In his essay titled The Untouchables and the Pax Britannica, Dr BR Ambedkar highlighted how the British government had deliberately intended to keep education “as the preserve of higher classes” in the Bombay Presidency by maintaining a paltry number of schools and colleges. Amidst the demands to increase the number of educational institutions and enhance the ambit of education to the poor as well, Ambedkar cited from the ‘Report of the Board of Education of the Bombay Presidency of 1850–51’ and pointed to a situation which the British government and the higher classes of western India earnestly wanted to avoid: “If the children of the poor are admitted freely to government Institutions, what is there to prevent all the despised castes — the Dheds, Mahars etc — from flocking in numbers to their walls?”
The demand to create more schools for the poor raised palpable fears among the higher classes of the then Bombay Presidency that they might have to share their classrooms with the children of the ‘despised castes’, thus revealing the caste-character of these higher classes as such. Given that this situation could have — and actually did — lead to violence between higher and lower castes on the question of the right to education, the British government thought it best to continue with their older policy of fewer schools, which mainly catered to the higher castes.
This historical instance is noteworthy because of how it traces the changing relationship between caste and poverty in India. While the expansion of educational institutions for the ‘poor’ caused palpable anxiety among the higher castes of western India in the 19th century, contemporary India has witnessed a unique deployment of the category of the ‘poor’ for the sole benefit of the higher castes in the sphere of public education and employment.
The Supreme Court has ratified the 103rd constitutional amendment which granted a 10% quota for ‘economically weaker sections’ (EWS), thus giving legal legitimacy to reservations based on economic criteria. The ramifications of the judgement can be analysed from many angles and perspectives — by focussing on the validity of the economic criteria, the 50% ceiling on reservations, and whether Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) ought to be excluded from availing the EWS quota.
Amidst this discussion however, what we are likely to overlook is the distinct social life of reservation in India, which is one of the most, if not the most, debated government policies. From its supposed departure from the notion of merit, to its alleged injustice towards the higher castes, it is fair to say that reservations for lower castes have been a permanent eyesore for the higher castes in India ever since its formal introduction during the colonial era.
What this article aims to do is to draw an outline of the social logic behind the EWS quota.
The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government’s introduction of this constitutional amendment in 2018 and the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the same needs to be contextualised in a broader history of caste-Hindu opposition to reservations meant for lower castes in India. Unless one captures the pulse of this opposition — which makes its presence felt at street agitations, in newspaper op-eds, classroom or workplace gossip, Whatsapp forwards, in the legislature and the judiciary — the near consensus about economics as a criteria for reservations in the Supreme Court cannot be understood.
Since the EWS quota has been described by the Bharatiya Janata Party as providing social justice to the country’s poor, it becomes important to shed some light on how the question of caste and labour is omitted in this particular articulation of poverty.
The very form of the EWS quota excludes castes and tribes enumerated under the categories of SC, ST, and OBC, thus effectively excluding around two-thirds of India’s population from availing it. As has been pointed out by a number of commentators, EWS is, for all intents and purposes, a quota for the social minority of the higher castes, which, as a class, is statistically deemed to be the richest in India. By rendering poverty among the higher castes as deserving of the intervention of reservation or affirmative action, the government and the judiciary have effectively created two different forms of dealing with poverty in India.
Poverty alleviation programmes and reservation policies worked with different categories of identification. Not only has the EWS quota jumbled these categories, it has made the poverty of some castes as deserving another layer of governmental aid or protection via reservations, apart from existing poverty alleviation schemes. The juridical reasoning behind the legitimisation of the EWS quota arguably hides this social distinction between castes that are ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. In India, this distinction bears a long history of sociocultural and religious sanctions.
The distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor can be illustrated through some examples from the ancient lawbook of the Manusmriti or The Law Code of Manu. For example, verse 10.129 reads, “Even a capable Sudra must not accumulate wealth; for when a Sudra becomes wealthy, he harasses Brahmins.”
