations for the depressed classes in legislatures, public offices, and in academic institutions; (2) the provisions in the forms of scholarships, grants, land allotment, etc.; and (3) the special protections and provisions. On one hand, aggrieved at the distributive justice attempts at recompense and reparations, the traditionally affluent castes opposed its unfairness, which translated into hostility and resentment towards the beneficiaries. On the other, despite marginal percolation to the peripheries, self-aggrandisement, and discernible internal hierarchies, the measures were well and truly embraced by the designated classes. Viewed from either vantage point, one cannot deny that both have substantially contributed in shaping caste in the first seven decades of independent India. In this section, we shall see how reservations, a reparative measure that changed the life-chances of a generation of the population, were also unwittingly instrumental in essentialising caste. Introduction 5 Reservations in legislatures Reservations of seats in the legislatures, coupled with the adult suffrage, were the most salient of the preferential policies, as they empowered the disadvantaged groups and ensured their representation and subsequently participation, and helped influ- ence public policy. These reservations, apart from tempering the traditional elite’s dream of legitimising their feudal political capital to ascend the democratic political ladder (Frankel 1990; Weiner 2001; Manor 2010), made them compete for seats, share political spaces, debate and discuss aspects of public and private life they have historically enjoyed monopoly over. Sooner than later political parties’ efforts at vote appropriation, Congress in the first three decades of independence at the centre and with the help of the regional dominant castes in the states, and successive govern- ment’s enthusiasm to appear progressive have begun including them in their respec- tive cabinets (Galanter 1984; Frankel and Rao 1990; Kothari 2010; Jensenius 2017). The counter-narrative to this preferential treatment – articulated in newspa- per articles, scholarly publications, and the political front – questioned its efficacy: how effective can the legislator be if the voters do not deem him efficient? Would not the SC voters be better served if their representative is assertive, driven, and articulate in policy matters with peers, experienced, and influential (Singh 2009; Jethmalani 2009)?6 ‘Finally, is the nation as a whole well served by these legislators’ (Galanter 1984: 51)? Agitations of similar nature grew and found political patron- age in the coming decades. Gujarat was at the forefront of such movements in the 1970s and 1980s, where the roles of class, caste, and religion in reservations were debated (Desai 1984; Shah 1985; Baxi 1985). However, if not for the legislative preferences on offer and their decennial renewal since, it is highly unlikely that the SCs would have succeeded in competing with the traditionally powerful and subsequently achieving these political appointments. Also, their presence in these positions ensures ‘(1) establishing programs of which they are the beneficiaries; (2) insuring deployment of resources to these programs; (3) pressing for better adminis- tration of these programs (4) resisting cut-backs and premature termination of such programs’ (Galanter 1984: 53; emphasis added). The path-dependent nature of electoral reservations has mired the politics of independent India in caste (Jensenius 2014), but having made it there, as illustrations suggest, the SCs have leveraged their status and initiated a similar ascendancy for the candidates at various levels of governance from similar backgrounds (Weiner 1983; Galanter 1979, 1984; Frankel and Rao 1990; Béteille 2005; Jaffrelot and Kumar 2009; Jensenius 2017). Reservations in employment Preferential commitment in government employment for the depressed classes (12.5 per cent for the SCs and 5 per cent for the STs in 1950; raised to 15 per cent and 7.5 per cent, respectively, in 1970) was the second most significant inter- vention. From the 1950s through the 1980s, employment in government service was one of the most sought-after ambitions for people from across all sections of 6 Rahul Choragudi et al. the society. For the individual belonging to a disadvantaged group,7 fulfilling this individual ambition prompted confidence and accorded glamour, power, prestige, security, and status in the society. For a prospective employee, the presence of indi- viduals utilising this preferment was a relief from unsympathetic and oppressive administration. Along with the reservations, special provisions included age concessions, waiver or reduction of examination fees, reduced minimum qualifying marks, etc. Thanks to the reservations and special provisions, in just over two decades, there were 29 times more SC employees in Class I and Class II services – from 133 in 1953 to 3,896 in 1975 – in the central government (Galanter 1984: 89). These are stellar numbers despite a host of problems that include, but are not limited to, the poli- cy’s penetrability; the government’s apathy towards the depressed class applicants; lack of sympathy, understanding, and flexibility; limited initiative; indifference of appointing authorities; according low priority to recruitment; non-comprehension and misinterpretation of the office orders, discriminatory attitudes, and lackadaisical monitoring and regulation (Galanter 1961, 1984, 1986). The consequences of propelling the individuals from disadvantaged groups into government employment were not felt at the recruitment stage, but in the middle stages and at the times of promotions. This resentment then brought out a whole host of questions: less-qualified individuals mean inefficient administrators (Aggarwal 1983; Singh 2009); self-aggrandisement at the cost of the group (Shah and Patel 1977); overprotection blunting the initiative to acquire skills thus causing stagna- tion (Galanter 1984); unfair favouritism depriving meritorious individuals (Chalam 2007). The claims of unfairness, similar in character but larger in scale compared to the legislative reservations, are ‘(1) that which rejects the principle of collective rec- ompense for historical disabilities; and (2) that which objects to the administration of the principle so that the burden is borne by a few who are no more responsible for the historical deprivations that underlie it than the many who escape’ (Galanter 1984: 115). In an ouroboros fashion, the antagonism towards the benefactor’s pres- ence in the workspace extends towards the policy; the antagonism towards the pref- erential policies is directed towards its individual beneficiaries. Gokhale, pointing at this self-perpetuating nature of reservations, claims that reservations have made it difficult for the Scheduled Castes to transcend their primordial identity, thereby lim- iting them to the status of the wards of the state (Gokhale 1990) while Weiner calls it the social marking where ‘individuals are labeled [sic] in the occupational structure in terms of the community from which they come’ (1983: 48). Provisions for education On the education front, the country saw massive expenditure on the sector in the initial years of independence, especially for the benefit of the SC, ST, and OBC students. Construction of schools and hostels for the SC and ST students, provision of textbook and uniform supplies, fee concessions, mid-day meals, pre-matricula- tion scholarships, etc., were allocated from the budget. The significance of these Introduction 7 provisions in education is visible in the long term: In 1927, of the 55,000 students in colleges across the country, only 82 students were from the Depressed Classes, a paltry 0.15 per cent; 34 years later, in 1961, it had reached 1.6 per cent, with 7,391 SC and ST forming 1.14 million graduates. By 1975, Rs 136 million was being disbursed in scholarships to nearly every post-matriculate SC, ST, and OBC student (Galanter 1984: 55–62).8 In higher education, 15 per cent of the seats were reserved for the SCs and 5 per cent for the STs.9 Additionally, a three-year relaxation of maximum age of the applicant and a reduced minimum mark for eligibility for admission by 5 per cent were provided. These provisions did not cause strife in the general classes, at least not as much as it did with the reservation in political offices and employment per se. However, come 1990s, these notions were to change, as reservations in the higher educational institutions touched 50 per cent affecting a much larger population and their life-chances, causing a commensurately widespread discontent. The above analysis of the protective discrimination policy is an exposition of the policy’s intricate mesh with the protean nature of the social, political, and