Backwardpeople

2006-10-04T07:42:00.000-07:00

'OBCs outscore general merit student

BANGALORE: The great OBC myth has been busted. The biggest concern of
the anti-reservation activists that introduction of castebased
reservations in higher education institutes would deteriorate the
quality of education has been debunked.

The final report of the Oversight Committee headed by M Veerappa Moily
to be submitted to PM Manmohan Singh will be backed by strong case
studies from southern states, including Karnataka, to establish how
OBC students have been consistently outscoring general category and
SC/ST students.

Sample this study on the performance of OBC students in Karnataka's
engineering colleges. The study pertained to the admission and
performance of four batches of students in Visvesvaraya Technological
University between 1998-2002 and 2001-2005.

While OBC students have a pass percentage of 93.01 to 97.4, general
merit students recorded just 66.09 to 94.77 from the 1998-2000 batch
to 2001-2005 batch.

The percentage of first class with distinction among OBC students was
between 37.7 and 42.38,while among SC/ST students it was between 9.32
and 11.90 in the same period.

An exclusive study by Bangalore University former vice-chancellor N R
Shetty at the behest of the Oversight Committee has concluded that
there has been no reduction or loss of performance due to introduction
of OBC candidates.

The study has only proved that given a chance, the so-called Backward
Classes can also perform. "In fact, OBC students have done better than
general category and SC/ST students. With the increasing
representation for the backward classes their performance may be
expected to improve," Shetty told The Times of India.

The study shows engineering colleges have been able to fill up the OBC
quota more easily than the SC/ST category. Against 32% reservation for
OBC students in Karnataka, the enrolment has been in the range of
21.17% to 29.69%, while intake of SC/ST students has been a paltry
5.35% to 6.66% against the recommended 18%.

"We don't want to stop just with engineering students. Shortly we will
study the performance of OBC students in medical and dental courses as
well. The aspect of excellence in terms of ranks in the Common
Entrance Test obtained by the OBC students will be explored," Shetty
added.

Moily committee has commissioned similar studies in Andhra Pradesh,
Tamil Nadu and Kerala, which have been implementing reservation
policies favouring OBCs.

No review of OBC reservation, says Moily panel member

2006-10-01T07:19:00.000-07:00

NEW DELHI, SEPT 28: Fissures within the oversight committee on quota
appear to have cropped up with a senior panel member questioning
chairman Veerappa Moily's assertion that the committee had recommended
a periodic review of the quota policy.
Planning Commission member BL Mungekar, senior member of the quota
panel, on Thursday maintained that the panel had only recommended a
review of the implementation, not the policy itself.

Briefing newspersons after an eight-hour long final meeting of the
committee on Wednesday, Moily had said they have recommended the
government review the quota policy every five to ten years.

Correcting Moily's assertions, Mungekar on Thursday told FE the
committee had only recommended a yearly review of the implementation.
"Media reports that we recommended a review of the policy are
incorrect. We want the government to make sure that institutions
implement the quota as per directions," Mungekar said.

The panel, significantly, has decided not to make any mention of
creamy layer as demanded by some parties. Tamil parties such as DMK
and PMK were against including the creamy layer criterion in the quota
structure. The PMK had even issued a "fatwa" against Moily entering
Tamil Nadu, if he dissallowed rich OBCs from getting reservation
benefits.

"Creamy layer was never under the purview of our committee. The panel
unanimously decided not mention it. Reports that I objected are
wrong," Mungekar said.

Mungekar, refuting reports that he had questioned giving autonomy to
higher education institutions, said "We cannot avoid introducing
changes with respect to autonomy in the higher education sector. The
issue, however, should be first discussed and debated," Mungekar told
FE.

To buttress his argument, he said that during his term as vice
chancellor of Mumbai University he had granted autonomy to two premier
institutes. "I favour giving autonomy to these institutes," he said.

Mungekar added that there was a consensus that issues not part of the
committee's terms of reference should be avoided. "We did not suggest
a view on creamy layer and quota in private educational institutes."

37 killed as 3 blasts rock Malegaon

2006-09-09T00:52:00.000-07:00

A crime against humanity, the terrorists have killed innocent people and this is shameful act.

CNN-IBN

GRIM TASK: An elderly man searches for the body of his relative among the bodies of people killed.
New Delhi/ Mumbai/ Nashik: At least 37 people were killed and 56 were seriously injured when three bombs concealed on cycles went off near a mosque in Maharashtra’s Malegaon town when people were coming out after Friday afternoon prayers.
The blasts occurred near the Hamidia Mosque in the Bada Kabristan area of the communally sensitive town just after Friday prayers.

Thousands of people were out on the streets on Friday for Shab-e-Barat, a festival during which people offer prayers to dead relatives.
The first blast occurred at 1345 hours IST and two more explosions follow in two minutes. Police suspect a timer device could have been used to trigger off the explosions.
A curfew was imposed in the textile town after the blasts.
Maharashtra Police sounded a statewide alert and had mobile networks jammed in the town to prevent rumours.
"The situation in Malegaon is tense but under control," said Maharashtra Director General of Police P S Pasricha. ''The motive appears to be to create panic and make people fight with each other,” he said.

Reservation buttresses social justice: Expert

2006-09-06T22:41:00.000-07:00

MADURAI: Reservation is not an isolated issue and it should been seen
against the backdrop of the larger plan of imparting social justice,
said P S Krishnan, former member secretary of National Backward
Classes Commission and National SC/ST Commission. He was delivering
the inaugural address at a seminar on reservation organised by the
Doctors' Forum for the People here, on Sunday.

"Reservation is only one of the means to attain social justice. So the
question, 'what has Tamil Nadu achieved from its reservation policy?'
does not hold water," he asserted. Elaborating on the need to continue
with reservation policy, Krishnan said, though social inequality is
prevailing in many countries across the world, India's case attracts
special mention because of caste-based segregation pursued in the
nation.

The oppressed people, he said, are also there among the upper castes,
but their number is comparatively very small. Reeling out statistics,
he pointed out that the reservation is a much needed measure in the
state while taking the national average on several criteria including
agricultural labourers in rural area and casual labourers in urban
area.

He also insisted for reservation in private sector as many of the new
employment opportunities are emerging there and not in the public
sector as was the case earlier. He also suggested that the term
'creamy layer' is deceptive and the better alternative is 'socially
advanced persons/section'.

Speaking on the occasion, CMD of Tamilnadu Urban Finance and
Infrastructure Development Corporation, Christhudoss Gandhi, said that
though Tamil Nadu is the forerunner in the reservation issue, there
are around 300 schools in the state that have no single SC/ST student
in their roll.

"Chennai alone has 150 such schools and if this is the situation in
Tamil Nadu, what would be the situation in other states," he wondered.

CPI(M) Polit Bureau member Varadharajan asserted that reservation
issue should not be viewed on caste basis and urged the oppressed
classes including SC, ST and OBC to lead a combined fight.

The seminar dealt with several topics related to reservation including
'Women and Reservation', 'Dravidian Movement and Reservation', 'Law
and Reservation' and 'Cultural Aspects to Reservation'.

The seminar was attended by ex-MLC and former principal of Mannar
Thirumalai Naickar College B Parthasarathy, general secretary of
Periyar Dravida Kazhagam Viduthalai Rajendran and head of the
Sociology department at MKU L Dharabhai.

Making right an obligation

2006-08-13T23:29:00.000-07:00

Making right an obligation

SANJAY PULIPAKA

Given an appropriate space, every student has a distinct possibility
of becoming a `meritorious student'

IN THE recent past, the Centre's decision to implement reservation for
Other Backward Castes (OBCs) in various institutes of `excellence'
prompted many to reflect on the necessity of having reservation to
address the problems associated with caste discrimination. Some
scholars have pointed out that reservation has become the only
paradigm of social justice in India. And they have argued that such
one-dimensional approach to social justice might in the long run
hamper the cause of social justice.
However, the question we need to ask is how come one-dimensional
approach dominates the discourse on social justice in India? Is the
political class solely responsible for this? If the politicians are
able to determine and define the discourse on social justice for their
partisan political ends, it is precisely because the space was vacated
by other segments of society. The failure in implementing multiple
approaches to ensure social equality was largely a consequence of
indifference displayed by the privileged towards the prevailing
inequalities and discrimination in society. Let me illustrate this
with an example.

Support centre

Currently, I am studying at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding,
Eastern Mennonite University, in the U.S. Many students with diverse
backgrounds come to the university to pursue their degrees. Given
their diverse backgrounds there is disparity in the communication
skills of the students. Instead of indulging in deprecatory statements
about the alleged low standards of in-coming students, the university
runs an academic support centre where the students are provided with
various services such as proof-reading and editing of their
term-papers.
Students visiting the academic support centre tend to build healthy
relationships with the professionals providing such services, and over
a span of time their communication skills tend to register a
remarkable improvement. All the students have access to employment
counsellors who help them in drafting their resumes apart from
providing employment counselling.
Persistent efforts are made to make the classroom space democratic.
The faculty and the students sit in a circle in the classroom to
negate the notion of hierarchy. Acknowledging the fact that there are
multiple levels of intelligence, students are given the option to
submit their assignments by using various methods such as role-plays
and other audio-visual mediums. All these measures are based on the
premise that given an appropriate space every student has a distinct
possibility of becoming a `meritorious student.'
This prompts me to raise a few important questions. How many
universities in India can claim that they are running academic support
centres that foster `excellence' among all students? How many
universities have made sincere efforts to make their classroom space
more democratic? Does all this require constitutional amendments by
Parliament? Can't a group of professionals committed to "fostering
merit" ensure that such changes are ushered in?
Language improvement sessions, employment counselling, and diverse
evaluation procedures might appear mundane for some. But such small
measures go a long way in building camaraderie among the members of
the campus community. And more importantly such an approach recognises
that merit is a consequence of interplay of social factors and has
many forms.

Greater malaise

The absence of such mechanisms in many Indian universities is
symptomatic of a greater malaise afflicting Indian society — a
persistent reluctance to think innovatively to address the problems
associated with social inequality and discrimination. There is very
little desire to foster merit in our institutions. The word `merit' is
thrown around flippantly only when there is a move to ensure
legitimate representation of disadvantaged sections.
I am not singing paeans of an American university. Rather, I am only
pointing out that there are various ways by which social equality can
be ensured and if there is yearning in society, even we can come up
with our own approaches/mechanisms for ensuring social equality. In
this context it is pertinent to note that many international
educational foundations in India, supported by big businesses from
outside, are making conscious efforts to ensure that the socially
disadvantaged are adequately represented in the fellowships they are
offering.
The anti-reservationists apart from their "nay-saying" do not have a
clearly defined agenda for a positive social change. Given the apathy
towards social inequality and discrimination, giving up reservation
would be the last thing to do. We should move away from this
"nay-saying" and explore the various measures that we need to take,
along with reservation, for ushering in social equality at a rapid
pace.

(The writer is a Fulbright Fellow in Conflict Transformation
Programme, Eastern Mennonite University. He can be reached at
pulipaka.sanjay@...)

Does the Irani panel report mean affirmative action by the private

2006-08-10T03:31:00.000-07:00

It's a deliberate move to prevent legislation

Udit Raj

Point 7 of the CII-Assocham Action Plan under the title 'Preamble'
says "Private sector industry is against any legislation that would
compromise the sanctity of its non-negotiable freedom of choice in
employment." Do we need more to question the timing, intention and
mindset of this Action Plan brought out by our big businesses? There
was tremendous pressure on Indian industry from the government,
political parties, civil society and the public after it was seen that
all along, industry has shirked its social responsibility. The Action
Plan is a deliberate move to pre-empt the intended legislation
proposed by none other than the ruling regime.

The Action Plan, under the title 'Entrepreneurship Development', says
"Larger companies to mentor and create at least one entrepreneur from
Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes a year. To begin with 100
entrepreneurs will be created in the first year." But, how they will
do it is not explained when the entrepreneurial base of deprived
communities is missing. Dalit businessmen will have to be created from
scratch and this will take years. What industry can do instead is to
start employing SCs and STs who, at present, find its doors shut to
them.

Moreover, there are over five lakh inter-racial marriages in the US
whereas Indian business communities marry within themselves. Only if
they start marrying in Dalit communities will we see Dalit
entrepreneurs and not by merely drawing up Action Plans.

JJ Irani's report may be trying to show that affirmative action, as is
practiced in the US, is being pursued. But the situation there is
different; the mindset and motives there are exemplary. IBM provided
reservations to African-Americans way back in 1930. In the US, they
bear the social responsibility for bringing ethnic minorities like the
Hispanics, African-Americans, into the mainstream out of their love
for an inclusive society. For they believe that a nation within a
nation and a society within a society can't work for the happiness of
all. Their charities are unparallelled and unprecedented. Take, for
instance, the recent donation by Warren Buffett. Or the fact that a
white American industrialist founded the Mississippi Medical College
for African-Americans.

In 2003, an African-American student got admission into the Law School of

Michigan University. A white American student challenged this
'affirmative action' which denied him admission even though he had
secured more marks than the African-American student. The case was
heard in the Supreme Court and about 75 industrialists defended the
affirmative action. Please give me some examples on these lines in
India. Rather, there have been indications in newspapers that the
recent anti-reservation protests were funded by corporate money.

In India, R&D is done by public-funded government institutions. On the
other hand, in the US private business does all the research in
science and technology. The public funds the budget of the IITs, IIMs
and AIIMS which provide very subsidised education. But the alumni of
such institutions contribute to the profits of big businesses; this
fact is never recognised and appreciated by our industry. If it can
take the help of government-funded education to grow and reap profits,
then why does it shirk its social responsibility to be an equal
partner in a common destiny and pitch in with some help. If the
government were all-powerful and all- resourceful, the likes of JRD
Tata, Jamnalal Bajaj, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett would not be
needed.

In India, we have legislation providing for reservations for SCs and
STs in government jobs and educational institutions, yet it is not
properly implemented.

The DOPT and the UPSC have taken unreserved seats as 'reserved' for
the so-called upper castes. My belief is that the Action Plan is an
eyewash. But, if the private sector really means it, then we are game
for it. However, without any stringent laws in place I don't see any
obligation falling on industrialists.

—The writer is founder- president of the Indian Justice Party

Moily Committe: For or against quota

2006-08-02T23:43:00.000-07:00

The Moily Committee which has been formed to formulate a policy for the implementation of the quota scheme, appears to have been packed with the anti-quota quota people. Every pronouncment made by the committe whether it is regarding to quota in IIMs or R&D institution has been attached with a number of suffixes and prefixes.

The Moily committee with a subtle backing from some congress Ministers is bent upon diluting the constitutional amendment regarding the quotas to OBCs. Basically, the upper caste lobby which has been unable to stop the quota brigade in the parliament is now trying to do the same through the Supreme Court which is no doubt filled by meritorious judges but all belong to the upper castes.
Somewhere down the line the caste becomes too strong a connection for any Indian to get beyond or above it, while making an important decision.
In addition, the upper caste media primarily led by Indian Express is hellbent on proving that there is a major rift in the government ranks on this issue and Congress is a house divided on implementing quota.
Even today, while no other newspaper has reported regarding any differences in the Indian government regarding quota, Indian Express has given this story the lead space.

Elite institutions will determine their own threshold: committee

2006-08-02T23:30:00.000-07:00

Anita Joshua

Admissions must be decided by the institutions

Cut-off for OBCs to be somewhere midway between those for SC/STs
Preparatory courses suggested to bring OBC candidates on a par with
fellow students

NEW DELHI: Merit will not necessarily become a casualty once the
Government's reservation policy for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) is
in place; at least not in top-of-the-line institutions such as the
Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), the Indian Institutes of
Technology (IITs), the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the
All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS).

The Oversight Committee — entrusted with preparing a roadmap for
implementing 27 per cent reservation for OBCs in Central educational
institutions — says the threshold for admissions to these institutions
should be determined by themselves, as is done today, commensurate
with the level of its excellence.

In its interim report submitted to the Government last week, the
Committee justified this hands-off strategy vis-a-vis the admission
criteria as an acknowledgement of the fact that the IITs, IIMs, IISc
and AIIMS and other such "exceptional quality institutions" which have
established a global reputation can maintain that standard only if the
highest quality in both faculty and students is ensured.

Even in the case of the other Central educational institutions, the
Committee has suggested that cut-off for OBCs be placed somewhere
"midway between those for Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes and the
unreserved category, carefully calibrated so that the principles of
both equity and excellence can be maintained." These recommendations
are based on inputs gathered by the five sub-committees from the
various Central educational institutions.

The sub-committee for management education institutions reported to
the Oversight Committee that the IIMs were very keen on their position
that "High standards and quality must be maintained and assured in the
whole process of expansion. There must be no unjustifiable demands on
the institutes to lower admission standards in order to accommodate
the enhanced intake." Also, the IIMs are clear that OBC reservation
should be confined to the post-graduate diploma and equivalent
programmes as is the case with SC/ST candidates.

Similarly, the sub-group for engineering institutions told the
Oversight Committee that admission criteria and cut-off "may be left
to the Joint Advisory Board of the IITs or the respective Board of
Governors." According to the sub-group, the cut-off figures should not
be lowered to fill the reserved seats. Like the management sub-group,
the engineering sub-group has suggested remedial preparatory courses
to bring OBC candidates on a competitive level with fellow students.

IITs, IISc seek Rs 5,520 cr to double seats

2006-08-02T23:27:00.000-07:00

Sreelatha Menon / New Delhi August 03, 2006

The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the IITs will double their
student intake from 38,500 to 60,600 in five years at a cost of Rs
5,520 crore.

This is being done to comply with the annexures to the interim report
of the Veerappa Moily committee on reservation in higher education.

The report projects a total requirement of Rs 9,640 crore for all
technical educational institutions and seeks a three-year time frame
to implement the 54 per cent seat expansion.

The figure for IITs, IIMs, medical colleges and central and
agricultural universities put together touches Rs 16,000 crore. Except
medical colleges and agricultural universities, which will bring in
the changes in two years, all other institutes want a 3-5-year
time-frame.

The IITs and IISc have said their total approved intake for 2006-2007
was 12,813 which would increase by 7,390. But it is silent on the
exact number of additional students to be admitted next year.

However it gives a break up of the number of teachers who are to be
recruited over a period of five years. The estimated total additional
faculty requirement spread over five years is 3,200.

Similarly, in the case of the National Institutes of Technology (NIT),
the total cost requirement has been put at Rs 3,385 crore, with the
student intake to increase from the present 49,185 to 76,000 in five
years.

The report says 2,000 additional faculty members would be required
over the period. Other central government technical educational
institutions have asked for about Rs 735 crore and 500 additional
faculty members.

The report recommends relaxation of retirement of the faculty to 65
years, re-employing retired faculty up to 70 years, securing services
of ad hoc and visiting faculty, adopting large classrooms with
tutorial sections, utilising the services of senior research scholars
for assistance in teaching and tutorials, establishing virtual
classrooms and starting e-learning facilities .

IIMs: IIMs, on their part, have asked for Rs 611.46 crore spread over
four years to effect 54 per cent expansion in seats. They have also
asked for full freedom to fill faculty positions based on a teacher to
student ratio of 1:7. The interim report of the committee has
incorporated these demands in its recommendations.

Central universities: About Rs 2,000 crore has been demanded for 54
per cent expansion in seats in 17 central universities.

Medical colleges: The central medical colleges have asked for Rs
2,442.05 crore to implement expansion over two years. With the
expansion, seats in medical colleges will increase from the present
355 seats to 546. Post graduate seats will rise from 1,173 to 1,771.

Agricultural universities: The four colleges under the Central
Agricultural University, Imphal, and the IARI New Delhi, IVRI
Izatnagar, NDRI Karnal and CIFE Mumbai have projected expansion in
seats over a period of three years. The total fund requirement sought
is Rs 194.6 crore.

While Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi, has agreed to
increase 18 per cent seats in the first year for PG and PhD, 36 per
cent would be increased in the second year.

IVRI, Izatnagar, and NDRI, Karnal, have also made similar commitments.
The latter, however, is to increase 54 per cent seats at the
undergraduate level from next year itself.

Devil doctors are meritwallahs

2006-07-30T00:08:00.000-07:00

Doctors hack off medical ethics

CNN-IBN
Posted Saturday , July 29, 2006 at 20:16
Updated Saturday , July 29, 2006 at 20:41 Email Print
New Delhi: Ajay Agarwal, senior orthopaedic surgeon at the Ghaziabad and Noida district hospitals, was not only willing to amputate beggar’s limbs for money but when promised more cash, he even introduced the CNN-IBN and DIG team to his partners in crime.

DIG: Dr Saheb ek cheez aur. Jo aapse phone per baat ki thi. Hum log is kam ke expand kar rahai hai, not only Ghaziabad. (Dr we are expanding our work and not only in Ghaziabad).

Dr Agarwal: Har district main ek ek de de ta hoon (I will give you one in each district).

DIG: Mujhe char dijiye, ek to mujhe apne Panipat bataya tha, Jaipur bataya tha (Give me four. You said one was in Panipat and the other in Jaipur)

Dr Agarwal: As pass ilake me kar lo (Do your work in nearby areas).

DIG: Kahan (Where?)

Dr. Agarwal: Meerut, Muzaffarnagar, Saharanpur.

Dr Agarwal quickly made a series of phone calls revealing a network of doctors who would agree to chop hands, arms, legs and in fact any limb for a price.

Dr Agarwal: Hello Arvind. Dr Ajay Agarwal Ghaziabad se. Aur kya haal hain, kaise chal raha hai kam dham. Ek kuch sansatha hain Goa ki, to jisse beggar ka ya diseased person, ka kuch amputation ke cases Bareilly mein karne ki cha rahee hai.. To tum kar dooge? (Hello Arvind. I am Dr Ajay Agarwal from Ghaziabad. How are you and how is the work? There is an organisation from Goa and it wants some beggars and diseased persons to be amputated in Bareilly. Will you do it?)

His sales pitch exposed his familiarity with the horrific practice of amputation.

Dr Agarwal: Bakaida patient consent de rehe hai. Aapko surgeon charges de rahe hai. Aapko kahin dikkat hain, aur yeh bahut moti si baat mano. Do beggar tumhare saamne khade hain, ek ka pair kata hai tumari jeb main ek sikka hai kis ko doge? Jiska amputation hai (The patient is giving his consent. You have to pay only the fee for the surgery. Believe me if there are two beggars before you and one of them is lame you will give the give money to the lame beggar.)

Dr Agarwal: Vohi consent dega patient ka, aur yeh surgeon ko surgeon charges pura denge, to tum kar paoge? Beggars ki earning badh jaati hai. (He will give the consent for the patient and will pay the surgeon’s fee. So will you do it? The earning of the beggar increases).

The Devil doctors are Meritwallahs

2006-07-30T00:00:00.000-07:00

The devil doctors exposed by the IBN-CNN raise a number of questions?

Are these doctors meritwallahs or from depressed classes?
Why the so-called upper caste merit wallahs doctors turned out to be devils ? We dont say depressed people cant do it, but till date none has been found in this racket.
This racket clearly shows why the doctors dont want to expand medical education ?
There is huge money in this profession which has become synonymous with dalali, anything can be fixed for money?

The IMA must tell why merit wallahs were found doing this, as it feels that they are the upholders of hippocrates oath in this country. The IMA itself is is battleground of corruption and sleaze, and there are many more skeletons in the cupboard.

Hacker docs in the dock, IMA promises action

CNN-IBN
Posted Saturday , July 29, 2006 at 21:17
Updated Sunday , July 30, 2006 at 10:59 Email Print
New Delhi: After CNN-IBN and DIG exposed doctors who cut off beggars' limbs for a price to help the beggar mafia the Indian Medical Association (IMA) has promised to prosecute the erring doctors.

Dr Ajay Kumar, National President Elect of the Indian Medical Association has said that the doctors will be arrested immediately.

"If they are registered with the IMA then their medical license will be immediately suspended," he said.

The police have already taken Dr P K Bansal for questioning. He runs a clinic named Orthomat in Delhi's Old Rajinder Nagar locality.

Dr Bansal had agreed to amputate the limbs of a beggar despite knowing that the law prohibits amputation by will.

Another doctor, Ghaziabad-based Ajay Agarwal took money to amputate healthy limbs of a DIG investigator who posed as a prospective beggar.

People entered Agarwal's house in Ghaziabad and demanded action against the erring doctor.

In a sting operation, a team of CNN-IBN reporters exposed orthopaedic surgeon Ajay Agarwal's unethical practice.

Dr Agarwal put the fake beggar through a series of medical tests at his nursing home.

The surgeon pocketed Rs 4,000 as advance for the operation from the team while also giving advice on how the amputation could be made to look legal.

When CNN-IBN reached Dr Ajay Agarwal at the Noida Civil Hospital, the cameraperson was pushed and abused.

It was in fact Dr Ajay Agarwal who had referred Dr P K Bansal to the investigative team as part of amputation nexus.

Dr Ajay Agarwal is absconding and the police are trying to track him down.

CNN-IBN had also exposed Dr Arvind Agarwal of Bareilly.

Dr Agarwal, who is also the Secretary of the Orthopaedic Association of Bareilly is now absconding.

His wife says he has not returned since Saturday afternoon.

When questioned about Dr Agarwal, his wife, Dr Neera Agarwal said,”If he has not come then how can I tell you?”

The police are now looking out for him. The Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), Bareilly, Anand Swaroop said, "We are looking for him and have contacted IMA for cooperation."

Divide over reservation deepens

2006-07-26T08:25:00.000-07:00

Priyam Bhasin

Sunday, July 23, 2006 (New Delhi):

The debate over reservation may seem to have toned down for people but
at medical colleges it still continues and is very much alive at
AIIMS.

The recent agitation has only underlined and fuelled the divide that
already existed between the pro-quota and anti-quota lobbies.

Not all doctors are happy with the Supreme Court's decision to pay
doctors who'd struck work.

Doctors, who were working during the three weeks of reservation row,
say the court was being discriminatory.

The SC's decision to pay has strengthened the anti-quota lobby.

"In the court it was said, that release the salaries, and do not make
it a precedent, which means that the judiciary was biased towards
those protesting against quotas," said Dr Anoop Saraya, senior doctor,
AIIMS.

On Saturday, senior doctors including the vice dean students and
workers demonstrated at AIIMS.

Caste-based discrimination

The pro-quota lobby says it is also fighting caste-based
discrimination and the insults and abuse faced by reserved category
students during the recent strike.

"We, the SC/ST doctors' association, have filed a PIL in the Delhi
high court. Doctors from reserved categories were harassed, and not
allowed to work, but the authorities failed to take action," said Dr
Rathore, Maulana Azad Medical College.

The doctors who oppose reservation say there was never any discrimination.

"These allegations are baseless, they oppose Dr Venugopal. It's all
being done because they are against him," said Dr Anil Sharma,
Spokesperson, Youth for Equality.

On one side of the AIIMS campus there were the anti quota protest
which went on for three weeks. But on the opposite side, protests are
still on against discrimination faced by students belonging to
reserved categories.

This deep and bitter divide within the medical community along caste
lines has further deepened with the Supreme Court's orders.

What's worrying is that what happens here sets a precedent elsewhere
in the country.

College seats, double shifts

2006-07-24T23:39:00.000-07:00

S.S. Gill

Whether we like it or not, 27 per cent reservations for the OBCs is here to stay. The big question exercising most people is whether we have the infrastructure to accommodate the increased intake. The problem is that we are looking for solutions within the existing parameters, instead of searching for alternatives.

Advertisment We should look at how the southern states addressed the issue. At one point, there are only 14 government engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu, eight in Andhra Pradesh and one in Karnataka. Today there are 252 engineering colleges in TN, 250 in AP, and 125 in Karnataka. How did this happen? The governments of these states realised that they just did not have the resources to set up new institutions to meet the demand. Either they could keep sticking to the ‘principled’ approach of not allowing the intrusion of private technical institutions on to the hallowed turf of professional education, or adopt a pragmatic approach and permit private parties to establish engineering, medical and management colleges. They adopted the latter course.

Of course, a number of these institutions do not maintain high standards of teaching; they charge exorbitant capitation fees and indulge in other malpractices. But the best should not be made an enemy of the good. These institutions have also made a notable contribution in enabling these states to lead the country in the field of technical and professional education. Suitable regulatory mechanisms can be devised to rectify some of the malpractices. Other steps would include prescribing minimum standards of teaching and making suitable provision for labs and libraries.

There is no reason why the southern model cannot be replicated in other states to overcome the infrastructure crunch resulting from additional reservations. Most of the northern states are woefully deficient in this regard, and no serious thought has been given to establishing a slew of new technical and professional colleges in association with the private sector. Also, there need be no problem in introducing double shifts in most schools and colleges. As the buildings, libraries, laboratories, and other infrastructure already exists on the ground, all you need to do to double existing capacity is to double the teaching and administrative staff.

When it comes to medical education, things get a bit more complicated. Here, much more important than increasing the existing capacities of professional institutions is the problem of providing reasonable healthcare to 65 per cent of our population living in the villages. Thousands of primary health centres remain unmanned because MBBS degree holders do not want to live in villages and work in these centres. In an earlier, post-revolutionary phase, China solved this problem by introducing the concept of ‘barefoot doctors’. These men and women were given rudimentary training in treating the most common ailments afflicting the villagers.

Before independence, India had a more professional corps of qualified physicians, who were put through a much shorter course of medical education than the MBBS. They were fairly well-acquainted with the principles of modern medicine, and could treat almost all the simple ailments of their patients. They were awarded a ‘Licentiate of Medicine’, and were eligible to practise as physicians. But medical professionals ganged up and abolished this system on the ground that these half-baked doctors were actually a health hazard. Today, the better qualified doctors have a monopoly of the profession but the poor villager is left at the mercy of quacks, who fleece them and indiscriminately prescribe broad-spectrum antibiotics and steroids to produce quick results.

There is a very urgent need to review the present system of medical education and re-introduce the earlier practice of short-duration medical courses for doctors qualified to treat simple ailments like fever, cold, cough, diarrhoea and headache. After all, most illnesses people suffer from are quite simple and do not require the service of a specialist.

As for the infrastructure required to accommodate more students, nearly half the medical colleges can be run in two shifts for MBBS students, and the other half for short-term courses, thus more than doubling the output of qualified doctors. There is bound to be lot of resistance from the entrenched medical fraternity to such reform. But given the failure to send MBBS degree holders to the countryside all these years, it is time the community came around to the view that it should not prevent the setting up of a system that could deliver basic healthcare for villagers and liberate them from the clutches of local quacks.

The writer was secretary, Mandal Commission

India Inc pens 4-part job plan

2006-07-14T05:43:00.000-07:00

Priti Bajaj

NEW DELHI: The joint task force of CII and Assocham has prepared a
draft report in four parts laying out the industry's response to the
prime minister's proposal for greater social diversity in private
sector jobs.

The draft, according to industry sources, recommends a legislation on
the lines of the US equal-opportunity employment law.

The US law - Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII)— prohibits
employment discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex or
national origin. Also, since 1965, the Federal government runs a
contract compliance programme under which government contractors are
required to comply with the equal employment opportunity and
affirmative action provisions of their contracts.

Private contractors are required to draw up a written programme giving
out the problems and solution for affirmative action in their
employment.

The draft report also contains a detailed code of conduct to be
followed by the member companies of the two apex chambers of commerce
and industry to ensure higher representation of scheduled caste and
scheduled tribes and other backward classes in private sector
employment.

The draft drawn up by a committee headed by JJ Irani and with members
like Subodh Bhargava, proposes the setting up of an office of
ombudsman to oversee the implementation of affirmative action in
private sector.

Caste, genes and Anthropology

2006-07-10T08:36:00.000-07:00

Half a century ago, Dr. Ambedkar surveyed the existing data on the physical anthropology of the different castes in his book The Untouchables. He found that the received wisdom of a racial basis of caste was not supported by the data, e.g.: “The table for Bengal shows that the Chandal who stands sixth in the scheme of social precedence and whose touch pollutes, is not much differentiated from the Brahmin (…) In Bombay the Deshastha Brahmin bears a closer affinity to the Son-Koli, a fisherman caste, than to his own compeer, the Chitpavan Brahmin. The Mahar, the Untouchable of the Maratha region, comes next together with the Kunbi, the peasant. They follow in order the Shenvi Brahmin, the Nagar Brahmin and the high-caste Maratha. These results (…) mean that there is no correspondence between social gradation and physical differentiation in Bombay.”70

A remarkable case of differentiation in skull and nose indexes, noted by Dr. Ambedkar, was found to exist between the Brahmin and the (untouchable) Chamar of Uttar Pradesh.71 But this does not prove that Brahmins are foreigners, because the data for the U.P. Brahmin were found to be very close to those for the Khattri and the untouchable Chuhra of Panjab. If the U.P. Brahmin is indeed “foreign” to U.P., he is by no mean . s foreign to India, at least not more than the Panjab untouchables. This confirms the scenario which we can derive from the Vedic and ItihAsa-PurANa literature: the Vedic tradition was brought east from the Vedic heartland by Brahmins who were physically indistinguishable from the lower castes there, when the heartland in Panjab-Haryana at its apogee exported its culture to the whole Aryavarta (comparable to the planned importation of Brahmins into Bengal and the South around the turn of the Christian era). These were just two of the numerous intra-Indian migrations of caste groups.

Recent research has not refuted Ambedkar’s views. A press report on a recent anthropological survey led by Kumar Suresh Singh explains: “English anthropologists contended that the upper castes of India belonged to the Caucasian race and the rest drew their origin from Australoid types. The survey has revealed this to be a myth. ‘Biologically and linguistically, we are very mixed’, says Suresh Singh (…) The report says that the people of India have more genes in common, and also share a large number of morphological traits. ‘There is much greater homogenization in terms of morphological and genetic traits at the regional level’, says the report. For example, the Brahmins of Tamil Nadu (esp. Iyengars) share more traits with non-Brahmins in the state than with fellow Brahmins in western or northern India. (…) The sons-of-the-soil theory also stands demolished. The Anthropological Survey of India has found no community in India that can’t remember having migrated from some other part of the country.”72 Internal migration accounts for much of India’s complex ethnic landscape, while there is no evidence of a separate or foreign origin for the upper castes.

Among other scientists who reject the identification of caste (varNa) with race on physical-anthropological grounds, we may cite Kailash C. Malhotra:

“Detailed anthropometric surveys carried out among the people of Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Bengal and Tamil Nadu revealed significant regional differences within a caste and a closer resemblance between castes of different varnas within a region than between sub-populations of the caste from different regions. On the basis of analysis of stature, cephalic and nasal index, H.K. Rakshit (1966) concludes that ‘the Brahmins of India are heterogeneous and suggest incorporation of more than one physical type involving more than one migration of people’.