This verse is important because it highlights that the Sudra is indeed capable of accumulating wealth. However, their wealth becomes a cause of harassment or annoyance for the Brahmin, because this acquired wealth would lead them away from their preordained task of providing service to the twice-born castes. On the contrary, the expectation that the Brahmin ought to lead their life in voluntary ascetic poverty does not render them unfit for accumulating wealth. In the Manusmriti, the Brahmins are the only social class permitted to receive and give gifts (dana), while all other classes can only give but not receive gifts (1.88–91). Only the Brahmin can receive gifts because their voluntary poverty must be offset by the labour of other classes. Thus, the fact of the poverty of the Brahmin does not change the status of who deserves a wealthy life, because Manu is categorical that the Sudra does not deserve a wealthy life, even though he is capable of it.
Modern day welfare schemes for Brahmins can be said to be based on this imagination of voluntary poverty, even if the real poverty faced by higher castes might be involuntary in nature and might have its causes in feudalism or capitalism. The State and people ought to show their gratitude to Brahmins by funding welfare schemes whereby they can continue their non-laborious life of ‘voluntary poverty’. The EWS quota, by excluding nearly two-thirds of the Indian population from its scope, has naturalised the poverty of the subordinate castes. It has also given a legal justification to the social perception that the poverty of the higher castes is somehow ‘accidental’ in nature, thus painting upper-caste poverty as a social deviation that ought to be remedied by the state through a ‘social’ justice programme.
Keeping in view the history of the caste-Hindu opposition to reservations for lower castes in India, it must be pointed out that the EWS quota is a compromise between two conjoint demands: (i) caste-based reservations should not exist; (ii) if there is to be any form of reservation in India, then it should be based on economic criteria alone. The EWS quota is a pragmatic mixture of these two contradictory but conjoint demands; it has introduced the economic criteria for reservations by disallowing lower-castes from its scope of beneficiaries.
However, what is the persistent reason behind the vastly popular idea of the economic basis of reservations in India? Suppose that such a policy is indeed promulgated, and caste-based reservations are wholly done away with. Would not most of the beneficiaries of such economic reservations come from the lower castes, since they constitute the majority of the country’s poor?
The scheme of economic reservations in public employment and education might as well provide more representation to the lower castes than higher castes, given that the latter are economically better-off than the former in class terms. However, the problem of the caste-Hindu opposition to caste-based reservations is not a matter of such practical considerations. It fundamentally concerns how India’s governing classes view themselves, and how they want others in the world to perceive them.
If the native elites during the colonial period saw the idea of caste-based reservations as hurting the formation of the emergent nation — basically implying that official or governmental recognition of caste would work to divide or fragment ‘nationalist sentiment’ — the postcolonial era has marked the displacement of the idea of caste-based reservations through the idea of class. That caste is the most pernicious source of injustice in Indian society, and that any project of justice ought to frontally tackle the effects of caste power is an idea that has proven to be foreign to the governing classes in most of India’s colonial and postcolonial political history. Economic reservations are acceptable for these classes because it appeals to their amnesia regarding the problem of caste injustices in India. India, for them, might as well be seen as a poor nation. Most other countries in the world face the problem of poverty. However, India must not be perceived as a casteist nation. That would mean that someone is guilty and responsible for all this casteism throughout India’s long history.
The presence of caste-based reservations in India at least makes the indigestible secret of caste public to the whole world. It is a humiliating reminder — especially for India’s ruling classes — that caste-based reservations are intended to correct a long history of caste-based exclusions and injustices. It is a pointer to the historical overrepresentation of upper castes in all major spheres of social life in India. On the contrary, economic reservations would work to hide the sight of caste privilege and upper-caste overrepresentation which have, by and large, enabled and activated the material conditions of India’s ruling classes.
The EWS quota is a major step in the direction of forgetting, by official decree, that it is caste that constitutes one of the main sources of injustice in India.
Ankit Kawade is a PhD student at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He can be reached at ankitkawade@hotmail.com.