legal institutions in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. The 1950s through the 1980s saw reparative, preferential, and protective discrimination policies deliver substantial justice and bring about an undeniable change. Institutions and spaces, where disadvantaged individuals and groups had never enjoyed any presence, pro- vided them representation and participation, boosting not just their political and economic standards but their morale, pride, and social standing. Despite the uneven distribution, clustering and aggrandisement, and a subsequent ‘creaming’ effect, on the other hand, all of the above were enabled by the transformative constitutional commitments. Varied claims ranging from ‘not enough’ has been done to ‘not the right thing’ has been done by those critical of the policy’s nuances were made; the aggrieved ‘others’ asserted that ‘too much’ has been done in the name of reparations, while the polemical lot claimed the ‘wrong thing’ is being carried out (Galanter 1984: 72–73). Therefore, in an attempt to achieve durable and substantive justice, a formally divisive and socially alienating means was chosen. For every preference offered, a negative stimulus was interpreted against the policy and thereby attached to its benefactors. Top among the felt constitutional contradictions by the non-depressed classes are why should their life-chances be compromised for the benefit of someone else? Why should they be forced to recompense more than others? Why should they pay reparations for something done by their ancestors? Does offering benefits based on ascriptive identities not perpetuate the differences and thereby strengthen the tenets of caste? Does the policy not go against the secular aspirations of a casteless society? How is it a secular policy, if it identifies its beneficiaries based on religious grounds? What if it metastasises and contributes to a communally divisive society? Weiner’s question, based on a comparative analysis of affirmative action in the USA and India, ‘is the kind of society produced by a system of ethnic group preferences more just than the society that might be produced by other kinds of policies intended 8 Rahul Choragudi et al. to reduce ethnic differences?’ (1983: 51); and Galanter’s context-specific question ‘what has the commitment to compensatory discrimination done to the shape of Indian society and of the lives lived within it?’ (1984: 547) is, it unwittingly deep- ened the differences and thereby essentialised caste. Answers to these questions are woven into a complex mesh. Nonetheless, the fact that these questions are posed point to the following fact: when common good is not cherished (Sandel 2020), protective discrimination is discrimination too. Mandal commission and the rise of the OBCs In 1977, the Indian National Congress (Congress party, for short), which had ruled the country uninterruptedly for almost three decades since independence, lost the general elections and the Janata Party, an amalgam of hitherto opposition parties, came to power. The Congress party, which had appointed the First Backward Classes Commission in 1953 under the chairmanship of Kaka Kalelkar, shied away to act on the Commission’s recommendations. On 1 January 1979, the Janata Party gov- ernment under the prime ministership of Morarji Desai appointed the second such commission, known as Socially and Educationally Backward Classes Commission, or Mandal Commission after its chairman Bindeshwari Prasad Mandal. The Mandal Commission had the mandate to ‘identify the socially and educationally backward classes’ in the country and to recommend necessary social emancipatory meas- ures. Unlike the Kalelkar Commission, the Mandal Commission had only members belonging to the OBC (4) and SC (1). The Mandal Commission, borrowing tropes from the existing protective dis- crimination philosophy and keeping true to the Janata Party government’s socialist inclinations, stated that to treat unequals equally is to perpetuate inequality. When we allow weak and strong to compete on an equal footing, we are loading the dice in favour of the strong and holding only a mock competition in which the weaker partner is destined to failure right from the start. (quoted in Jaffrelot 2003: 321) Recognising the caste system’s central role in perpetuating structural inequali- ties, the Mandal Commission granted caste the highest weighting in determining the OBCs (Galanter 1978; Radhakrishnan 1996).10 By a process of elimination, the Commission found that 52 per cent of the Indian population belonged to the OBCs. It recommended that the OBCs be granted 27 per cent reservations in government employment and public educational institutions.11 The idea, the Committee believed, was to provide the OBCs access to power, not just jobs, because ‘In India Government service has always been looked upon as a symbol of prestige and power’ (Jaffrelot 2003: 323). Thus, submitted to the Congress party government led by Indira Gandhi in 1980, and tabled in the Lok Sabha only in 1982, the backward classes report was shelved for the second time. Introduction 9 After Congress government had served two terms in office in the 1980s, Vishwanath Pratap Singh’s Janata Dal-led National Front came to power in 1989.12 The National Front believed in the emancipatory prowess of the protective dis- crimination policy and promised, in its election campaigns, an expeditious imple- mentation of the Mandal Commission recommendations if it came to power.13 Singh thought that the power structure underlying the caste system needs recalibra- tion, and a transformation of power structure is the only way to change the status quo. Thus, in his address to the nation as Prime Minister on the Independence Day in 1990, he claimed, that the OBCs can be developed ‘only if they have a share in power and we are prepared to provide this share’ (Publications Division 1993: 61). Two sections of the population were aggrieved with this prospective preferential treatment, especially in North India (Brass 1985: 94; Frankel and Rao 1989; Jain 1996)14: the Jats, because they were not included in the OBC category and the Janata Dal’s promise of healing the rural economy was becoming a mirage; and the upper castes, who had enjoyed a quasi-monopoly in government administration, feared it would be undone. To put this upper caste dominance in perspective, in 1980, the upper castes comprised 90 per cent of the Class I employment, central and state combined, and the OBCs were a paltry 5 per cent. In 1983, in Uttar Pradesh, 93.8 per cent principal secretaries, 86.6 per cent heads of the department, and 93.2 per cent section officers were from the upper castes with a significant per- centage of each category being a Brahmin or a Kayasth (Jaffrelot 2003: 343–344). The reservations, which had by now touched 49.5 per cent – that is, 15 per cent for the SCs, 7.5 per cent for the STs, and 27 per cent for the OBCs – in all pub- lic professional educational institutions peeved the upper caste student population across North India. Delhi University’s Anti-Mandal Commission Forum, Aarakshan Vidrohi Sangharsh Samiti (Committee for the Struggle against Reservations) and Mandal Ayog Virodhi Sangarsh Samiti (Committee for the struggle against the Mandal Commission) were established and headed by upper caste land-owning mid- dle classes, and its members included the lower classes from the Hindi speaking states. The demands were not just limited to the OBC reservations; they demanded the abo- lition of reservations for the Scheduled Castes as well (Frankel 1990). This initiated an alliance between the SCs and the OBCs to challenge the agitating upper castes. The agitations took a violent turn when a middleclass Brahmin student attempted self-im- molation in New Delhi and escalated as 63 more students succumbed to a similar act. The Supreme Court of India, in the Indra Sawhney v. Union of India case, agreed with the incumbent government15 in acknowledging the role of caste, as a necessary but not sufficient or singular criterion, in defining the backwardness of social groups, thereby approving the implementation of the OBC reservations.16 The cleavages in the social composition had become wider where ‘the main achievement of V. P. Singh was clearly to forge a broad coalition of castes under the OBC label, and con- sequently, to contest the elite-groups’ domination more effectively than ever before’ (Jaffrelot 2003: 347). Thus, in the 1990s, ‘caste had become the building block of the larger social coalition … helped the lower castes to organise themselves as an interest group, outside the vertical, clientelistic Congress-like patterns’ (ibid.: 349). 