“A more detailed study among eight Brahmin castes in Maharashtra on whom 18 metric, 16 scopic and 8 genetic markers were studied, revealed not only a great heterogeneity in both morphological and genetic characteristics but also showed that 3 Brahmin castes were closer to non-Brahmin castes than [to the] other Brahmin castes. P.P. Majumdar and K.C. Malhotra (1974) observed a great deal of heterogeneity with respect to OAB blood group system among 50 Brahmin samples spread over 11 Indian states. The evidence thus suggests that varna is a sociological and not a homogeneous biological entity.”73

4.9.2 Family traits

This general rejection of the racial basis of caste does not exclude that specific castes stand out in their environment by their phenotypical or genotypical characteristics. Firstly, any group that goes on breeding endogamously for generations will have “family traits” recognizable to the regular and sharp observer, at least to a statistically significant extent. This does not mean that these family traits (rarely distinctive enough to be called “racial” traits) are in any way the reason why one caste refuses to intermarry with another caste, as you would have in the case of racial discrimination.

Secondly, intra-Indian migrations have taken place so that certain caste groups stand out by retaining the physical characteristics of their source region’s population for quite a few generations. Thus, the Muslim invasions chased some Rajput castes from western India to the Nepalese borderland, and some Saraswat Brahmins from Kashmir to the Konkan region; geneticists ought to be able to find traces of that history.

It is well-known that the Brahmin communities of Bengal and South India originated in the physical importation of Brahmin families by kings who sought accession to the prestigious Vedic civilization and wanted to give extra religious legitimacy to their thrones. These Brahmin families were brought in from northwestern India where, for obvious geographical reason, people are whiter and closer to the European physical type than in Bengal or the South. (Even so, due to intermarriage and the incorporation of local priesthoods, numerous Brahmins in South India are simply black.) Apart from Brahmins, numerous other caste groups throughout India have histories of immigration, putting them in environments where they differed in genetic profile from their neighbours, e.g. the Dravidian-speaking Oraon tribals of Chotanagpur recall having migrated from Maharashtra along the Narmada river.

The Chitpavan Brahmins of Maharashtra are often mentioned as a caste that stands out by its physical type. Their slightly more “Nordic” build and the occurrence of blue eyes among them look like the perfect evidence for the theory that the Brahmins are the descendents of the Nordic Aryans who invaded India in 1500 BC. In fact, it is only during the initial Islamic onslaught that the Chitpavans migrated from the Afghan borderland to their present habitat.

Nevertheless, the Chitpavan case shows that sometimes, such distinctive family traits do coincide with the difference between the higher or lower incidence of the distinctive traits of the white race, esp. the low pigmentation of the skin or, in this case, the eyes. The difference between castes can in some cases be expressed in terms of the respective distances between their average characteristics and those of the European type. And this is only to be expected given the basic fact that India is a large country with great variation in physical type and lying in the border zone between the major races. The rich biological variety in the Indian chapter of the human species is due to many factors, but so far the Aryan Invasion has not been shown to be one of them.

4.9.3. Mixing of castes

The genetic differential between castes has recently been confirmed in a survey in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.74 The main finding of the survey, conducted by human-geneticists Lynn B. Jorde (University of Utah) and Bhaskara B. Rao and J.M. Naidu (both with Andhra University), concerned the role of inter-caste marriages: men stay in their castes, while women sometimes go and live with a man from another, mostly higher caste. In spite of the definition of caste as an “endogamous group”, the fact is that there has always been a marginal mixing of castes as well. Likewise, even outside the marital framework, upper-class employers (in any society) have made passes at their maid-servants, while prostitutes got impregnated by their higher-class clients, all producing mixed offspring.

Factoring all these marginal mixed-caste births in, the cumulative effect over centuries is that the castes have mixed much more than the theory of caste would lead you to expect. Over many generations, this mixing had to lead to a thorough genetic kinship even between castes of very divergent origins. Given these known sociological facts, the scientists naturally found that genetic traits in the male line (Y chromosome) are stable, those in the female line (mitochondrial DNA) considerably less so. Because inter-caste marriages are mostly between “neighbouring” castes in the hierarchy, the genetic distance between highest and lowest is about one and a half times greater than that between high and middle or between middle and low.

However, none of this requires a policy of racial discrimination nor an Aryan invasion into India: the known history of internal migrations and the general facts about relations between higher and lower classes in all societies can easily account for it.75 Moreover, the observed differences between Indian communities are much smaller than those between Indians collectively and Europeans (or Africans etc.) collectively. A provisional table of the genetic distance between populations shows that North-Indians and South-Indians are indeed very close, much closer than “Aryan” North-Indians and “Aryan” Iranians are to each other.76

Both sides in the debate should realize that this evidence can cut both ways. If an Aryan or other invasion is assumed, this evidence shows that all castes are biologically the progeny of both invaders and natives, though perhaps in different proportions. Conversely, if the genetic distance between two castes is small, this still leaves open the possibility that the castes or their communal identities can nonetheless have divergent origins, even foreign versus native, although these are obscured to the geneticist by centuries of caste mixing.

4.9.4. Tribals and “Caucasians”

The one important general difference between two parts of the population is that between a number of tribes on the one hand, and some other tribes plus the non-tribals on the other. V. Bhalla’s mapping of genetic traits shows that the latter category roughly belongs to the Mediterranean subgroup of the Caucasian race (though by the superficial criterion of skin colour, it can differ widely from the type found in Italy or Greece). incidentally, the term Caucasian as meaning the white race was coined in 1795 by the German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who believed that the Caucasus region, particularly Georgia, “produces the most beautiful human race”, and that it was the most likely habitat of “the autochthonous, most original forms of mankind”.77 Thus, the typically Caucasian Rhesus-negative factor is “conspicuous by its absence” in the Mongoloid populations of India’s northeast, but the non-tribal populations “show a moderately high frequency of 15% to 20% but not as high as in Europe” of this genetic trait.78

Bhalla lists a number of specific genes which are characteristically strong or weak in given racial types, and finds that they do define certain ethnic sub-groups of India, esp. the Mongoloid tribals of the northeast, the Negritos of the Andaman Islands, and the Australoids in the remaining tribal pockets of the south. Everywhere else, including in many tribal areas, the Mediterranean type is predominant, but the present battery of genetic markers was not able to distinguish between subtypes within this population, much less to indicate different waves of entry.

In fact, no “entry” of these Mediterranean Caucasians can be derived from the data, certainly not for the post-Harappan period. According to an older study, they were present even in South India in 2,000 BC at the latest: “The evidence of two racial types, the Mediterranean and the Autochthonous proto-Australoid, recognized in the study of the skeletal remains from the neolithic levels at Brahmagiri, Piklihal, Tekkalakota, Nevasa etc., seems to suggest that there was a thick population consisting mainly of these two races in South India around 2000 BC.”79

The Caucasian race was present in India (like in Europe and the Kurgan area) since hoary antiquity. Kailash Malhotra reports, starting with their geographical spread today: “The Caucasoids are found practically all over the country, though the preferred habitats have been river valleys and plains.”80

In the past, the Caucasian presence was also in evidence: “Although a large number of prehistoric sites have been excavated in India, only a few of them have yielded human osseous remains (…) None of the pre-Mesolithic sites have yielded skeletal material; the earliest remains are around 8,000 years old. An examination of the morphological features of skeletons from sites of the Mesolithic, Neolithic, Chalcolithic and iron age periods reveals the presence of Australoids and Caucasoids in all the periods, the absence of Mongoloids, and the existence of at least two types of Caucasoids, the dolichocephals and the brachycephals (…) The skeletal evidence thus clearly establishes the presence of Australoids and Caucasoids in India for at least 8,000 years.”81

All that can be said, is that the population of India’s northeast is akin to that of areas to India’s north and east, that of the southeast to that of countries further southeast, and the bulk of the Indian population to that of areas to India’s west. Probably a large demographic expansion from India’s northwest to the east and south took place during and at the end of the Harappan period (2,000 BC). It is logical to infer that the populations of the Mediterranean type were more concentrated in the northwest prior to that time; but it does not follow that they came from the outside. India’s northwest simply happened to be the easternmost area of Caucasian habitation, just like India’s northeast happens to be the frontier of the Mongoloid type’s habitat.

For politically correct support in denying the racial divide between tribals and non-tribals, we may cite the Marxist scholar S.K. Chatterjee, who dismissed the notion of distinct races in India, be they Aryan, Dravidian, Mongoloid or Austro-Asiatic. He called the Indian people a “mixed people, in blood, in speech and in culture”.82

Though the Christian missionaries have been the champions of tribal distinctness, Christian author P.A. Augustine writes about the Bhil tribals: “The Bhils have long ceased to be a homogeneous people. In the course of millennia, various elements have fused to shape the community. During their long and tortuous history, other aboriginal groups which came under their sway have probably merged with them, losing their identity. One can see a wide range of physical types and complexion. The variation in complexion is very striking indeed, ranging between fair to quite dark-skinned (…) There is no consensus among scholars on the exact ethnic character of the Bhils, They have been alternatively described as proto-Australoid, Dravidian or Veddoid.”83 The same racial “impurity” counts for most Indians, tribal as well as non-tribal. While not by itself disproving the Aryan invasion, it should prove even to invasionists that all Indians are descendents of both indigenous and so-called invader populations.

4.9.5. Language and genetics

While it is wrong to identify a speech community with a physical type, it is also wrong to discard physical anthropology completely as a source of information on human migrations in pre-literate times. Lately, findings have been published which suggest that, for all the racial mingling that has taken place, there is still a broad statistical correlation between certain physical characteristics and nations, even language groups.

Thus, the percentage of individuals with the Rhesus-negative factor is the highest (over 25%) among the Basques, a nation in the French-Spanish borderland which has preserved a pre-IE language. Other pockets of high incidence of Rh-neg. (which is nearly non-existent among the Bantus, Austroloids and Mongoloids) are in the same part of the world: western Morocco, Scotland and, strangely, the Baltic area, or apparently those backwater regions least affected by immigrations of the first Neolithic farmers (from the Balkans and Anatolia), the Indo-Europeans, and in Morocco also the Arabs.

Another European nation which stands out, at least to the discerning eye of the population geneticist, is the Sami (Lapp) population of northern Scandinavia: when contrasted genetically with the surrounding populations, the Sami genetic make-up “points to kinship with the peoples of North Siberia” eventhough they now resemble the Europeans more than the native Siberians.84 This confirms the suspicion of an Asian origin for the Uralic-speaking peoples of which the Sami people is one.

Where a small group of people have spread out over a vast area and lived in isolation ever since, as has happened in large parts of America in the past 20,000 years, genetic differentiation and linguistic differentiation have gone hand in hand, and the borderline between genetic types usually coincides with a linguistic borderline: “Joseph Greenberg distinguishes three language families among the Native Americans: Amerind, Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut. (…) According to Christy Turner of Arizona University, Native American dental morphology indicates three groups, which coincide with Greenberg’s. Luigi Cavalli-Sforza from Stanford investigated a variegated set of human genes. His results equally point in the direction of Greenberg’s classification.”85

Linguistic difference between populations may coincide with genetic differences; and likewise, linguistic mixing may coincide with genetic mixing. A perfect illustration is provided by Nelson Mandela, leader of the anti-Apartheid struggle and belonging to the Xhosa nation. His facial features are more Khoi (Hottentot) than Bantu, and his language, Xhosa, happens to be a Bantu language strongly influenced by the Khoi-San (Hottentot-Bushman) languages, most strikingly by adopting the click sounds. In this case, genetic mixing and linguistic mixing have gone hand in hand.

However, in and around the area of IE expansion, a notorious crossroads of migrating peoples, the remaining statistical correlation between genetic traits and language groups is less important than the evidence for the opposite phenomenon: languages spreading across genetic frontiers. In India, the only neat racial division which coincides with a linguistic borderline is between the mainland and the Andamans: though so-called Negrito features are dimly visible in the population of Orissa and surrounding areas, the pure Negrito type is confined to the Andamans, along with the Andamanese language group. For the rest, in India, like in Central Asia or Europe, i.e. in areas with lots of migration and interaction between diverse peoples, genetic and linguistic divisions only coincide by exception.

Thus, the Altaic languages are spoken by the Mongolians, eponymous members of the Mongoloid race, and by the Turks, who have mixed so thoroughly with their Persian, Armenian, Greek and Slavic neighbours that they now belong to the Caucasian race. The Hungarians are genetically closer to their Slavic and German neighbours than to their linguistic cousins in the Urals. India being the meeting-place (or rather, mixing-place) of Mongoloid, Caucasian and Austroloid racial strands, it is naturally impossible to identify the speakers of the different Indian language-groups with different races.

Asked whether there are “concordances between genetic data and languages”, L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, the world’s leading population geneticist, explains: “Yes, very much so. Our genealogical tree [of genetic traits] corresponds remarkably well with the table of linguistic families. There are a few exceptions e.g. the Lapps, genetically rather European, have preserved the language they spoke in their Siberian-Uralic homeland. The Hungarians, similarly, speak an Uralic language while being predominantly European. In the late 9th century AD, the Magyar invaders in Hungary, then called Pannonia, imposed their language on the natives. (…) What counts from a genetic viewpoint, is the number of invaders relative to the natives. As the Hungarians were not very numerous, they left only a feeble genetic imprint on the population.”86 So, the replacement of native languages by those of less civilized but stronger invaders is a real possibility (it is also what the Greeks did to the Old Europeans), though it becomes less probable in proportion to the size and the cultural superiority of the native population.

The reason why the replacement of native languages by the languages of genetically distinguishable invaders remains relatively exceptional, is this: “In a traditional culture, language is transmitted vertically from parents to children, just like the genes. But in some conquests or in civilizations with schools, there is also horizontal transmission and substitution of languages. The Romans organized schools in their part of Europe and thereby managed to replace the native languages by their own. But this type of phenomenon is relatively recent. In 90% of its history, mankind consisted of hunter-gatherers speaking tribal languages. That is why the genetic tree has preserved a strong concordance with the linguistic tree.”87

A typical example are the Basques: “The Basque language is the direct descendent of a language which must have arrived along with modem mankind, say 30,000 years ago. It is [in Europe] the only pre-Indo-European language which has been preserved. Why? Probably because the Basque people had a very strong social cohesion. Genetically too, the Basques are different. They have mixed very little. All the other Europeans have lost their original language and adopted an Indo-European language.”88

So, the Basques are both biologically and linguistically the straight descendants of Old Europeans. Most other Europeans are biologically the progeny of the non-IE-speaking Old Europeans, with some admixture of the Asian tribes who originally brought the IE languages into Europe. These immigrants may have differed somewhat from the average European type, into which their smaller number got genetically drowned over the centuries. Linguistically, most non-Basque (and non-Uralic) Europeans are the progeny, through adoption, of the IE-speaking invaders.

4.9.6. The original “Aryan race”

Is there anything we can say about the ethnic identity of the nomads or migrants who spread the early IE languages, if only to help physical-anthropologists to recognize them when found at archaeological sites? Competent authorities have warned against the “semi-conscious prejudices on original genetic characteristics of the Indo-Europeans: they are supposed to be blond and blue-eyed”.89 This prejudice has even been reinforced recently by the discovery of blond-haired mummies of presumably IE-speaking people in the Xinjiang province of China.90

The fact that the IE speech community includes people of diverse race, from the dark-skinned Sinhalese to the white-skinned Scandinavians, definitely implies that the spread of the language cannot be equated with the spread of a racial type. Languages can and do migrate across racial boundaries. That the IE languages crossed racial frontiers during their expansion accords well with established perspectives on the spread of IE, e.g. by I.M. Diakonov:

“These expanding tribes met local, poor and hungry sparser populations, often consisting of hunters and cattle-breeders. The migrants started to merge with the local population, giving them their language and cultural achievements. But in some cases, the local population may have been larger in numbers than the migrants. In some historical situations the language of the minority, if it was widely used and understandable on a vast territory, could be accepted as lingua franca, and later as the common language, particularly if it was a language of cattle-breeders (cf. the examples of the Semites and the Turks). The area of the newly created population became itself a centre of population spread, and so on. Bloody conquests could take place in some instances; in others it was not the case, but the important thing to realize is that what migrated were languages, not peoples, although there had to be at least a handful of users of the languages, though not necessarily native speakers.”91

On the other hand, the fact that the PIE-speaking community must have been a fairly small ethnic group, living together and marrying mostly within the community, implies that they must have belonged collectively to a fairly precisely circumscribed physical type. Even if you throw together people from all races, after a few generations of interbreeding they will develop a common and distinctive physical type, with atavistic births of people resembling the pure type of one of the ancestral races becoming rarer and rarer. Therefore, in the days before intercontinental travel and migrations, a speech community was normally also a. kinship group (or, in strict caste societies, a conglomerate of kinship groups) presenting a fairly homogeneous physical type.

During the heyday of the racial theories, a handful of words in Greek sources were taken to mean that the ancient Indo-Europeans were fair-haired and had a tall Nordic-looking build. In Homer’s description, the Greek heroes besieging Troy were fair-haired. The Egyptians described the “Sea Peoples” from the Aegean region (and even their Libyan co-invaders, presumably Berber-speaking) as fair-haired. The Chinese described the Western (Tokharic) barbarians likewise.

However, the incidence of Nordic looks was not necessarily overwhelming. In classical Greek writings, the Thracians and Macedonians (most notably Alexander the Great), whose language belonged to an extinct Balkanic branch of the IE family, are mentioned as being fair-haired; apparently most Greeks were by then dark enough to notice this fair colour as a trait typical of their “barbaric” northern neighbours. The Armenians have a legend of their own king Ara the Blond and his eventful personal relationship with the Assyrian queen Sammuramat/Semiramis (about 810 BC), who is known to have fought Urartu (the pre-IE name of Armenia, preserved in the Biblical mountain name Ararat). The use of “the blond” as a distinctive epithet confirms the existence of fair-haired people in Armenia, but also their conspicuousness and relative rarity.

All this testimony, along with the Xinjiang mummies and the presence of Nordic looks in the IE-speaking (Dardic/Kafiri) tribes in the Subcontinent’s northwestern valleys, does suggest a long-standing association between some branches of the IE family and the genes which program their carriers to have fair hair and blue eyes. These traits give a comparative advantage for survival in cold latitudes: just as melanine protects against the excessive intake of ultraviolet rays in sunny latitudes, lack of melanine favours the intake of ultraviolet. This segment of the sunrays is needed in the production of vitamin D, which in turn is needed in shaping the bones; its deficiency causes rachitis and makes it difficult for women to birth - a decisive handicap in the struggle for life. The link between northern latitudes and the light colour of skin, hair and eyes in many IE-speaking communities only proves what we already knew: IE is spoken in fairly northern latitudes including Europe and Central Asia. Yet, none of this proves the fair-haired and blue-eyed point about the speakers of the original proto-language PIE.

Suppose, with the non-invasion theorists, that the original speakers of IE had been Indians with dark eyes and dark hair; then, according to I.M. Diakonov: “if this population had migrated together with the languages, blue-eyed Balts could not have originated from it. Blue eyes, as a recessive characteristic, are met everywhere from Europe to the Hindu Kush. But nobody can be blue-eyed if neither of his/her parents had blue-eyed ancestors, and a predominantly blue-eyed population cannot originate from ancestors with predominantly black eyes.”92

This allows for two possible scenarios. Either the PIE speakers were indeed blue-eyed and fair-haired: that is the old explanation, preferred by the Nazis.93 Or the blue-eyed people of Europe have not inherited their IE languages from their biological ancestors, but changed language at some point along the genealogical line, abandoning the pre-IE Old European language of their fair ancestors in favour of Proto-Germanic, Proto-Baltic, Proto-Slavic etc., based on the language of the invaders from Asia. The latter scenario would agree with I.M. Diakonov’s observation: “The biological situation among the speakers of modern Indo-European languages can only be explained through a transfer of languages like a baton, as it were, in a relay race, but not by several thousand miles’ migration of the tribes themselves.”94

That this is far from impossible is demonstrated by the Turks who, after centuries of mixing with subdued natives of West Asia and the Balkans, have effectively crossed the racial borderline from yellow to white. But against using this Turkish scenario as a simile for the story of IE dispersal, one could point out that some eastern Turkic people, such as the Kirghiz and the Yakut, are still very much Mongoloids. However, far from forming a contrast with the IE state of affairs, this makes the simile more splendid: if IE spread from a non-white to a white population, it also remained the language of numerous non-whites (though technically “Caucasians”), viz. the Indians. On the Eurasian continent, South-Asians still constitute more than half of the wider IE speech community; the Indian Republic alone has more IE speakers than the whole of Europe.

It is perfectly possible that the PIE language and culture were developed after a non-white group of colonists from elsewhere settled among and got racially immersed in a larger whitish population. As we saw in our speculations about IE-Austronesian kinship and about Puranic history, it is at least conceivable that Aryan culture in India started after “Manu” and his dark-skinned cohorts fled the rising sea level by moving up the Ganga and settling high and dry in the upper Ganga basin, whence their progeny conquered areas to the northwest with ever whiter-skinned and lighter-haired populations: the Saraswati basin, the upper Indus basin, the Oxus riverside, the peri-Caspian region. By the time these Indian colonists settled in eastern Europe with their Kurgans, their blackness had been washed off by generations of intermarriage with white people of the type attested by the Xinjiang mummies. (Likewise, their material culture had been thoroughly adapted to their new habitat, hence de-indianized.)

So, it is perfectly possible that the Aryan heartland lay farther to the southeast, and that, like eastern Europe in the later 5th millennium BC, the Panjab area a few centuries earlier was already a first area of colonization, bringing people of a new and whiter physical type into the expanding Aryan speech community which was originally darker. While the Panjabi is physically very similar to the European, the Bihari, Oriya or Nepali is markedly less so, and yet it is possible that he represents more closely the ultimate Proto-Indo-European.

4.9.7. The race of the Vedic Aryans

As for the Vedas, the only ones whom they describe as “golden-haired” are the resplendent lightning gods Indra and Rudra and the sun-god Savitar; not the Aryans or Brahmins. At the same time, several passages explicitly mention black hair when referring to Brahmins.95 These texts are considerably earlier than the enigmatic passage in Patanjali describing Brahmins as golden- or tawny-haired (piNgala and kapisha).96 Already one of Patanjali’s early commentators dismissed this line as absurd. To the passage from the grammarian Panini which describes Brahmins as “brown-haired”, A.A. Macdonnell notes (apparently against contemporary claims to the contrary): “All we can say is that the above-mentioned expressions do not give evidence of blonde characteristics of the ancient Brahmans.”97 Considering that Patanjali was elaborating upon the work of Panini, could it have anything to do with Panini’s location in the far northwest, where lighter hair must have been fairly common?

On the other hand, demons or Rakshasas, so often equated with the “dark-skinned aboriginals”, have on occasion been described as red- or tawny-haired (also piNgala or kapisha, the same as Patanjali’s Brahmins).98 Deviating from the usual Indian line that all these demon creatures are but supernatural entities, let us for once assume that they do represent hostile tribals racially distinct from the Vedic Aryans. In that case, reference can only be to certain northwestern tribals, among whom fair and red hair are found till today, indicating that they at least partly descended from a fair-haired population. If the Vedic Aryans were dark-haired and migrated from inside India to the northwest, these odd coloured hairs may have struck them as distinctive.

In modern Anglo-Hindu publications, such as the Amar Chitra KathA religious comics, Rakshasas are always depicted as dark-skinned, a faithful application of the AIT. Yet, there are instances in Vedic literature where “blackness” is imputed to people whom we know to have had the same (if not a lighter) skin colour than the Vedic Aryans: the Dasas and Dasyus, as Asko Parpola has shown, were the Iranian cousins and neighbours of the Vedic Aryans. Physical (as opposed to metaphorical) blackness or more generally skin colour was never a criterion by which the Vedic Aryans classified their neighbours and enemies; that precisely is why we have no direct testimony on the Vedic Aryans’ own skin or hair colour except through a few ambiguous, indirect and passing references.

4.9.8. Evidence of immigration?

A very recent study, not on crude skull types but on the far more precise genetic traits, confirms the absence of an immigration from Central Asia in the second millennium BC. Brian E. Hemphill and Alexander F. Christensen report on their study of the migration of genetic traits (with reference to AIT advocate Asko Parpola): “Parpola’s suggestion of movement of Proto-Rg-Vedic Aryan speakers into the Indus Valley by 1800 BC is not supported by our data. Gene flow from Bactria occurs much later, and does not impact Indus Valley gene pools until the dawn of the Christian era.”99 The inflow which they do find, around the turn of the Christian era, is apparently that of the well-known Shaka and Kushana invasions.

Kenneth A.R. Kennedy reaches similar conclusions from his physical-anthropological data: “Evidence of demographic discontinuities is present in our study, but the first occurs between 6000 and 4500 BC (a separation of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic populations of Mehrgarh) and the second is after 800 BC, the discontinuity being between the peoples of Harappa, Chalcolithic Mehrgarh and post-Harappan Timargarha on the one hand and the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age inhabitants of Sarai Khola on the other. In short, there is no evidence of demographic disruptions in the northwestern sector of the subcontinent during and immediately after the decline of the Harappan culture. If Vedic Aryans were a biological entity represented by the skeletons from Timargarha, then their biological features of cranial and dental anatomy were not distinct to a marked degree from what we encountered in the ancient Harappans.”100

Kennedy also notes the anthropological continuity between the Harappan population and that of the contemporaneous Gandhara (eastern Afghanistan)101 culture, which in an Aryan invasion scenario should be the Indo-Aryan settlement just prior to the Aryan invasion of India: “Our multivariate approach does not define the biological identity of an ancient Aryan population, but it does indicate that the Indus Valley and Gandhara peoples shared a number of craniometric, odontometric and discrete traits that point to a high degree of biological affinity.”102

And so, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, one of the great pioneers of the AIT, may be right after all. Indeed, even he had remarked that “the anthropologists who have recently described the skeletons from Harappa remark that there, as at Lothal, the population would appear, on the available evidence, to have remained more or less stable to the present day.”103 If anything Aryan really invaded, it was at any rate not an Aryan race.

There are no indications that the racial composition and distribution of the Indian population has substantially changed since the start of the IE dispersal, which cannot reasonably be placed much earlier than 6,000 BC. This means that even if the IE language is imported, as claimed by the AIT, the IE-speaking people in India are nevertheless biologically native to India. Or in practice: the use of the terms “aboriginal” and “indigenous” (AdivAsI) as designating India’s tribals, with the implication that the non-tribals are the non-indigenous progeny of invaders, has to be rejected and terminated, even if the Urheimat of the IE languages is found to lie outside India.

One of the ironies of Indian identity politics is that those most vocal in claiming an “aboriginal” identity may well be the only ones whose foreign origin has been securely established. The Adivasi movement is strongest in the areas where Christian missionaries were numerously present since the mid-19th century to nourish it, viz. in Chotanagpur and the North-East. Most tribals there speak languages belonging to the Austro-Asiatic and Sino-Tibetan families. Their geographical origin, unlike that of IE which is still being debated, is definitely outside India, viz. in Southeast Asia c.q. in northern China.

The Tibeto-Burmese tribals of Nagaland and other northeastern statelets are among India’s most recent immigrants. Many of those tribes have entered during the last millennium, which is very late by Indian standards. As for the Munda tribes in Chotanagpur, it is not even certain that the ancestors of the present tribes are the authors of the attested Neolithic cultures in their present habitat. In H.D. Sankalia’s words: “It is an unanswered but interesting question whether any of the Aboriginal tribes of these regions were the authors of the Neolithic culture.”104 Those who want to give the Austro-Asiatic peoples of India a proud heritage, will find more of it in China and Indochina than in India, e.g. in the Bronze age culture of 2300 BC in Thailand.

On the other hand, biologically the Indian Austro-Asiatics (unlike the Nagas) are much closer to the other Indians than to their linguistic cousins in the east. Exactly like the Indo-Aryans in the Aryan invasion hypothesis, they are predominantly Indian people speaking a foreign-originated language: “Whereas the now Dravidian-speaking tribals of Central and South India can be considered to be descendents of the original inhabitants of India, who gave up their original languages in favour of Dravidian, Tibeto-Chinese speaking tribals (Northeast India) and Austro-Asiatic speaking ones (East India) immigrated into India since ancient historical times. Most likely they came in several waves from Southern China (Tibeto-Chinese speakers) and from Southeast Asia (Austro-Asiatic speakers) respectively. Without doubt these immigrating groups met with ancient Indian populations, which were living already on their migration routes, and thus one cannot exclude some cultural and also genetic contacts between immigrants and original inhabitants of India, at least at some places.”105

In the case of Indo-Aryan, by contrast, its speakers have obviously also mixed with other communities, but its foreign origin has not been firmly established.

4.9.9. Conclusion

We may conclude with a recent status quaestionis by archaeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer of Wisconsin University at Madison: “Although the overall socioeconomic organization changed, continuities in technology, subsistence practices, settlement organization, and some regional symbols show that the indigenous population was not displaced by invading hordes of Indo-Aryan speaking people. For many years, the ‘invasions’ or ‘migrations’ of these Indo-Aryan-speaking Vedic/Aryan tribes explained the decline of the Indus civilization and the sudden rise of urbanization in the Ganga-Yamuna valley. This was based on simplistic models of culture change and an uncritical reading of Vedic texts. Current evidence does not support a pre- or proto-historic Indo-Aryan invasion of southern Asia. Instead, there was an overlap between Late Harappan and post-Harappan communities, with no biological evidence for major new populations.”106

We repeat that physical anthropology is going through rapid developments due to the availability of new techniques, and we don't want to jump to conclusions in this moving field. But we notice that whatever new technique is applied and from whichever new angle the question is approached, it has so far consistently failed to yield evidence of the fabled Aryan Invasion..

Who is perpetuating reservation in jobs?

2006-07-08T23:24:00.000-07:00

Sharad Yadav

In a bizarre turn, the Union Public Service Commission and the Department of Personnel and Training have transformed the policy of reservation into a policy of communal awards. They have treated general seats as seats reserved for people belonging to non-reserved categories.

WHENEVER THERE is talk about reservation, the bogey of merit is raised by opponents of this policy. But the question arises: do the opponents respect the merit of candidates from the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and the Scheduled Tribes (STs)? Empirical studies suggest they do not. Almost six decades have passed since Independence but all important institutions of India, barring Parliament and Legislative Assemblies and Councils, have been under the strong command of these self-styled votaries of merit. With some exceptions, they have abused their position to denigrate the merit of the people who have been given the constitutional right of reservation — so that privileges enjoyed by some people under the caste system are de-reserved.

The Union Public Service Commission provides glaring examples of how the merit of candidates belonging to SCs, STs, and OBCs is denigrated. The UPSC is a constitutional body. It commands high respect in India but in collusion with the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT), it has been denying the rights of meritorious candidates belonging to reserved categories. It has been indulging in unconstitutional activities despite the clear-cut policy of the Government of India on reservation. The Supreme Court and High Courts have interpreted the policy in many judgments. There is no scope for any ambiguity regarding this policy, but the UPSC has continued to deny meritorious candidates of reserved categories the right to join the civil services as general category candidates.

This has resulted in a denial of jobs to hundreds of successful candidates belonging to reserved categories; and almost the same number of candidates belonging to the non-reserved category has got jobs, without being declared successful by the UPSC at the time of declaration of results. This is happening despite many judgments of the higher judiciary against the practice. People controlling the UPSC and DoPT are so strongly motivated against the candidates of reserved categories that they can go to any extent in their adventure to block the entry of reserved categories in the civil services.

Under the reservation policy, 49.50 per cent of the seats is reserved. The remaining 50.50 per cent is open to all. Candidates who qualify for the civil services by dint of their merit alone should be enlisted in general open categories. After all, there is no bar on SC and ST candidates fighting elections for general seats. Many leaders, including Kansi Ram and B.P. Maurya, have fought and won from general seats. General seats do not mean seats reserved for people belonging to non-reserved categories. Similarly, general open seats in the civil services are not reserved for people belonging to non-reserved categories. The Government of India has not reserved hundred per cent of the seats of the civil services. In fact, it cannot do so. There is a 50 per cent ceiling placed on reservation by the Supreme Court. But in effect, the UPSC and the DOPT are implementing reservation policy to ensure 50.50 per cent reservation for the unreserved categories that are supposed to form just 15 per cent of the Indian population.

For the last civil services examination, around 214 of 425 seats were general open merit seats. Out of the first 214 candidates, 50 were from reserved categories. Forty of them were from OBCs. But the UPSC refused to allow reserved category candidates to enlist themselves as general candidates. Twenty seven per cent of 425 is 117: this is the exact number of candidates belonging to OBCs who were declared successful. Even those in the top 10 were classified as reserved category candidates!

By doing this, the UPSC has denigrated meritorious candidates from the reserved categories. It has also denied jobs in the civil services to an equal number of reserved category candidates. In fact, 157 candidates from OBC categories should have been selected: 40 on the basis of merit and 117 on the basis of the 27 per cent reservation extended to them.

People belonging to SCs and STs in the early days of the Republic lacked education. Their number was not sufficient to fill the vacancies declared for them. Later on they picked up but there were all-out efforts to deny them their right to reservation under one pretext or another. If we analyse the data on successful ST and SC candidates, we discover they have done better in the written test, where the examiner does not know their caste. In the interviews they have been given fewer marks because people in the interview board know their caste.

It is shocking that candidates belonging to reserved categories are interviewed separately. They sit for the written examinations alongside non-reserved category candidates, but when the time of interview comes, they are segregated. The interview board is well aware of their social background and discriminates against them while giving them interview marks. An analysis of the results reveals a big gap between the average interview marks given to reserved category candidates and non-reserved category candidates. One successful candidate of the 1996 civil service examinations, who was denied a job, has calculated these averages on the basis of information available with him. Since he fought for his job in the Supreme Court and won, the data he offers can be relied upon in the absence of authoritative data provided by the UPSC. According to this candidate, the average interview mark in the non-reserved category is around 200, while the average for reserved categories candidates is 140. I believe that if there were no caste discrimination, the number of successful OBC candidates in the general merit category would have been much higher than 40. Unfortunately, even these 40 candidates were not declared successful in the general merit category.

The concept of excluding the creamy layer sounds progressive. Indeed the benefit of reservation should be made available to people from less privileged OBC families. In principle this is all right. But the design of those opposed to OBC reservation is to keep the creamy layer out of the reservation ambit and deny the benefits of reservation to less privileged individuals. These individuals have no means of fighting the might of the UPSC and the DoPT. They have no money to engage lawyers to fight legal battles. It is quite easy to deny them their right. So they are denied jobs despite getting letters from the UPSC informing them of their success. My information is that thus far 390 successful candidates have been denied jobs in the civil services. Some of them, who have had resources thanks to being in other services, have challenged the DoPT successfully. But what about those who have not moved the courts? Why can't the courts take suo motu notice of such gross denial of justice?

