he
editor, KS Chalam, Member, Union Public Service Commission, New Delhi,
analyses one of the most contentious issues of our times – caste-based
reservations, one which has seen tragic, needless, deaths, riots and one
which has torn the country apart into protagonists and antagonists.
Caste-based reservations have
existed in India for more than a century, it was initially introduced by
the British to bring about equal opportunity in education. Later
reservation was extended to other sectors of the development process to
overcome the economic inequalities attributed to caste.
Today India along with Brazil,
Russia and China (BRIC) are amongst the fastest developing countries in
the world in terms of GNP. The transition from under developed to a
developing country is not without its massive problems and limitations
and each country has to tackle its peculiar issues. One of the main
issues being that the fruits of development does not percolate to all
sections of society. No democratic society can survive keeping a vast
majority of its population away from participating in the socio-economic
processes. The democratic principle of "one man, one vote" needs to be
translated into all spheres of public life. With all this in mind the
framers of our Constitution had incorporated caste-based reservations as
one of the methods of achieving this. But no effort was made to assess
the impact of the strategy. While people were polarized as ‘for’ and
‘against’, the country’s intellectual did not come forward to
participate in the debate – it is this lacuna, the lack of a
dispassionate judgement, that the author purports to fill in with this
volume.
The situation in India , feels
the author, is not different from what has happened in the USA. The
Dalits here take the role of African-Americans. When India entered the
liberal capitalist frame in the 90s, the powers that be, recognized that
the feudal system was not passing on the economic benefit down the line
to the lowest strata.
Historical data and exhaustive
tables apart, the volume analyses what can well be termed the modern
history of caste-based reservations and its ongoing impact. What is the
alternative? Representation? As more respectable than reservations?
The individual in India represents a caste or community and therefore it
is necessary to ensure that each caste or community is adequately
represented in the institutions through which the system operates.
To ensure that the democratic
capitalism functions efficiently, all groups, both advantaged and
disadvantaged need to be proportionately represented, in all
organizations, be it private or public, education or employment,
parliamentary seats or panchayat and so on.
Well concluded, but whither
implementation? The acid test in a democratic process is consensus and
implementation, each one of us has been a witness to this. While no
right thinking person disagrees with representation and even
reservation, in over half a century of Independence we have not found
the right way of going about it!