10 Rahul Choragudi et al. The SCs too benefitted vicariously from the political fallout following the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations. The Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, proved to be a potent instrument in the collective effort to mobilise and assert for political power in the coming decades. The extension of reservations to the SCs who converted to Buddhism in 1990 was another significant step in the emancipatory direction.17 The efforts of Kanshi Ram (1934–2006), a Dalit18 leader from Punjab, in mobilising the Bahujan19 population, especially in Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra, through the 1970s and 1980s were consolidated in the 1990s.20 With Kanshi Ram leading the national cause, leaders like Mayawati emerged from Uttar Pradesh the Bahujan politics moved from mere interest groups to political force to reckon with in the 1990s (Pai 2002; Gundimeda 2013; Narayan 2014). In just one year, the Janata Dal-led National Front ushered in a second dem- ocratic upsurge in the country propelling the OBCs and the SCs political stature (Yadav 1996: 95). Thus, the third and perhaps the most significant of the three events of law and policy essentialising caste, after colonial census policy and trans- formative constitutionalism’s protective commitment to the depressed classes, was socially initiated and constitutionally enabled in the short period when the National Front was in power. The hitherto divided, discrete, and backward castes were crys- tallised into one collective thanks to the emancipatory fillip that enabled a robust political identity powerful enough to break the monopoly enjoyed by the higher castes, especially in the fields of education and administration. The OBC enumer- ation, however, committed the fallacy of reification by adapting a static definition for caste, occupation, and backwardness. It failed to recognise that only in the most backward and remote regions of the country can one find a congruence of people with their traditional occupations (Srinivas 1996: xxxiii). This reification has done the OBCs a disservice by rendering them homogenous and lost in time. Despite the geographical unevenness in the spread of benefits to the OBCs, the lower castes voting, both in state assemblies as well as in the general elections, to preserve and promote the common interests of their fellow backward candidates meant join- ing forces, political consolidation, and electoral success (Frankel and Rao 1989; Chandra 2004; Jaffrelot and Kumar 2009; Banerjee 2014). Coinciding with this was the neo-liberal economic reforms of the 1990s which saw the rise of the private sector in India. With the protective discrimination poli- cies halving the pie and dismantling their monopoly in government and public sec- tor employment, the traditionally elite upper caste middle classes from urban areas focused on securing employment in the private sector. Some of them even went abroad in pursuit of higher education and employment; some from the educated and upwardly mobile SCs and OBCs too followed suit. The same, however, cannot be said of the rural lower classes, even if they belonged to the upper castes. The fact that employment opportunities in the state sector are declining has thrown a wet blanket on the possibilities of the SCs, OBCs, and the other underprivileged from realising their job aspirations. This has also resulted in the demand for reservation in the private sector (see Thorat 2005; Guru 2005; Munshi 2016; Mosse 2018). Introduction 11 Adding to all this is the increasing population, depleting resources, and the escalat- ing agrarian crisis highlighting the class character of the caste cleavages widened by the OBC categorisation. Engaging with caste in policy formulation in changing times As a prelude to an examination of the role of caste in policy formulation in con- temporary times, it is pertinent to look at the character of caste today. Since the early twentieth century, analysis of what the French philosopher Célestin Bouglé called the ‘spirit of caste’ focused on three elements: (1) the hereditary occupations, (b) hierarchy in access to rights and privileges, and (3) mutual repulsion (Bouglé 2010: 65). Ghurye extended this to six attributes of caste: (1) segmental division of society, (2) hierarchy, (3) restrictions on feeding and social intercourse, (4) civil and religious disabilities/privileges of the different sections, (5) lack of unrestricted choice of occupation, and (6) restrictions on marriage caste (see Ghurye 2010: 2–18). However, caste has come a long way from these characterisations of the phenomenon subsumed by the term. Village studies, pioneered by Srinivas and other anthropologists and sociol- ogists (see Srinivas 1960; Marriott 1969), have shown us regional variations in the manifestation of jatis as different from the typical four-fold varna classification brought into academic vogue by the colonial scholar-administrators. As different from the ‘book view’, the ‘field view’ of the socio-anthropological studies, con- ducted in the little communities across the Indian subcontinent, pointed to the role played by Hinduism in the ritual sphere, detailed the patron–client relationship, and explained the transmission of power from the traditional elite to the demo- cratically elected representatives. They highlighted the consequent relocation of the spaces of authority, dominance of landed jatis, significance of the numbers in a democracy, corporate disabilities of the disadvantaged, jatis as corporate groups carrying out socio-political tasks, significance of kin networks in out-migration, the endogamous practices, inter- and intra-jati violence, etc. These studies, with caste dynamics at their centre, were illustrative of the continuity, change, and con- flict in rural India and bore testament to the macro developments in the country. Although Louis Dumont’s structuralist conceptualisation of caste as being civilisa- tional to India makes for a significant contribution to our understanding of caste (see Dumont 1970), it does not help us in grappling with the primordial assertions, interest articulation, and community mobilisation around caste (Jayaram 1996: 71). At the macro level, caste mobilisations were in place since the turn of the cen- tury (Cohn 1990; Bayly 1999). Across the county, the caste-based organisations were mobilising resources for their own in an attempt to achieve social mobility. Establishment of schools and hostels for their students, instituting scholarships for the deprived among them, and providing material and human support to those moving to the cities for employment, were just a few notable aspects of utilising the social basis of caste to consolidate their lot. Post-independence, however, this has become a political craft as participatory democracy meant a livening up of the caste 12 Rahul Choragudi et al. consciousness towards a consolidation of one’s lot. Rajni Kothari’s examination of the role of caste in politics, during the 1950s and 1960s, in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, and Tamil Nadu, points to the presence of a secu- lar element, power, within the traditional caste. Based on his analysis, he forecasted that participatory democratic politics will help maximise the caste consciousness to achieve power at the cost of caste’s less secular and ritualistic aspects (see Kothari 2010: 1–23). Kothari’s exposition of ‘traditionalisation of modernity’ (ibid.: 23) is akin to that of Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph’s analysis of the political role of caste (1960). Importantly, the caste associations link the electorate to the democratic political institutions and processes and make them comprehensible in traditional terms to a population still largely politically illiterate. Caste has been able to play this curious political role as the bearer of both India’s ancien régime and its modern democratic political machinery by reconstituting itself into the sabha, with characteristics of both the natural and the voluntary association, of caste defined in terms of both dharma and democracy (ibid.: 22). Such association strengthened the ‘fictive caste sentiments of we-ness against the members of other castes, and to reinforce such feelings by providing material and social support to castemen during times of strain’ and most importantly, for the purpose of this volume, such ‘Caste organizations also were used to for political action, especially to lobby the state government to include the caste as a backward community eligible for reservation’ (Frankel 1990: 506). It is important to note that the first two decades of independence saw the hori- zontal mobilisations of the higher and the middle castes. The Kisan Mahasabha (Jats), the Kshatriya Mahasabha (Rajputs), the Vanniya Kula Kshatraya Sangham, the Reddis and Kammas (Andhra Pradesh), Nadars (Tamil Nadu), Kshatriyas (Gujarat), etc., are illustrations of this. The Mahars, a SC group in Maharashtra