Babasahib Bhim Rao Ambedkar was for separate electorates for Dalits. He wanted proportionate reservation for them but also demanded that their representatives should be elected from an electoral college comprising Dalits exclusively. Separate electorates for Dalits were termed the communal award. Gandhiji and many other leaders thought such an arrangement would divide India; he went on a fast and Dr. Ambedkar withdrew his demand. The policy of reservation was put in place so that those hailing from reserved categories could contest elections from unreserved seats also.

The same rule applies to jobs. But the UPSC has turned the policy of reservation into a policy of communal awards. I cite below some judgments of Indian courts that are being consistently violated by the UPSC and the DOPT:

(a) India Shawnee v. Union of India, 1992 Supp. (3) SCC 217

"In this connection it is well to remember that the reservation under Article 16(4) does not operate like a communal reservation. It may well happen, that some members belonging to, say, Scheduled Castes get selected in the open competition field on the basis of their own merit; they will not be counted against the quota reserved for Scheduled Castes; they will be treated as open competition candidates."

(b) Union of India vs. Virpal Singh Chauhan (1995) 6 SCC 684

"While determining the number of posts reserved for SCs and STs, the candidates belonging to the reserved category but selected on the rule of merit (and not by virtue of rule of reservation) shall not be counted as reserved category candidates."

(c) Rithesh. R. Shah's case (1996) 3 SCC 253

"In other words, while a reserved category candidate entitled to admission on the basis of his merit will have the option of taking admission to the colleges where a specified number of seats have been kept reserved for reserved category ... while computing the percentage of reservation he will be deemed to have been admitted as a open category candidate and not as reserved category candidate."

In a Delhi High Court judgment of April 29, 2003, the division bench made the following observation: "The decision of the Apex Court in Rithesh. R. Shah's case (supra) as also the proviso to rule 16 clearly prohibit deprivation of the benefit of the reservation only because some reserved category candidates had also been selected on merit inasmuch as they were not to be treated as reserved category candidates except for a limited purpose, namely, for the purpose of allocation of service, but thereby OBC candidates cannot be deprived of their right to obtain allocation of any service."

The interesting question arises: who is perpetuating reservation? If people from the SCs, STs, and OBCs get representation according to their population, the scheme of reservation will come to an end. But who is depriving the meritorious from getting jobs as general category candidates?

(The author, a Member of the Rajya Sabha, is president of the Janata Dal (United) and a former Union Minister. He was educated to be an electrical engineer.)

Caste divide in UK Indian communities rampant, claims report

2006-07-05T09:00:00.000-07:00

By Hugh Muir

They are communities that live together, look alike and share a common background. To the uninitiated, there is no discernible difference. But a report will today claim that many Indian communities in Britain are blighted by caste discrimination. Researchers detail claims that many of the 50,000 Dalits in the UK - once known as India's lower-caste "untouchables" - suffer discrimination from other castes in terms of jobs, healthcare, politics, education and schools.

In a report likely to provoke bitter controversy, researchers were told how couples who marry outside their own caste face "violence, intimidation and exclusion". The study, No Escape - Caste Discrimination in the UK, focuses on domestic discrimination, although campaigners are also trying to force British firms with commercial interests in India to outlaw practices unfair to Dalits. The government has promised to consider the issue in forthcoming legislation and to look at claims of discrimination against lower-caste Gurkhas in the British army.

David Haslam of the Dalit Solidarity Network, who organised the research, said the group had spoken to 130 people for the study. "Dalits across the UK felt that within the Indian community, their identity was based on caste and that the caste system was very much in operation." He said respondents called for caste discrimination to be addressed in schools as part of the national curriculum and for the establishment of more temples open to worshippers of all castes. Eighty-five per cent urged the UK authorities to "work towards the elimination of caste discrimination".

Jeremy Corbyn, MP for Islington North and a Dalit Solidarity Network trustee, said he was aware of caste discrimination abroad but was "horrified" to "realise that caste discrimination has been exported". He added: "This is an issue which the government and all those concerned about good community relations need to address."

The former mayor of Coventry, Ram Lakha, told researchers how he faced discrimination from upper-caste voters when seeking election in a largely Indian ward. "During campaigning I was told that I would not get people's vote as I was a chamar [a derogatory name for Dalits]. So I filed my nomination in a non-Asian constituency and was able to win." He said it was customary for the Indian community to honour each new mayor - yet his achievement had not been recognised in that way. "Everyone in the Indian community knows how things are. It is there, and it will take a long time to die out. I recently discovered from my children that they suffered difficulties at school. It is only now, because the issue is being raised, that they chose to tell me. Given everything that has happened, I am very proud and thankful to God for what I have gained."
Harbans Lal Virde, general secretary of the west London religious association Buddha Dham, said he also faced workplace difficulties. "The non-Dalits in my community objected to my promotion and did not support me in my work. They did not like me as a supervisor. The non-Dalits presume that 'chamars' are good for nothing." One respondent, who asked to remain anonymous, said it was difficult to confront the problem. "At work there is no open discrimination; it is usually discreet. Most of the businesses are small - if you complain, the person who will listen to your complaint is from the higher caste, so no action is taken."
Researchers say some barriers are breaking down. In India, Dalits and non-Dalits rarely eat together, but 81% of those questioned said the restriction did not usually apply here. Piara Khabra, MP for Ealing Southall, accused researchers of exaggerating the extent of problems: "It is a big issue in India, but not here. There is a broader community and different traditions. People live happily together." He said many complainants may claim caste discrimination mistakenly or for political reasons. "I am the MP and people come to me who are from the lowest castes."

In one employment tribunal case alleging discrimination based on caste, a factory worker claimed he had been unfairly disciplined at work and then dismissed because non-Dalits complained about him. In another, a healthcare worker claimed he was victimised when his supervisor, who had been friendly, discovered his caste.

India Inc hints it's now open to quota

2006-07-02T00:11:00.000-07:00

India Inc hints it's now open to quota
[ Saturday, July 01, 2006 12:09:14 amTIMES NEWS NETWORK ]

NEW DELHI: Indian industry has finally thrown in the towel in its fight against reservations in the private sector. In a clear departure from its previous stand to oppose reservation, India Inc has now promised to work with the government to improve employment opportunities for the backward classes, beginning September.

A CII-Assocham joint task force on affirmative action, set up by the government, has pointed out that the industry is committed to work with the government to formulate an Act that will be designed to ensure that discrimination in the workplace is prohibited by law.

According to a draft prepared by the task force, a Code of Affirmative Action will be formulated for compliance by all affiliate companies of CII and Assocham, starting September 2006. CII and Assocham officials were not available for comment despite repeated attempts.

"Industry commits, in principle, to align the workforce in its companies and units with the diversoty goals for greater representation of targeted communities, starting September 2006 progressively," the draft said.

The industry, it said, will also help in improving the employability of people from the backward classes, besides taking initiatives to foster entrepreneurship.

"CII and Assocham will immediately set up a national level apex body, Councils for Affirmative Action, to promote and co-ordinate the industry's action in this regard," a source said.

The task force, sources said, has pointed out that competitiveness of companies will not be compromised in the exercise to promote employment from backward classes.

"The industry has stated that competitiveness of companies will remain a primary consideration," the source said. Companies will also be encouraged to set goals for executive positions from among applicants of targetted communities.

"For instance, companies could commit to hiring a certain number of graduating engineers from the targeted communities each year... Such policies will be applicable to new recruitment beginning September 2006," the source added.

Its about empowerment

2006-06-28T01:31:00.000-07:00

Chandrabhan Prasad

With just over 50 MPs, the Left has been virtually blackmailing the
UPA Government. But, how powerful the Dalit/Tribals are with 121 MPs
in the Lok Sabha?

In the popular Dalit perception, most Dalit/Tribal MPs are clay
statues in the Parliament, who can rarely move on their own. How do
the successive Prime Ministers and Finance Ministers been treating the
successive Dalit/Tribal MPs in the realm of governance? Readers can
make their own judgments.

What however, we know is that, rarely the Finance Minister talks to
Dalit/Tribal MPs during the formative months of Budget preparation,
though the Finance Minister makes it a point to meet with various
industrialists and their associations. He even meets with the trade
Union leaders, and associations of agriculturists.

At the hindsight, the 121 Dalit/Tribal MPs don't seem to enjoy the
clout normally associated to the official power-protocol of the
institution of Parliament. This is understandable given positioning of
the community inside society. There is no meaning thus, in despising
the Dalit/Tribal MPs, as barring some Tribal constituencies, most of
them are elected the majority where non-Dalit call the shots. Silence
of Dalit/Tribal MPs is thus, predestined.

But what if the Dalit/Tribals had eleven Billionaires? Can in any
society the political power structure ignore its Billionaires? Can US
for instance, ignore Jews, who constitute a mere two per cent in the
total population of that country? Despite numerically being
insignificant, 45 per cent of all American Billionaires are of Jewish
origin. The Jewish Billionaire Club thus, largely predestines the
American policy on Israel. The money therefore, is not only about
market.

According to the Business Standard Billionaire Club listing (2005),
there are 311 billionaires in India, whose combined worth is at Rs
3.64 trillion. Needless to say, there is no Dalit/Tribal in that
Billionaire Club.

What if there were 11 Dalits/Tribals as Billionaires? Wouldn't they be
more powerful than 121 Dalit/Tribal MPs? In other words, with 11
Billionaires, wouldn't the same 121 MPs become more powerful?

Why do after all, the successive Prime Ministers and Finance Ministers
address functions organised by industry bodies such as CII and FICCI?
Or why do the industry bodies invite Prime Minister or/and Finance
Minister in their public functions when most policy level deals are
clinched in non-official engagements?

If allowed to understand things in abstract, when a Finance Minister
goes to deliver a speech in the CII or FICCI organised function, he in
fact, does so as a performer. If allowed to drag it little farther,
the Finance Minister does exactly what Cine artists do in functions
organised in Dubai. This phenomenon is no India specific. The world
over politics salutes money. There are just three Black Billionaires
in the USA, and the neither State and nor the society can mess with
the larger Black mass.

Dr Ambedkar once wrote that "Men love property more than liberty "
Just one Dalit Billionaire can influence a quarter of the Parliament.
In fact, a Dalit Billionaire can even take a political party on rent
to air the community rights.

In the age of globalisation, Dalits now should redefine the very
notion of power. There can be nothing more powerful thing than the
State power. The State power is regulated by politics. The politics
and the State power are innately interwoven. What we tend to miss is
the fact that, the politics itself can be regulated by Capital. The
Capital and politics thus become as innately interwoven as the
Politics and the State power are. In the end, the power revolves
around the trinity of Capital-Politics-State.

The Dalit/Tribal mass should understand that, without some command
over Capital, their politicians will remain powerless. In fact, this
phenomenon can be at times so vicious that despite a Dalit/Tribal
having become the Prime Minister of the country, the larger
Dalit/Tribal society can still remain powerless. It is in this sense,
a Dalit/Tribal Billionaire Club becomes a critical factor in
empowering the community.

The English divide

2006-06-27T09:02:00.000-07:00

THIRD EYE |Barkha Dutt

June 24, 2006

One of the most awkward — and yet, strangely compelling — things about
journalism is that sometimes, your work makes you hold a mirror to
your own life. This past week, a quiet, but determined, 16-year-old
became an unexpected reflection of my education.

I have always believed that my school and college years were the first
architects of my personality; like every middle-class Indian, I take
pride in where I studied and what I was taught. And yet, the gentle
idealism of this young girl made me pause to wonder: had my public
school education been shamefully elitist?

At first, the story seemed straightforward enough. Garima Godara, a
CBSE topper, with an astonishing 97.6 per cent, had taken the entrance
exam for Delhi Public School, Dwarka, the school closest to her
village. The daughter of a police constable who earned less than Rs
6,000 per month, the school's fees would have been a problem. But the
family was undeterred; perhaps there would be a scholarship or a loan;
surely the school would be keen to admit the girl who had topped the
national capital's merit list. Garima's proud father had spent months
battling the entrenched patriarchy of his peers, fending off nosy
neighbours who gossiped about why she didn't spend enough time in the
kitchen. Now, he was even more determined to give his daughter the
best education her marks could buy.

This could have been the story of New India and its emerging,
self-made middle-class; a proud milestone for a country that dares to
dream.

Instead, here's what happened: DPS turned her down. Her results were
good, it conceded. But marks aren't everything, said the school
principal to NDTV, and besides, her English was poor, and just didn't
cut the grade.

Later, listening to Garima in the studio, it was hard not to feel
both angry and moved. Angry because of the obvious injustice: not only
was she as bright as her results indicated, there was nothing about
her spoken English that suggested that she would have been unable to
keep pace with the syllabus. Yes, she spoke with a regional accent
that some would consider insufficiently sophisticated. But there was
no doubt that she could not only follow a complex argument, she could
also make herself understood to any English speaker.

But it was her calm that was almost heart-breaking; a quiet courage
that belied her teen years. It was almost as if we were more outraged
and indignant than she was. During the course of the programme, a
principal from a well-known school in Dehradun called in, offering her
admission and a scholarship; others promised to get DPS to change its
mind. But betraying only the slightest sense of hurt, she said firmly
that her aim now was to show DPS that she would do better than any of
its students. She had already got herself admitted to another school
and DPS could, quite simply, take a walk.

As she spoke, viewers clearly shared my anger. The online poll showed
that 90 per cent of viewers believed that the English language exerted
a disproportionate influence over the education system.

Yet, were we all being hypocritical and dishonest? This time it was
DPS under the microscope, but were any of us any different?

Let's say, she continued to do outstandingly well in school. The next
stage would be college. I pictured her trying to take the entrance
interview at my old college, Delhi's St. Stephen's. Would she get in?
And even if she made the cut, how would other students react to her
presence? Would they admire her for her academic brilliance? Or would
they snigger at her accent, titter each time she made a grammatical
error and then, melt away, leaving her alone to find her own friends?

Garima's story is a metaphor for India's twisted tryst with the future.

I learnt after the programme was over — and it is significant that
neither she nor her parents brought this up themselves — that she is
an OBC.

For some months now, as the debate over reservation has raged,
opponents of the quotas have made the same point again and again: we
should be a society where merit matters. It's a compelling argument,
and one that I have personally supported.

But what do the anti-quota street fighters have to say now? Here's a
girl who competed in the mainstream, her own DAV pitched against the
trendier, richer, big names. But her merit was swallowed up by
prejudice.

Is it any wonder then that supporters of reservation believe that the
system is stacked against them, and that merit is a con-word used by
upper-caste tricksters?

Her story is also a scathing comment on the class divide in India. It
is fashionable for marketeers and economists to talk about the
burgeoning middle-class. Each day a new figure is conjured up to
demonstrate the size of the Indian market, and the clout of the new
middle-class; is it 250 million this week or has it already reached
300 million? We embrace these statistics, because we like the idea of
India as this century's favourite financial destination. We feel
flattered when Time magazine puts our country on its cover, and we
talk glibly, especially to foreigners, of social mobility and how the
gap between the rich and poor is closing; we argue that India's
tomorrow is being built by its industrious and enterprising
middle-class, and we feel like the future is unfolding, right here and
right now.

But here's what we never admit. We're just the worst sorts of snobs.

The social mobility of the last decade has meant that the new
middle-class does not consist of people like us. Instead, it is made
up of people like Garima, who we still find excuses to exclude; we
sneer at their lack of Westernised sophistication; make fun of their
accents; and we try and ensure that our children have nothing to do
with theirs.

Finally, Garima's story exposes India's paradoxical relationship with
the English language. Nobody in the world speaks English like us. We
have our own idioms, our own words and our own accents.

We pretend to love our own English and brag about how it is India's
great selling point; the reason we dominate the global outsourcing
business. But, of course, deep down we know that our English is not
the English that the West really wants. And so, each time we talk to
Britons or Americans, we subtly alter our diction and inflection. When
we set up our call centres, we drop the subtlety entirely and start
accent classes to teach our young people to abandon the speech
patterns of our own society and to migrate to a virtual, linguistic,
middle America, where they become impersonators of people they will
never meet and never know.

But within India, we still treat our own English as the great social
decider. We laugh at regional accents, smirk at those who make
grammatical errors and feel most at home with those who talk like us.
Everyone else belongs on the other side of the English divide. And as
it turns out, the other side of the class and caste divide as well.

Maybe we cling so tightly to this tiny community because secretly we
are just insecure. Outside of our little bubble, India is changing.
Every major institution in recent times — Parliament, the bureaucracy,
the military, our colleges and schools — is being forced to rewrite
the rules. A new breed of Indians, who no longer look towards the
West for self-affirmation, is making its presence felt. We like to
call this a decline in quality. But actually, it's the rest of India
waiting to get in.

How long are we going to keep the gates shut?

Reservations – Some Questions and their Answers

2006-06-24T00:38:00.000-07:00

Reservations – Some Questions and their Answers
*
Q: What is reservation?

The word reservation is a misnomer. The appropriate word for it used in the
Indian constitution is Representation. It is not given to anyone in his
individual capacity. It is given to individual as a representative of the
underprivileged community. The beneficiaries of reservations are in turn
expected to help their communities to come up.

Q: Why reservation?

The policy of reservations is being used as a strategy to overcome
discrimination and act as a compensatory exercise. A large section of the
society was historically denied right to property, education, business and
civil rights because of the practice of untouchability. In order to
compensate for the historical denial and have safeguards against
discrimination, we have the reservation policy.

Q: Were Reservations incorporated by the founding fathers of the
constitution only for first 10 years?

Only the political reservations (seats reserved in Loksabha, Vidhansabha,
etc) were to be reserved for 10 years and the policy review was to be made
after that. That is why after every 10 years the parliament extends
political reservations.

The 10 year limit for reservations is not true for the reservations in
education and employment. The reservations in educational institutions and
in employment are never given extension as it is given for the political
reservations.

Q: Why give reservations on basis of caste?

To answer this question we must first understand why the need for the
reservations has arisen. The cause for the various types of disabilities
that the underprivileged castes in India face / have faced, is the systemic
historical subjugation of a massive magnitude based on caste system having a
religious sanction. Therefore if the caste system was the prime cause of all
the disabilities, injustice and inequalities that the Dalit-Bahujans
suffered, then to overcome these disabilities the solution has to be
designed on basis of caste only.

Q: Why not on basis of economic criterion?

Reservations should never be based on economic status for various reasons as
follows:

1. The poverty prevailing among the Dalit-Bahujans has its genesis in the
social-religious deprivations based on caste system. Therefore poverty is an
effect and caste system a cause. The solution should strike at the cause and
not the effect

2. An individual's Economic status can change. Low income may be taken to
mean poverty. But the purchasing value of money, in India, depends upon
caste. For example a Dalit can not buy a cup of tea even in some places.

3. Practical difficulties in proving economic status of individual to the
state machinery are many. The weak may suffer.

4. In caste ridden India infested with rampant corruption, even for an
unchangeable status like caste, the false "Caste Certificate" can be
purchased. How much easier will it be to purchase a false "Income
Certificate"? So income based reservation is impractical. It is no use
arguing when both certificates can be bought, why caste only should form
basis of reservation. It is certainly more difficult to buy a false caste
certificate than a false income certificate.

5. Reservation is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end. The main
aim is to achieve the active participation and sharing by the "socially
excluded" humanity in all the fields of the affairs of the society. It is
not panacea for all ills, neither it is permanent. It would be a temporary
measure till such time the matrimonial advertisements in newspaper columns
continue to contain the mention of caste.

Q: Should there be a creamy layer criterion or not?

The demand from anti-reservationists for introduction of creamy layer is
ploy to scuttle the whole effectiveness of reservations. Even now out of all
seats meant for SC/STs in IITs , 25-40 % seats remain vacant because it
seems IITs do not find suitable candidates. Just imagine what would happen
if by applying creamy layer criterion the SC/ST middle class, lower middle
class people who are in position to take decent education are excluded from
reservations benefit ! Will the poor among SC/STs be able to compete with
these 'privileged 'students' trained under Ramaiah and at various IIT-JEE
training centers at Kota ?
Of course Not.
This will lead to 100 % seats in IITs for SC/STs going vacant.

Q: How long should the reservations continue?

The answer to this question lies with the anti-reservationists. It depends
on how sincerely and effectively the policy makers which constitute
"privileged castes" people in executive, judiciary and legislature,
implement the reservations policy.
Is it just on part of "privileged castes" people who have enjoyed undeclared
exclusive reservations for past 3000 years and continue to enjoy the same
even in 21st century in all religious institutions and places of worship, to
ask for the timelines for reservations policy?
Why do not they ask, how long the exclusive reservations for particular
community in the religious institutions and places of worship are going to
continue?

The people who have acquired disabilities due to inhuman subjugation for
3000 years will need substantial time to come over those disabilities. 50
years of affirmative action is nothing as compared to 3000 years of
subjugation.

Q: Will not the reservations based on castes lead to divisions in the
society?

There are apprehensions that reservations will lead to the divisions in the
society. These apprehensions are totally irrational. The society is already
divided into different castes. On the contrary reservations will help in
annihilating the caste system. There are around 5000 castes among the SC/ST
and OBCs. By grouping these various castes under 3 broad categories of SC,
ST and OBC, the differences among 5000 separate castes can be abridged. This
is a best way of annihilation of castes. Therefore rather than making
rhetoric about reservations leading to divisions in the society the
anti-reservationists should make honest and sincere efforts to annihilate
castes. Have these people made any efforts towards this direction? In most
of the cases the answer is NO. The people making these anti-reservations
rhetoric, all this time have been enjoying all the privileges that the
Indian caste system offers to the "Privileged Castes". As long as they enjoy
the privileges of the caste system they do not have any qualms regarding it.
But when it comes to making castes as basis for achieving social equality by
providing representations these same people make noises. These are the
double standards of highest order practiced by the 'privileged' people.

Q: Will not reservations affect the Merit?

As regards to how Merit is defined in a very narrow sense and what it
actually means, following is the quote from an article by Prof Rahul Barman
of IIT Kanpur.

"Is merit all about passing exams? After all, are the exams a means or an
end? If the exams are means to look for ability to make better engineers,
doctors and managers, then can there be better methods to look for such
ability? After all in my first engineering class I was told that a good
engineer is the one who can produce the best out of the least resources and
similarly, management is supposed to find one's way in an uncertain
situation – or allocate scarce resources in the most optimal way possible.
If that is so, whatever I have seen of our deprived masses (of which
overwhelming majority belongs to the backward, dalit castes or adivasis),
they have the astonishing capacity to make something productive from almost
next to nothing! For the last few years I have been studying small industry
clusters, like Moradabad brass, Varanasi silk and Kanpur leather. Put
together (all the clusters in the country), they are exporting more than the
IT sector and their cumulative employment will be several times of the
whole of IT industry. In all these clusters they operate with miniscule
resources – small investment, no electricity, forget about air-conditioning,
non existent roads, lack of water, and little formal education. These
clusters are primarily constituted of these so called backward/ dalit castes
and are truly a tribute to the genius that our society is. But in spite of
centuries of excellence these communities have hardly produced any formal
'engineers', 'doctors' and 'managers', and conversely these elite
institutions have not developed any linkages with such industries and their
people. "

Reservations of more than 60 % have existed in the 4 states of southern
India and around 40 % in Maharashtra since last 50 years. On other hand in
the north Indian states the 15 % 'privileged castes' have been enjoying 77 %
of the seats in educational institutions and in employment (assuming that 23
% reservations for SC/STs are totally filled, which is not the case). The
World Bank study has found that all the 4 south Indian states are much ahead
of north Indian states in terms of their human development index. It is a
common knowledge that all the southern states and Maharashtra are much ahead
in fields of education, health, industrial development, in implementing
poverty alleviation schemes, etc. than the north Indian states. This shows
that reservations have indeed helped the southern Indian states in making
progress on various fronts. Whereas lack of adequate reservations is
responsible for the lack of development in most of the north Indian states.

Q: Have existing reservations for SC/STs been effective or not?

The reservation policy in the public sector has benefited a lot of people.
The Central government alone has 14 lakh employees. The proportion of
Scheduled castes in class III and IV is well above the quota of 16 per cent
and in class I and II, the proportion is around 8–12 per cent. So, the
middle and the lower middle class that we see today from the Dalit community
is because of reservation. With no reservation, the entry of these people in
government services would have been doubtful.
The situation is similar in education. An article in the EPW (Economic and
Political Weekly) estimates that there are seven lakh SC /ST students in
higher education and about half of them are there because of reservation.
Reservation has certainly helped but there are limitations in any policy
with the way it is implemented.

What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream

2006-06-23T00:29:00.000-07:00

From a talk at Z Media Institute June 1997

By Noam Chomsky

Part of the reason why I write about the media is because I am interested in the whole intellectual culture, and the part of it that is easiest to study is the media. It comes out every day. You can do a systematic investigation. You can compare yesterday’s version to today’s version. There is a lot of evidence about what’s played up and what isn’t and the way things are structured.

My impression is the media aren’t very different from scholarship or from, say, journals of intellectual opinion—there are some extra constraints—but it’s not radically different. They interact, which is why people go up and back quite easily among them.

You look at the media, or at any institution you want to understand. You ask questions about its internal institutional structure. You want to know something about their setting in the broader society. How do they relate to other systems of power and authority? If you’re lucky, there is an internal record from leading people in the information system which tells you what they are up to (it is sort of a doctrinal system). That doesn’t mean the public relations handouts but what they say to each other about what they are up to. There is quite a lot of interesting documentation.

Those are three major sources of information about the nature of the media. You want to study them the way, say, a scientist would study some complex molecule or something. You take a look at the structure and then make some hypothesis based on the structure as to what the media product is likely to look like. Then you investigate the media product and see how well it conforms to the hypotheses. Virtually all work in media analysis is this last part—trying to study carefully just what the media product is and whether it conforms to obvious assumptions about the nature and structure of the media.

Well, what do you find? First of all, you find that there are different media which do different things, like the entertainment/Hollywood, soap operas, and so on, or even most of the newspapers in the country (the overwhelming majority of them). They are directing the mass audience.

There is another sector of the media, the elite media, sometimes called the agenda-setting media because they are the ones with the big resources, they set the framework in which everyone else operates. The New York Times and CBS, that kind of thing. Their audience is mostly privileged people. The people who read the New York Times—people who are wealthy or part of what is sometimes called the political class—they are actually involved in the political system in an ongoing fashion. They are basically managers of one sort or another. They can be political managers, business managers (like corporate executives or that sort of thing), doctoral managers (like university professors), or other journalists who are involved in organizing the way people think and look at things.

The elite media set a framework within which others operate. If you are watching the Associated Press, who grind out a constant flow of news, in the mid-afternoon it breaks and there is something that comes along every day that says "Notice to Editors: Tomorrow’s New York Times is going to have the following stories on the front page." The point of that is, if you’re an editor of a newspaper in Dayton, Ohio and you don’t have the resources to figure out what the news is, or you don’t want to think about it anyway, this tells you what the news is. These are the stories for the quarter page that you are going to devote to something other than local affairs or diverting your audience. These are the stories that you put there because that’s what the New York Times tells us is what you’re supposed to care about tomorrow. If you are an editor in Dayton, Ohio, you would sort of have to do that, because you don’t have much else in the way of resources. If you get off line, if you’re producing stories that the big press doesn’t like, you’ll hear about it pretty soon. In fact, what just happened at San Jose Mercury News is a dramatic example of this. So there are a lot of ways in which power plays can drive you right back into line if you move out. If you try to break the mold, you’re not going to last long. That framework works pretty well, and it is understandable that it is just a reflection of obvious power structures.

The real mass media are basically trying to divert people. Let them do something else, but don’t bother us (us being the people who run the show). Let them get interested in professional sports, for example. Let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems or something like that. Anything, as long as it isn’t serious. Of course, the serious stuff is for the big guys. "We" take care of that.

What are the elite media, the agenda-setting ones? The New York Times and CBS, for example. Well, first of all, they are major, very profitable, corporations. Furthermore, most of them are either linked to, or outright owned by, much bigger corporations, like General Electric, Westinghouse, and so on. They are way up at the top of the power structure of the private economy which is a very tyrannical structure. Corporations are basically tyrannies, hierarchic, controled from above. If you don’t like what they are doing you get out. The major media are just part of that system.

What about their institutional setting? Well, that’s more or less the same. What they interact with and relate to is other major power centers—the government, other corporations, or the universities. Because the media are a doctrinal system they interact closely with the universities. Say you are a reporter writing a story on Southeast Asia or Africa, or something like that. You’re supposed to go over to the big university and find an expert who will tell you what to write, or else go to one of the foundations, like Brookings Institute or American Enterprise Institute and they will give you the words to say. These outside institutions are very similar to the media.

The universities, for example, are not independent institutions. There may be independent people scattered around in them but that is true of the media as well. And it’s generally true of corporations. It’s true of fascist states, for that matter. But the institution itself is parasitic. It’s dependent on outside sources of support and those sources of support, such as private wealth, big corporations with grants, and the government (which is so closely interlinked with corporate power you can barely distinguish them), they are essentially what the universities are in the middle of. People within them, who don’t adjust to that structure, who don’t accept it and internalize it (you can’t really work with it unless you internalize it, and believe it); people who don’t do that are likely to be weeded out along the way, starting from kindergarten, all the way up. There are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people who are a pain in the neck and think independently. Those of you who have been through college know that the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience; if you don’t do that, you are a troublemaker. So, it is kind of a filtering device which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren’t lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society. The elite institutions like, say, Harvard and Princeton and the small upscale colleges, for example, are very much geared to socialization. If you go through a place like Harvard, most of what goes on there is teaching manners; how to behave like a member of the upper classes, how to think the right thoughts, and so on.

If you’ve read George Orwell’s Animal Farm which he wrote in the mid-1940s, it was a satire on the Soviet Union, a totalitarian state. It was a big hit. Everybody loved it. Turns out he wrote an introduction to Animal Farm which was suppressed. It only appeared 30 years later. Someone had found it in his papers. The introduction to Animal Farm was about "Literary Censorship in England" and what it says is that obviously this book is ridiculing the Soviet Union and its totalitarian structure. But he said England is not all that different. We don’t have the KGB on our neck, but the end result comes out pretty much the same. People who have independent ideas or who think the wrong kind of thoughts are cut out.

He talks a little, only two sentences, about the institutional structure. He asks, why does this happen? Well, one, because the press is owned by wealthy people who only want certain things to reach the public. The other thing he says is that when you go through the elite education system, when you go through the proper schools in Oxford, you learn that there are certain things it’s not proper to say and there are certain thoughts that are not proper to have. That is the socialization role of elite institutions and if you don’t adapt to that, you’re usually out. Those two sentences more or less tell the story.

When you critique the media and you say, look, here is what Anthony Lewis or somebody else is writing, they get very angry. They say, quite correctly, "nobody ever tells me what to write. I write anything I like. All this business about pressures and constraints is nonsense because I’m never under any pressure." Which is completely true, but the point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going say the right thing. If they had started off at the Metro desk, or something, and had pursued the wrong kind of stories, they never would have made it to the positions where they can now say anything they like. The same is mostly true of university faculty in the more ideological disciplines. They have been through the socialization system.

Okay, you look at the structure of that whole system. What do you expect the news to be like? Well, it’s pretty obvious. Take the New York Times. It’s a corporation and sells a product. The product is audiences. They don’t make money when you buy the newspaper. They are happy to put it on the worldwide web for free. They actually lose money when you buy the newspaper. But the audience is the product. The product is privileged people, just like the people who are writing the newspapers, you know, top-level decision-making people in society. You have to sell a product to a market, and the market is, of course, advertisers (that is, other businesses). Whether it is television or newspapers, or whatever, they are selling audiences. Corporations sell audiences to other corporations. In the case of the elite media, it’s big businesses.

Well, what do you expect to happen? What would you predict about the nature of the media product, given that set of circumstances? What would be the null hypothesis, the kind of conjecture that you’d make assuming nothing further. The obvious assumption is that the product of the media, what appears, what doesn’t appear, the way it is slanted, will reflect the interest of the buyers and sellers, the institutions, and the power systems that are around them. If that wouldn’t happen, it would be kind of a miracle.

Okay, then comes the hard work. You ask, does it work the way you predict? Well, you can judge for yourselves. There’s lots of material on this obvious hypothesis, which has been subjected to the hardest tests anybody can think of, and still stands up remarkably well. You virtually never find anything in the social sciences that so strongly supports any conclusion, which is not a big surprise, because it would be miraculous if it didn’t hold up given the way the forces are operating.

The next thing you discover is that this whole topic is completely taboo. If you go to the Kennedy School of Government or Stanford, or somewhere, and you study journalism and communications or academic political science, and so on, these questions are not likely to appear. That is, the hypothesis that anyone would come across without even knowing anything that is not allowed to be expressed, and the evidence bearing on it cannot be discussed. Well, you predict that too. If you look at the institutional structure, you would say, yeah, sure, that’s got to happen because why should these guys want to be exposed? Why should they allow critical analysis of what they are up to take place? The answer is, there is no reason why they should allow that and, in fact, they don’t. Again, it is not purposeful censorship. It is just that you don’t make it to those positions. That includes the left (what is called the left), as well as the right. Unless you have been adequately socialized and trained so that there are some thoughts you just don’t have, because if you did have them, you wouldn’t be there. So you have a second order of prediction which is that the first order of prediction is not allowed into the discussion.

The last thing to look at is the doctrinal framework in which this proceeds. Do people at high levels in the information system, including the media and advertising and academic political science and so on, do these people have a picture of what ought to happen when they are writing for each other (not when they are making graduation speeches)? When you make a commencement speech, it is pretty words and stuff. But when they are writing for one another, what do people say about it?

There are basically three currents to look at. One is the public relations industry, you know, the main business propaganda industry. So what are the leaders of the PR industry saying? Second place to look is at what are called public intellectuals, big thinkers, people who write the "op eds" and that sort of thing. What do they say? The people who write impressive books about the nature of democracy and that sort of business. The third thing you look at is the academic stream, particularly that part of political science which is concerned with communications and information and that stuff which has been a branch of political science for the last 70 or 80 years.

So, look at those three things and see what they say, and look at the leading figures who have written about this. They all say (I’m partly quoting), the general population is "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders." We have to keep them out of the public arena because they are too stupid and if they get involved they will just make trouble. Their job is to be "spectators," not "participants."

They are allowed to vote every once in a while, pick out one of us smart guys. But then they are supposed to go home and do something else like watch football or whatever it may be. But the "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders" have to be observers not participants. The participants are what are called the "responsible men" and, of course, the writer is always one of them. You never ask the question, why am I a "responsible man" and somebody else is in jail? The answer is pretty obvious. It’s because you are obedient and subordinate to power and that other person may be independent, and so on. But you don’t ask, of course. So there are the smart guys who are supposed to run the show and the rest of them are supposed to be out, and we should not succumb to (I’m quoting from an academic article) "democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interest." They are not. They are terrible judges of their own interests so we have do it for them for their own benefit.

Actually, it is very similar to Leninism. We do things for you and we are doing it in the interest of everyone, and so on. I suspect that’s part of the reason why it’s been so easy historically for people to shift up and back from being, sort of enthusiastic Stalinists to being big supporters of U.S. power. People switch very quickly from one position to the other, and my suspicion is that it’s because basically it is the same position. You’re not making much of a switch. You’re just making a different estimate of where power lies. One point you think it’s here, another point you think it’s there. You take the same position.

How did all this evolve? It has an interesting history. A lot of it comes out of the first World War, which is a big turning point. It changed the position of the United States in the world considerably. In the 18th century the U.S. was already the richest place in the world. The quality of life, health, and longevity was not achieved by the upper classes in Britain until the early 20th century, let alone anybody else in the world. The U.S. was extraordinarily wealthy, with huge advantages, and, by the end of the 19th century, it had by far the biggest economy in the world. But it was not a big player on the world scene. U.S. power extended to the Caribbean Islands, parts of the Pacific, but not much farther.

During the first World War, the relations changed. And they changed more dramatically during the second World War. After the second World War the U.S. more or less took over the world. But after first World War there was already a change and the U.S. shifted from being a debtor to a creditor nation. It wasn’t huge, like Britain, but it became a substantial actor in the world for the first time. That was one change, but there were other changes.

The first World War was the first time there was highly organized state propaganda. The British had a Ministry of Information, and they really needed it because they had to get the U.S. into the war or else they were in bad trouble. The Ministry of Information was mainly geared to sending propaganda, including huge fabrications about "Hun" atrocities, and so on. They were targeting American intellectuals on the reasonable assumption that these are the people who are most gullible and most likely to believe propaganda. They are also the ones that disseminate it through their own system. So it was mostly geared to American intellectuals and it worked very well. The British Ministry of Information documents (a lot have been released) show their goal was, as they put it, to control the thought of the entire world, a minor goal, but mainly the U.S. They didn’t care much what people thought in India. This Ministry of Information was extremely successful in deluding hot shot American intellectuals into accepting British propaganda fabrications. They were very proud of that. Properly so, it saved their lives. They would have lost the first World War otherwise.

In the U.S., there was a counterpart. Woodrow Wilson was elected in 1916 on an anti-war platform. The U.S. was a very pacifist country. It has always been. People don’t want to go fight foreign wars. The country was very much opposed to the first World War and Wilson was, in fact, elected on an anti-war position. "Peace without victory" was the slogan. But he was intending to go to war. So the question was, how do you get the pacifist population to become raving anti-German lunatics so they want to go kill all the Germans? That requires propaganda. So they set up the first and really only major state propaganda agency in U.S. history. The Committee on Public Information it was called (nice Orwellian title), called also the Creel Commission. The guy who ran it was named Creel. The task of this commission was to propagandize the population into a jingoist hysteria. It worked incredibly well. Within a few months there was a raving war hysteria and the U.S. was able to go to war.

A lot of people were impressed by these achievements. One person impressed, and this had some implications for the future, was Hitler. If you read Mein Kampf, he concludes, with some justification, that Germany lost the first World War because it lost the propaganda battle. They could not begin to compete with British and American propaganda which absolutely overwhelmed them. He pledges that next time around they’ll have their own propaganda system, which they did during the second World War. More important for us, the American business community was also very impressed with the propaganda effort. They had a problem at that time. The country was becoming formally more democratic. A lot more people were able to vote and that sort of thing. The country was becoming wealthier and more people could participate and a lot of new immigrants were coming in, and so on.

So what do you do? It’s going to be harder to run things as a private club. Therefore, obviously, you have to control what people think. There had been public relation specialists but there was never a public relations industry. There was a guy hired to make Rockefeller’s image look prettier and that sort of thing. But this huge public relations industry, which is a U.S. invention and a monstrous industry, came out of the first World War. The leading figures were people in the Creel Commission. In fact, the main one, Edward Bernays, comes right out of the Creel Commission. He has a book that came out right afterwards called Propaganda. The term "propaganda," incidentally, did not have negative connotations in those days. It was during the second World War that the term became taboo because it was connected with Germany, and all those bad things. But in this period, the term propaganda just meant information or something like that. So he wrote a book called Propaganda around 1925, and it starts off by saying he is applying the lessons of the first World War. The propaganda system of the first World War and this commission that he was part of showed, he says, it is possible to "regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies." These new techniques of regimentation of minds, he said, had to be used by the intelligent minorities in order to make sure that the slobs stay on the right course. We can do it now because we have these new techniques.

This is the main manual of the public relations industry. Bernays is kind of the guru. He was an authentic Roosevelt/Kennedy liberal. He also engineered the public relations effort behind the U.S.-backed coup which overthrew the democratic government of Guatemala.

His major coup, the one that really propelled him into fame in the late 1920s, was getting women to smoke. Women didn’t smoke in those days and he ran huge campaigns for Chesterfield. You know all the techniques—models and movie stars with cigarettes coming out of their mouths and that kind of thing. He got enormous praise for that. So he became a leading figure of the industry, and his book was the real manual.

Another member of the Creel Commission was Walter Lippmann, the most respected figure in American journalism for about half a century (I mean serious American journalism, serious think pieces). He also wrote what are called progressive essays on democracy, regarded as progressive back in the 1920s. He was, again, applying the lessons of the work on propaganda very explicitly. He says there is a new art in democracy called manufacture of consent. That is his phrase. Edward Herman and I borrowed it for our book, but it comes from Lippmann. So, he says, there is this new art in the method of democracy, "manufacture of consent." By manufacturing consent, you can overcome the fact that formally a lot of people have the right to vote. We can make it irrelevant because we can manufacture consent and make sure that their choices and attitudes will be structured in such a way that they will always do what we tell them, even if they have a formal way to participate. So we’ll have a real democracy. It will work properly. That’s applying the lessons of the propaganda agency.

Academic social science and political science comes out of the same thing. The founder of what’s called communications and academic political science is Harold Lasswell. His main achievement was a book, a study of propaganda. He says, very frankly, the things I was quoting before—those things about not succumbing to democratic dogmatism, that comes from academic political science (Lasswell and others). Again, drawing the lessons from the war time experience, political parties drew the same lessons, especially the conservative party in England. Their early documents, just being released, show they also recognized the achievements of the British Ministry of Information. They recognized that the country was getting more democratized and it wouldn’t be a private men’s club. So the conclusion was, as they put it, politics has to become political warfare, applying the mechanisms of propaganda that worked so brilliantly during the first World War towards controlling people’s thoughts.

That’s the doctrinal side and it coincides with the institutional structure. It strengthens the predictions about the way the thing should work. And the predictions are well confirmed. But these conclusions, also, are not allowed to be discussed. This is all now part of mainstream literature but it is only for people on the inside. When you go to college, you don’t read the classics about how to control peoples minds.

Just like you don’t read what James Madison said during the constitutional convention about how the main goal of the new system has to be "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority," and has to be designed so that it achieves that end. This is the founding of the constitutional system, so nobody studies it. You can’t even find it in the academic scholarship unless you really look hard.

That is roughly the picture, as I see it, of the way the system is institutionally, the doctrines that lie behind it, the way it comes out. There is another part directed to the "ignorant meddlesome" outsiders. That is mainly using diversion of one kind or another. From that, I think, you can predict what you would expect to find.

Reply from Prof Altbach

2006-06-19T03:44:00.000-07:00

Respected Mineguruji

Thank you for your thoughtful comments. Just a few thoughts in
response:

1. I was trying to do one small thing in my short article -- point out
that if India is to be a dynamic force in the global economy, it has to have
a internationally competitive to sector of its higher education
system--and that requires meritocracy, resources, and so on.

2. What US affirmative action in higher education did was NOT to
reserve seats for designated minorities but rather to provide incentives to
enroll minorities. The system has worked reasonably well, but the present
conservative government has cut back on these programs. It is a
complex issue.

--
Philip G. Altbach
Monan professor of Higher Education
USA

A letter to Prof AltBach

2006-06-16T02:38:00.000-07:00

Respected Professor Altbach

I read your article on the issue of reservations in
higher education in India in the Indian Express. I was
wondering why a Professor from United States would
concern himself with this issue which has troubled the
Indian society for the last two months.

Consequently, I made a google search for you and i
was not surprised to find that you are one of the top
authorities on international education, and have
written prodigiously on education in the Asian and
Eastern countries.
However, what flummoxed me was the manner in which you
have put forward your views regarding the quota debate
and that too in India Express, a paper which is
identified far too close with upper caste elite of
India.
Since the inception of reervations and affirmative
ation, this paper under Arun Shourie and Shekhar Gupta
has been opposing the same.
And the reason for this is simple, Indian Express has
Ninety nine percent staff that belongs to upper caste
particulalry in the newsroom. Similar, is the case
with majority of media houses in India, which employ
only upper castes in the news room.
The lower castes are also employed but only for
scrubbing the floors, as such when you give your
enlightened views in such a biased newspaper, for
majority of Indian population, it means that you are
on the side of the high and the mighty upper caste
elite.
I have never been to USA but i believe that newspapers
in USA have a fair sprinkiling of Blacks in their
ranks, though they are bound to so due to government
rules.
As far as your arguments in the column are concerned,
i agree with you that every country requires elite
institutions to take it ahead, but i would like to ask
why these intitutions should remain only in the hands
of upper castes like the Brahmins and Banias. As far
as your conention that India has very poor quality of
education, i will say that for the last thousands of
years the education system has been monopolized by a
single caste which was not represenative of the entire
country.

What the Indian government is trying to do is just to
ensure like yours did in 1964, that sons of artisans,
oil millers, farmers, potters, boatmen, barbers are
also able to enter these elite institutions.
The reason why India is poor on quality education is
that due to socialism of Nehru and Gandhi family,
education was tighltly controlled by the government,
which was ofcourse dominated by upper castes.
So this ensured that while the kith and kin of these
people could get quality education in India and
abroad, the lower castes kept on living in the
medieval ages.

I will like to ask whether the entry of Blacks at
Harward, Yale, Columbia and MIT has made them poorer
academically or qualitatively.

You mention that the quota policy in India has been
hotly contested by the academia and the media. I agree
and will like to add that quota policy was vehemently
opposed and rubbished, not just opposed.
This happend because overwhelming majority of
acedemics, media and medicos belong to the upper
castes and they will never agree to relinquish the
privileges bestowed upon them for millions of years.

Sir, you say that the quota candidates will score 0
marks and still get admission, this is a wrong
perception of the story.
I think you are talking a lot to upper caste Indian
students and journalists and this is the reason you
have got this impression.
It is pertinent to mention here that the population of
OBCs and SC/STs in India is close to 70 crores or 700
million, and these people are quite intelligent and a
number of them are competing with the upper castes in
open category.
However, because they are concentrated in rural and
non-english speaking areas, they face difficulty in
competing with elite and once given a chance, i
promise to you that they will beat even the best
American students. Infact the population of depressed
classes in India is more than the total population of
USA.
Secondly, no one is given admission below a cutoff
percentage in India and if you compare the results of
the general and reservaed categories, you will see
that their is not much difference.
The depressed students face trouble in colleges due to
casteism and racism and that is why some of them fail
to get through. While you sit in USA , you enjoy the
benefits of the first Amendment, but just come and
visit one the villages in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and
you will understand hwat casteism means.

We dont want an end to elite colleges but sir, what we
want is that monopoly of upper castes should end there
and they should be open to depressed classes like the
black in USA.

You have mentioned that Education institutions should
have meritocratic values but do you think that giving
more chances to depressed classes will dilute the so
called merit, when all of these institutions are
giving admissions to NRI candidates in lieu of hefty
capitation fee, where does merit go in this case.

You say, government support is must, but when the
government supports these colleges, then the can not
function as private domain of a particular caste or
class but they must share the constitutional
responsibilities. Did not US government force the
Blacks into American universities. I think even today
if given a chance the whites will like to throw off
the black yoke.

Who is stopping the Indian universities from
internationalization. Do you think quota prevents them
from getting connected. However, for Indians
internationalization means getting a positions at a US
university or in a multinational company at government
cost.
I must informa you that teaching in India is not a hot
profession, people, who have failed to get jobs become
teachers. Or else their are family teachers, who have
connections in the University and manage to get a job.

Reaserach in the Indian universities, for a majority
of them is not a top priority and neither the elite
IITs and IIms. Indians are happy with reverse
engineering and old US technology. Whatever R&D
happens is accidental and not linked to education
system.
The best and brightest in India do not like to join
academics, they prefer MNCs and US universities, where
they can earn top dollars. Now, how on earth a third
world country can pay top dollars to a teacher or a
doctor in the wake of huge demand in the USA. You need
our docs, engineers, teachers, cleaners and every one
skilled and qualified and have the ability to pay,
what can be done.
And these people are educated on Indian taxpayers
money.

Sir, you are White and i dont know your background,
but I think you never suffered casteism. Had you been
at the ends of a casteist barrage or even racism, you
would have understood better the rationale behind
these policies. I agree that politics is behind most
of the government decisions, but then it happens every
where and even in your great democratic which has
taken up the job of spreading democracy in middle east
and central Asia.

Yours truly

jiski jitni sankhya bhaari, uski utni

2006-06-16T01:06:00.000-07:00

jiski jitni sankhya bhaari, uski utni
bhagidari”
Dear friends,

1. I think one of the things that we need to do is to
bring together the original constituents of the
Bahujan Samaaj, and work towards original credo of
Bahujan Samaaj Party (BSP). Originally Bahujan Samaaj
was supposed to include all except the upper caste
Hindus – SC, ST, OBC & minority religions. And credo
of Bahujan Samaaj Party used to be “jiski jitni
sankhya bhaari, uski utni bhagidari” (power to be
shared on the basis of the numerical strength). It is
another matter that Mayawati jee has since changed the
doctrine to "jiski jitni hai taiyari, uski utni
hissedari" (power according to the level of
preparedness). She has also changed the constituents
of Bahujan Samaaj as well, replacing Muslims by
Brahmins and Other Upper Castes (OUCs), and giving up
all connections with the OBCs. However, we don’t have
to necessarily follow our political leaders like sheep
follow their herdsmen or herdswomen. We can never be
sure whether one has sold himself or herself to one or
another party or person. We need to follow the
dictates of our own logical conclusions and our
conscience.

2. Logic suggests that since we don’t have much
money, nor do have media & muscle (guns), we need to
have support of as many people with us as possible, to
achieve our goal. We must also remember that there can
never be unity among groups without fairness to each
other. What we seek from the upper caste (power-share
in proportion to our population), we must grant to our
own less fortunate brethren among us (power-share in
proportion to their population). As such, we must
support the concept of quotas within quotas, as far as
practicable. In other words, care will have to be
taken to see to it that none of the sub-groups within
the upper of the lower castes groups is able to gobble
up share of power of the other less fortunate ones. To
that end, each of the major caste groups (SC/ST/OBC)
would need to be further sub-divided into something
like, say, 2% sub-groups. There are many castes that
are bigger than 2% of the population; they should
constitute a sub-group by themselves. The ones that
are smaller than 2% would need to be grouped with
other numerically smaller castes with nearly equal
educational level to bring their joint population to
more than 2%. Each of these sub-groups may then be
allocated power in proportion to their population. If
disparity is found among the numerically small caste
constituents of a sub-group, they may perhaps use
roster to distribute power among themselves.

3. We should be cognizant that the Brahminical forces
are in a position to buy or hire some of us and make
us not only their political stooges, but also their
agents in the media as well as in academia. Among us
there may be people who would like to impress upon us
that “the social contradiction has shifted. This is
the era of Dalits vs Shudras, and Dalit movements must
accept this social reality and redraft their
strategies”. It should not be difficult for us to tell
why is someone saying whatever if we tried to figure
out where that person is getting his/her salary from.
We should not get distracted by a few incidents of a
few individuals among us exploiting some others. Truth
is that we are all selfish and exploitative. However,
in order to save ourselves from biggest exploitation
at the hands of the strongest among us (the upper
caste), we may have to, to a certain extent, overlook
selfishness and exploitative deeds of others above us,
towards us. We will oppose all exploitations (even
those by some of us against some of us) without
considering them to be our permanent enemies. Just as
we are all selfish, the truth is that no group is a
permanent enemy, or a permanent friend of any other
group. We should be open and able to cooperate with
other common victims of exploitation and injustice.
Such cooperation may strengthen their bonds so much
the relatively stronger one of them may not try to
exploit the lower ones. Biggest injustices have to be
opposed first. Smaller injustices may end due to
cooperation and subsequent goodwill in the fight in
opposition to the biggest injustices.

4. I think many of the Muslims have been too timid to
join demands for their share of pie. Brahminical
forces had blamed Muslim demand for their own share of
pie as the cause for division of the country, and that
has stuck in the minds of many Muslims. In the face of
umpteen riots in most of which Muslim casualties are
generally much higher than others, many of the Muslims
probably just feel happy to be alive. On the top of
that, of course, BJP/RSS are most vociferously against
any thing like quota for Muslims. Without giving any
specific reason, they seem to suggest that it will be
the worst possible thing for India. They seem to imply
that it (quota for Muslims) will lead to another
division of the country. However, recent news
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1637344,curpg-1.cms
from Mumbai is heartening: “Muslim groups on Sunday
demanded reservations for the community in politics
and jobs on the basis of population.” Please see the
full news below. From our side, we should make every
possible effort to bring them into movement towards
100% reservation. Needless to say, the larger is the
number of people demanding their share of pie, the
stronger will be our voice. In the absence of money,
media and muscle, we must do all that can be done to
increase our number to as much as possible, perhaps,
to at least 85%.

5. The credo of “jiski jitni sankhya bhaari, uski
utni bhagidari” resonates much more with European
political philosophy than with the American
philosophy. In Europe they have come to accept rights
of groups. When people talk of rights, right to
equality is the first thing that has to be granted. As
such, groups in Europe have equitable power sharing
arrangement, meaningful implementation of which
necessarily requires tacit approval of quota system.
This is more obvious in multilingual societies like
Switzerland and Belgium than in other countries that
are monolingual ones. On the other hand, in America,
at the height of their civil rights movement, when
they reluctantly had to concede equal opportunities to
their discriminated minorities, they did so under the
fuzzy name of “affirmative action”, with categorical
rejection of quotas. On account of categorical
rejection of quota system in America, we must be
careful in the use of terms like “affirmative action”
and “diversity”. These are fuzzy terms that have been
especially given currency in order to avoid the use of
quotas. That is the reason why I have seen in the
Economic Times and other newspapers some of the Indian
industrialists or their spokespersons stating “YES to
affirmative action” but an emphatic “NO to quotas”.
When the government happens to be a bit more liberal,
affirmative action may signify quota or close to
quota. On the other hand, when the government is a
conservative type, “affirmative action” and
“diversity” would mean pretty much nothing. In the
USA, affirmative action has come almost to naught.
Their diversity, in most cases consists mostly of
having a few Chinese, Indians, African Americans and
some others that look different from white. The most
deprived ones (African Americans and Spanish speaking
persons of Latin American origin) hardly get their
share of the pie. The US system has a lot to be
desired. Europe, specifically, Switzerland, is a much
better model for us to emulate than the USA. We will
talk more about the Swiss system of power-sharing in a
bit greater detail towards the end of this write up.

6. The only thing for which we can cite the example
of the USA is their use of affirmative action in the
private sector right from the beginning of enactment
of civil rights acts. They never thought the private
sector would be outside the purview of affirmative
action. On the other hand, somehow in India, people
were given the impression that private industries were
personal property of its owners and that they have to
be free in hiring and firing of their employees; that
they cannot be subjected to any kind of quota system
among their employees. Personally, I think tax
incentive is the best way of inducing the private
sector to adopt quota system. A detailed plan as to
how tax incentive can be used to make quota system
enforceable as well as palatable would be a subject
matter of a separate post.

7. Let me give a couple of more arguments in favor of
reservation system. This is because the more we are
convinced about a cause, the harder we are likely to
work for the cause. Further, in our everyday life in
arguments with our adversaries, we should be able to
strengthen our arguments from as many points of view
as possible.

7a. Making a devil’s argument, suppose there is an
identifiable group of people that happens to possess
super-intelligence. Would such a situation make it
acceptable for us to have a royal class of
super-intelligent group controlling all power? How
would such a system be different from colonialism?
Would such a system be any different from the system
envisioned by our own great rishi by the name of Manu?
If reliance on purely so-called merit-tests results in
filling all positions of power by individuals from
“super-intelligent” group alone, making them “royal
group”, and effective colonial masters, would that,
and should that, be acceptable to the majority? If the
British had so arranged that Indians would have found
it difficult to have higher education, would they have
been justified in continuing to rule our country for
perpetuity, on the basis of their performance in some
sort of merit-test? If master-slave relationship among
groups of people, i.e., colonial relationship, is not
an acceptable way of life, what is the remedy? Would
the royal class have any interest or incentive in
improving the slave-like condition of the rest of our
society? Particularly, if the super-intelligent group
happens to be in minority, would they have any stake
in any kind of democracy? Or would they reject
democracy as a politics of vote-bank?

7b. Another justification for reservation lies in
“reparation” concept. None will deny the fact that the
upper castes have oppressed the lower ones for ages
and kept them in state of serfdom and deprivation.
That calls for “reparation” for the wrongs done to the
lower castes. During the Second World War Japanese
Americans were incarcerated by the American
Government. They were later given compensation for
harm done to them. Many of the survivors of Hitler’s
holocaust were compensated by the companies that aided
Hitler. Likewise lower castes have to be compensated
for the wrongs done to them by the upper castes. What
would be the right compensation? Well, had it not been
for the oppression from the upper castes, there would
have been parity between the lower and upper castes,
in all regards, including educational and economic
situations. Therefore, all that can be done to bring
about the said parity as soon as possible (in no more
than one generation) must be done.

7c. Some upper caste individuals may claim that they
should not be penalized for wrongs done by their
fore-fathers. However, stolen goods have to be taken
away and given back to the original owners or their
progeny even if the goods were stolen by ancestors of
the current owners. Power and privileges currently
enjoyed by the upper castes, in excess of their dues
share, are nothing but goods stolen and passed on by
their ancestors. All or part of the same must be
restored back to the victims’ progenies. As for
considering it to be punitive, if we advocated
assigning a number of seats disproportionately smaller
than proportion of the upper caste in the population,
it could have been considered to be punitive.
Assigning a number of seats in proportion to their
population is nothing but just the right amount of
power they would have had, had there been no
exploitations in the past; it cannot be considered to
be punitive by any stretch of imagination. The excess
goods (disproportionate power and privilege) passed on
to the upper castes by their ancestors must be taken
away (just as any stolen goods should be taken away
from its current possessors) and distributed among the
dispossessed towards establishment of an equalitarian
society.

8. Finally, let me point out that an equalitarian
society is not a figment of imagination. It exists in
Switzerland, Belgium and the Nordic countries in
Europe. However, being a multi-lingual country, it is
most obvious in Switzerland. Here is what Wolf Linder
(in his book, “Swiss Democracy: Possible Solutions to
Conflict in Multicultural Societies,” St. Martin’s
Press, 1994, p-xv-xvi,) says: “Switzerland provides a
model example (for a multi-cultural society) because
of its enduring will to constitute an independent
political nation based on the mutual respect of its
minorities. It provides a model for finding political
institutions and patterns of behavior that enable
peaceful conflict-resolution in a multi-cultural
society.”

Linder further says, “Power-sharing, proportional
representation of different segments of the society,
not only in the government, but also in various
economic, social and cultural organizations of the
Swiss society appears to have become Swiss way of
life. … It is practiced in the organization of the
economy, in social life and even in sports. This is
true at least for linguistic proportional rule. As
Jurg Steiner (1990) writes: ‘It is unimaginable that
the executive committee of the Swiss Soccer
Association would consist of German-speakers only’.”

The table shown below is suggestive of quite a strict
quota system used in Switzerland.

Proportional Representation of linguistic groups
(percentages) in certain federal jobs in Switzerland:
Representation German French Italian
Population (Swiss citizen only) 74.5 20.1 4.0
Federal Administration:
All personnel 76.5 15.4 5.2
Senior staff 73.6 20.9 3.5
Top Management 78.8 19.0 2.2
Expert Committees 76.9 20.0 3.1
Presidents of committees
of the National Council 76.0 20.0 3.1

In the above table, the sums of various rows do not
add to 100, as they should. This discrepancy may
possibly be because the authors decided to ignore the
statistics about Romansch speaking people on account
of their small size – I do not know. I have simply
copied the table from the book by Wolf Linder.

In connection with European acceptance of
power-sharing, I must say that they were aided in this
direction by their system of election – Proportional
Representation (PR) system of election. All of
European countries (with the exception of England and
France) use PR or semi-PR of one kind or the other.
Under PR various parties get seats in proportion to
votes obtained by them. It helps small parties gain
representation. Weaker segments of the society can
only have small parties. On the other hand, FPTP
(first-past-the-post) system that we inherited from
the British, leads to two-party system. Moreover, the
two parties can’t differ from each other much, as they
have to try to please the “independent voters”. We
would discuss PR in greater detail in another post.

Regards,
Satinath

Merits of Mandal report

2006-06-14T00:17:00.000-07:00

Merits of Mandal report
S S GILL

In view of the confusion created by Mandal II, the Supreme Court has asked the government to clarify two things: One, what is the basis for determining who belongs to an OBC category; and two, the rationale behind 27 per cent reservation for OBCs. These two points need to be immediately cleared.

OBCs belong to the shudra category in the caste classification. Several people confuse shudras with Dalits (earlier known as untouchables). OBCs were supposed to be people who lived by their physical labour.

Though not treated as untouchables, they formed the largest segment of low castes and suffered from all sorts of social disabilities. That is why they qualify to be categorised as socially and educationally backward, and thus entitled to affirmative action under the Constitution.

As to their identification, the Mandal Commission undertook the biggest social survey ever attempted in this country. To begin with, an experts' panel under the chairmanship of eminent sociologist M N Srinivas and 14 other social scientists was formed to devise schedules for identification of OBCs.

Simultaneously, Delhi University held a seminar for a thorough discussion of the terms of reference of the commission. After several meetings, the experts' panel prepared four comprehensive schedules, two each for rural and urban areas.

All the state governments were sent these schedules for conducting the survey. Two villages and one urban block were selected at random in each and every district of the country, and all the residents of these areas were covered by the survey.

Questionnaires were also sent to all the states and 30 ministries of the central government, and notices published in national dailies and regional papers inviting public response.

The data thus collected was passed on to the National Informatics Centre, which analysed the information contained in the four pre-coded schedules.

The results of this analysis were used by the experts' panel, which derived 11 indicators of social, educational and economic backwardness. It was by the application of these indicators that OBCs were identified.

As to the number of OBCs and their percentage, government had stopped collecting caste-wise enumeration of population after the 1931 census.

Consequently, the population of various OBCs identified by the commission were culled from this census, and extrapola-ted on the basis of population growth trends over this period.

That is how the percentage of OBCs was arrived at, and it worked out to 52 per cent. When the 11 indicators were applied to identify OBCs, 44 per cent happened to be Hindus and 8 per cent were from other religions.

That shows how authentic the indicators were as it picked up a fair number of non-Hindus who were socially and educationally backward.

Some commentators have pointed out that the National Sample Survey Organisation's investigations show that OBCs constitute 32 per cent of the population, and National Family Health Survey places the figure at 30 per cent.

These two surveys cannot match the span and depth of Mandal Commission's investigations, and its findings can be revised only if an exercise of the same magnitude is attempted.

It has also been pointed out that 25-50 per cent of the reserved seats remain vacant for lack of qualified OBC candidates, resulting in a colossal waste of resources. This is true, but it is the result of sloppy and unplanned implementation.

The commission had laid great emphasis on creating suitable infrastructure in institutions to enable OBC candidates to derive full advantage from reservation. This required adequate planning and financial commitment. But as in 1990, the issue is again at present being treated purely as a vote-getting ploy.

The government is now dangling the carrot of proportionately increased seats in professional institutions to obviate any shrinkage in the 'merit' quota, as if the additional infrastructure can be created by waving a magic wand.

The current turmoil could have been averted if educationists had been taken into confidence, a sober assessment made of available capacities and a phased scheme of implementation prepared for a smooth transition.

The writer is a former bureaucrat. He was secretary, Mandal Commission.

Survey: Majority of Indians want quota

2006-06-11T05:33:00.000-07:00

For those who love statistics over what they dismiss as mere ‘emotions’, well, here are the statistics.

The anti-quota protests dominated news headline for weeks, but were they the representative of the real mood of the nation? A CNN-IBN and The Indian Express survey conducted by A C Neilsen on the issue has come up with some startling facts.

The findings of the survey show that majority of Indians support reservations and feel that quotas in higher education will lead to equal opportunities.

According to the survey, 57 per cent Indians favour the Government’s decision on 27 per cent reservation for OBCs in higher education. Only 37 per cent feel otherwise.

Majority of the respondents feel that reservations in higher education are a key to social justice. As many as 63 per cent of the respondents said that reservations in higher education will lead to equal opportunity as against 34 per cent who felt that it will lead to loss of quality. [Go read the phull thing!]

Am I excited? You bet! This is the will of the people. Do you respect it?

The best part about the survey are the comments that page is getting. Look who’s talking media bias!

Jindal Shah: The poll is inherently biased and gives misleading information to the readers. If 65% participants are from SC/ST or OBC cateogories then it is hardly surprising that the polls conclusion favor the reservation policy. I sincerely think that this is waste of time, money and resources. So this is no way people’s verdict.

I do not think that the poll sample is unique and is not representative of the overall population statistics

Just one survey against the upper caste guys has now turned them against the media also. The same medium which they were praising for taking up their cause and fighting for them has come under questioning.
Basically, these guys are not willing to face the truth and the reality that there are vast sections of Indian people, who favour reservations.
Had this survey gone in the favour of anti-reservation lobby, they would have lapped it like anything.
What the medicos want is a skewed media which favours their agenda and supports them.

Caste is supreme today

2006-06-09T23:27:00.000-07:00

The strike against reservations has come to an end, and it revealed
interesting insights. Here are some of them:

Caste still divides India like nothing else. How else can you explain who so
many disparate groups got together to suddenly discover the concept of merit
and how letting in OBC students in would lower standards?

On the other side, caste also unites: it is amazing how all the so-called forward castes (this is a better word than the misplaced upper caste; I mean, how can some say they are above others!) got together to fight the OBCs. Not sure if anyone
noticed, but around the same time, one newspaper (or was it a website)
carried an ad for a matchmaking seminar for Brahmins, regardless of
subcaste.
Clearly, the times are a changing. Brahmins are ignoring subcastes
to marry within castes. But then, the more things change, the more they
remain the same too. Which means Brahmins are only marrying fellow Brahmins!

While the protesting medical students accuse Arjun Singh of being casteist,
they showed they are just as casteist (at least Arjun is on the side of the
dispossessed).
Or else why would the students insist on carrying on with the
strike after the PM assured them that the number of general seats would not
be reduced and also promised many more colleges? At this point the students
began demanding an end to ALL reservations.
But is that right? Can such
decisions be made on the streets and in the heat of a dispute? Worse, it
gave the impression that the forward caste students were not just against
quotas, but against the very rise of the backwards.
And in case students want us to believe that the reason they are protesting
against reservations per se is because they believe in merit, that has been
effectively answered by Udit Raj and his friends.

Because if you really believe in merit, then what about the private colleges that admit students with far lower marks and far more money to spend? What about NRI students who put in dollars where their marks should be? Is it because most
protesting students probably have a relative or a friend who has availed of
the private colleges after paying a handsome capitation fee (or horribly
high fees year after year).
After all, private colleges have actually benefited the paying middle class, most of who are from the forward castes.
There is another loophole in this merit-will-be-affected claim. Every Indian
is clearly aware that south India is far better off than north India on
almost all parameters of human development. Yet, south India has far more
reservations than north and has had them for years altogether. So clearly
reservations does not affect merit but actually helps a region prosper.
Infact, one can argue that if north India had put in better policies to help
its dispossessed (including reservations) earlier, it would not be the
blighted region that it currently is. And Bihar would not have had the
negative connotations it currently does!

This sounds like a Ripley's Believe it or not, but India with a population
of 1 billion, a majority of them young, is facing a shortage of manpower to
fuel its growth. Almost every sector is struggling to find people and this
shortage is raising costs, hurting India's core advantage (cheap labour). On
the other side, there are millions of uneducated (or little educated)
youngsters struggling to find decent jobs that can give them and their
families two square meals.
Why the paradox? Because our education system churns out only a few highly educated people; 90 per cent of the students enrolled at primary drop out, and end up with little skill to offer the marketplace.
Now, can India ever become a great power if so many Indians are not even decently educated to be a part of our booming economy? More important, do we deserve to be a great power when the nation's greatness benefits a few while millions languish?

Merit is the luxury of the privileged

2006-06-09T01:43:00.000-07:00

There are linkages between the backward castes/classes and poverty, which are in turn intricately related to the education system

By Jitendra Kumar

Jitendra Kumar

For some time now, the mainstream media has been replete with only one news — "The students of All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) are opposing reservation in all central institutions." All the medical colleges and the students of iit, Delhi have joined them. And on behalf of these "meritorious" and "patriotic" students, the upper caste-controlled media is fighting their "war". The agitation has spread all over the country. According to one news item, an event management company was organising the protest march in Mumbai (isn't it a brand new lesson for mass movements?) In the meantime there has been another news hogging news space — "The stock market is falling sharply." So from now on, only two categories of news would make headlines: anti-reservation protests and the stock market (because the market 'guides' our economy and 'merit' controls our country! Though it is quite a separate matter that only 2.5 percent people have investments in the stock market).

When we look into the protests in AIIMS and the iits and the publicity given to them by the media, it becomes clear that even today the number of dalits, obcs and minorities is insignificant in these institutions. If they had a presence there, why would there be such loud protests? Why would they protest against themselves? Second, even the media that has made this issue into such a huge thing, is monopolised by high castes. Then, shouldn't reservation be ensured for these deprived classes to ensure their presence out there?