were similarly mobilised, thanks to the leadership of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956). The two decades of protective discrimination policies have made the Scheduled Castes a force to reckon with in politics. The Internal Emergency during 1975–1977 under the Indira Gandhi regime marked the end of the political monopoly of the Congress party and its clientelist federal relationship with the states. Anti-incumbency and the political vacuum post-Congress brought the Shudra castes in North India together to establish the Janata Party, thereby providing an impetus for the OBC movement in the next decade. The rise of Kanshi Ram, also in the 1970s, marked a new era in the Dalit politics: the establishment of the BAMCEF and the DS-4 were the first attempts at politicisation of the SC identity since Ambedkar. All this political cartelisation was an attempt at converting their feudal political capital by utilising the participatory democratic rights guaranteed by the Constitution. There, how- ever, was a qualitative shift in these mobilisations in the 1980s and 1990s. The nature of caste has by now substantially and significantly moved away from its classical anthropological and sociological formulations and majorly so in the public sphere. This shift can be attributed primarily to the OBC politics along with the privatisation and globalisation of the Indian economy. Kisan politics and the OBC Introduction 13 mobilisations threw up chief ministers like Mulayam Singh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh and Lalu Prasad Yadav, Ram Vilas Paswan, and Nitish Kumar in Bihar. One of the most significant contributions of the OBC reservations to the nature of politics in the twenty-first century is the methodology of maximising the cultural identity and ethos for electoral successes. The collapse of the single-largest party at the centre brought into significance the regional political parties forming national level alliances like the National Front, the Third Front, the National Democratic Alliance, and the United Progressive Alliance (Palshikar et al. 2014). Sooner than later the potential in the cultural and social basis of consolidating the vote bank was realised, acknowl- edged, and implemented in electoral politics. As Frankel points, ‘They [marginalised] have started to understand the benefits of organization in extracting from political parties tangible gains in return for their support’ (1990: 516). Parties that rallied around welfarism, socialism, and other political philosophies also had begun adopting caste as an instrument of maximising electoral gains by appealing to caste-based vote banks. Such rallying around interest group mobilisations based on primordial identi- ties meant the success of regional political parties21 and their contribution to the for- mation of the coalition governments at the centre during the past twenty-five years. Today, one can see the presence of the caste-based interest groups and cartels in establishing a variety of institutions and organisations: banks and financial insti- tutions; schools, colleges, and even universities; wedding halls and matrimonial bureaus; temples and churches; hostels and residential colonies; cinema production companies and fans associations; newspapers and entertainment channels; hotels and restaurants; industries and cooperatives, clubs and recreational avenues, hospi- tals and nursing homes, road transport services, etc. All such endeavours privilege and promote caste-consciousness, thereby elevating the collective identity of the group to a significant pitch politically. Public policy is naturally a key sphere which primordial interest groups like caste associations seek to influence and act as ‘policy intermediaries’ (Bhattacharya and Thakur 2020). The seminar and the volume The fact that the country has been experiencing considerable economic, political, and social churning since the implementation of the neo-liberal economic reforms during the last decade of the last century is by now well known. What is not that well known, however, is the dynamics of a highly resilient primordial socio-cultural institution like caste in the context of policy formulation and programme imple- mentation in the public sphere. To fill this gap in our knowledge, the Institute of Public Policy at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, organised an international seminar on ‘Primordial Institutions and Public Policy: Re-examining Caste in the 21st Century’ on 10–11 December 2018. In all sev- enteen scholars, including the three organisers of the seminar, participated in the proceedings.22 It was impressed upon the participants that the thematic of the seminar was on the interface between caste and public policy in contemporary India; that it does 14 Rahul Choragudi et al. not wish to engage with the conventional ethnographic or historical approach to caste, unless the understanding derived from such approaches has a bearing on the seminar theme. Thus, the seminar participants brought on to the table their analysis and understanding of how the citizens’ aspirations, articulations, and agitations are shaping the policy framework and the manner in which interest groups have been successful in politicising them. The discussion, therefore, revolved around the cycli- cal process of how caste drives policies, and how policies, in turn, shape the reality of caste. Empirically, the seminar participants provided descriptions and insights drawn from their research work in such diverse states as Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Karnataka, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and West Bengal, some providing his- torical and comparative macro analysis at the national level. In all eleven papers were presented in six thematic sessions. The authors of six papers agreed to revise their presentations based on the discussion at the seminar; the authors of two papers were disinclined to publish their presentations, and sadly the author of one paper passed away within months of the seminar. Two papers had to be discarded as they could not fit into the thematic thrust of the volume. To make the volume comprehensive, the editors decided to include four freshly writ- ten chapters and the epilogue to tie up the discussions in the volume. The outcome of this exercise is in your hands. The ten contributions in this volume are organised under three parts: the first deals with the caste question in the national scenario; the second explores the per- spectives from five states – Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal; and the third discusses the reality of caste among three non-Hindu religious communities – Christians, Muslims, and Sikhs. This organisation, to be sure, is influenced by analytical considerations. Substantively, the contributors to the volume touch upon many intersecting themes across these three parts, as dictated by their engagements with the dynamics of caste, both historically and regionally. The two chapters in Part I discuss the dynamics of caste and its bearing on some aspects of public policy at the national level. Stig Toft Madsen, who has been a long-time observer of socio-political developments in India, reflects on the location of caste in relation to the state, market, and culture. He analyses the ‘weaknesses in the current arrangement’ that warrant a change in the policy related to caste. While Madsen agrees with Anand Teltumbde that the present policy of reservation in government service ‘consecrates castes and religion’ (2018: 53), he does not think, as Teltumbde does, that caste should have been outlawed along with untouchability. He notes that caste is an integral part of Indian civilisation; it has survived for more than two millennia because it provides a basic identity, self-respect, and security to people, high and low. He argues that ‘while the state should not be reduced to caste arithmetic, caste is part of the chemistry of society’. He explores what a public policy for caste would look like in contemporary times. Policy formulation in areas in which caste is a point of reference, directly or indirectly, is hampered by the absence of any authoritative and reliable database on caste and its changing demographics over the decades. Proposals to reintroduce the enumeration of caste in the decennial census, which had been discontinued since Introduction 15 independence, have raised controversies, which are more ideological than academic in nature. N. Jayaram examines this conundrum. He traces the trajectory of the construction and objectification of caste through its enumeration in the census dur- ing the colonial era, discusses the discontinuation of its enumeration in the post-in- dependence period and the proposal to reintroduce it in the census, and analyses the conceptual and methodological