These days by merely opening a newspaper, one gets the feeling that every common man has become a social scientist and each social scientist, a common man. Almost all the political commentators have begun criticising reservation on the grounds of loss of talent and the threat of 'brain drain'. The debate around merit gives one the idea that it is a sole preserve of a few castes and if it went to other castes, it will vanish. The reality is different. Chandrabhan Prasad has recently unravelled the myth behind the idea of 'merit'. He quotes the report of the Indian Universities Commission, 1902, according to which, in the matriculation examination of 1901, 19.2 percent students in Madras, 32.6 percent in Bombay, 53.9 percent in Calcutta, 35.2 percent in Allahabad, and 50.9 percent in Punjab had passed. If we look carefully at 'merit', it becomes clear that at that time only upper castes studied in universities because dalits and obcs were in no condition to access education. But the British government continued to give them patronage and the situation today is that they are in the seat of power.

Short-Sighted Visionaries: students protest against the 'compromise with merit'
Photo K. Satheesh

Protestors have shouted themselves hoarse about 'merit' but they don't bother to remember that, at least, there is some minimum cut-off point for the SCs, STs and OBCs. There is no such minimum limit for the NRIs and those giving capitation fees
The second argument of anti-reservationists is that if reservation was given, a large-scale migration of talent will take place from these elite institutions. This is even more hilarious. Migration of Knowledge Workers: Second Generation Effects of India's Brain Drain written by B. Khadria tells us that during 1956-1980 there was a continuous brain drain of students from AIIMS, Delhi and in 1980 it had reached up to 85 percent. The same is true for the iits. By 2001 at least 25,000 iitians were in the USA alone. Overall their presence reaches up to 34 percent.

The question then arises that if there was no reservation for obcs till now in these institutions and dalits' quota never got filled, then who were these 'bright young minds' leaving the country? Was it in the interest of the nation or were they moving out due to personal interests?

The matter is quite clear. Those high castes who aren't part of the power elite or don't have a direct stake in the power-sharing, have left this country. They have neither any love for their society and country nor for the labouring classes. Neither do they have any respect for them. Those 'talented' students who are protesting against reservation are showing this through either polishing shoes or by sweeping the streets. Doesn't this kind of regressive protest prove the kind of hatred they have against those performing these activities as regular jobs for centuries?

In 1990, when the Mandal Commission recommendations were implemented in Central government jobs, these very people had argued that 'first make them capable enough by giving them education' and today when it is actually being implemented in education, they have crossed all barriers of ethics. Before the implementation of the Mandal Report, the elite of this country made fun of the Communists by saying that these guys didn't understand the multi-layered caste, class, religion-ridden reality of this country where any slogan of class-war would never be successful. But the day Mandal came into force, this same elite became Marxist overnight and began to say that there are only two classes in this society, rich and the poor. Never would you find in the pages of history such rapid socio-intellectual transformation of any society. But one shouldn't mistake this concern as their love for Marxism. The reality is that they hate both Marxism and Marxists, but this 'understanding' about the rich and the poor serves their interest and hence their 'spontaneous' understanding of Marxism. They have subverted the peace of this country by shouting hoarse about 'merit' but they don't bother to remember that at least there is some minimum cut-off point for the scs, sts and obcs, but there is no such minimum limit for the nris and those giving capitation fees. Perhaps they don't want to know that in this very country the number of engineering aspirants getting admission through capitation fees is 1,50,000.

What is the socio-economic background of those 'extremely talented' students protesting against reservations? Most of them have passed out of English medium schools, belong to urban middle classes and are high castes. And what is the social composition of the Knowledge Commission appointed by the prime minister, which is egging them on? Sam Pitroda (Satyen Gangadhar Pitroda) heads this commission and has six out of eight members who are Brahmins and two others come from other high castes. (Check out the 'merit' here as well. This commission has not been founded on 'merit' but has been nominated by the pm. Isn't the same 'merit' principle working in the entire country?)

If people in our country are unable to see the gap between diwan-e-aam and diwan-e-khaas, then they should read the chapter on caste in the brilliant book Contemporary India written by the sociologist Satish Deshpande. He has factually analysed the condition of the scs, sts, obcs and Muslims in urban and rural India. According to him, more than 50 percent of sts in rural India are living below the poverty line (BPL) while 43 percent scs and 34 percent obcs fall under this category. Similarly, in urban India, the comparative figures for the scs and sts are 43 percent and for the obcs 36 percent respectively. According to the 2001 census, all these sections put together living under-BPL in urban India form 91 percent while in rural India they constitute 88 percent. This poverty is the main reason why 41.47 percent SC children in the fifth standard, 59.93 percent in the eighth and 71.92 percent in the tenth standard drop-out. While the respective figures for the ST children are 51.37 percent, 68.67 percent and 80.29 percent. (Source: goi reports, 2002-03).

Despite these facts, the so-called wise people of this country are against any concessions to be given to the poor, as they own the knowledge industry and power. They don't want to be impartial or they can't understand this in their panic-stricken state. This intellectual class is standing on a gradually melting snow and not real ground. These are the same intellectual classes, which were claiming that the roots of secularism are so deep in this country that there was no need to worry about communalism. And yet in 1992, Babri Masjid was demolished and within five years, communal forces came to power in the Centre. They also say that democracy has strengthened in India by now while the truth is that there has been a constant fall in the voting percentage over the years. Hence, the need for them is to come down to the ground level in order to understand the reality of India.

In the end, reservation is not only a means to find jobs but the first step towards power-sharing for the deprived. These classes have been denied their rights for years and hence they deserve it, otherwise there will be chaos. In the words of the Punjabi revolutionary poet of the 1970s, Avtar Singh Pash, Maine ticket kharidkar Aapke loktantra ka natak dekha hai Ab to mera preksha griha men baithkar Hai-hai karne aur chikhein marne ka Haq banta hai Aapne bhi ticket dete samay Takey tak ki chhut nahi di
Aur main bhi apni pasand ki baju pakad Gadde faad doonga Aur parde jala daalunga.

(I have bought the ticket And seen the play of your democracy Now I have a right to sit inside the auditorium And scream my lungs out shouting hai-hai You too never gave me any concession of even a penny while dispensing the ticket I, too, would find my favourite seat And tear the cushions apart And burn the curtains down.)

The writer, a journalist, is currently working on a book on VP SinghFor some time now, the mainstream media has been replete with only one news — "The students of All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) are opposing reservation in all central institutions." All the medical colleges and the students of iit, Delhi have joined them. And on behalf of these "meritorious" and "patriotic" students, the upper caste-controlled media is fighting their "war". The agitation has spread all over the country.

According to one news item, an event management company was organising the protest march in Mumbai (isn't it a brand new lesson for mass movements?) In the meantime there has been another news hogging news space — "The stock market is falling sharply." So from now on, only two categories of news would make headlines: anti-reservation protests and the stock market (because the market 'guides' our economy and 'merit' controls our country! Though it is quite a separate matter that only 2.5 percent people have investments in the stock market).

When we look into the protests in AIIMS and the iits and the publicity given to them by the media, it becomes clear that even today the number of dalits, obcs and minorities is insignificant in these institutions. If they had a presence there, why would there be such loud protests? Why would they protest against themselves? Second, even the media that has made this issue into such a huge thing, is monopolised by high castes. Then, shouldn't reservation be ensured for these deprived classes to ensure their presence out there?

These days by merely opening a newspaper, one gets the feeling that every common man has become a social scientist and each social scientist, a common man. Almost all the political commentators have begun criticising reservation on the grounds of loss of talent and the threat of 'brain drain'. The debate around merit gives one the idea that it is a sole preserve of a few castes and if it went to other castes, it will vanish. The reality is different. Chandrabhan Prasad has recently unravelled the myth behind the idea of 'merit'. He quotes the report of the Indian Universities Commission, 1902, according to which, in the matriculation examination of 1901, 19.2 percent students in Madras, 32.6 percent in Bombay, 53.9 percent in Calcutta, 35.2 percent in Allahabad, and 50.9 percent in Punjab had passed. If we look carefully at 'merit', it becomes clear that at that time only upper castes studied in universities because dalits and obcs were in no condition to access education. But the British government continued to give them patronage and the situation today is that they are in the seat of power.

The second argument of anti-reservationists is that if reservation was given, a large-scale migration of talent will take place from these elite institutions. This is even more hilarious. Migration of Knowledge Workers: Second Generation Effects of India's Brain Drain written by B. Khadria tells us that during 1956-1980 there was a continuous brain drain of students from AIIMS, Delhi and in 1980 it had reached up to 85 percent. The same is true for the iits. By 2001 at least 25,000 iitians were in the USA alone. Overall their presence reaches up to 34 percent.

The question then arises that if there was no reservation for obcs till now in these institutions and dalits' quota never got filled, then who were these 'bright young minds' leaving the country? Was it in the interest of the nation or were they moving out due to personal interests?

The matter is quite clear. Those high castes who aren't part of the power elite or don't have a direct stake in the power-sharing, have left this country. They have neither any love for their society and country nor for the labouring classes. Neither do they have any respect for them. Those 'talented' students who are protesting against reservation are showing this through either polishing shoes or by sweeping the streets. Doesn't this kind of regressive protest prove the kind of hatred they have against those performing these activities as regular jobs for centuries?

In 1990, when the Mandal Commission recommendations were implemented in Central government jobs, these very people had argued that 'first make them capable enough by giving them education' and today when it is actually being implemented in education, they have crossed all barriers of ethics. Before the implementation of the Mandal Report, the elite of this country made fun of the Communists by saying that these guys didn't understand the multi-layered caste, class, religion-ridden reality of this country where any slogan of class-war would never be successful. But the day Mandal came into force, this same elite became Marxist overnight and began to say that there are only two classes in this society, rich and the poor. Never would you find in the pages of history such rapid socio-intellectual transformation of any society. But one shouldn't mistake this concern as their love for Marxism. The reality is that they hate both Marxism and Marxists, but this 'understanding' about the rich and the poor serves their interest and hence their 'spontaneous' understanding of Marxism. They have subverted the peace of this country by shouting hoarse about 'merit' but they don't bother to remember that at least there is some minimum cut-off point for the scs, sts and obcs, but there is no such minimum limit for the nris and those giving capitation fees. Perhaps they don't want to know that in this very country the number of engineering aspirants getting admission through capitation fees is 1,50,000.

What is the socio-economic background of those 'extremely talented' students protesting against reservations? Most of them have passed out of English medium schools, belong to urban middle classes and are high castes. And what is the social composition of the Knowledge Commission appointed by the prime minister, which is egging them on? Sam Pitroda (Satyen Gangadhar Pitroda) heads this commission and has six out of eight members who are Brahmins and two others come from other high castes. (Check out the 'merit' here as well. This commission has not been founded on 'merit' but has been nominated by the pm. Isn't the same 'merit' principle working in the entire country?)

If people in our country are unable to see the gap between diwan-e-aam and diwan-e-khaas, then they should read the chapter on caste in the brilliant book Contemporary India written by the sociologist Satish Deshpande. He has factually analysed the condition of the scs, sts, obcs and Muslims in urban and rural India. According to him, more than 50 percent of STs in rural India are living below the poverty line (BPL) while 43 percent scs and 34 percent obcs fall under this category. Similarly, in urban India, the comparative figures for the scs and STs are 43 percent and for the obcs 36 percent respectively. According to the 2001 census, all these sections put together living under-BPL in urban India form 91 percent while in rural India they constitute 88 percent. This poverty is the main reason why 41.47 percent sc children in the fifth standard, 59.93 percent in the eighth and 71.92 percent in the tenth standard drop-out. While the respective figures for the ST children are 51.37 percent, 68.67 percent and 80.29 percent. (Source: goi reports, 2002-03).

Despite these facts, the so-called wise people of this country are against any concessions to be given to the poor, as they own the knowledge industry and power. They don't want to be impartial or they can't understand this in their panic-stricken state. This intellectual class is standing on a gradually melting snow and not real ground. These are the same intellectual classes, which were claiming that the roots of secularism are so deep in this country that there was no need to worry about communalism. And yet in 1992, Babri Masjid was demolished and within five years, communal forces came to power in the Centre. They also say that democracy has strengthened in India by now while the truth is that there has been a constant fall in the voting percentage over the years. Hence, the need for them is to come down to the ground level in order to understand the reality of India.

In the end, reservation is not only a means to find jobs but the first step towards power-sharing for the deprived. These classes have been denied their rights for years and hence they deserve it, otherwise there will be chaos. In the words of the Punjabi revolutionary poet of the 1970s, Avtar Singh Pash, Maine ticket kharidkar

Aapke loktantra ka natak dekha hai
Ab to mera preksha griha men baithkar
Hai-hai karne aur chikhein marne ka
Haq banta hai
Aapne bhi ticket dete samay
Takey tak ki chhut nahi di
Aur main bhi apni pasand ki baju pakad
Gadde faad doonga
Aur parde jala daalunga.

(I have bought the ticket And seen the play of your democracy Now I have a right to sit inside the auditorium And scream my lungs out shouting hai-hai You too never gave me any concession of even a penny while dispensing the ticket I, too, would find my favourite seat And tear the cushions apart And burn the curtains down.)

The writer, a journalist, is currently working on a book on VP Singh

CASTEISM IN NON-HINDU RELIGIONS

2006-06-08T01:07:00.000-07:00

Another wonderful article which tells us how much caste is ingrained in the Indian society and psyche. It debunks the claims of the upper caste Hindus that India is ready for a casteless society.

CASTEISM IN NON-HINDU RELIGIONS
- Danger Will Robinson

Casteism is often regard as a religious matter of the Hindus. However in India other religions too are equally caste riddled. Sikhism, Islam and Christianity formally do not sanction caste since the varna-dharma concept do not exist in their founding ideology. Nevertheless, in reality members of all three replicate the Hindu caste pattern including untouchability.

Sikhism was begun by Guru Nanak in Punjab in sixteenth century who invited all irrespective of caste to join him as equals. He was followed by nine gurus who kept up the tradition. Respect for manual labour is enjoined on Sikhs so that no one is held to be high or low because of his occupation. Sikh commitment to equality is demonstrated by the institutions of 'sangat' (gathering) and 'langar' (dining). It is a religious requirement for Sikhs to socialize in the gurudwara (temple) and take food together in the community dining hall. Since commsensality is the most important element of caste, such practices break down caste -barriers. Priesthood was open to all. The new religion was naturally attractive to low castes and many joined. However, gradually, social forces came into play and inevitably all kinds of distinctions came in.
Sikhism does not have any Brahmin as such, but the equivalent position is occupied by Jats, a land-owning and soldiering caste. Belonging to the peasant caste, which is a low caste, they had converted to Sikhism : there they found mobility and soon established themselves at the top by virtue of their wealth and political power. By the seventeenth century a great Sikh empire had been established. But Sikh society had also become split into several castes like Jats, Arora, Ramdasias, Khatris etc., with them further subdivided and it was hierarchical. The various castes were strictly ranked, and commsensality and connubium was adhered to rigidly. All Sikhs were equal in langar, but in the outside world social difference were legitimized. Even untouchability made a return; Sikh untouchables, called Mazhabis, were denied access to gurudwaras and village wells. When the Sikhs took service in British army, Sikh regiments were caste based, since the higher castes would neither mix nor take orders from lower castes. Caste was a way for Jats to retain their social dominance.
In 1880's Bhai Kahn Singh published his book Hum Hindu Nahi. The aim of the book backed by a large number of educated Sikhs was to persuade the British that Sikhs constituted a separate people from Hindus so that Sikhs should have their own representatives and laws. The thesis of the book was that Sikhism did not not support Varna, while Hinduism does. Probably in answer , Gianni Ditt Singh, a disillusioned new convert, wrote Naqli Sikh Prabodh; he pointed out that an amritdhari or fully baptized Sikh retained his caste name and an untouchable remained an untouchable even after conversion.
In 1900's Rahtia Sikhs tried to enter the Golden Temple, the chief temple of Sikhs. The head Sardar ordered their arrest. The reason for their barring was that they were impure and so defiled the purity of the temple.
Because of dangerous reformist tendencies developing, the Khalsa Dharam Shastra was published in 1914. It strictly laid down the rules. Members of Mazhabi, Rahtia and Ramdasia castes did not have the right to go beyond four steps inside the Golden Temple. The four Varnas were instructed not to mix with the untouchable Sikhs. Those guilty of breaking the caste rules were called 'patit' or fallen and were shunned by civil society.
1920' s saw the Gurudwara Reform Movement which continued to gather steam. The religious body of SGPC was set up and they passed resolution to ban untouchability and took in low caste priests. However it did not make much headway. Even in 1933 the head of Golden Temple noted that mahzbis' offerings of consecrated food were not accepted and other Sikhs denied them use of public utilities. (One story is that when Ambedkar wanted Hindu dalits to convert to Sikhism, Sikh dalits told him of the atrocities they suffered daily and dissuaded him). In fact so entrenched had the caste system become in the Sikh psyche that after Independence the Sikh leaders demanded that Sikh untouchables should have the same reservation rights as Hindu untouchables. Thus the same Sikhs who demanded that the Indian Constitution recognize them as a separate religion because they did not recognize caste , now argued that not recognizing Sikhs had untouchables was discrimination against Sikhs. Since then caste system had continued among the Sikhs, though concern with purity and mixing is less than it si with the Hindus.
A survey in 2001 found that each castes have separate temples. Most villages even have separate crematoriums for dalits. Though the upper castes insist there is no discrimination because Sikhism do not believe in caste, the dalits tell a different story. They had to sit at the last rows in the temple, to eat last at langar (which defeats its purpose), are often not allowed to cook or serve food at langar, are not allowed to carry the Granth sahib or Sikh holy book and is often taunted for their origins. If the try to cross the limits set for them (like taking out a guruparb procession or entering a caste gurudwara) violence is inflicted on them by the upper castes. The more they assert themselves, the more atrocities are inflicted on them, religion notwithstanding.
Sikhism is confined to a limited area, is a newer religion and had been documented extensively since its inception; hence it is easier to study the development of caste hierarchy in it. Study of Sikh social history tells us a great deal about the rise of caste in Hinduism.

The Indian Muslim society is divided into Asrafs (noble) and non-Asrafs. Ashrafs and non-Ashrafs are collectively referred to as 'oonchi zat' (high caste) and 'neechi zat' (low caste). In their turn Asrafs are subdivided into Sayyids supposedly descendants of Muhammad, Shaykhs (Arabic: â€œChiefsâ€), descendants of Arab or Persian invaders, Pathans (members of Pasthun tribes) and Mughals. It is not that all who belong to such castes actually are descended from these races; but high hindu castes who have become absorbed into them took such designations as well. Economic relationships between Asrafs and non-Asrafs depend on the jajman-kamin or patron-client system. The non-ashraf Muslim castes are similarly subdivided into farmer, artisan castes etc., with untouchables at the bottom. They follow the same rules of endogamy and intermixing as do their Hindu counterparts. Though rules of pollution are less strict, they are nevertheless observed so that people like barbers are treated as untouchables. Nightsoil and carrion carriers form the most untouchable caste whose very touch pollutes. Even mosques are sometimes separate. Among the non-Asrafs superiority or inferiority of a caste is determined by the relatively pure or impure nature of the occupation associated with each, and how close they come to physical proximity of the Asrafs in their daily activities. However non-Asrafs are always inferior to Asrafs. If an Asraf marries non-Asraf the Asrafs will not accept him or her as equal and would not dine with them, particulary not on formal occasions before the general public. The non-Asrafs are also known as Ajlaf meaning wretched, mean. Even after conversion all the old practices remain. For example, Meos are Muslim rajputs who employed Brahmin genealogists to fabricate claims to Ksatiryahood.

The case is the same with Indian Christians. They too are divided into a number of castes with the previously Brahmin castes at the top and untouchables at the bottom. The same rules of Hindu caste system govern them, and they are known by their caste names --- Christian Nayars, Christian Paraya etc. Hardly any lower castes are allowed to be appointed as priest. Untouchables have separate graveyards and churches. So entrenched is the system that if a Christian upper caste cannot find a suitable caste Christian to marry, then a Hindu of the same caste will be selected rather than another Christian of lower caste. The Dalits who converted to Christianity possibly gained a new sense of self-respect, but the gains were wiped out by the fact that uppercaste Christians from whose ranks their religious superiors come still treated them as untouchables. There has been recorded instances of priests refusing to enter the houses of their dalit congregation; the mission schools have separate arrangmenets for dalits and other castes. Nor did their relationship with Hindu castes change in any way. So, many Dalit Christians have either started new churches themselves or reconverted back to Hinduism. How castesim is practised by Christians is attested by the Christian dalits themselves.

www.dalitchristians.com:
"But the irony is that caste discrimination is very much practised in Christianity. For example, there are separate seats for the dalits in churches; in fact there are separate churches for Christian dalits, separate communion cups, and even separate burial grounds. As Mr. Kaka Karlekar. Chairman of the Backward Classes Commission, commented, "even today the Christians belonging to the SCs are forced to have separate cemeteries in some parts of India. Even the dead must observe caste and untouchability."

Though Christianity also does not recognize caste system, there are upper and lower caste among Christians. In Goa, for example, there are upper caste Catholic Brahmins who do not marry Christians belonging to the lower castes. In many churches, the low caste Christians have to sit apart from the high caste Christians. In Andhra Pradesh, there are Christian Dalit, Christian Malas, Christian Reddys, Christian Kammas, etc. In Tamil Nadu, converts to Christianity form Scheduled Castes - Latin Catholics, Christian Shanars, and Christian Gramani are in the list of Scheduled Castes. Such instances are many and vary from region to region.

" The external forms of untouchability and their practice still exist among Christians, within the Church, in the graveyard, in the festivals, in marriage alliances, etc. The most unfortunate thing is that the caste Christians, practising these inhuman acts are often supported by their own caste-priests and nuns, who even encourage them to attack Dalit Christians. That is the main reason for caste-practice continuing in the Church. Incidents in the past and also in recent years prove that in those areas and villages where large number of priests and nuns have been ordained, (few example: Thatchoor in Madras diocese, Eraiyur in Pondy diocese, Varadarajanpet in Kumbakonam diocese) the Caste-Christians are more active in oppressing Dalit Christians and resisting vigorously when they demand dignity, equality, and justice. Most of the caste priests, nuns and some in hierarchical positions use their money, authority and institutional power against Dalit Christians at the times of crisis, instead of supporting their just cause. We are saying this from many experience".

"Archbishop George Zur, the apostolic Pro-nuncio to India spoke to the Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) in December 1991, declaring ....: "Though Catholics of the lower castes and tribes form sixty percent of church membership, they have no place in decision- making. Scheduled caste converts are treated as low caste not only by high caste Hindus but by high caste Christians too. In rural areas they cannot own or rent houses, however well-placed they may be. Separate places are marked for them in the parish churches and burial grounds. Inter- caste marriages are frowned upon and caste tags are still appended to the Christian names of high caste people. Casteism is rampant among the clergy and the religious. Though Dalit Christians make up 65 percent of the ten million Christians in the south, less than 4 percent of the parishes are entrusted to Dalit Priests. There are no Dalits among thirteen Catholic bishops of Tamilnadu or among the Vicars-General and Rectors of seminaries and Directors of Social Assistance Centres."
Protestant Churches suffer from the same malaise.

The feelings of the low castes can be gauged from the event where about a 1,000 Dalit Christians armed with lethal weapons had barged into the "Conversion Victory Mela" on July 13, 2002 at the Chengalput St. Joseph's Church shouting "Don't dupe Dalit Hindus by promising equal treatment!"

It might appear surprising that Islam and Christianity though being religions of equality should be so riddled with caste. Their apologists invariably explain that Hinduism has corrupted them. Of course it is true that when castes converted enbloc, they carried all their baggage with them and the economic-political forces ensured that the social relationships do not change. But they ignore the beam in their own eye, viz that, though all Muslims or all Christians might be equal in God's eyes, the religious institutions had always sanctioned social inequality.

Among the Arabs the Querash claimed excellence by virtue of being Prophet's tribe, and Omar distributed booty according to the length of time one has been a convert. In India the names of the Asrafs give away their claims to superiority; they were superior because of their birth from conquering invaders, while their conquered subjects were low or ajlaf. Rather like the varna system, Humayun brought with him a Muslim society divided into Ahl-e-kalam or clergy, Ahl-e-Jegh or warriors and Ahl-e-Murad. Above all slavery was practiced. Though the Koran says that freeing slaves is a meritorious act slavery was never abolished; Muhammad himself enslaved captives of war and freely engaged in buying and selling slaves --- there can be no greater social discrimination than that. Therefore though the Muslim rulers and clergy expressed surprise at untouchability which did not exist among them, they saw nothing wrong with a endogamous hierarchy and made no attempts to change things when their co-religionists practiced it. Indeed there do not seem to have been any highly regarded Islamic authority who ever spoke of an equal society.

In Christianity also, spiritual salvation was no guarantee of social equality. Whatever Christ may have taught, the Christian Church had never been too eager for equality. The New Testament condones slavery explicitly.
Ephesians 6: 5-9:
Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.
Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but like slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart.
Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not men, because you know that the Lord will reward everyone for whatever good he does, whether he is slave or free. And masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Do not threaten them, since you know that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him.
1 Timothy 6:1-3 "Let as many servants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honor, that the name of God and his doctrine be not blasphemed. And they that have believing masters, let them not despise them, because they are brethren; but rather do them service, because they are faithful and beloved, partakers of the benefit. These things teach and exhort. If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness;"
Titus 2:9-10:
Teach slaves to be subject to their masters in everything, to try to please them, not to talk back to them, and not to steal from them, but to show that they can be fully trusted, so that in every way they will make the teaching about God our Savior attractive.
1 Peter 2:18-21:
Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh. For it is commendable if a man bears up under the pain of unjust suffering because he is conscious of God. But how is it to your credit if you receive a beating for doing wrong and endure it? But if you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God. To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.
Philemon 1:6.
He is no longer just a slave; he is a beloved brother, especially to me. Now he will mean much more to you, both as a slave and as a brother in the Lord.

Slavery was continued in Christian Byzantine and slaves were kept in the heart of Catholic Rome by the Popes during medieval age. USA of course practised slavery , justifying it with quotes from the Bible.

During Middle Ages Europe was ruled the hierarchical system of feudalism --- though pollution was not a concern and interdining was allowed, in every other respect from dress codes to marriage rules it showed the same pattern as the caste system. The Church taught that this feudalism is divinely ordained, and a good Christian who did not protest his lowly position would be rewarded by God. After the Protestant revolution at first there was some impulse towards equality and reformation within the Church. . But soon both Catholic and Protestant Churches became more interested in retaining power and gaining wealth. The mainstream Churches taught that one should not rebel against the status quo; indeed after the 1857 mutiny in India, the Monghyr Baptists told the British govt. that had they been allowed to convert all Hindus then the mutiny would never have happened because "Christianity does not teach subjects to rebel".

When these Churches came to India it was never with the idea to change society; saving souls was only a way to swell their numbers. Letters still exist from the Colonial times where we find churches engaged in bidding for heathen souls. Caste leaders would send letters asking what material benefits each Church could offer even listing what other Churches had offered; an auction of sorts would ensue until the whole caste converted. When uppercastes converted it was with the understanding that caste distinctions would be maintained. Some priests did try to do away with these practices but the Churches were more anxious not to upset wealthy and powerful patrons. The missionaries themselves came from a society that was class-based with fixed ideas about how each class should behave. So though they found untouchability to be against Christian principles they found nothing wrong with a hierarchical society per se. (Not to mention they missed the irony of trying to separate the Hindus and Christians on basis of purity). Moreover the Britishers brought with them racism. They thought that darker skinned people were inherently inferior. When the first Brahmin clergyman, (fully convinced of his superiority as well) demanded equal salary with European missionaries his religious superiors were scandalized. They spoke bitterly of his ingratitude and lamented that natives now thought themselves to be as good as white men. It is not surprising therefore that the Churches made no serious attempts at eradicating casteism, though the Bishops are fond of proclaiming loudly how they are eradicating caste. In fact even now certain Christian groups are quite prepared to accept caste, if only Hindus would convert.

Affirmative action and caste dilemmas

2006-06-08T00:26:00.000-07:00

This is a wonderful article on the issue of affirmative action and reservations. Infact is is an effective critique of the Indian business classes and the corporate czars, who wish that upper castes or dvijas dominate the Indian society and economy.

Affirmative action and caste dilemmas

MEERA NANDA

Indian businesses are taking a skewed view of `affirmative action' in the U.S. to sell a strategy that is big on promises and low on accountability.

THE United States hardly ever gets good marks from Indian intellectuals. Its dog-eat-dog capitalism, its trigger-happy foreign policy and even its highly seductive and much imitated popular culture are held up as examples of what India should not emulate.

But at least on one issue of great public interest and debate in India - namely, the best way to provide upward mobility for historically oppressed social groups - America has found many admirers. Its affirmative action programme in particular has become an object of much admiration lately.

Affirmative action, or AA, refers to an Executive Order that President Lyndon Johnson signed in 1965 as a part of his Great Society initiative. The goal of this directive was to encourage private businesses and educational institutions to make aggressive efforts to recruit black applicants for jobs and college admissions.

Everyone in India claims to be in favour of AA these days. Many are looking at it for fresh ideas for "Dalit capitalism" which will embrace "caste diversity" in the private sector and in the institutions of higher learning that feed into it. Even those in the business community who are vehemently against reservations insist that they are perfectly willing to adopt American-style AA, which in their view, is "totally" voluntary and free of quotas. AA, in other words, is seen as a less intrusive, more voluntary mechanism for bringing about caste justice than state-mandated quotas.

This article will argue that this rosy picture of AA as voluntary and quota-free is only partially true, as are the rosy scenarios for the potential of Dalit capitalism to pull up the many historically oppressed castes.

A closer look at the American experience shows that Indian businesses are taking a superficial and biased view of the actual workings of AA in the United States in order to sell their own version of AA, which is big on promises and low on any accountability and enforcement.

But the American experience must also serve as a warning about the limits of identity politics and group rights. The colour-based inclusion of blacks in the great American middle class has been purchased at the cost of turning a blind eye to class-based exclusion of millions of poor blacks and whites from decent education, adequate health care and jobs that pay living wages. Yes, race-based positive discrimination has created a substantial black middle class. But it has also contributed to the creation of a desperately poor and deeply alienated black underclass living under the American version of apartheid. It has also created a large mass of poor whites who are simmering with resentment against the advantages they are denied. Those concerned with social justice cannot afford to close their eyes to the shadow side of identity-based redistribution programmes.

Globalisation and private sector jobs

Affirmative action in the private sector is one of the two fronts in the current agitation for caste justice; the other being the so-called Mandal II.

Job reservations in the private sector are seen as central to the advancement of Dalits in the neoliberal global capitalist economy. The much-discussed "Bhopal Declaration", adopted by Dalit activists and intellectuals in January 2002, demanded that reservations be made "mandatory in the same proportion as in the public sector and government institutions". This issue found its way into the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government's Common Minimum Programme, which promised to "immediately initiate a dialogue with industry and other parties on how best the private sector can fulfil the aspirations of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe youth". The current focus on AA is a product of this national dialogue. The corporate sector has opposed Mandal-style quotas. In its place, the captains of Indian industry have offered to adopt AA voluntarily for Dalits, modelled after the U.S. plan for African-Americans.

The second front in the reservations debate is the Mandal II, which seeks to extend the 27 per cent reservations for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) mandated by the Mandal Commission to Centrally-aided, private universities and institutions that offer professional degrees in engineering, medicine and management. Reservations for OBC, over and above the already existing 22.5 per cent reservations for Dalits and Adivasis, in Central government jobs was instituted in 1990, the Mandal I. Even though the government has tried to defuse the anti-Mandal II agitation by promising to increase the total number of seats in universities, street protests against reservations are still going on.

The current debate is taking place in the context of the increasing privatisation and globalisation of India's economy. Jobs in the public sector are drying up, while the ones that remain are losing their prestige and power. In the new economic climate, jobs in the private sector enterprises in Information Technology, biotechnology, advertisement, marketing and finance have become the new passports to prosperity. Indeed, the mere ability to speak in American-accented English has become an economic asset in our call-centre economy.

The vast majority of Dalits, Adivasis and the "most backward" among the OBCs face a legacy of thousands of years of prejudice, sanctified by religion and tradition, which blocks their entry into the new economy. Unlike their richer, `twice-born' urban counterparts, they do not have the economic and cultural resources to buy their way into the kind of computer-savvy, English-speaking "merit" that the new economy calls for.

Until the time when, to paraphrase Kancha Illaiah, a rich Brahmin child and a poor Dalit child can study in the same English medium schools, talk of "merit" will only keep the Dalit child out. Or as Lyndon Johnson said in a famous 1965 speech that laid the foundations of AA: "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains, bring him to the starting line in a race and then say, `you are free to compete with all others'. It is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates." Because the vast majority of "lower" caste kids who do not drop out and somehow make it to the starting line, arrive there without the benefit of adequate education and without the cultural capital that the "upper" caste kids take for granted, some kind of positive discrimination on their behalf is morally justified.

Private sector myths

The Indian private sector has vehemently rejected all Mandal-style quotas. But influential corporate leaders have indicated that they are willing to accept AA instead. They seem to believe that these programmes in the U.S. do not mandate quotas and are entirely voluntary. The following statement of Rahul Bajaj, chairman of Bajaj Autos, is typical: "People ought not to confuse reservation with AA. When people here talk about AA carried out by companies like IBM in the U.S., they are unfortunately unaware that AA is not mandatory there. It is totally voluntary. AA does not mean job reservation." A closer look at AA, below, will reveal that this view of AA is simplistic to the point of being false.

Let us first examine the private sector's reasons for rejecting quotas. The corporate sector has argued that caste-based hiring will "kill efficiency" and "weaken competitiveness". Caste criteria, it has been argued, "do not work" in today's "knowledge economy". Some have even claimed that caste-based reservations will not be acceptable to Western multinationals who will take their business to other countries.

The irony is that U.S. multinationals, whose competitiveness and efficiency Indian businesses are so keen to duplicate, have embraced racial, ethnic and gender diversity in hiring precisely because they have found it to be good for business. Poll after poll of American corporations has shown that an overwhelming majority (over 95 per cent) of CEOs embrace AA. They do that not out of the kindness of their hearts, nor out of a burning desire for social justice. They have adopted AA because it is good business policy and good public relations policy.

American businesses (and one must add universities, colleges and workplaces) have discovered that promoting racial and ethnic diversity - even at the cost of not always picking white male candidates with higher grades and stronger academic record - brings in many different perspectives and styles of thinking, which adds to innovation and creativity. American corporations have been able to make room for diversity while enhancing their quality of work by expanding the definition of "merit": they do not only look at the marks obtained in schools and colleges, but give plus points for other less formal, less tangible indicators of initiative, perseverance and originality. Far from "weakening competitiveness" and "killing efficiency", the world's most competitive firms have become so competitive by going out of their way to recruit actively African-Americans, Hispanics and women.

The second myth perpetuated by the private sector is that AA is voluntary and that it does not demand quotas. Even though it has won the enthusiastic compliance of big business, AA in the U.S. has never been voluntary. And even though the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Executive Order 11246 that created AA in September 1965 did not lay out numerical targets, enforcement agencies and corporations themselves routinely use numerical targets - yes, quotas - to judge if they are complying with the law.

Backed by the state

Let us first look at the myth of AA being voluntary. Enforcement of the provision of the Civil Rights Act and AA was never left to the good intentions and kindness of the private sector. Right from the start, both these laws were backed by the full might of the federal government. Any business, contractor or university that wanted to do business with the government, or get any subsidies, grants or tax-breaks, had to completely de-segregate their workplaces (as required by the Civil Rights Act) and had to take concrete, verifiable steps to recruit black talent aggressively for all levels of the hierarchy (as demanded by AA). A business could not meet its AA obligations by hiring more minority community members as janitors and unskilled labourers, for example. It had to make demonstrable, verifiable steps to find, train and hire suitable black candidates at all levels, including the management. Of course, businesses had a "choice" not to do this, but then the government, too, could "choose" not to do any business with them. With millions of dollars involved in government contracts and grants, there was not much of a free choice in the matter of complying with the law. The apparent "voluntariness" of the system has always been backed by the enormous power of the state treasury.

The issue of quotas in the U.S. system is also much more complicated than the spokesmen of the Indian private sector make it appear. It is true that Chapter VII of the Civil Rights Act expressly prohibits preferential treatment for any group or individual, black or white. The sole purpose of this Act was to remove any intentional and overt discrimination against non-whites. (Remember, this law was written at a time when black people were still forced to sit in the back of the bus, when white-owned restaurants refused to serve blacks, when housing, schools and universities were largely segregated. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted in response to the growing strength of the civil rights movement which culminated in the march on Washington and the famous "I have a dream" speech by Martin Luther King Jr. on August 28, 1963).

But it soon became apparent that just getting rid of overt discrimination would not be enough to get blacks their fair share in the economy or put an end to the second-class treatment they received in civil society. (India faces a very similar predicament: merely outlawing caste, as the Constitution does, has not put an end to caste prejudice in society.) Lyndon Johnson called for "equality as a fact and a result" and not just as a legal statement of good intentions. This became the basis for his Executive Order that laid the foundations of AA. On the surface, AA also did not impose numerical quotas. All it demanded was that those companies supplying goods and services to the government had to show that they were making extra efforts to locate black talent and to give it a chance to develop.

INDUSTRIALIST RAHUL BAJAJ.The Indian private sector has vehemently rejected all Mandal-style quotas.

But AA's emphasis on actual results was very quickly interpreted by the government enforcement agency (EEOC, or Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), and businesses and universities as an imperative to hire by numbers. Any business whose workforce was not in proportion to the racial make-up of society faced the risk of lawsuits that the EEOC and the Labour Department has the authority to initiate. So, even without expressly demanding quotas, racial quotas have always been a part of the AA enforcement mechanism. The use of quotas is well known and has been challenged in the courts many times. Each time, the American courts have thrown out explicit quotas, but each time they have come back through the back door as the objective standards for enforcement.

The point is that the private sector in the U.S. has learned not only to live with, but also actually to thrive upon a state-enforced, quota-driven preferential treatment for the minorities. The private sector in India, in contrast, only seeks to render AA toothless by removing all enforcement mechanisms. It is basically offering to do some good old Dalit "uplift" here and there, now and then, but completely outside the reach of any state regulatory agency. One cannot help wondering where these captains of industry were all these years. Who was stopping them to "voluntarily" do what they are promising now? Given their dismal record, it is hard to take their sudden conversion to AA seriously.

Dalit-Bahujan myths

Dalits, OBCs and their allies have also become great admirers of the U.S. model. Two elements in particular seem to attract most attention: one, the apparently genuine and deep-seated commitment to racial and ethnic diversity one finds in the corporate boardrooms, workplaces and universities in America; and two, the federal and state governments' set-asides for minority-owned businesses for procurements and contracts. Both of these measures are - correctly - seen as key in creating a thriving black middle class in the U.S. Not surprisingly, both these elements are included in the Bhopal Declaration of 2002, the founding charter of Dalit capitalism.

A closer look at the black experience, however, reveals serious limitations of what AA has been able to accomplish for black people.

It is true that, thanks to AA, blacks have made substantial inroads into the corporate world in America and the number of black people in the middle class has grown tremendously. As Chandra Bhan Prasad, the tireless champion of Dalit capitalism, has documented carefully, major American corporations have indeed created boardrooms that reflect the racial diversity of America. To take just one recent example from Prasad's writings, Lockheed Martin, the aerospace manufacturer and a major defence contractor, employs 124, 000 workers, 21 per cent of whom are members of minority communities. The company also has a fair number of black senior CEOs and members of the Board of Directors. There are many other U.S. corporations whose workforce displays a similar degree of racial diversity.

Yes, AA has "worked" for black people, but not for all of them. Nearly half a century after the passage of preferential laws, black people today are divided into what has been described as an "Afristocracy" of black elites and professionals, and a "ghettocracy" of desperately poor blacks trapped in menial, minimum wage jobs. (Jobs in manufacturing and low-end white collar jobs in data-entry and call-centres used to be the mainstay of blacks and whites who did not have college education and professional degrees. But most of these jobs have moved off-shore.)

The tragedy is that the black elites, as they move into the middle class, tend to adopt white middle-class stereotypes regarding the poor blacks: like most middle-class whites they, too, begin to blame the culture of poor blacks for their own poverty. The chasm between the Afristocracy and the ghettocracy has become so bad that in 2004, Bill Cosby, the legendary black entertainer, in a major speech supposed to celebrate civil rights, openly used negative and insulting stereotypes of poor blacks to blame them for their own backwardness - while his mostly rich black audience laughed and cheered. The black community that survived slavery together and fought hard battles for civil rights together is today split on class lines: the poor blacks are becoming as alienated from middle-class blacks as they have always been from middle-class whites. The tragedy is that because black advancement has been largely based upon colour-based preferences, poor blacks have not been able to build bridges of solidarity with poor whites, poor Arabs, poor Asians. The poor in each racial community suffer alone, while the rich are getting united across racial lines - and indeed, across national lines - in their quest for American-style hyper-consumerism. Race-based diversity has become an ideological tool to give the appearance of inclusiveness to global capitalism which, in fact, is excluding larger and larger chunks of working people from the wealth that is being created by working people around the world.

Most American scholars, black and white, agree that AA has helped enormously in creating a substantial and growing black middle class. But one must not lose sight of the fact that AA is colour-conscious but class-blind. When the proponents of Dalit capitalism cheer American corporations for embracing racial diversity, they forget that these companies are perfectly free to fill the diversity quota from the so-called creamy layer: American businesses and universities are under no legal obligation to look for, or nurture, black talent in the poor inner-city schools, which are literally falling apart. (Yes, many corporations give out scholarships and encourage some general "uplift" type volunteer work. This kind of voluntary "uplift", with no legal strings attached, is as far as the Indian private sector seems willing to go). When the proponents of Dalit capitalism cheer American-style government contracts and set-asides for minority-owned small businesses, they forget that many of these set-asides end up going to the already well-to-do minority businesses.

Likewise, those who look up to the U.S. for creative, market-oriented fixes for historical injustices of race and caste, must pay attention to the savage inequalities in American public schools that are getting re-segregated on black and white lines. America has one of the most unequal educational systems in the industrialised world. A state of apartheid exists between financially-strapped, resource-starved, technologically primitive schools that serve the poor inner-city districts with higher concentrations of blacks, and the fancy five-star public schools that spend more than 10 times as much money per student as the inner city schools, and which serve the richer suburbs where the professional and upper-middle classes of whites, blacks, Indians, Chinese, West Asians and every other nationality live. For all the growth of diversity in larger society, the harsh reality is that American schools are becoming more, not less, segregated on class lines which still, after all these years of AA, overlap the colour line.

Lessons of the U.S. model

What lessons can those fighting for caste justice draw from the American experience?

One thing is very clear: the Indian private sector has seriously misunderstood and misrepresented the ground reality of AA as it has evolved in the U.S. In the name of American-style affirmative action, the Indian industry and businesses are selling us a mushy, do-good, Dalit "uplift" type agenda, without any government oversight and enforcement and without any numerical targets that can be used to verify the extent of implementation of AA. This toothless version of AA is mere window-dressing.

How far should Dalit-Bahujan movements for reservations push for American-style affirmative action? If the goal is primarily to create a Dalit middle class, the American experience does have some valuable ideas. There is no reason why the Government of India cannot make good-faith, verifiable attempts at hiring poor Dalits and backward caste members a condition for businesses to get any subsidies and/or business contracts from the state. There is no reason why the Central and State governments cannot follow the American example and set aside potentially lucrative dealerships and supplier contracts for castes that need a helping hand. The federal and State governments in the U.S. have found creative ways to direct the trickle down to selected racial minorities and women. There is no reason why such mechanisms cannot work in India as well.

But insofar as the goal of the Dalit-Bhaujan movement is to bring about a social transformation, to create conditions for "annihilation of caste", as Babasaheb Ambedkar envisioned, AA will always fall short. It will fall short because it lacks an impulse for justice for all regardless of the colour of one's skin, as in the American case, or the accident of one's birth in one caste rather than another, as in the Indian case. In principle, the concern for improving education and economic opportunities must extend to all poor and deprived people, equally, regardless of whether they are Dalits or the highest Brahmin. But because Hinduism has never accepted this principle of universal justice, and has defied it in actual practice in so many ways and for so many centuries, preferential treatment for caste disabilities has to be accepted for some time to come. The words of the U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Harry Blackmun, that "in order to go beyond racism, one must first take account of race", apply as much to race in the U.S. as they do to caste in India.

But we must be clear that affirmative action is not a panacea for all ills. It is rather a bitter pill that the Indian society must swallow for a specific purpose of pulling as many Dalits and other oppressed castes as possible out of their abysmal conditions of life. Without it, many more generations of Dalits and OBCs children will be denied their legitimate share of the country's wealth.

Indian media caught in a caste warp

2006-06-06T01:48:00.000-07:00

Aasim Khan
CNN-IBN

New Delhi: Journalism is called the fourth pillar of democracy and media has
always raised a vociferous debate on the caste cauldron in society.

But has the Fourth Estate itself ignored the principles of democracy in
their institutions?

According to a survey conducted across the newsrooms of top newspapers and
television news networks by Centre for Study of Developing Societies (CSDS),
it's the upper caste that makes the key editorial decisions for the rest of
the country.
The survey covered over 300 top editors working in 40 television and print
news networks, and profiled them in terms of age, religion, caste/community
and gender.
It reveals that Hindu upper caste men, who constitute just eight per cent of
the total population of India, hold over 70 per cent of the key posts across
newsrooms in the country.
The so-called twice born Hindu castes dominate 85 per cent key posts despite
constituting just 16 per cent of the total population, while the
intermediary castes a represent meagre three per cent.

The Hindu Other Backward Class groups, who are 34 per cent of the total
population, have a share of just four per cent in the Indian newsrooms.
Muslims, who constitute about 13 per cent of the population, control just
four per cent top posts while Christians and Sikhs have a slightly better
representation.
But the worst scenario emerges in the case of Scheduled Castes (SCs) and
Scheduled Tribes (STs).
Despite constituting around 24 per cent of the total population, their
representation in key decision making across the news spectrum amounts to
zilch.
That means there is not a single SC or ST person taking a call on editorial
policies in country's news arena.

But don't we hear journalists breaking "hard" news stories irrespective of
their profiles?
"Some of the best stories on riots against Muslims were done by Hindus, on
women's oppression by men and so on. We just want to put this information in
the public domain so that there's better awareness of the diversity profile
of the newsmakers," Senior Fellow CSDS Yogendra Yadav says.
While the caste divide might be news for outsiders, the veteran newsmen have
always known the inside story.
"Not that a newsroom should represent India's population trend, the fact
that you have no Dalit or Scheduled Tribe person is a shocking omission,"
Deputy Editor The Hindu Siddharth Vardrarajan says.

So whose news is it anyway?

A media that triggers heated debate about the reservation row is in itself
divided along caste lines.

Looks like it's time to raise the debate within.

Doctor, teach thyself

2006-06-05T02:40:00.000-07:00

In this column below Pamela Phillipose has given a sound critique of the Medico strike. The author debunks the manner in which the entire issue was dramatized by the striking students. Moreover, being published in Indian Express or Bania Express, it becomes our duty to appreciate the efforts of Ms Phillipose.
Although the newspaper has given some space to criticise the doctors but it has continued its vigorous and senseless rant against reservations.
Rahul Bajaj has got Rajya Sabha seat, please ask BJP to give one to Shekhar Gupta.

Pamela Philipose in Indian Express

There was an edge to the recent doctors’s strike that surprised many. It needed the Supreme Court to threaten contempt action before Delhi’s resident doctors decided to resume work. As for the students, they have made it clear that their mutiny continues. What accounts for this extraordinary spectacle of an otherwise de-politicised professional community taking to the streets, facing water canons, staging hunger rallies, defying the authority of the prime minister? That the protesters were backed by some powerful and well-heeled players is without doubt. But that still does not fully explain their dogged persistence and impassioned demeanour.

This strike, in fact, tells us a whole lot about the state of the medical profession in India today and the education it is based on. The profession has come to be measured by the same yardstick of success that a career in technology or management is measured by — its income-generating potential. So the frustration voiced in those tents rigged up in the AIIMS courtyard was genuine, make no mistake. When an IIM graduate can walk away with a salary of Rs 86 lakh a year after putting in, say, seven to eight years of intense study, these poor, bright, white-coated young things have first to get into the gruelling MBBS course, then complete it, then — if they are lucky to land a seat in an post-graduate course — swot for another two or three years for an MD. Even that may not be sufficient. The goodies may come, but they are indefinitely deferred to some point in the future. This realisation must be galling for those who believe that they are among the most “meritorious” young people in India, comparable to the best an IIT or IIM can churn out. The sheen of being in an “honourable” profession can only take one so far.

This is where we come across an irony: the medical profession, if it is to be useful to society, cannot but be judged by a standard that is unique to itself, because there is no other profession quite like it. IIT or IIM graduates can remain unconnected with social reality; live each in his/her discrete bubble and still be successful professionals. MBBS graduates cannot afford that luxury — if luxury it is — because the profession demands that they touch the human body in a bid to heal it, and the health of that human body is in turn determined by the society in which it lives. The disparities of caste are a part of India’s reality, whether these students would like to recognise it or not. Addressing them is also part of India’s reality. Medical students, therefore, at least those who counted themselves on the anti-quota side of the divide, need to take a more considered view of reservations.

Is the country’s medical education fostering this tunnel vision? That would indeed seem to be the case. First, take the rules of entry. A school graduate of 18 years, or so, is required to answer 400 multiple choice questions in order to make it into an MBBS course (interestingly, the entry point in medical schools in the West is far less rigid — kids do undergraduate studies in the arts there and still make it to medical school and, in any case, they are generally older when they take the decision to opt for a career in medicine). There is little “merit” involved in our system that a good coaching institute or a handsome sum of money cannot take care of. The fact that a significant percentage of kids who make it into medical college have parents who are themselves doctors is proof enough of this.

The 18-year-olds are then put through the paces of the MBBS course, comprising nine semesters over a period of four and a half years. The syllabus is singularly lacking in the larger themes that could instill in the student a broader view of the world. While the IITs make some effort to teach the humanities, medical schools don’t generally think this necessary. Even the nodding acquaintance with “community medicine” and “welfare planning” that the MBBS course makes mandatory, is cursory in the extreme. Besides, it is taught so indifferently that students routinely bunk these classes. The system clearly places no premium on issues of social welfare and it is not surprising that the students don’t either.

Everywhere in the world, there is a constant public effort to review and measure the standards of medical education. After Hurricane Rita signalled the failure of the US medical system to respond to a great humanitarian crisis, there was an extended period of brain-storming on the issue. One of the conclusions reached was that there was a shortage of at least 90,000 physicians, and that there was a lack not just of facilities in the areas that needed them most but of “diversity” in the ethnic composition of the medical community. Finally, it was also recognised that the quality of teaching in medical schools needed to be enhanced in order to produce socially responsible physicians.

Caste matters in the Indian media

2006-06-04T09:16:00.000-07:00

Caste matters in the Indian media

Siddharth Varadarajan

If television and newspaper coverage of the anti-reservation agitation was indulgent and one-sided, the lack of diversity in the newsroom is surely a major culprit.

MY FIRST brush with caste prejudice in higher education came in 1999, when a group of Dalit students from the University College of Medical Sciences (UCMS) came to see me at my office in another English newspaper where I worked at the time as an editorial writer.

The students were residents of the hostel and had silently borne the brunt of casteist abuse and discrimination for some time. Whether by happenstance or design, the Scheduled Caste students were confined to two floors and not assigned rooms elsewhere in the building. In the dining hall, they were forced by the forward caste majority to sit together at one end. If a Dalit student sat somewhere else, he would be abused. "Bloody shaddu," one of them was told when he sat amidst others by mistake, "you cannot eat with us."

The Dalits put up with this harassment and humiliation because, as one of their parents told them, "you have to become a doctor at any cost." But the abuse eventually turned to violence and when one of the students was badly beaten and another had his room ransacked, they decided to go on a dharna. This is also when they ended up in my office.

After hearing them out, I requested the head of the Metro section to send someone to UCMS to cover the story. I was promised a reporter would be sent soon. Several days went by but nothing appeared. It turned out no reporter was assigned. I tried again, this time going one notch higher in the editorial chain-of-command. Again there was no response. Eventually, I decided to do the story myself. I spent half-a-day at the college, interviewed the college authorities, the students on dharna as well as the general category students. One of them admitted reluctantly to using the slur `shaddu' for the Scheduled Caste students but only as a `pet name'.

I filed the story but it did not appear the next day or the day after. Nobody ever said the story was not interesting or not up to scratch but for some reason space could never be found. The story finally appeared, in a cut and mutilated form, a full month after the Dalit students began their dharna. Needless to say, the travails of the Dalit students at UCMS were not considered newsworthy enough by other newspapers or by any of the news channels.

I narrate this story because of how it contrasts with the extraordinary indulgence the national media showed the nearly month-long anti-reservation agitation of doctors and medical students at AIIMS and other colleges. Despite the 24x7 presence of TV cameras, the daily protests in favour of reservation by AIIMS doctors and staff under the banner of `Medicos Forum for Equal Opportunities' were virtually blacked out. One channel showed the counter-protest last Sunday only when a `citizen journalist' presented it with footage he had shot. Often, it was impossible to separate the breathless TV reporters from the anti-reservation doctors they were reporting about. The insensitive and casteist forms of protest some of them adopted — the `symbolic' sweeping of streets, the shining of shoes, the singing of songs warning OBCs and others to `remember their place' (`apni aukat mein rahio') — were put on air without comment by the channels. Nobody asked what kind of doctors these `meritorious' students were likely to become if they had such contempt towards more than half the population of India. And in a media discourse which routinely reports the protests of the underprivileged only as "traffic jams" and other disruptions to the "normal" life of the city, the suffering of poor patients as a result of the AIIMS strike figured largely as a footnote to the "heroic" struggle the medical students and junior doctors were waging.

Amidst the hysteria induced by the media coverage, no one cared to point out how indulgent the AIIMS authorities themselves were being towards the anti-reservation strike. Earlier this year, when a section of doctors concerned about higher user fees being imposed on poor patients sought to protest, they were warned of dire consequences. Under the terms of a High Court order, no protest or demonstration is permitted within the AIIMS campus. Yet nobody demurred when the anti-reservation students occupied the lawns, put up shamianas and coolers and received the "solidarity" of traders, event managers, and IT employees (whose employers usually ban their own staff from ever striking work.)

While there were honourable exceptions — Outlook, The Hindu , and Frontline among them, as well as individual reporters in some newspapers and channels — would the media's coverage have been more balanced had there been a greater degree of caste diversity in the newsroom and editorial boards of our newspapers and channels? Put another way, in egging the forward caste students on to oppose any extension of reservation, were forward caste editors and reporters reflecting their own personal impatience with the idea of affirmative action? Was the media coverage, then, a display of trade unionism by the privileged?

There are no official or industry statistics but every journalist is aware of the extent to which forward castes dominate the media. When B.N. Uniyal surveyed the scene in 1996, he found not a single Dalit accredited journalist in Delhi. Today, the position is unlikely to be much better. At a recent meeting of Journalists for Democracy, it was reported that an informal survey had found that the number of accredited North Indian OBC journalists in Delhi was under 10. I myself have counted the number of Muslims with accreditation to the Press Information Bureau and they barely cross the three per cent mark. In Chhattisgarh, a recent attempt to send Tribal journalists on a training programme had to be dropped because there was none.

One is not saying the absence of Dalit or OBC journalists is the product of conscious discrimination though that factor cannot be ruled out. But the reality of their absence is something the media must have the courage to acknowledge.

In an ideal world where professionalism is paramount, the caste or religious affiliation of a journalist should not matter. But journalism that has little or no space for the majority of citizens is bound to end up missing out on the complexity of the society it seeks to cover. Story ideas will not be taken up, or if taken up then covered only from a particular perspective. To be sure, many of the negative trends so evident in Indian journalism — the shrinkage of space, the lack of coverage of rural India or of the problems of poor Indians, the episodic, frenetic nature of news, the cult of the Sensex, the preoccupation with trivia and sensationalism — will not be cured by newspapers and TV channels hiring more Dalit, OBC, and Muslim journalists. But greater workplace diversity will certainly infuse a greater degree of vitality in the newsroom as wider varieties of lived experience intrude upon and clash with the largely urban, rich, forward caste Hindu certitudes of the overwhelming majority of journalists.

Far from seeing affirmative action as a threat, India's media houses should look upon the entry of Dalit, Tribal, OBC, and Muslim journalists as an opportunity to broadbase their journalism and make it more professional and authentic. Last year, Ankur and Sarai-CSDS provided teenagers in the now-demolished slum cluster of Nangla Machi with computers. The daily diaries and fly-sheets they produced even as their homes were being brought down by bulldozers is journalism of as high a quality as anyone can find in India today (Interested readers should visit http://www.sarai.net/nm.htm). Certainly their writings tell us more about the reality of "slum clearance" than any of our TV channels, and in prose that is better than what one normally gets to read in our newspapers.

As the OBC and SC-ST youths who want to become doctors and engineers are saying, merit is not simply a score that can be bought by parents who have the money to invest in the most expensive education for their children. It is also about the talent that all children have within them regardless of their caste or socio-economic background. A society — or an industry like the media — which does not find a way to tap that talent will only end up impoverishing itself. Specifically, media houses must seriously think about starting internships and training programmes for Dalit, Tribal, Muslim, and OBC students interested in becoming journalists.

Reservation, affirmative action, targeted expenditure, and investment are all means of society helping people unlock their inherent talent. As pro-reservation scholars such as Yogendra Yadav, Satish Deshpande, Purshottam Aggarwal, and others have argued, the United Progressive Alliance Government's current approach is not necessarily the best one. But by conducting a shrill campaign and encouraging forward caste students to launch an ill-conceived agitation, the media themselves foreclosed the possibility of a rational debate on what the best way of building an inclusive education system really is. When the dust settles, the media should introspect and ask what they can do to make society as a whole more inclusive. Encouraging conversation and not hectoring is one way. But another is surely to diversify the newsroom by consciously bringing in those sections of society who have hitherto been excluded. There are a million stories out there waiting to be told. If only we allow the storytellers to do the telling

Indian Express aka Bania Express

2006-06-03T02:30:00.000-07:00

HI Guys just read the leading article of the Indian Express or what is rightly the Brahmin Express or Bania Express, you will realize that the upper caste conspiracy to halt the UPA government's decision to introduce reservations in private sector is either has become successful or in the usual manner the Indian (Sic) Express has tried to mould the news in such a manner that it appears that government has bowed to the upper caste lobby.

The story says that the Prime Minister has slowed down the decision making process, although this decision is a part of the CMP of UPA government.
To be frank, it must be said that both Congress and BJP are filled with uppercaste people, and both these parties are not willing to dilute the caste hegemony.
What they want is to reap the political benefits by adopting a piecemeal approach towards social justice and equality.
It is therefore hightime that the backward classes and SC/ST people unite to fight for our due share in economy, polity and society of this country which has been denied to us for thousand of years.

Indian Express or Brahmin Express

2006-06-03T02:16:00.000-07:00

Media coverage of reservation stir biased: Journalists Group

2006-06-02T23:10:00.000-07:00

Media coverage of reservation stir biased: Journalists Group

New Delhi, May 30 (UNI) Senior journalists, academicians and a senior doctor
from AIIMS have described the media coverage of the anti-reservation stir as
"one-sided and biased" with well-known psephologist Yogendra Yadav announcing
that his oganisation would survey the background of all mediapersons and judges
within two years and put their profiles on the website.

Participating in a seminar on "How Media Covered Reservation Stir" organised
by "Journalists for Democracy, Delhi" here on Saturday, Mr Yadav said the media
went off the mark in reporting the agitation but added that proponents of
reservation should also reconsider to what extent the caste-based OBC
reservation was an affirmative action in the Indian society. "Since the Mandal
Commission implementation in 1990s, things have undergone a sea change with
economic issues coming to the fore", he said.

Referring to his organisation - Centre for Study of Development Socieites
(CSDS) - plan to prepare a profile of working journalists and judges, Mr Yadav
said such an exercise had already been undertaken in the US and it was necessary
to know the conduct and performance of the persons concerned and their expected
contribution to the development of the society.

Dr Anoop Saraya, a Professor from AIIMS said the same venue - the park of the
premier hospital where employees and doctors were debarred by a court order from
staging a protest which is their legal right - now had been thrown open to the
anti-reservationists.

''These protesters have rather been facilitated by the hospital management and
egged upon by industrialists and a section of political class to raise their
bogey of protest with the print and electronic media hovering all around to
highlight them." On the other hand, the media had deliberately ignored the
pro-reservationists in the AIIMS from projecting their point of view, Dr Saraya
said adding that the media bias was more pronounced this time than that
witnessed during the anti-Mandal agitation during 1990s.

Well-known columnist Anil Chamdria supported Mr Yadav's views that a section
of electronic media deliberately projected the National Health and Family Survey
that the percentage of OBC population was only 29 per cent excluding OBC from
the Muslim community and not 52 per cent as given out by the Mandal Commission.

Mr Chamdria agreed with Mr Yadav's assertion that the Health and Family survey
had a limited purpose and could not be correct.

However, Mr Yadav maintained that the Mandal's figure of the OBC population
was disputed and according to his assessment, it could be around 42 per cent.

Most of the senior journalists including Mr G Chandrasekar from UNI, Mr Shambu
Nath Singh from Jagran and Mr Urmalesh from Hindi Hindustan argued that the
media 'sustained and projected the anti-reservation stir out of proportion and
completely blacked out the views and protests of the pro-reservation people who
constitute at least 80 per cent of the country's population.

Most of the speakers, including Mr S S Bechain, Professor of Journalism in a
Delhi University College and Mr Sidharath Verdhrajan, Delhi-based editor of 'The
Hindu,' said most of the working journalists covering the anti-reservation stir
"were ignorant about the recent 104th Constitutional Amendment in favour of 27
per cent reservation for OBC and which had been supported by all political
parties including the BJP".

Veteran journalist Masat Ram Kapoor said, ''the Indian media is dominated by
the upper caste people and none of the Dalits so far have become editor in any
mainstream media including the vernacular press....and the ongoing doctors'
agitation reflected the pride and self-centredness of the moneyed class with
middle calss trappings which does not want to lose any of its privileges."

However, Mr Parshotam Aggrawal, a professor from JNU wondered how media could
go to the extent of ignoring version of the other side while reporting an
incident.

The participants viewed that with economic liberalisation and with private
trade owning the electronic media, news was being projected as a 'saleable
commodity' meant to generate maximum advertisement revenue for the
establishment. "And, the reporters on the spot have ceased to exist in the game
of business and enhancing TRP rating," they added.

Some good out of evil

2006-06-02T07:06:00.000-07:00

Some good out of evil

Strikers need to shed ages old prejudices

THE way the anti-reservationist medicos have held the weak and the sick of the country to ransom for over a fortnight is, indeed, a fine example of the collective evil intention of the privileged. They have thrown a challenge at the face of our government's declared social policy aiming at bridging the deep and wide gaps among different social groups and have brought untold misery to the poor in need of medical help.
However, from the centre's latest response to their demands, it seems that some good is going to emerge out of the mess the HRD Ministry and the medicos have, so far, jointly created.
While the centre, as expected, have expressed their determination to implement their declared policy of reservation from the year 2007, they have also announced a slew of sops to persuade the medicos to go back to their duty and class-rooms. Earlier the centre had declared that six new AIIMS would be set up in different parts of India within the coming three years. Now, they say that the entire process will be speeded up to complete the job within a year and a half, where necessary by hiring private buildings for that purpose. The present AIIMS in Delhi has agreed to raise their annual intake from 50 to 90, with effect from the coming session. All the medical teaching institutions around the country under central control have been asked to double their annual intake for the MBBS course and to raise the seats for MD/MS etc. by 25 to 30%. The total number of new seats around the country thus created will come to 2600 -- a hefty figure, no doubt. The strikers have also been assured in writing that there would be no reduction in seats in the general category.
So, they now have no justification to be on strike unless they are really opposed to many more seats being created for the OBC candidates. Nor have they covered themselves with laurels by rejecting the aforesaid offers assured by the centre. They have, in the meantime, mobilised their forces by persuading the students of JNU and IITs to join them in their hunger-strike.
The unjustified self-immolation bid by a couple of strikers has further emotionalised the controversy, while one Delhi-based advocate has further complicated the issue by filing a PIL with the Delhi High Court challenging the centre's decision. Seeing the countrywide support the upper castes have successfully mobilised, in the name of merit and the media-hype they are enjoying, the BJP too now is secretly changing their course.
Not daring to oppose reservations for the OBC they have accused the centre of adopting a divisive policy and have now asked for a competent committee to go into the entire question of caste-based reservation. So, despite the best possible response, at this stage, by the centre the issue is getting murkier and more insoluble with each passing day.
However, although nothing can be said in support of those united to protect their privileges, the HRD Ministry too cannot be condoned for having, almost thoughtlessly, messed up the entire issue and switched on the countrywide conflagration. We know that institutions of higher learning, especially those related to science, engineering and medicine, cannot be created overnight out of thin air.
Such slap-dash decisions and their implementation are sure to convert the so-called higher studies in the new institutions into a big joke. So, why did not the HRD Ministry assess the possible reaction of the nation to their hastily-announced decision. They should have made a realistic appraisal of the likely response of the upper caste young men and women and announced simultaneous increase in the number of general category seats, if not at one go but by stages.

India needs more qualified doctors and engineers. So, one may legitimately question, why have not the HRD Ministry increased the seats in AIIMS and other medical institutions, IITs and IIMs before the present crisis broke out? Why did they not act on time instead of reacting to the agitators' demand? Even now there is strong justification for being skeptical about their official assurance.

The very slow progress with the proposed centres of higher scientific studies at Pune and Kolkata and with another IIM at Shillong makes any normal person doubt both the intention and the ability of the centre to set-up any thing worthwhile with alacrity. However, now that the centre has come out with their best possible offer, it is high time that the strikers resume their duties, instead of holding the nation to ransom for perpetuating their age-old privileges.

Fighting for inequality

2006-06-02T07:04:00.000-07:00

Fighting for inequality
Upper castes striving to preserve their hegemony

It’s a shame that the supreme court of the country has to intervene in the doctor’s agitation, asking them to resume duties, and the government is forced to consider the drastic step of appointing fresh recruits. Nothing deters the agitationists, who believe that the upper caste alone should enjoy monopoly in all major fields.

The worst is doctors donning T-shirts with freedom fighter Bhagat Singh’s caricature, which makes for a simple case of mockery of the legendary figure, who not only fought against the British but also believed in a classless society. It is one thing fighting oppression, seeking freedom and justice. But, it is yet another to struggle for maintaining ones monopoly in a certain arena.

The doctors are neither fighting against oppression, injustice, human rights violations or corruption nor for equality. In fact, the ugly manifestation of monopolistic tendencies that the agitation purports is only a means to ensure that oppression and inequality continue. The crude display of lust to maintain and reserve these positions solely for the socially and economically upper classes is self evidentiary. There may be flaws in the manner in which government wants to go about the business of reservations for the backward classes, which can be debated and amended, but one thing is clear; given the present circumstances, the country certainly cannot do without the quota system to bail out the socially and economically poor. The newly appointed chief secretary of Jammu and Kashmir, C Phunsong, the first one to be appointed from a backward area like Ladakh, may have a point in opposing reservations. But this opposition cannot be seen in isolation. In an interview to a newspaper, while maintaining that reservation system is not a healthy practice has also averred that there is need to provide quality education at the basic level to everybody. But that itself is the catch.

In the absence of quality education at the primary and middle schooling level, equal opportunities for all remain elusive. As long as there are no equal opportunities to allow a natural process to enable the meritorious from any class of society to come up to the top level, the backward classes will continue to remain oppressed.

Unfortunately, even almost six decades after independence, a democratic form of government in India has not been able to ensure the amelioration of the oppressed classes. It would be good to dispense with any form of reservation policy but that can not happen without first upgrading basic education and offering equal opportunities to all. Only then can one talk of open merit.

What moves the media: the elite mind?

2006-06-01T23:18:00.000-07:00

What moves the media: the elite mind?

By Minu Jain: This could be the Eureka moment for anyone trying to understand what moves India. A debate on quotas evokes a vicious backlash in the media and in cyberspace, activists on a hunger strike to highlight the future of 35,000 families displaced by a dam attract but a cynical smile and a fashion week is the subject of avid discussion and endless news space.

It could have almost been pre-ordained, so perfectly timed were the events that dominated the media and the mind in the last week. All coalescing together to point to an uncaring India where the other half - or shall we say three-quarters of over a billion people - just don't matter.

That a drummed up debate on reservation for backward classes, environmental activist Medha Patkar's hunger strike to demand rehabilitation for the tens of thousands displaced by the Sardar Sarovar dam in central India and the fashion week should have come at exactly the same time is a coincidence that would be deliciously ironical were it not so grim in its overtones.