difficulties in enumerating caste in contemporary times. He argues that the caste data from the census would be of dubious value in policy formulation and is more likely to legitimise the aggrandisement of caste. There is no single narrative of the dynamics of caste across the country; it var- ies from state to state. The six chapters in Part II examine the public policy issues resulting from the caste dynamics in five states. D. Rajasekhar and R. Manjula examine the impact of the Karnataka government’s Scheduled Castes Sub Plan and Tribal Sub Plan Act, 2013, which stipulated that the funds earmarked in the state’s budget for the development of the SC and ST households must be mandatorily spent for their benefit and not diverted to the other groups. Based on the data col- lected from 2,232 unorganised worker households located in nine districts in the state, Rajasekhar and Manjula argue that the policy of targeting beneficiaries will positively influence the access to social security benefits among households belong- ing to the disadvantaged caste groups. It is well known that the SCs do not constitute a homogenous category and that there is, what Ambedkar called, ‘graded inequality’ among them (Ambedkar 1979–1991: 101). The fact that some caste groups listed in the Schedule have ben- efitted more to the neglect of the others and the perception of injustice by those at the bottom of the SC hierarchy has resulted in the demand for ‘internal reser- vation’ among the SCs. Arvind Narrain and Basawa Prasad Kunale point out that this complex and layered reality of discrimination in the SC category has not been appreciated by the Supreme Court in its decision in E. V. Chinnaiah v. State striking down ‘internal reservation’. They argue that this decision was ‘sociologically blind’ and has shown a marked departure from the Supreme Court’s ‘more sociologically attuned jurisprudence on the backward classes’. They note that in its 2020 decision in State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh, the Supreme Court has begun ‘to make partial atonement by indicating that the legality of the demand for internal reservation should be considered by a larger bench of the Supreme Court’. This issue of ‘inter- nal reservation’ remains as yet unresolved in Andhra Pradesh (and Telangana), where it originated first, and in Karnataka, where it followed later. Among all the states, Tamil Nadu has the oldest and the most wide-ranging pro- tective discrimination policy in the country. This policy can be traced to the efforts of the government of Madras Presidency under British rule in the early decades of the twentieth century. Presently, against the Supreme Court’s restriction of all reservations to less than 50 per cent, the state provides reservation to 69 per cent of various categories of backward communities, including the SCs and STs. The category of the ‘Most Backward Classes’ is unique to the state. R. Saravana Raja tracks the history of the reservation policy in Tamil Nadu through the period of Dravidian politics till recent times. 16 Rahul Choragudi et al. That the socio-economic hierarchy defined by the caste system has been under- going change since independence and especially in the wake of neo-liberal eco- nomic reforms is well known. Based on an ethnographic study of a coastal village in Andhra Pradesh, Rahul Choragudi analyses the nature of this change in a micro set- ting. He analyses the role of material fortunes and misfortunes of jati groups, cou- pled with the rights guaranteed by the state, in realising one’s political ambitions. He examines the consequences of the contradiction between a policy intended to benefit a targeted population in a neo-liberal economy and implemented in a polit- ical landscape which emphasises primordial jati identities. The sparse sociological literature on caste in West Bengal has often misled peo- ple to believe that it is not a significant factor influencing public policy in that state. Antara Ray dispels this misconception by examining how, in West Bengal, caste has been influencing both the formulation and implementation of public policies in the context of market economy and a vibrant civil society. She explains why, in the face of evidence to the contrary, the Bengalis, especially the educated bhadralok, are reluctant to recognise the presence of caste in their society and engage with its dynamics in their public and private lives. Service caste groups are an integral part of Indian society, both in rural areas where they are a part of the prevalent caste system and in urban areas where they render a variety of services to different categories of the population. Subhadra Mitra Channa traces the relationship of the Dhobis (washermen), a service caste belong- ing to the Shudra varna, with the city of Delhi along with the growth and develop- ment of the city itself. She examines Delhi’s urban planning and its accommodation as well as denial of the livelihood rights of these people in the context of changing political visions and power relations in a historical perspective. Generally, caste, both in its systemic and interest-group aspects, is identified with Hinduism. However, given its remarkable resilience, caste in both these aspects has survived religious conversion, and is to be found among many non-Hindu reli- gious communities despite it finding no ideological endorsement in their religious doctrines. The two papers in Part III deal with this apparent incongruity, if not aberration. Paramjit S. Judge, a Sikhism scholar, discusses the existence of castes among the Sikhs, despite Sikhism’s claims of equality, but clarifies that ‘the caste hierarchy among the Sikhs does not correspond with that of the Hindus in Punjab or elsewhere’. He observes that the caste stratification among the Sikhs is ‘marked not only by the existence of castes, but also by the caste-identity politics’. He traces the interface between caste and public policy from the colonial times to the modern era. He forecasts that, in future, caste-oriented policies would be pursued in terms of economic backwardness. Gaurang R. Sahay discusses the existence of caste and caste-like social groups among the Christian and the Muslim communities, whose religious faith is theo- logically egalitarian. This is particularly significant in that the lowest ‘caste’ groups among them – the New Christians, the Azaral Muslims – have been the most excluded and discriminated within their communities. Although their position and condition are very much similar to the Hindu ex-untouchable castes, these Introduction 17 ‘caste’ groups are not entitled to the benefits of protective discrimination policy to which the SCs are entitled to. Sahay makes out a case for the inclusion of the New Christians and Azaral Muslims under the constitutional rubric of ‘Scheduled Castes’. The epilogue by Sony Pellissery synthesises the highlights in the contributions and the discussion at the seminar to arrive at a framework for using caste as an ana- lytical category in the discourse on public policy. He clarifies that his intention is not to create ‘a path-dependency by entrenching caste in policy interventions’. On the contrary, he emphasises the importance of being conscious of ‘what is done in the name of caste that may be averse to public policy’ and ‘what is done in the name of public policy that may work against the principles of integration by deepening caste-consciousness’. Substantively, Pellissery reviews the literature on the relationship between cul- ture and public policy to ascertain whether the existing frameworks of analysis are adequate to understand the role of caste in shaping public policy. He finds that the literature is silent on the public sphere as an intersecting arena of the state, the market, and the civil society institutions. He, therefore, elaborates on the public sphere through ‘an institutionalist perspective to understand how caste as a category throws light on our understanding of policy processes’. He concludes by outlining a framework to incorporate caste into public policy analysis. Notes 1 ‘Lifeworld’ (German, Lebenswelt) is a phenomenological concept that focuses on the col- lective inter-subjective experience while constructing social reality. Its intellectual leg- acy is shaped by Wilhelm Dilthey (‘life-nexus’), Edmund Husserl (‘Lifeworld’), Martin Heidegger (‘Being-in-the-world’), Jürgen Habermas (background for ‘practical ration- ality’), and Pierre Bourdieu (‘Habitus’). The special issue of Indian Anthropologist on ‘Anthropology’s Contributions to Public Policy’ (2014) connects the idea ‘lifeworld’ with public policy. 