As the media went into overdrive hysterically raising the spectre of Mandal II, there were few voices of reason to explain that reservations for the other backward classes (OBCs) in central government-funded institutions like the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) was not something new at all. It was a constitution amendment agreed to by all parties and passed in parliament way back in December.

But nobody stopped to pause as TV channels and the print media devoted reams to students spewing venom against the move and hate mail flooded blog spots. A comment from a couple of students who were beneficiaries of the quota system at one of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) that they were uncomfortable with it because it gave them an inferiority complex was blown up into a second lead in a leading newspaper.

But what about the other side of the story of a deeply feudal India that led to this sense of inadequacy and the need for affirmative action to bring some degree of equality? That was not looked into at all.

In the last week, there have been many references to Rajeev Goswami, the poster boy of the 1990s anti-Mandal (eponymous movement named after the author of affirmative action for socially backward groups) student protests who attempted to immolate himself with cameras flashing and many watching.

That sight of the body in flames is seared in the collective memory of the nation, but has anybody in the last few days recounted the tragedy of the student who tried to become a leader, could not and finally died in relative obscurity at the age of only 33?

No. For many of us he is just a romantic figure and a mere means to stoke the fires of angry protests.

That effort to romanticise and glamorise youth anger has also been seen in many references to the "Rang De Basanti" generation and their anti-reservation sentiments.

"Rang De Basanti" generation? That same film where a group of youngsters cynically and cold-bloodedly murder the defence minister and a son is shown as mercilessly killing his father all in the name of idealism and patriotism. Is that the anarchy that we aspire for?

It would certainly look like it.

In savage contrast has been the blasé attitude towards Medha Patkar and her colleagues who launched their fast unto death. For days, nobody bothered about the high-profile activist as she sat under a scorching sun near Delhi's Jantar Mantar monument, hoping that someone would listen. Nobody did. It didn't merit much interest until she was on the verge of collapse.

Some ministers went to meet her and then on day eight the rest of the country woke up when she was forcibly taken to hospital in the dead of night. The land of Mahatma Gandhi turned a deaf ear when Patkar tried to give the thousands of tribals in the Narmada valley a voice.

Viciousness or sheer indifference? Both are equally worse as far as our reactions to the reservations issue or to the tribals of Narmada are concerned.

That sense of involvement was, however, more than evident as special programmes and many, many columns of news space were devoted to the Wills India Fashion Week and the one before that in Mumbai. Both events, as expected, attracted huge interest and lots of educated writing on the business of fashion - not very big anyway - and whether hems are up or down this season.

By the way, even as I wrote this piece, Salman Khan was declared guilty in a Jodhpur court of killing an endangered chinkara gazelle. And horror of horrors, the bad boy of Bollywood was even sentenced to five years in prison.

Enough grist to keep the TV channels going for the next couple of days at least.

Lucky for them, unlucky for Salman.

Why Reservation For OBC Is A Must

2006-06-01T23:09:00.000-07:00

Why Reservation For OBC Is A Must

By V.B.Rawat
18 April, 2006 Countercurrents.org

Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh declared government's intention to fix a quota for the Other Backward Castes (OBCs) in the premier government educational institutions like the Indian Institute of Technologies (IITs) and Indian Institute of Managements and other institutions of higher learning. While one know very well the intentions of Arjun Singh and his Congress Party, which was in the forefront of anti-Mandal agitation in 1990, it is important to analyse the nature of protest and fury of the upper castes in India. Why the same upper castes who burnt themselves today keep silent. Whether Arjun Singh and his party is just working on tokenism and refuses to learn lesson that the cry from the Dalit and backward today is political power which has not yet been over despite the fact that they had chief ministers and ministers. The administration remains strongly in the hands of the upper castes.

A Revisit to events in 1990 : A hero became villian

On August 7th, 1990 when Prime Minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh announced that his National Front government was going to implement the Mandal Commission Recommendations in Education and jobs, there was not much fury in the beginning. Slowly, a slanderous media campaign was launched particularly to attract circulation.

A middle class newspaper like Indian Express and its loud mouth Editor Arun Shourie became mouthpieces of the upper caste contempt to the Dalits and backwards. Shourie, worked not as an ethical journalist but as a hired lawyer who has to defend his case. Upper caste students and their parents went on rampage in North India. Suicide were committed by the innocent students as young as 8 years of age who might not have known what Mandal was and what was the meaning of reservation for the downtrodden. Clearly, two big brahmanical parties of the country, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party used this opportunity to target the government.
Lal Krishna Adavani decided to go on a Rathyatra to unite the Hindu society, which was 'divided' by V.P.Singh and his actions. There was a wave of anti Muslim sentiments in the middle classes. Advani became hero who revived the Hindu society and VP Singh became 'dushman number one' of the upper castes in India. Yes, the prime minister of the popular votes of India became the target number one because of reservations. All his merits became non functional once he ordered the implementation of the Mandal recommendations.
Commentators after commentators condoned the Hindutva and their thugs, their misdeeds and anti national act of spreading hatred and violence but none of them could ever muster the courage to support a prime minister who dared to go ahead against all odds.

Yes, one may not agree with VP Singh and his style of politics but one need to see his track record as an efficient minister and an honest Member of Parliament. It was for the first time in history of India that a government fell because it defended a shrine and committed its constitutional duties. Yes, Ayodhya's October 1990 events led to fall of V P Singh government. It is not for nothing that he decided to stay away from the parliamentary politics, disown prime ministership and is persistently being seen with the growing mass struggles in India when the so-called mainstream politicians are busy with their castes, religious sentiments. How many of them come and support Narmada or the cuase of dying farmers. When the slums were being dislocated none of the politicians dared to come out and challenge the court. But these things do not matter for the journalists who have decided that they have to oppose anything, which brings social justice.
V.P.Singh is nowhere in mainstream politics but his Mandalisation process has spread all over. That is the great achievement because the composition of our parliament has changed. Dalits and backward communities are asking for their share in power. The political parties have to listen to them and come to the reality. Today, thanks to Mandalisation process among the Muslims, the one time social justice hero Laloo has to go.

Conspicuous Silence

15 years later when Arjun Singh informs the journalists about the reservation policy, there is not much war by the upper castes though there is resentment by the 'meritorious' industrial houses who run on a monarchical basis. Again, the same talks of merit being affected and non-availability of the students from the backward and Dalit communities. It is amusing how people change their stand.

Industrialists like Rahul Bazaz, known for the shameless Hindutva lineage, remarked that reservation in the private sector would damage the credibility of big companies in India. The Bazazs should tell the world why most of the business works in India is done by the Bania community. North East South West, it is the Marwadis and Banias who have captured the major institutions with Brahmin their Gurus. The opponents of reservation should also inform why the scavenging work is fixed for the Valmiki community in India. Why is this 'Intellectual property Right' over certain work while ignoring others. Social scientists should also explain why no other community person is seen as doing scavenging work or carrying night soil over head. This meritorious upper caste would then hang their head in shame.
What is happening is most astonishing and show double standard. In 1990, the Dalits were in the forefront of supporting the Mandal Commission Recommendations meant for the backward communities.

Today, a number of 'Dalit' intellectuals, who would like to parade Dalit capitalists in Delhi, are asking for a creamy lawyer theory to implement the Mandal Commission Report. An example is being given here of the lone dissenter why should the dissenter argument be taken into account. Mandal gave a report and government accepted it in toto. A person like S.S. Gill who was member secretary of the Mandal Commission today condemns VP Singh for implementing it with political motivation. It is amusing when commentators write of political motivation. Why should not any work done with political motivation? Did not the backward communities voted for the government? It is also important to analyse as why some of the Dalit intellectuals are crying for fixing quota for the Most Backward Communities (MBCs).

Arun Shourie, who spearheaded anti Mandal agitation through his reckless writings and was later rewarded by the Sangh Parivar for persistently abusing the minorities through his newspaper columns, would never had imagined that Mandal would eat his own party. He might never have foreseen the growing assertion among all communities after it. Why was India burning in 1990 and quiet in 2006.
To be sure, in 1990, the people realized that the government that time was determined to give the Dalits and backward their due share in power. One need not to remind that Ministers like Ram Vilas Paswan and Sharad Yadav had become very powerful proponents of the Mandal Mantra. The government did not stay there only.

It was bringing a bill in parliament for labour reform particularly related to labours participation in Management, bill on electoral reform under Dinesh Goswami, autonomy to Prasar Bharati apart from putting Dr Ambedkar's statue in Parliament and honoring him with Bharat Ratna. Every of these acts had loud messages. It is this time that the Buddhists converts got right in job reservations. Mandal in 1990 changed the politics of the country. It gave an unprecedented and lethal weapon for the Dalit backward and Adivasis to come together. Every party had to understand the power of Mandal. Over the years, despite talks of globalisation and Hindutva, Mandalisation process continued. In the process, the upper caste leadership of the Hindutva gangs have to play second fiddle.
Right from Uma Bharati to Kalyan Singh and Narendra Modi, caste his forced the Sindhi Lal Krishna Advani to ponder over his own future and he is again on another Yatra, knowing fully well, that he has lost his caste battle. The upper castes are silent and protesting just in front of the cameras. A few papers that do not sale much are again trying to instigate people to protest but those who get everything at home cannot protest. Secondly, they know they have their own government and their opposition. A government which just pretend to work for the Dalits and backward and has no real intention to do so. Most of the people know that in Manmohan Singh's safe hand their interest are safe and would be looked after. After-all, Arjun Singh's own track record for social justice is laughable and his politicization of Ministry of HRD is well known. The tricks of anti Hindutva do not work all the time in the same way as the anti Muslim card of Advani failed miserably.

Why Opposition to reservation for backward communities

One needs to understand the psychology of opposition to Mandal. Reservation for Dalits was never implemented properly before 1990. Every time it was informed that due to lack of non availability of the candidates, seats remained vacant and quota was filled by the upper caste particularly those close to the people in power or with big bags. The 1990s changed that the backlog has to be filled with the candidates from the same community. Therefore 1990 is a watershed in the history of India and implementing the Mandal Commission Report VP Singh might have become the most hated politician of the country despite his impeccable credentials, yet, the politics of India has changed.
15 years later when Narsimha Rao crookedly with the help of the Hindutva brigade tried to undo what the Mandal had done. He went overboard to implement the privatization process and added fire to the Hindutva. Therefore, both the demolition of Babari Masjid and growing privatization were part of the Narsimha Rao era which some of our pen pushers termed as glorious. One need not to inform the readers here how Narsimha Rao died. Not a single tear was shed for him.

When the jobs are nowhere and everything is gone private, then why are the upper castes angry at reservation for backward communities? The fact is that seats for Dalits were rarely fulfilled and we had seen huge backlog. There has been no protest. It was easier to curtail the protest of the Dalits because of their numbers and social background. Now, the reservation for backward communities being a reality, the powerful backward communities will hit and break the bone of the upper castes. That is the fear of these. They know that there are enough students from these communities who will join the great institutions of technology and managements.
Today, these pen pushers pretend that reservation should only for the Dalits. Similarly, Dalit opportunists also dance to the tone of their brahmanical masters when they condemn reservation for the backward communities. It is a fact that many of the backward communities should not have been there in the list. But that is not a way to justify that there should not be reservation.
Discrimination despite merit
It is completely lie to say that Dalit and backwards are not doing business today or they lack ability. To say that there is no discrimination in India on the basis of caste is again a great lie which only insensitive caste Hindus can tell the whole world. Four years back I investigated a case of a very bright Dalit student Jyoti Prakash Vishwas who passed out from R.K.Mission School in Kolkata and was working as an engineer in a central government public sector company.
His Bengali bosses used filthy language against him and suspended him on various charges, which were found absolutely untrue by a team of human rights activists including me. Vishwas was not allowed to join a well paid job in a reputed private company. His wife who was working with Government of West Bengal was not given medical compensation as per company's rule.
After our fact-finding report came out, the management tried to strike a cordial note. Vishwas who by then had never knew what exactly was Dalit movement and discrimination realized what is the identity of a bright Dalit scholar. Two Years, when he left Delhi, Vishwas one day send me a mail from Saudi Arabia where he was working as an Engineer. He wrote: "Sir, I thank you for standing with me in my struggle against injustice. I know Dalits would not be able to get justice as long as they are part of Hindu system. I have decided to embrace Islam, a faith which give me strength and inner peace."

Those votaries of 'merit' should understand clearly well that things are not as easy as they think. A few days back when I was in Chhatishgarh and a Dalit student from National Law University Raipur came to me and informed me about the harassment he faced in the University. Despite the fact that he was the only candidate in his course of M.Phil/Ph.D/LLM, it took 3 years for the board of the college to accept his M.Phil and then deny him right for Ph.D. Yes, I talk about Abhishek Priya Anand, a student who completed his M.Sc from Hyderabad and qualified and ranked 8 th in the merit in the National Law college entrance test, today face a caste prejudiced Vice chancellor and his bureaucracy.
Will the Indian merit mongers ever think why they want to shut every door for the Dalits and backward communities? If Dalit converts to other faith, the Hindutva brigade is up in arm against it. There is no reform movement with in Hindu dharma where they can get justice. The jobs, which were reserved for them, have been privatized. Educational institutions rarely fulfill their quota. So demeaning are the upper castes that they are ready to get forged certificate of Dalit quota to get admitted in the University. In Delhi, a prominent doctor of a famous medical college got his MBBS degree on passing an entrance test under the SC quota. He produced a false certificate of adoption by a Dalit father. The fact was that his father's servant happened to be a Dalit. This upper caste doctor used his leverages and asked his servant to 'adopt' him to get admit. A Similar case of admission has been found in Lucknow by a Brahmin girl.

Creamy lawyer theory is dangerous at the moment

Unfortunately, some of the Dalit intellectuals have also jumped in to condemn the quota for the Dalits. These commentators are talking in terms of creamy lawyer theory. Question is let the government first implement the reservation only then creamy lawyer theory could be implemented. If the creamy lawyer theory could be implemented in the Mandal, then the same should be true for the Dalits also. And the same should be true for the upper castes also in the general seats. It is a dangerous preposition. It is a fact that the power elite of a community are the first to get the benefits of education and quota. Did not the Brahmin got it from the upper castes initially? There are so many of them but many of them have little representation in power structure. Same is true about Dalits and backward communities.
Of course, the politics of quota is dangerous. Arjun Singh's intention has been like that of his party. I am sure he know it well that Dalit and backwards are thoroughly politicized and are not going to be just 'vote bank' of any party. They are today running with confidence and asking for a share in power. While the political parties may not have implemented the reservation fully, the Most Backward Communities in Uttar-Pradesh have learnt a lesson from Bihar. The MBCs have already revolted against the political elites of the state and asking for their fair representation in power. Today, power is the real need of the people.
As far as jobs are concern, let the government bring a white paper on reservations and give us ideas as how long will it take it to complete its backlog. When can we see 17.5% IAS officers from Dalits, 27.5% from backward communities and 7.5% from tribal? Once the government fulfill its promise we can think of new ideas to give representation to MBCs and oppressed Dalits particularly women from these sections of society.

Reforms mean debrahmanising India

In a welfare state, the government cannot shy away from implementing reforms. Where are government reform for land, forest and water? If reform mean giving precious national assets to a few cronies of the power elites then the government has to be ready to face protest of various forms. Reform means that the government demolish its brahmanical structure.
Reform truly mean debrahmanisation process of India. It means India's corrupt caste structured village structure is hit from below the belt. For that a strong land reform measures need to be carried out. Our corrupt and caste-iests Industrial magnets are not ready for the same therefore face resistance from the people. Reform means that the upper castes should learn that time for hegemony has gone and it is time they learn to live together and respect diversity of India.

Reservation are going to stay as long as government does not reform itself and Hindu system remain caged in the age old myopic vision of division of work based on caste. Let us truly reform our society and work for a truly democratic India where every community participates in power and every person go to school irrespective of caste and creed.

Reservations risk Indian security, says former IB chief

2006-06-01T23:07:00.000-07:00

Guys

just read the editorial in Indian Express, It is a piece of s............
AK DOVAl, former head of IB has written that reservation is a security risk. LOL.
He gives the specious argument that due to reservations, the security of this country is threatened.
But, one should ask him what happened in 1962 as well as in Kargil. Why has India failed to get benefits from the Bangladesh war and its liberation.
Why we were thrown out of Srilanka after getting a heavy beating.
Why did the upper caste rulers always lost to the muslims and British.
To be frank the Indian Express has along with HT and Times of India launched an all out offensive against the depressed classes.
Its high time that these people are taught some lessons in civility and social justice.

Why Are We Opposed To Reservations?

2006-06-01T22:51:00.000-07:00

Why Are We Opposed To Reservations?
Prof Rahul Varman, IIT Kanpur

I teach at one of the IITs, and off late my students, colleagues, friends and relatives have been sending me mails, organising meetings, writing petitions, initiating e-tirades, etc. against the recent MHRD announcement and generally taking it for granted that I’ll join them in their protests. Each time they are taken by surprise when I decline their offer, try to mumble something as to why I do not agree with them, or sometimes simply keep quiet if I have the advantage of an impersonal medium like the email. But increasingly it has been hard to shrug the whole issue away - every time I open my mail box, or as I walk along the corridor, and even as I bid farewell to my students of the outgoing batch, the sentiment against reservations seem to be thick in the air intermixed with the feeling of unease when one does not make the ‘right’ noises. And therefore I’ll try to articulate at some length as to why I disagree with the ‘anti-reservationists’, (the issue is too complicated for a mere agree/ disagree vote); in spite of having little sympathy with MHRD and their ‘motivated’ methods.

Let me begin with an incident which occurred when I had just joined IITK way back in 1994. We were staying in the guest house then and some census officials knocked on our door one afternoon to make enquiries for filling up a questionnaire. On being asked about my caste my wife expressed her unawareness. When a brief consultation with each other trying to ‘categorise’ my surname did not yield any answer, the main person resolved the issue in an ingenious way. After confirming that I was a faculty member, he told his associate in quiet confidence, “likh do, Brahman honge”. The point that I want to stress here is that it is not suddenly that either Mr. Arjun Singh today, or 16 years earlier Mr. B P Mandal, suddenly injected the caste divisions into our society (or, for that matter, in the elite educational institutes) as is being alleged by those against the reservations. The caste divide very much exists everywhere in our society and especially so in any of these elite institutes; my claim would be borne out by the names on the doors along the corridors in the faculty corridors or during the roll call in any of the class rooms. Only thing is that those who are on the right side of the divide can choose to ignore it. This will also be borne out by various kinds of statistics if we bother to look at them.

Some say that instead of caste we should talk about the economic deprivation and by bringing caste reservations we’ll only bring in more divisiveness. I do not understand this argument; it is like saying that we should not address the gender oppression as an issue primarily concerning women, as men also have been sometimes oppressed; or that racial discrimination is not about the blacks and Hispanics in the US, as whites also are sometimes on the receiving end. Further, as if acknowledgement of this form of discrimination(s), instead of being a logical step towards affirmative action, would actually promote them. Coming back to reservations in the present context, it is true that a lot of men and upper castes are also oppressed, but here we are talking about a specific systemic historical subjugation of a massive magnitude, at present perhaps involving more than half a billion people. Reservations may not be answer to this problem but the issue cannot be addressed by bringing in every other kind of discrimination also while attempting to address this issue. Caste problem can be solved only by addressing caste issues; similarly if there are other discriminations that exist in the society (and of course they do) they need to be identified and addressed too, not substituting one form of redressal for the other. Further if the social and economic equity spreads it will not harden the caste identity but loosen it as I’ll argue further through the experience of the southern states later.

Of course the most important argument of those protesting is that it is against the ‘merit’, that it is going to keep the ‘meritorious’ students out and bring in lesser students due to reservations, which in turn will ‘lower’ the standards and destroy the excellence of such institutes, which has been so assiduously and precariously cultivated as a part of the post colonial nation building project. Now this argument is at various levels and we can examine various parts of it one by one.

The first part of the above argument is that reservations will bring students who lack merit and hence will lower the standards of the elite institutions; hence they should be kept away from such reservations. The point is that what does this merit really mean? In any exam where lakhs appear and only thousands get selected, it is not that rest are ‘bad’ but only that there are very limited opportunities. But does it mean that if we go down in the performance list of the exams, others are incapable of undergoing the training and we as an institution are incapable of teaching them in whatever it takes to make them a good professional? Remember we are talking of half a billion people when we say ‘backwards’. Can’t we find handful out of them who have the ‘capability’ to undergo the required training? To me the argument does not sound very different from the ancient times where by their birth a large number were excluded from learning Sanskrit or entering the temples. It is very much like Dronacharya refusing admission to Eklavya. Moreover, we do not seem to even recognise the odds that the children from disadvantaged face; my friend who is from a village 100 kms from Kanpur tells me that his village has just one school where hundreds study across classes with one 18 year old teacher for all the classes put together! And the point is that, even in this school, dalit children are not even allowed to drink from the public pot kept for the rest of the children. In contrast, is it merit when we see that overwhelming majority of those who clear the JEE and CAT are able to do so, only after spending huge resources, money and time, as will be borne out from the newspapers inserts everyday and hoardings at every corner in vast urban parts of the country? What this shows is the singular lack of opportunities and the desperation of educated youth to find a berth in the elite institutions that will catapult them into a different social and economic orbit. Now the point is that these berths are being reserved in one way so far, the question is are we ready to alter that process?

If something sets the elite institutions apart it is the enormous resources that they attract, both human as well as material. And I do not see what stops such individuals who enter even after reservations from becoming good professionals given proper nurturing and resources. As far as failing of students in such institutes is concerned we’ll find that students of all categories make such a list as the overwhelming reason for that is either lack of motivation and/ or the social context and not the lack of ability. Many students after clearing JEE, CAT, etc. lose the motivation to do well – they stop going to classes and studying and look for other expressions in life and simply feel alienated with the academics. The second reason is that many students simply find it hard to adjust to a westernised – elite culture of these institutions, especially those who come from rural or small town background. Since they are not able to find the right kind of supporting network of friends and peers they are not able to perform as a lot of learning in such institutions is collective. Many of the reserved category students have to further bear the stigma of coming through ‘quota’, of not being good enough and hence they get into a shell and are more likely to find themselves alienated, which finally reflects on their performance. If this is so, then what is required is more supporting systems within institutions and not stopping them at the gates.

As a teacher I have also seen cases where within a semester or two some of the so called ‘poor students’ are completely transformed. They have been able to adjust to the requirements of the system and flourish, may be with the help of a supporting friend, or a patient teacher, or through an activity where they could express themselves, or a combination of the above. Moreover if these institutes are not only abut learning inside the class as we never tire telling the fresh students, but about becoming a complete professional as so many alumni will vouch for, and transforming a teenager into a professional who is in touch with her surroundings, then of course this diversity can do wonders to the overall learning inside and outside the class rooms. I have learnt so much from those of my students who are different from my protected middle class upbringing – a village in eastern UP, a small town in Bihar, a construction site in Kerala, and so on. Though I understand nothing about the medical education, but I am sure if a student can bring his experience of a Chattisgarh village, it can contribute hugely to the real education in the class.

One can at this point ask a further question, is merit all about passing exams? After all, are the exams a means or an end? If the exams are means to look for ability to make better engineers, doctors and managers, then can there be better methods to look for such ability? After all in my first engineering class I was told that a good engineer is the one who can produce the best out of the least resources and similarly, management is supposed to find one’s way in an uncertain situation – or allocate scarce resources in the most optimal way possible. If that is so, whatever I have seen of our deprived masses (of which overwhelming majority belongs to the backward, dalit castes or adivasis), they have the astonishing capacity to make something productive from almost next to nothing! For the last few years I have been studying small industry clusters, like Moradabad brass, Varanasi silk and Kanpur leather. Put together (all the clusters in the country), they are exporting more than the IT sector and their cumulative employment will be several times of the whole of IT industry. In all these clusters they operate with miniscule resources – small investment, no electricity, forget about air-conditioning, non existent roads, lack of water, and little formal education. These clusters are primarily constituted of these so called backward/ dalit castes and are truly a tribute to the genius that our society is. But in spite of centuries of excellence these communities have hardly produced any formal ‘engineers’, ‘doctors’ and ‘managers’, and conversely these elite institutions have not developed any linkages with such industries and their people.

This brings me to a further question, what do ‘meritorious’ students from these institutions do when they pass out? I recall what Srilata Swaminathan, the noted activist, had said at the beginning of her talk at IIMA in the early 1990s (I at the time was a student there), “I am told that this is the cream of the country, and what do you do, sell soaps and toothpastes (ITC, HLL, etc. were the most coveted recruiters those days)?”. There was hushed silence in a room full of students and faculty. I remember in the mid-90s my sense of disbelief, when I was the placement coordinator for my department, the HR manager of one of the big three Indian IT companies told me, “as long as somebody can recognise a keyboard we take him” in response to my query about what they sought in a potential employee. Remember this company over the years has employed thousands of IIT-IIM engineers - managers. As a child I remember the famous surgeon in my home town, who would first cut up a patient and then renegotiate the price with the relatives, before proceeding with the surgery! Or everywhere around me I find ‘meritorious’ doctors employed in public hospitals, drawing comfortable salaries and doing roaring private practice! You are not even required to turn up in the village health centre even once if you have a rural posting. If the majority of our people usually have to do with the village quack, they would not mind a ‘slightly less meritorious doctor’ coming to take care of them, instead of finding solace in the fact that super-specialised doctors are ensuring that the elite of our country have no wrinkles, and such like grave ailments.

I recall when some students from IITK, almost all of them belonging to the North from UP to MP to Orissa, went to participate in post-Tsunami relief work in Tamil Nadu. After they came back the overwhelming feeling was this difference from the North that “things are different over there and they work!” My relatives and acquaintances prefer to go down south when they are seriously unwell and not to Delhi or Lucknow. Remember this is the same place which has implemented the ‘quota’ much before Mandal and much beyond it too. I hear of far less caste strife in Tamil Nadu than in UP where caste based reservations have been implemented for such a long time – it does not seem to have furthered the caste based identities in South into a full fledged war like Bihar and UP. Point is ‘merit’ is not about stopping somebody at the gates or throwing them out of these seats of learning, but in creating robust institutions which can cultivate and nurture the talent with all the complexities of a vast and disparate society that we are.

Let’s put the creamy layer argument also in perspective now. Point is that such elite education which has so many barriers – expensive and time consuming coaching, expensive education, elite culture, etc. is under the present order going to be a preserve only of a select few. All we are saying is whether it is going to be the preserve of a few higher castes or some of the other castes can also find an entry. Even if it is backward IAS’s daughter, so be it, finally many others are also IAS’s wards, so how does it make a difference? As has been rightly said by the critiques, it’s a populist measure for the votes. etc. But so is every single policy of the govt. and so it will be in a ‘vote bank democracy’ – either for the votes directly, or for generating resources for the next election. When an Ambani or an Enron is granted abominable concessions, why don’t we come on streets and say, “it is for money for the next elections.”

The difficulty perhaps is that we are only against certain kinds of reservation. When an Ambani becomes a CEO, when a Gandhi becomes a minister, we do not say it is against merit, when a professor whose son is not able to qualify JEE, is still able to send her child abroad for higher studies, we do not say it is reservation, when only Valmikis do all the cleaning work at IITK we do not say it is reservation, the point that we need to ponder is that why is it that we are only against certain kind of reservation and for certain kind of merit?

Finally for those of us who think that the present reservation exercise is ornamental and they would like to do something more basic and lasting, I recommend a reading of the Mandal report - they will find that the report goes to some length to capture the socio-economic indicators in understanding and classifying ‘backwards’. Moreover reservation is a small part of their recommendation which includes things like special coaching for the disadvantaged to basic issues like land reforms. The difficulty is that in all these years, only the naxalite movement seem to have taken up some of the radical suggestions of the Mandal Commission!

Meanwhile I have a question for those whose problem is the hasty implementation, that “how can we implement MHRD’s recommendations so suddenly?” After all, the report has been available for debate, discussion, modification and implementation for all these 16 years! Why is it that we have suddenly woken up to bother about primary – secondary education as well as the economic upliftment of the masses, only when the government has started acting in its own bumbling ways? As far as I know, no academic body or business institutions like CII has debated these issues and no committees have been setup to examine the Mandal report all this while.

Finally, history is catching up in its own imperfect ways. We need to ponder whether these institutions are meant only for supplying cheap labour for the American corporations. If they have to be more than that, the time has come for us to be self critical and look beyond the knee jerk response to the present quagmire.

Backwardpeople

2006-05-28T09:12:00.000-07:00

The Independent Dalit Movement and the Challenge ofSavarna Cooptation

Yoginder Sikand

One of the greatest challenges before the contemporaryDalit movement is the threat of cooptation by SavarnaHindu forces. Historically, conquest and physicalsubjugation of Dalit and Adivasi communities by Savarna Hindus has gone along with a gradual processof absorption of these communities into the castesystem, with these communities being relegated to thebottom of the caste hierarchy as slaves or worse.

This historical process entailed a re-writing of thehistory and myths of these communities in such a wayas to promote Savarna hegemony and Dalit and Adivasienslavement.
This process of refashioning of myths and histories ofthese communities is underway today as well. Hindutvaas well as Gandhian organizations, often with statebacking, have been hard at work to Hinduise these communities, which, in other words, means to furtherentrench their marginalisation and the hegemony of theSavarnas.

At the same time, every effort is beingmade to prevent the Dalits from mobilizingautonomously for their rights independent of Savarna tutelage and control. Independent Dalit activism isseen as threatening Savarna privileges and hence as amenacing threat, denounced routinely as 'divisive','casteist' and 'anti-national'.

A recently published booklet recently brought out bythe Gandhian Institute of Studies, Varanasi, clearlyindicates that on the question of the independentDalit struggle seemingly do-gooder Gandhians as well Hindutva chauvinists think alike.

Titled'Manufacturing History Through Falsehood: Revisitingthe Dalit Movement in India', it quotes both Gandhi aswell as Hindutva ideologues to launch a bitterdiatribe against Dalit leaders and ideologues who insist on the separate, independent mobilization ofDalits against Savarna Hindu oppression.

The booklet's major purpose is to absolve the Savarnasof their role in the oppression of the Dalits andhence to steer the Dalits away from challengingSavarna hegemony. It is not the Savarnas, the bookletseems to suggest, that the Dalits should be mobilizingagainst.
Hence, it seeks to provide a defence of thecaste system, extolling its supposed virtues anddenouncing any critique of it. Not willing torecognize the fundamental inequality and oppression on which the caste or varna system is based, it insists,'The details of the Varna system were always innovatedand up-to-dated (sic.) as per the need to (sic.) thesociety, but Varna Vyavastha and Varna dharma has (sic.)
remained an integral part of Hindu dharma fromthe earliest period till the present times'.
It arguesthat varna is based on qualities of a person and aperson can therefore shift from one varna to another, completely ignoring the fact that this was probablynever true in the past and is most certainly not thecase today. Seeking to provide a pseudo-scientificdefence of the Varna system, it argues that theBrahmins are 'undoubtedly most revered and privileged' because they supposedly possess various noble virtues.
It quotes numerous Hindu religious texts to argue thispoint. Significantly, there is not even a hint ofcritique of Brahminical texts, from the Vedas down to the Ramayana and after, for the harsh strictures theycontain against the Shudras and the Dalits.
The booklet recognizes the practice of untouchability,but every effort is made to minimize its magnitude andinhumanity.
Thus, it claims that the proportion ofpeople actually treated as untouchables is miniscule, arguing, without citing any proof, that in the earlytwentieth century British administrators estimatedthem to be a mere 3.5% of the total population ofIndia. Blaming the British for allegedly creating acategory of untouchables, it claims that by 'cleverlyordain[ing] some special facilities for them', theymanaged to get several more castes to definethemselves as untouchables, thus inflating theirnumbers.

Likewise, the Adivasis were allegedly instigated by the British to declare themselves asseparate from the Hindus, and in this they wereallegedly enticed by offers of special facilities. Itis as if the British magically conjured up the Dalitsand Adivasis from nowhere, and that prior to thisthere was absolutely no consciousness on the part ofthese oppressed communities of the inhuman conditionsunder which they had to live as a result of Savarnadomination.
There is also in this argument a clearattack on reservations and other forms of affirmativeaction for Dalits and Adivasis, which are seen asencroaching on the privileges of the Savarnas. Turningto the present day, the booklet opposes the notion ofa separate Other Backward Classes category andpolicies of affirmative action for these groups onsimilar specious grounds. The inane argument it givesin its defence is that 'It is impossible to divide the highly spiritually-advanced, complex Bharatiya societyinto such primitive groups and understand itscharacteristics with such an immature approach'.

The booklet reluctantly recognizes the practice ofuntouchability, but Savarna Hindus are sought to bespared all responsibility for it. Instead, Muslims areblamed for the practice, although, of course, this goes quite against all historical evidence.
Thus, thebooklet argues, 'Untouchability and excommunicationgrew when Hindu society was facing very difficulttimes', an indirect reference to the period ofTurkish, Afghan and Mughal rule. At the same time, it is at pains to defend untouchability onpseudo-scientific grounds. Thus, it argues,"[U]ntouchability out of consideration for purity andcleanliness had nothing to do with any kind ofhardness of heart but is the result of the requirements of hygiene and cleanliness and also dueto psychological or religious views.

The nearest anddearest women relatives, such as one's own mother ordaughter or wife were to be 'untouchable' during their monthly periods. The most affectionate friends wereuntouchable during the mourning period". In this way,the seriousness of the permanent untouchability of theDalits is sought to be dismissed, being equated with the temporary ritual untouchabilty that some Savarnaswere subjected to by their fellow Savarnas on certainoccasions.

The booklet claims that 'The Smritis do not say thatthe untouchables or antyajas cannot worship the Hindudeities', but conveniently ignores the horrendousstrictures against the Dalits and Shudras contained in the Smritis and other Hindu scriptures. It seeks toargue that the Dalits have never been subjected tooppression by the Savarnas, neither in the past nor inthe present. After whitewashing the history of crimes committed by Savarnas against Dalits that aresanctioned by the Brahminical religious tradition, thebooklet then shifts to the present-day, making thesame sort of specious claims.

Thus, for instance, itargues that 'When the Constitution of IndependentIndia was prepared, untouchability was declared acrime and no Hindu opposed it'. The continued practiceof untouchabiluty all over India is ample testimony tothe ridiculousness of this claim. The booklet offersthe example of some Dalit leaders holding importantpolitical posts and insists that this shows that'mainstream Hindus, believing in the caste system,have elected and honoured so-called untouchable leaders in recent times'. There is no reference, ofcourse, to the fact that several of these leaderscontinued to be derided even after the assumedimportant positions of power, and that the ordinarySavarna continue to deeply resent what is seen to be their wrongful usurpation of positions that theyconsider as meant for Savarnas alone.