2 Various expressions are used in the literature on the subject to describe the legislation and programmes under this policy: positive discrimination, compensatory discrimination, protective discrimination, etc. Although ‘positive discrimination’ covers the reservations in the elections to legislative bodies, recruitment to government jobs, admission to edu- cational institutions, and other special provisions for the benefit of the identified castes, tribes, and classes, it does not seem to include the protection that the state offers in the form of civil rights legislation. Also, the policy is something more than ‘compensatory’ in nature. ‘Protective discrimination’ encompasses the protective cover that the state provides to these hitherto excluded or marginalised sections of the population. It would subsume the positive, the compensatory, and the preferential aspects of the policy. Moreover, the protective cover that the policy provides is more significant in the current politically charged times with generally unpleasant and occasionally violent reactions that this policy provokes. Accordingly, in this introduction, we use the expression protective discrimina- tion. In the contributions to the volume, the terminology used by the authors is retained. 3 According to the 1951 Census, the Hindus comprised 84.1 per cent of the total popula- tion in India. In 2011, this percentage had come down to 79.8. 4 This segue is not entirely new, though. Such transformations have been occurring across India ever since the first synchronous census was carried out in British India in 1881. However, political assertion using primordial identities of caste, horizontal integration, 18 Rahul Choragudi et al. mobilisation, etc., was not the modus operandi of the early-twentieth-century Indian politics as much as it is in the post-independent India, and especially since the 1980s. 5 The Constitution of India did not make a reference to the ‘Other Backward Classes’ (OBCs) in its definition of the ‘Depressed Classes’. Only the ‘Scheduled Castes’ (SCs) and the ‘Scheduled Tribes (STs) ‘were included in the first definition of the ‘Depressed Classes’ and the criteria for the former was the status of an individual as an untouchable. In fact, it was left for the states and the executive to come up with the definition of the OBCs and a list of all the communities that came under that category. Incidentally, one of the major criteria to ascertain the OBC’s has been caste and its location in the caste-based social hierarchy. 6 From the 1950s through the 1970s, a majority of the SC reserved constituencies have had not more than 20–25 per cent SC voters. Therefore, a majority of the SC voters lived and voted in the non-reserved, general constituencies; and majority non-SC voters lived and voted in the SC reserved constituency. The non-SCs scepticism of the candidate’s competence was visible in the lower voter turnout in reserved constituencies. To place this in perspective, in the case of the STs, close to 70 per cent ST voters lived in the constituencies reserved for them (Galanter 1984: 47–48). This trend continues till date with the SC population being geographically diversified, but the same cannot be said of the STs. 7 Reservations in the central government employment did not exist for the OBCs. Different state governments had different percentages for their respective OBC prospects. 8 For more on this, see Caste-based Reservations and Human Development in India (2007) by K. S. Chalam. 9 This was increased to 7.5 per cent in 1982. Since there was no legislation determining the membership of the OBCs, different states have accorded variable reservations in educational institutions for this category. This changed after the Mandal Commission’s recommendations were implemented in 1990. 10 Of the eleven criteria, based on three categories – social, educational, and economic – social, i.e., caste, received the most weighting. The methodology adopted by the Commission for determining backwardness was critiqued as being dubious at best (see Radhakrishnan 1996). 11 By then, various state governments had already put in place reservations for the OBCs. In 1980, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam government (led by M. G. Ramachandran) in Tamil Nadu had raised the OBC quota from 31 per cent to 50 per cent; in 1983, the Telugu Desam Party government (led by N. T. Rama Rao) in the then Andhra Pradesh had increased it from 25 per cent to 44 per cent; and in 1983, the Congress party government (led by Madhav Singh Solanki) in Gujarat raised it from 10 per cent to 28 per cent. In each case, the courts had to intervene later to ensure the total reservations does not exceed the 50 per cent limit set by the Supreme Court of India in Indra Sawhney v. Union of India (Jaffrelot 2003: 324–326). 12 National Front was a coalition of regional parties led by the Janata Dal, a party with socialist leanings. The other coalition partners were Asom Gana Parishad (Assam), Telugu Desam Party (Andhra Pradesh), and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (Tamil Nadu), with external support from the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Left Front. 13 Among the other major electoral promises was the uplift of the peasants and healing the rural economy. However, undelivered promises on this front and excessive focus on the OBC politics pushed the Jats, a landowning caste supporting the Janata Dal, out of it in the early 1990s. 14 The south Indian states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh have been at the forefront of the OBC reservations from the 1950s. One of the earliest mentions of reservations for the backward classes is from the Madras Presidency during the colonial era. 15 At the time of filing the case, the National Front was in power. However, at the time of the judgement in 1992, the Congress party led by Pamulaparthi Venkata Narasimha Rao was in power. Introduction 19 16 The Court, however, observed that the ‘creamy layer’, i.e., the socially advanced persons/ sections, be excluded from the OBCs. To this end an Expert Committee was appointed to ensure the weeding out of the progeny of the OBC elite. 17 The policy issues relating to the demand for and the denial of the reservation and other benefits to the Scheduled Castes converting to Christianity and Islam are discussed by Gaurang Sahay (Chapter 10 in this volume). 18 ‘Dalit’, a term derived from Sanskrit, literally means ‘oppressed’ or ‘broken’; in political discourse it is mainly used to refer to the Scheduled Castes. 19 ‘Bahujan’, derived from the Pali term ‘Bahujana’, literally means ‘the many’ or ‘the majority’; in political discourse it is used to refer to ‘the majority of the people’, that is, the SCs (Dalits), the STs (Adivasis or indigenous people), and the Shudra (peasant) caste groups cutting across religion and geographies. 20 Kanshi Ram established the All India Backward (SC, ST, OBCs) and Minority Communities Employees Federation (BAMCEF) in 1973. In 1981, he founded the Dalit Shoshit Samaj Sangarsh Samiti (DS-4), a political party which, in 1984, became the Bahujan Samaj Party. These associations and parties were instrumental in the political consolidation of the Dalits, especially in north India. 21 The Telugu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh, Janata Dal (Secular) and Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar, Janata Dal (United) in Karnataka, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena and Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, Biju Janata Dal in Odisha, Shiromani Akali Dal in Punjab, All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in Tamil Nadu, Telangana Rashtra Samithi in Telangana, Socialist Party and Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh, All India Trinamool Congress in West Bengal. 22 The seminar participants included Aparajita Bakshi, Des Gasper, Paramjit S. Judge, Staffan Lindberg, Stig Toft Madsen, R. Manjula, Subhadra Mitra Channa, Kunal Munjal, R. Siva Prasad, R. Saravana Raja, D. Rajasekhar, Pradeep Ramavath, Antara Ray, and Rowena Robinson. The seminar was coordinated by Rahul Choragudi, N. Jayaram, and Sony Pellissery. References Aggarwal, Pratap C. 1983. Halfway to Equality. New Delhi: Manohar Publications. Ambedkar, B. R. 1979–1991. Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, Volume V. Bombay: Department of Education, Government of Maharashtra. Banerjee, Mukulika. 2014. Why India Votes? New Delhi: Routledge. Basu, Kaushik. 2004. India’s Emerging Economy: Performance and Prospects in the 1990s and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Baxi, Upendra. 1985. ‘Caste, Class and Reservation (In Memoriam: I. P. Desai)’, Economic and Political Weekly, 20 (10): 426–428. Bayly, Susan. 1999. Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (The New Cambridge History of India, Vol. 3). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Béteille, André. 1962. Caste Class and Power: Changing patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore Village. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Béteille, André. 2005. ‘Matters of Right and of Policy’, Seminar, 549. https://www.india-sem- inar.com/2005/549/549%20andre%20beteille.htm (accessed on 27 March 2021). Bhattacharya, Niloshree and Manish Thakur. 2020. ‘From Protests to Policies: Actors, Spaces and Processes’, Sociological Bulletin, 69 (3): 368–384. Bouglé, Célestine. 2010. ‘The Essence and Reality of Caste System’, in Dipankar Gupta (ed.), Social Stratification, pp. 64–73. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Brass, Paul. 1985. Caste, Faction and Party in Indian Politics, Vol. 2. New Delhi: Chanakya Publications. 20 Rahul Choragudi et al. Chalam, K. S. 2007. Caste-Based Reservations and Human Development in India. New Delhi: Sage Publications India. Chandra, Kanchan. 2004. Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohn, Bernard S. 1990. ‘The Census, Social Structure, and Objectification in South Asia’, in S. Bernard Cohn (ed.), An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays, pp. 224–254. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Damodaran, Harish. 2008. India’s New Capitalists: Caste, Business, and Industry in a Modern Nation. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. Desai, I. P. 1984. ‘Western-Educated Elites and Social Change in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 19(15): 639–647. Deshpande, Satish. 2006. ‘Exclusive Inequalities: Merit, Caste and Discrimination in Indian Higher Education Today’, Economic and Political Weekly, 41 (24): 2438–2444. Dirks, Nicholas B. 2003. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (paper- back edition). Delhi: Permanent Black. Dumont, Louis. 1970. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. Delhi: Vikas Publications. Frankel, Francine. 1990. ‘Conclusion: Decline of a Social Order’, in Francine Frankel and M. S. A. Rao (eds.), Dominance and State Power in Modern India: Decline of a Social Order, Vol. II, pp. 482–518. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Frankel, Francine and M. S. A. Rao. 1989. Dominance and State Power in Modern India: Decline of a Social Order, Vol. I. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Frankel, Francine and M. S. A. Rao. 1990. Dominance and State Power in Modern India: Decline of a Social Order, Vol. II. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Galanter, Marc. 1961. ‘Equality and “Protective Discrimination” in India’, Rutgers Law Review, 16: 42–74. Galanter, Marc. 1978. ‘Who Are the Other Backward Classes? An Introduction to a Constitutional Puzzle’, Economic and Political Weekly, 13 (43/44): 1812–1828. Galanter, Marc. 1979. ‘Compensatory Discrimination in Political Representation: A Preliminary Assessment of India’s Thirty-Year Experience with Reserved Seats in Legislatures’, Economic and Political Weekly, 14 (7/8): 437–454. Galanter, Marc. 1984. Competing Inequalities: Law and Backward Classes in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Galanter, Marc. 1986. ‘Pursuing Equality in the Land of Hierarchy: An Assessment of India’s Policies of Compensatory Discrimination for Historically Disadvantaged Groups’, in Dilip K. Basu and Richard Sisson (eds.), Social and Economic Development in India: A Reassessment, pp. 185–207. Delhi: Sage Publications India. Ghurye, G. S. 2010. Caste and Race in India. Bombay: Popular Prakashan. Gokhale, Jayashree B. 1990. ‘Evolution of a Counter-Ideology: Dalit Consciousness in Maharashtra’, in Francine Frankel and M. S. A. Rao (eds.), Dominance and State Power in Modern India: Decline of a Social Order, Vol. II, pp. 212–277. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Gundimeda, Sambaiah. 2013. Mapping Dalit Politics in Contemporary India: A Study of UP and AP from an Ambedkarite Perspective. PhD Thesis. School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Guru, Gopal. 2005. ‘Corporate Class and Its “Veil of Ignorance”’, Seminar, 549. india-semi- nar.com/2005/549/549%20gopal%20guru.htm (accessed on 21 May 2021). Indian Anthropologist. 2014. ‘Anthropology’s Contributions to Public Policy’ (Special Issue). 44 (1). Indian Anthropological Association, Department of Anthropology, University of Delhi, India. Introduction 21 Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2003. India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Low Castes in the North Indian Politics. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Jaffrelot, Christophe and Sanjay Kumar. 2009. Rise of the Plebeians: The Changing Face of the Indian Legislative Assemblies. New Delhi: Routledge. Jain, Meenakshi. 1996. ‘Backward Castes and Social Change in UP and Bihar’, in M. N. Srinivas (ed.), Caste: Its Twentieth Century Avatar, pp. 135–151. New Delhi: Viking. Jayaram, N. 1996. ‘Caste and Hinduism: Changing Protean Relationship’, in M. N. Srinivas (ed.), Caste: Its Twentieth Century Avatar, pp. 69–86. New Delhi: Viking. Jayaram, N. 2004/1992. ‘Emancipation through Proselytism? Some Reflections on the Marginal Status of the Depressed Classes’, in Rowena Robinson (ed.), Sociology of Religion in India (Themes in Indian Sociology – 3), pp. 256–272. New Delhi: SAGE Publications India. Jensenius, Francesca R. 2014. ‘Mired in Reservations: The Path-dependent History of Electoral Quotas in India’, Journal of Asian Studies, 74 (1): 85–105. Jensenius, Francesca R. 2017. Social Justice through Inclusion: The Consequences of Electoral Quotas in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Jethmalani, Ram. 2009. ‘Mandal Revisited’, in Indra Deva (ed.), Sociology of Law, pp. 261– 265. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Jodhka, Surinder S. and James Manor (eds.). 2018. Contesting Hierarchies and Persisting Influences: Caste and Power in Twenty-First Century India. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan. Kothari, Rajni. 2010. ‘Introduction: Caste in Indian Politics’, in Rajni Kothari (ed.), Caste in Indian Politics, pp. 3–25. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Manor, James. 2010. ‘Prologue’, in Rajni Kothari (ed.), Caste in Indian Politics, pp. xi–lxi. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Marriott, McKim. 1969/1955. Village India: Studies in the Little Community. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Mosse, David. 2018. ‘Caste and Development: Contemporary Perspectives on a Structure of Discrimination and Advantage’, World Development, 110 (October): 422–436. Munshi, Kaivan. 2016. ‘Caste Networks in the Modern Indian Economy’, in Mahendra S. Dev and P. G. Babu (eds.), Development in India: Micro and Macro Perspectives, pp. 39–58. New Delhi: Springer. Munshi, Kaivan. 2019. ‘Caste and the Indian Economy’, Journal of Economic Literature, 57 (4): 781–834. Narayan, Badri. 2014. Kanshiram: Leader of the Dalits. New Delhi: Penguin Random House. Pai, Sudha. 2002. Dalit Assertion and Unfinished Democratic Revolution: The Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh. New Delhi: Sage Publications India. Palshikar, Suhas, K. C. Suri and Yogendra Yadav. 2014. Party Competition in Indian States: Electoral Politics in Post-Congress State. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Pritchett, Lant. 2009. Is India a Flailing State? Detours on the Four Lane Highway to Modernization. HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series RWP09-013, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn- 3:HUL.InstRepos:4449106 (accessed on 2 May 2021). Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. 1993. ‘Pledge to Keep the Flag Flying’, in V. P. Singh’s Selected Speeches and Writings, 1989–1990, pp. 51–67. New Delhi: Government of India. Radhakrishnan, P. 1996. ‘Mandal Commission: A Sociological Critique’, in M. N. Srinivas (ed.), Caste: Its Twentieth Century Avatar, pp. 203–220. New Delhi: Viking. Robinson, Rowena and Sathianathan Clarke (eds.). 2007. Religious Conversion in India: Modes, Motivations, and Meanings. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. 22 Rahul Choragudi et al. Rudolph, Lloyd I. and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph. 1960. ‘The Political Role of India’s Caste Associations’, Pacific Affairs, 33 (1): 5–22. Sandel, Michael J. 2020. The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? London: Penguin Random House. Shah, Ghanshyam. 1985. ‘Caste, Class and Reservation’, Economic and Political Weekly, 20 (3): 132–136. Shah, Ghanshyam. 2002. ‘Introduction: Caste and Democratic Politics’, in Ghanshyam Shah (ed.), Caste and Democratic Politics in India, pp. 1–32. Delhi: Permanent Black. Shah, Vimal P. and Tara Patel. 1977. Who Goes to College? Scheduled Caste/Tribe Post-Matric Scholars in Gujarat. Ahmedabad: Rachana Publications. Singh, M. P. 2009. ‘Jurisprudential Foundation of Reservation’, in Indra Deva (ed.), Sociology of Law, pp. 250–260. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Srinivas, M. N. (ed.). 1960/1955. India’s Villages. Bombay: Asia Publishing House. Srinivas, M. N. 1996. ‘Introduction’, in M. N. Srinivas (ed.), Caste: Its Twentieth Century Avatar, pp. ix–xxxviii. New Delhi: Viking. Srinivas, M. N. 2009/1972. Social Change in Modern India. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Subramanian, Ajantha. 2019. The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Teltumbde, Anand. 2018. Republic of Caste: Thinking Equality in the Time of Neoliberal Hindutva. New Delhi: Navayana. Thorat, Sukhdeo. 2005. ‘Why Reservation is Necessary’, Seminar, 549. https://www. india-seminar.com/2005/549/549%20sukhadeo%20thorat.htm (accessed on 17 May 2021). Thorat, Sukhdeo and Katherine Newman. 2010. Blocked by Caste: Economic Discrimination in Modern India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Weiner, Myron. 1983. ‘The Political Consequences of Preferential Policies: A Comparative Perspective’, Comparative Politics, 6 (1): 35–52. Weiner, Myron. 2001. ‘The Struggle of Equality: Caste in Indian Politics’, in Atul Kohli (ed.), The Success of India’s Democracy. pp. 193–225. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yadav, Yogendra. 1996. ‘Reconfiguration in Indian Politics: State Assembly Elections, 1993– 95’, Economic and Political Weekly, 31 (2/3): 95–104. PART I The national scenario 1 CASTE IN AND OUT OF PLACE State, market, and culture Stig Toft Madsen General argument For two millennia, caste has been a central pillar, or the Achilles heel, of the Indian civilisation, and for two centuries, the Indian state has related to caste in ways which are familiar to us today. Local and legislative bodies, government departments, pub- lic sector undertakings and banks, educational institutions, the courts, the police, and other wings and arms of the state now deal with matters relating to caste on a daily basis all over the country. The state runs a host of targeted interventions in development projects to secure welfare benefits to particular castes and tribes. There are reservations in the form of quotas in political bodies, in educational institutions, and in public employment constituting what has been referred to as ‘the world’s oldest and farthest-reaching affirmative action programme’ (Tharoor 2018: 73–4). Social justice legislation, which includes the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, and the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1995, reinforces a legal framework that rests on a solid constitutional bedrock. This painstakingly built edifice, it may reasonably be held, will be able to adequately serve India well into the twenty-first century. There is no burning platform, and it is, therefore, only natural that there is currently no high-level effort to formulate a new public policy on caste. If the policy platform ain’t broke, don’t fix it!1 Nonetheless, I will argue that there are weaknesses in the current arrangement that do warrant policy change. The main problem is the policy of reservation in government service which benefits thousands of people, but which in the words of Anand Teltumbde also ‘consecrates castes and religion’ (2018: 53). The reserved quota for the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and the Scheduled Tribes (STs) together con- stitute 22.5 per cent in central government service. With the provision of a further 27 per cent quota for the Other Backward Castes (OBCs), reservations came close DOI: 10.4324/9781003104919-3 26 Stig Toft Madsen to half the vacancies in the public sector. The framers of the constitution did not intend quotas to exceed 50 per cent, and the Supreme Court has tried to safeguard this principle lest the promise of equality enshrined in the constitution would be jeopardized (Sitapati 2017). However, in the run-up to the 2019 general elections, the Government of India awarded a 10 per cent quota for ‘poor’ people of castes otherwise not benefitted by reservation, i.e., for the high castes (Rajagopal 2019). In Tamil Nadu, the 50 per cent ceiling was broken years ago, and at least 69 per cent of government jobs are now in the reserved category. In Karnataka, around 92 per cent of the population is considered eligible for reservation (Teltumbde 2018: 49, 55). Edmund Leach (1960) has argued that castes are a kind of trade unions enjoying a monopoly over a certain trade. Such monopolies have weakened, but instead almost all castes can now claim their caste-based share in governmental employment. Unless it is specified how such reservations should be phased out, this will indefinitely consecrate, underwrite, and reinforce caste in a manner that con- tradicts the constitutional intention of securing equality of status and opportunity to all citizens. Teltumbde has also argued that ‘When the lawmakers outlawed untouchability, castes should also have been outlawed’ (2018: 53). I do not agree with him on this point. Whether one likes it or not, caste is an integral part of Indian civilisation. As Mark Tully has said, ‘caste provides a basic identity, self-respect and security to people, high and low’ (1991: 6–7). Had caste not been able to provide such goods, it might have disappeared long ago. Thus, I will argue that, while the state should not be reduced to caste arithmetic, caste is part of the chemistry of society. The coming to power, for the second time in a row, of a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government indicates that a policy change may be under way. The BJP comes in several avatars. In one of its avatars, the party represents a homogenising nationalistic force. It has abrogated the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, it delegitimises dynastic politics, it seeks a common civil code for all irrespective of religion, it supports the spread of Hindi, it subscribes to a common system of iden- tification of all citizens, it has generalised the sales tax, it has tried through demon- etisation to eliminate the parallel black economy, and it advocates near-universal welfare benefits. In this article, I will endeavour to explore what a public policy for caste would look like given the rise of the BJP, while taking into consideration that the BJP has other avatars, as well as opponents. In general, I will follow the lead of Gurcharan Das (2012) who has argued that India should aim to build a strong state that will match its strong civil soci- ety. Das opens his book by approvingly quoting G. W. F. Hegel contrasting India with China: ‘If China must be regarded as nothing else but a State, Hindoo polit- ical existence presents us with a people but no state’ (Hegel 2004: 179 quoted in Das 2012: 52). Ties of caste, kinship, and religion have strengthened communi- tarian solidarity among Hindus, but focused the state on maintaining the ‘ordered heterogeneity’ of Indian society. Leaning on Hegel and on B. R. Ambedkar, Das concludes that ‘The task of modern citizenship was to convert partial loyalties of society to a loyalty to the modern, impartial state’ (2012: 57). Das invites the BJP Caste in and out of place 27 and the Congress to take up his agenda, but if it gains no traction with those two parties, he suggests reviving the Swatantra Party. This party was founded in 1959 by C. Rajagopalachari, N. G. Ranga, Minoo Masani, and others on a classical lib- eral platform. Minoo Masani’s son, Zareer Masani, is the author of a book called Macaulay: Britain’s Liberal Imperialist. T. B. Macaulay, I would argue, was crucial to the creation of a strong Indian state. His approach was civilisationally pratiloma. He went against the grains with his educational minute, which promoted Western science and the English language at the cost of Sanskrit, Farsi, and Arabic learning. He furthered the creation of an elite meritocracy of generalist administrators, and in 1837 he drafted the Indian Penal Code. This code conformed to his maxim: ‘We propose no rash innovation; we wish to give no shock to the prejudices of any part of our subjects. Our principle is simply this; uniformity where you can have it; diversity where you must have it; but in all cases certainty’ (Macaulay 1833). Macaulay did not try to mimic, please, or appease Indian society. His was a precise and comprehensive code in the spirit of Jeremy Bentham’s universal jurisprudence. His agenda is still relevant. Thus, according to Satish Saberwal: Macaulay initiated the construction of integrated, impersonal codes in India; and access to, and enforcement of, such codes – in law and also in bureau- cracy and other organizational settings – is essential to the possibility of any kind of sustainable, large-scale operations; it is essential for making megaso- ciety possible.

Caste Matters in Public Policy: Issues & Perspectives 2023 PDF

Document Details

Tags

Related

Summary

Full Transcript

Upgrade to continue