Clearly, as the booklet suggests, as far as the issueof independent mobilization of Dalits, Adivasis andother similarly placed marginalized communitiesagainst Savarna hegemony is concerned, there is little to distinguish Gandhians from rabid Hindutvawadis.Whatever their other differences, they are bothequally opposed to these oppressed communities seekingto struggle for their rights on the basis of their own identities, instead of subsuming them under aSavarna-led Hindu umbrella.

Backwardpeople

2006-05-27T01:02:00.000-07:00

OU students rally for instant quota

[ Thursday, May 25, 2006 03:28:26 amTIMES NEWS NETWORK ] HYDERABAD:
]
Students of Osmania University have demanded that the OBC reservation approved by the Union government should be implemented from the current academic year (2006-07) itself and not the next, as proposed by the government.
The Tuesday night's decision by the government to implement 27 per cent quota for OBCs in top educational institutes like IITs, IIMs and central universities across the country was hailed by BC students and professors of the university, but at the same time they demanded that the reservation be implemented from this academic year itself.
Hundreds of students of the university took out a rally from Arts College to Tarnaka and staged a rasta roko there on Wednesday morning.
As they were holding up traffic, the police stepped in and asked them not to resort to such measures. Moreover, they did not have permission to take out a rally, the police added.
"I reasoned with the agitating students that their demonstration should not inconvenience others and since they did not have the permission to stage the dharna, they had to leave.
The protesters obliged," said P Narsimhulu, circle inspector, Osmania University. "We read in the newspapers that the quota will be implemented in 2007 after a bill to this effect is passed in the monsoon session of Parliament...
...
But we want the BC quota be implemented this academic year, at least in IITs and IIMs, where the admissions process will begin shortly.
As it is, despite having a constitutional amendment to implement the quota long back, pressure from upper castes has prevented the government in doing so until now.
We do not want any more delays, since the government has already decided on giving the quota," said BC Students' Union state president Rajaram Yadav, who was part of the demonstration.
Yadav and his fellow protesters said that if the government plans to increase the seats in general category, even those seats should be considered for quota.
That is, if there is 27 per cent reservation in 100 seats and 50 more seats are added in the general category, 27 per cent quota should be given to them in the increased 50 seats as well.
Meanwhile, anti-reservation lobbies are using the wireless network to spread their message far and wide. Phones are buzzing with messages.
Several unconfirmed reports and rumours of deaths of agitating doctors are being SMSed country wide, exhorting people to fight reservation.
While some messages talk of alleged death of two doctors after during an anti-reservation rally, some others are in lighter vein and say "majority of persons who may be drowning in an 'Indian Titanic' will not be saved, because most of the life boats will be reserved for SC/STs and BCs

Backwardpeople

2006-05-27T00:49:00.000-07:00

To my meritorious friends
Despite the efforts to foment widespread resentment among the students community on the question of reservations being extended to OBCs by the Brahmin Baniya media, print and electronic, rightly fearing that the reservations next being extended to private sector, have not succeeded.

It is because the editors of this media have a vested agenda mandated to them by the press barons who pay them and the upper caste label bequeathed to them by their parents make them naturally biased and so they lack professional integrity as is evident from the fact that they are putting forth only the antireservtionist views to appease their masters and appease their upper caste ego.

How shameful that Mumbai edition of a national newspaper started with the catch line that let there be light showed that the spreadsheet paper lacks light. How shameful! Such people are indeed manuwadil lacking moral courage.

This media constantly misguides the gullible masses about basic concepts like the tenure of reservations, which are essentially for representing the 85% population of India the OBCs/SCs/STS/DTNTs/VJNTs (along with such other groups from religions like Islam and Christianity which are yet to be included) in all walks of life.

Article 334 of the Constitution which deals with reservations in the House of People and state legislative assemblies specifying time limit that can be extended by constitutional amendment has nothing to do with reservations in educational institutions funded by the State as well as employment opportunities which come under the purview of the State.

In short in the zeal of adding motive to facts the media conveniently ignores article 15(4) as amended by the 93rd amendment adds clause (5), which reads as "(5) Nothing in this article or in sub-clause (g) of clause (1) of Article 19 shall prevent the State from making any special provision, by law, for the advancement of any socially and educationally backward classes of citizens or for the Scheduled Castes or the Scheduled Tribes in so far as such special provisions relate to their admission to educational institutions including private educational institutions, whether aided or unaided by the State, other than the minority educational institutions referred to in clause (1) of article 30 ” in addition to article 16(4), and 46 of the Constitution which very rightly keeping in mind the socio economic reality of the Indian society does not make it obligatory to the State to spell the time limit for such type of reservations.

Secondly the media barring exceptional examples like Outlook and Frontline magazines produce one-sided interviews of aberrational examples of failures of few students who could not cope with the studies forgetting at the sometime the successful many. I am sure the Brahmin baniya media has missed Mandal 2 bus this time perhaps they might be trying to catch Kamandal 2 bus now. Amen! Ayushyman Kamble

Backwardpeople

2006-05-25T09:53:00.000-07:00

Reservation Debate: A Great Opportunity To Restrengthen Dalit Bahujan Alliance

By V.B.Rawat -

One need to give due credit to V.T.Rajshekar, editor of Dalit Voice, Banglore, for wonderfully explaining the issue of merit and reservation. Rajshekar himself faced threat when he was in Delhi during those heydays of anti Mandal agitation of the upper caste youths 1990-91. Mr Rajshekar has a sharp mind who understand well the brahmanical crookedness and has been really well ahead of his contemporaries in analyzing caste system in India.

He is quoted two excellent judgment of Justice Krishna Iyer and Justice Chinappa Reddy in his thought provoking article " The Myth of Merit and Efficiency Dalit Voice January 16th, 1987. I take liberty in quoting the wonderful judgment of Justice Krishna Iyer and Justice Chinnapa Reddy from the article for the benefit of readers.

Justice Krishna Iyer of the Supreme Court says in the ABSK Sangh case 1981)
"Trite arguments about efficiency are a trifle phoney. ... We are not impressed with the misfortune about the governmental personnel being manned by morons, merely because a sprinkling of harijans and Girijans happened to find their way into the service. The malady of modern India lies elsewhere, and the merit monger are greater risks in many respects than the native tribals, and slightly better off lower caste.

.. The fundamental question arises, as to what's 'merit' and 'suitability'? Elitists, whose sympathies with the masses have dried up, are from standards of Indian people, least suitable to run the government and least meritorious to handle the state business. ...
A sensitized heart and vibrant head tuned to the tears of the people, will speedily quicken the developmental needs of the country... Sincere dedication and intellectual integrity - these are some of the components of merit and suitability- not a degree from Oxford or Cambridge, Harvard or Simian.

Unfortunately, the very orientation of our selection process is distorted and those like the candidates from Scheduled Castes whom from their birth, have a traumatic understanding of the conditions of agrestic India, have in one sense more capability than those who lived under affluent circumstances and are callous to the human lot of the sorrowing masses."

According to Justice Chinnappa Reddy of the Supreme Court :
"There is no statistical basis or expert evidence to support the assumption that efficiency will be impaired if reservation is continued or if reservation exceeds a certain percentage or reservation is extended to promotional posts."
Justice Chinnappa Reddy of Supreme Court said (in the Railways case 1881) "Therefore, we see that when the posts ... are reserved ... to members of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and other socially and economically Backward Classes it is not a concession or privilege extended to them, it is in the recognition of their undoubted fundamental right to equality of opportunity and ...and to secure to all its citizens, justice, social, economic and political and equality of status and opportunity ... to ensure their participation on an equal basis in the administration of the country ..

What is merit?

Perhaps those campaigning against reservation may not even know that Justice Krishna Iyer, one of India's most illustrious judicial reformists made such a scathing remark on the issue of merit.
The fact of the matter is that upper Hindus, their masters in the media and business rarely read books. They are not bothered about human rights. Rarely would they feel apologetic about what their forefathers have done to the Dalits.

The violence against Dalits, Adivasis and backward communities is still rampant. None of our brothers want to discuss on this and carry a campaign against the same.

They are equally not bothered about getting a seat through money and muscle power. Watch at any railway station they would like to book reserve seat for them. Why cannot they go in general category if they are so enamored with General. You oppose reservation where you feel others will damage your 5000 years hegemony. You support it where you can buy it.

The same upper caste Hindus are back in action after a long wait of useless sitting. They did not come in the street when Gujarat was burning. No doctor boycotted Praveen Togadia, a shame on medical profession who warned doctors not to treat the Muslims.
They did not come to the street when Ayodhya's Babari Mosque was demolished 1992. They cannot come to the street when Hindus in Kashmir are massacred. They do not cry against the Sharmas who are involved in a majority of criminal cases for the last ten years.
Beginning from the tandoor famous Sushil Sharma to Shivani murder case R.K.Sharma and then onwards hundreds of Sharmas are behind the bar facing criminal charges. No upper caste in the street come forward to condemn Sharmaisation of crime. During the British period the same upper castes with the help of their British bosses declared some of the Dalits and backward communities as criminal tribe.
If one Mushhar was caught for stealing a piece of bread, the entire Mushhar community was branded as thief. Similarly, Gujars were declared as criminal tribes. Upper castes have no time to think over it, for they think it is not their issue.

They are born to rule the country and therefore when the political system is Mandalised, they still feel they can still rule the country through media and bureaucracy. Sorry, their time has gone.
Debate on Merit therefore is gaining ground. We are hearing Trivedis, Chaturvedis, Malhotras, Guptas, Sanghvis, Chawalas on the virtue of a 'meritorious' society. One does not know what do they mean by meritorious society. Let us start to unravel some facts of merit.

As Ambedkar once wittingly said that Hindus failed to write even their two great epics the Mahabharata and Ramayana. We all know that these epics were written by sage Vyasa and sageValmiki.
The third Epic, the constitution of Modern India was written by Ambedkar himself. All three happened to be Dalits.Where was the merits of upper castes. Of course, when a Brahmin heads the Maths in Badrinath or Chennai, Varanasi or Tirupati, there are no open tenders.
In all other communities including Christians, Sikhs, Muslims, any one can become priests. There are some procedures and when they pass out they become priests. In the racist Varnashram Dharma there is no meritorious quota fixed for being a priest.

After all, a priest should be not only knowledgeable but also look respecting the 'freedom, equality and liberty'. Instead, they abuse and spit fire. That is Hindu way of life. Always being crooked, cunning and pretending very liberal. Where are liberal Hindus who can discuss quota?

South Indian states led by Tamilnadu have more than 69% quota and as a recent report in Frontline suggests not a single institution has been affected due to efficiency of merit.
Karnatka, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh are also following the same pratice and yet without any social backlash.

In fact as noted Bahujan historian Kancha Illaiah rightly says, South Indian states are better governed than their north Indian states despite high dose of reservation. There is no such protest against reservation. But after making Banglore the hub of North Indian activities, they are back to same dirty tactics.

Meritorious reporters

Strangely, the debate on merit is started by those who are not meritorious at all and sitting there from one connection or others. Editors once upon a time were sensitive enough to social cause but today their first loyalty is towards their supplier.
Most of the editors are more involved in 'Jugad' with political parties, sitting with them and asking for a favor. Can the editors and those pretty faces on the TV channels claim they are the best to represent the country?
Since you do not want to see the ugly side of your own faces, you close eyes and say you are unaware of it. Let us discuss some of the merits of our editors.
Some of them got to the job with political connections. One editor of a famous news weekly has a Sangh background. It was said that he could not write even two pages of a report in English.
Today, he heads such a big organization and under him are a number of meritorious editors suffocating and grinning. There are similar stories in other media organizations where the meritorious reporters and editors have to work with politically crooked fellows.

I would not like to name here personally but the fact is those preaching us merit should disclose their educational background and where they stood in their classes. It would make anything by just saying that they passed out. Writing, they say, come from sensibilities of society. British and European scholars visit India, stay in villages and respect its diversity and have contributed more than our own social scientists because of the dishonesty of its upper caste intellectual class.

Why are Indian editors and writers behaving racially? Why is that the Dalits are now forced to write their own history? It is simply because our history has been a victim of brahmanical notoriety, the value system of Hindus which hid everything which was meant for social justice.

It is also necessary for these upper caste reporters to understand what India is. You cannot understand India by just reporting from Kargil from the bunker of army? Neither can you report from injecting upper caste mind on all us. For any reporter, understanding India's diversity and social issues is a must. But then why should TV channels bother about these.

Their concern is to make a few of them as star.
Those who have watching TV for the past 12 days would certainly want to ask question on the merit of the editors. Do we deserve 24 hours Mahajan Puran for several days on our bedrooms? No doubt he was a young leader who died an unnatural death.

Surely, he was a great manipulator of things, so-called strategist but that does not make him a mass leader. Going by the same criteria the channels should have devoted a few days to inform us about the greatness of Dr Rajkumar, a great Kannadiga or MGR who people worshipped in Tamilnadu. The same channels and great editors would not give a page or 5 minutes tribute to K.R. Narayanan or Gyani Jail Singh, two great former presidents of India.

The caste Hindus and their dirty minds would always play game in India. They would like us to believe what they believe. Fortunately, we still do not vote according to the whims and fancies of these insincere reporters, a complete prostitution of a sane profession.

South African blacks need reservation now

A number of backward castes and Dalit intellectuals have been roped in to inform people that reservation is against merit. Indian Express recently carried out a report from South Africa and how it is working on affirmative action.

The fact of the matter is Nelson Mandela was unable to extract any thing specific for the blacks. One has to see history that Mandela is more popular abroad than in his communities. The demand for participation in power has to come through quota. If the same whites who ruled Africa for years and crushed it, are ruling without any challenge on their authority with a 'black' head of state, that does not mean any change.

One has to remember that Mandela after his release came to India first in February 1991 when the country was facing the worst-ever upper caste protests against reservation. Mandela refused to speak on it. Clear enough, Mandela became bigger than the issue of South African blacks.

The result was that South African cricket team still is a white team and the bureaucracy is still dominated by the whites. If change of power mean transfer of power from one prime minister to other, then South Africa has achieved all its goal but if change means power to the people, South African leadership has failed in that direction. One is sure Mobuki knows this better than his predecessor.

The Neighboring Zimbabwe when tried to implement Land Reforms, the white human Rights Organizations came against Robert Mughave.
He was termed as racist and undemocratic. Every time there has been efforts by Robert Mughave to provide land to the black poor, international agencies criticized him. Even when he won elections on a massive mandate, charges of forgery made against him. This is West's style to downgrade democracy and put in their interests.

Land Reform and Reservation: Undoing Historic Wrongs
One has to understand that reservation and Land Reform go hand in hand. Land Reform brings to a large number of rural landless people into the mainstream. It is meant to undo historic wrong while quota in the government services mean representation in power structure.
It has to be proportionate based. Often argument is given that Dalits and backward do not compete with the upper caste students. What could be far from truth is that such lies continue to spread through media. I am sure they should know that a large number of Dalits in the bureaucracy are functioning relatively better than their upper caste counterparts. Some of them have been writing in daily newspapers. Dalit academia has come up and writing their history which has been concocted by the upper caste historians.

The case of Justice KG Balakrishnan is a reminder. Justice Balakrishnanas' name was Suggested by late President K.R.Narayanan.
The media made hue and cry. Narayanan wrote that there are many efficient judges from Dalits, Backward and tribal categories and they should be given representation in judiciary.

The answer he got from the Government was that Balakrishnan was competent judge but underage. But the real fear was that if Justice Bala Krishanan is not denied due opportunity, he would be one of the longest serving Chief Justices of Indian Supreme Court, nearly for six years.

That is the matter of concern for the manipulators. Upper castes wanted judiciary to remain in their hands so that all the executive order are abolished by judicial judgments under the false pretext of Public Interest Litigations.
Hindus are expert in these litigations and become leaders after filing them in the court. It is not easy for any other community particularly for Dalits, OBCs and Adivasis to file PIL and get accepted.

Recently, an outlook story pointed out how a senior officer belonging to Scheduled Castes was first made Deputy Governor and then demoted.
Such injustices against Dalits happen in large number. If there is no quota, we know the upper castes have no respect for merit. They will want an India led by the North Indian Brahmins and their Bania chums. Since the political environment has changed therefore they are targeting educational institutions.

Our Industries so far are domain of Marwaris run on family business. I am sure Rahul Bajaj would not appoint any other meritorious person as head of his organization against his own children. I am sure he wont claim that he has the best brain.

Dalit and backwards are running business now

As far as Dalits and backwards are concern, no body can put any doubt on their merit. They are running business institutions and even banks.
Siddhartha Bank in Maharstra, Kunbi cooperative Bank in Konkan, Banks in the name of Ambedkar in and around Madhya Pradesh are working and succeeding. Blaming Dalits for just 2% of job is Another calumny, which the Hindus are experts in over the year. One needs not to tell these guys as who are the people who make 'Dastkar' or 'Fab India' what they are today.
How come the upper castes minting money on the excellence and work of Dalit Adivasi women in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharastra. Do upper caste reward them with this merit?
Today, Dr Narendra Jadav is one of the most respected

Economists in Government of India and deputed to Central Bank of Afganistan to support build financially strong Afganistan. This upper caste phobia of reservation against merit has to be rebutted. To run a country and its administration, we need diversity reflected in our masses. A few Brahmins and Marwaris cannot represent India. You have to give fare representation to Linguistic and religious minorities. Dalits, Adivasis and backward communities have faced discrimination for years and therefore they need special attention by the governments.

Lesson for backward communities: Dalits face brunt of the upper castes for supporting backward communities. It is not unusual that Dalits were in the forefront of support to Mandal Commission Report. That was a time when Dalit Bahujan concept materialized. Unfortunately, because of short term gains of our political leaders, all succumbed to Hindutva game plan.
Backwards became champion of Hindutva gang and started hitting the Dalits in their respective power domain. Whether it is Yadavas in UP and Bihar or Thewars in Andhra or Gujjars in Uttar-Pradesh and Haryana, backward communities worked as a foot soldiers of their brahmanical bosses.

But in this important battle for reclamation of their rights, backwards have found that they lack a complete political will to fight this battle. They should now humbly follow the Dalits in this battle of reservation. Dalits have Ambedkar, Phule as their icons and backwards would do well to gain from

Ambedkar and his writings.
In the meanwhile, all Dalit bahujan should join hand against the upper caste onslaught on their rights. Remember, the brahmanical forces of the cow belt are afraid of losing their hegemony. They have already lost the political battle. They run politics on crookedness. It is time the Dalits, backwards, Adivasis come together and give a fitting reply. Organise debates and debunk the upper caste merit. Merit is nothing but a Dronacharya syndrome. That was past. Today in the 21st century such Dronacharyas would be taught a lesson.

India cannot gain if a majority of its population is absent from power structure. Let us force the government to implement quota fully. Let government bring out a white paper on reservation and tell us what exactly is the percentage of Dalits,and backwards in government services. Give us report categories wise. Let us demand that where are 27% backward IAS officers or 17.5% Dalit IAS officers in government if quota is fairly implemented.
Meanwhile, the Medical students would do well to study their classes and think of their future. Such blackmailing on part of them would be counterproductive for India's health. Let this debate also build up a formidable alliance of Dalit Bahujan which got derailed in the past.

The upper caste protest therefore will ultimately help us realize the long cherish dream of unity of all the oppressed communities led by the Dalits. For the Dalit backward Member of Parliament, it is time to awake and arise. Put the entire reservation for OBCs, Dalits and Adivasis in IX Schedule of the constitution so that it remained outside the judicial scrutiny, as has been the case in Tamilnadu.

Perhaps, this anti reservation rhetoric of the upper caste 'spiritual' medical practitioners, a majority of whom are unethical and follow Tantra and have allowed to build temples outside ICUs of the hospitals against rational medical practices, will help Dalits and bahujan communities to sink their differences and draw a common strategy to secure their future

Backwardpeople

2006-05-25T09:33:00.000-07:00

It is certainly true that reservation for O.B.Cs. will cause a lot of heart-burning to others. But should the mere fact of this heart burning be allowed to operate as a moral veto against social reform. A lot of heart burning was caused to the British when they left India . It burns the hearts of all whites when the black protest against apartheid in South Africa . When the higher castes constituting less than 20 per cent of the country’s population subjected the rest to all manner of social injustice, it must have caused a lot of heart burning to the lower castes. But now that the lower castes are asking for a modest share of the national cake of power and prestige, a chorus of alarm is being raised on the plea that this will cause heart burning to the ruling elite. Of all the spacious arguments advanced against reservation for backward classes, there is none which beats this one about ‘heart burning’ in sheer sophistry.
Report of the Backward Classes Commission, 1980 (Mandal Commission), First Part, Chapter XIII, pages 57 & 58. Government of India 1980.

Backwardpeople

2006-05-25T09:23:00.000-07:00

Reservation for OBCs - Lessons from the new intolerance

Harish Khare – The Hindu, 12-04-2006

Whether or not the IIMs and IITs are forced to open their doors a little wider, the new fashionable intolerance exhibited in these last few days should be a sobering experience for all of us.
THESE LAST few days have witnessed a fascinating battle for the control of the public discourse. A handful of newspapers and a couple of English language television channels have done their best to stoke a 1990-type hysteria over the proposed new reservation regime in Central educational institutions.

Television crews have been despatched to find voices of "merit" that are aghast at the very idea that institutes of management, presumed bastion of merit and competition, are now sought to be pried open to admit children of the lesser gods. Captains of industry are on record as to how a few hundred seats in management schools will erode India's competitiveness in this age of globalisation.

A twist has been given to the controversy by casting Union Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh as the villain of the piece. All this in the belief that if enough hype is created, the decent man, Manmohan Singh, will intervene and put an end to this "mischief" afoot. Even the nice and sincere gentlemen in the Election Commission allowed themselves to be taken in by this elite media noise.

There is little chance of resurrecting the 1990-type hysteria. The reason is simple. The 1990 agitation could be sustained because the largest political party, Congress, lent its support to the anti-Mandal agitation. Rajiv Gandhi's Congress was peeved at the Raja of Manda making it to the Prime Minister's chair.

When the V.P. Singh Government opted for the Mandal report, the Congress brought into play all its muscle power to create an illusion of a massive backlash against the reservation regime. Those self-immolations were all paid for by a cynical political party. The V.P. Singh Government had to go not because of the anti-Mandal agitation but because of the intractable intrigues within the Janata Dal. But in popular historical perception, "Mandal" is deemed the cause of Mr. Singh's downfall. Two years later, the same Congress took credit for implementing the Mandal scheme.

2006 is not 1990. The Mandal initiative has helped to change the face of the Indian polity and society. The grammar of entitlement has become part of the language of Indian politics. There can be a debate on how to go about it but all political parties accept the logic and reality of the Constitution (93rd Amendment) Act, 2005. As and when the Human Resource Development Ministry comes up with a Bill commensurate with the 93rd Amendment, Parliament and the country will get to debate the issue anew.

But the 2006 controversy has only reminded one and all of how entrenched social prejudices remain and how deep runs the hostility to change in areas where it matters the most. Suddenly it seems fashionable to speak of "them" who now dare want to enter the holy portals of management and technology institutes.

All political systems witness a continuous struggle over societal resources, according to the accepted rules of the game. In India these rules are prescribed in the Constitution but are always reinterpreted according to the distribution of power. As it were, power — political and electoral — has passed into the hands of the less socially and educationally advanced groups.

And it is only a matter of time before the logic of democracy and numbers asserts itself in every sphere of social activity.
Today it is the IIMs and IITs that are sought to meet the demands of social justice, tomorrow it will be the private sector that will be called upon to broad-base its mostly caste-based personnel structures. Those who demand and get, and prosper from the state's protection cannot remain oblivious to its obligation to engineer some kind of equity.

The crux of our present day dilemma was foreseen many years ago by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. In the last sitting of the Constituent Assembly, he noted: "We are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics, we will be recognising the principle of one man-one vote and one vote-one value. In our social and economic life, we shall by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man-one value.
How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril.

We must remove this contradiction at the earlier possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this assembly has so laboriously built up."

Dr. Ambedkar, social justice, egalitarianism, and equity seem obsolete to the influential sections of the Indian society. Our discourse-manufacturers have worked themselves into a comfortable delusion that the "market" has made India a vast level-playing field and therefore any suggestion of any kind of affirmative action is a violation of some sacred mantra.

"Reservation" is deemed one of those devious stratagems these undesirable politicians are forever devising just to keep themselves in power. It is taken as an affront to a new India that thinks of itself as a partner in a cosmopolitan march to prosperity. The unstated claim is that the market has cured India of all its social inequalities and inequities.

Power of the market
The assumption is that the 300-million strong consumerist middle class has sorted out its caste stratifications and is now uniformly and unanimously worshipping on the altar of merit and competence. The curative power of market has melted away social distinctions and disadvantages.

Politics and politicians have failed India and they should not be allowed to dispel the market magic. This middle class, the assumption goes, is capable of propelling India into becoming a super economic power and is smart enough to engage with the global economy on competitive terms. In any case, this middle class need not be hobbled by the burden of the rest of the 700 million and their deprivations.

In the midst of the market euphoria, there is a strong reluctance to see, let alone acknowledge, inequalities. Take for instance the controversy a few months ago over the so-called "Muslim headcount" in the armed forces. The voices that raised a din on the Muslim headcount are, more or less, the same kicking up a shindy on "reservation."
Last year, for example, only 11 Muslim candidates could make the grade out of the 422 men and women selected for the IAS, IFS, IPS and other Central services.
Of these 11, eight made it in the category of Other Backward Classes (OBC). No one wants to acknowledge the near-systemic marginalisation of the largest minority in the country.

Yet any attempt to even catalogue discrimination and disadvantages faced by the minorities is immediately dubbed anti-merit, anti-progress, and anti-national. As long as a problem is not acknowledged, there will be no obligation to find a solution.

But precisely because the new economy is creating new inequalities in our society, the Indian state and its political instruments are duty-bound to find ways of institutionalising some kind of fairness. This duty has become even more pronounced now that the state has been forced to retreat from many areas of economic activity.

If the politicians were not to address themselves to the aspirations and dreams of the socially disadvantageous groups, the polity and economy would not experience the peace to enjoy the fruits of the eight per cent economic growth.

As it is, vast chunks of the country have already come under the naxalite sway, amenable neither to the state's coercion nor to the lure of the market. The 2006 reservation controversy will not get resolved easily.
Whether or not the IIMs and IITs are forced to open their doors a little wider, the new fashionable intolerance exhibited in these last few days should be a sobering experience for all of us.
The Constitution is not a convenient document but a compact that the people of India made among themselves. That compact is premised on the promise of an egalitarian social order. The new intolerance is at odds with that promise. Promoters and patrons of the new economy need to realise the implications of this new intolerance

Backwardpeople

2006-05-08T00:19:00.000-07:00

Reservations and the MediaAbhishek Behl April 20, 2006

This is my first article on this forum called Chowk.
I am here because I think this is one of the most democratic things to happen today.
I say so in the light of the fact that the conventional media, both print and electronic, has failed to evolve into a mature organism and this is perhaps due to the fact that more businessmen than journalists and more professionals have entered this profession for the sake of moolah rather than for any genuine commitment for the society.
Today, I begin with an issue which is close to my heart and whose coverage by the media has shocked the wits out of me i.e. the raging issue or rather a non-issue called OBC reservations.
OBCs which have around 60 percent of the population in this country called Bharat consist of various castes particularly the working classes-Barbers, Boatmen, blacksmiths, carpenters, washermen, oil-millers and numerous others.
Historically and in reality, this section of the society comprises of the section called Shudras, in fact all those sections of the society which were not the Brahmins, Rajputs and Banias were Shudras. And, mind you the present day SC/ STs were not even included in the Varna system imposed by the Brahmin-Rajput nexus for centuries in this country.
Nowhere in the world was such a devious system imposed on the 80 percent population of the country to keep themselves out of the loop of life.
Untold, miseries were imposed upon these people in the name of Varnas, they could neither read nor write, they could not migrate from one village to another.
There were separate quarters for them to live, the people could not intermarry, and they would not climb up the social ladder, there was no equality before law and these people were like slaves.
The domination of upper-castes was so pernicious that it would allow these people to breathe in open air let alone live. It was only after the arrival of British and after the independence that the SC/STs and OBCs could at least think of being free. Although the constitution had given them equality before law, but it could not ensure equality in society.
For these low castes were still the scum of the society, the laggards, who were a burden on the nation. The government still was controlled by the high-born, the politics in their hands, business was theirs and so was the entire power.
However, due to some minor or major changes there was a change for the good also. Due to his sheer obduracy, Ambedkar managed to beat the class conscious Congress into submission and won for his brethren some concessions.
These were yielded but grudgingly, but the major change was effected by VP Singh, the Mandal messiah, worshipped by some and castigated by others. His gambit of giving the 27 percent reservations perhaps changed the entire political spectrum of India.
In one stroke he had empowered the OBCs, the pushovers, who had been lost in the development debate. People, who had numbers but no political will suddenly emerged from the shadows and boondocks of Bihar and UP and numerous other areas and decided enough was enough.
This also led to the emergence of Lalus, Rabris, Mulayams and score of other leaders, ready to take on the caste politics till date being played with ease by the upper caste congress and Jansangh.This and perhaps the later developments are too known to discuss here.
However, one thing must be said that the upper castes, who have never considered the OBCs as their brothers have never taken kindly to this revolution by their standards of the low caste lohars, chamars, telis and their ilk. In the present case also, while Arjun Singh, he might want some votes, has tried to provide some succour to the OBCs through reservations in IITs and IIMs and other institutes of higher learning but this has been opposed by the rich and powerful upper castes. Perhaps they forget that for four thousand years the Brahmins had simply reserved education for themselves, no one could learn Vedas, none could recite holy mantras, and no one could learn any skill which was not sanctioned by his caste.
This was perpetuated with such conviction that even now the upper castes believe that India should revert to old system of Varnas, where they enjoyed all the power and pelf, no questions asked. And guess which section of the society is upholding this notion?
The much enlightened Indian Media. In his edit page in The Indian Express Shekhar Gupta writes, "Arjun Singh is more direct, first pushing for reservations in private institutions and now slicing away half of the IITs and IIMs for reserved quotas.
But his desperate bid to re-invent himself as V.P. Singh Mark II will not benefit his party. It will damage it as much as V.P. Singh Mark I did. Given today’s messy politics nobody wants to vote against any idea of increasing reservations.
But he will only succeed in destroying these great institutions by politicising them.
To that extent he will be more successful than his predecessor, Murli Manohar Joshi. And just as Joshi did, he will also turn away the middle-class, upwardly mobile, even small-town and aspirational voter in disgust.
Further, it will not impress the OBCs." Shubojit Mehta writes in Indian Express, “The first voice of protest against Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh’s decision to impose 49.5 per cent quota in IITs, IIMs and Central universities has come from the high-profile National Knowledge Commission (NKC), which reports directly to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and whose mandate is to sharpen the country’s “knowledge edge”.
The above examples are not exceptions but the norm. Perhaps, this is due to the fact that ninety-nine percent of the Indian media is controlled by the upper caste and class conscious intelligentsia. Most of the journalists writing and producing stories might have their own constraints and the interests of their own to take care of.
However, in the interest of justice and journalism itself, it is important that they report events and news taking into account the versions of both sides and make the story

Backwardpeople

2006-05-07T23:57:00.000-07:00

I read the article below in Hindu and its a wonderful piece in which the author offers a non-partisan support to reservations in IITs and IIMs.

Abhishek Behl

Eviscerating a holy cow
NISHEETH SRIVASTAVA
LET US NOT DELUDE OURSELVES. IIT IS A VERY EFFICIENT AND CONSISTENT BREEDING GROUND FOR PRODUCTIVE MEDIOCRITY
It is very fashionable for the young upper middle class `global' Indian citizen to inveigh against the `sectarian', `populist' and `parochial' policies of the government. The article `Reservation saga' (Open Page, April 23) denouncing 27 per cent reservation for OBCs in the IITs and IIMs falls under this category. It seeks to question the validity of the anti-reservation lobby. As a specific case, we will examine their claims with regard to IIT.

The most feasible approach towards analysing the argument against reservation in IIT is to view the underlying axioms that its proponents cheerfully assume to be unquestionably true.
The most banal of them all is the presumption that the IITs are merit-based `prestigious' `temples of education' that command international respect.
Centres of excellence?
Merit-based? As of JEE 2004, more than 25 per cent entrants to IIT had been enrolled in a coaching institute named FIIT-JEE. The curriculum is based on analysing trends in JEE papers and focusing students' preparation on mindless precision in solving problems to clear the JEE.
The fee for the two-year course is upwards of Rs. 40,000. And FIIT-JEE is but one of myriads of coaching institutes that populate the high-school education system in our cities. Vidyamandir in Delhi, Ramaiah in Hyderabad and Bansal in Kota are household names in the society of JEE aspirants.
All these institutes, with perhaps the honourable exception of Vidyamandir, concentrate on rote-repetition and practice to prepare candidates for the JEE.

Prestigious? Infosys recruits upwards of 50 B. Tech students, from a batch of about 500, to work as software-writing minions at a salary of Rs. 11,000 a month. The IIT system has acquired a reputation for producing `techno-clerks' to create wealth for the burgeoning Indian economy. That's not prestige; it's pragmatism.

Temples of education? Of the 180 credits that a B. Tech student is required to accumulate towards completing his degree, how many do not relate to science and technology? A grand total of twelve — including an instructional course in English. How much flexibility does a B. Tech student possess in deciding his course work? None.

Let us not delude ourselves. IIT is a very efficient and consistent breeding ground for productive mediocrity. It generates graduates with a one-dimensional view of the world and with an intellectual horizon stunted to perform in a particular field of economic activity, viz. technology.

This leads us to the crux of the argument against reservation — there should be no regulations upon excellence. "Why not have reservation in the army? Is education not as important as defence?" goes the plaintive cry. Such an argument would have much merit if we were speaking of actual centres of research that do indeed strive for creative and disciplined endeavour — TIFR, BARC and IISc are the first examples that spring to mind.
But to raise such an argument in favour of the IITs evinces an almost criminal disregard for the ground reality.
Even a cursory perusal of campus culture in the IITs — their cultural hierarchy, their social interactions, their means of recreation, etc., paints a definitive picture of IIT students as self-aggrandising delusional brats living off the fat of the land in the form of subsidies that an indulgent government continues to ritually bestow upon a system that has deviated so far from its founding principles that it betokens those who feel responsible for it to look the other way.

It is instructive to note that the only opposition to the reservation proposal arises from the sections of society that will `suffer' as a consequence — the self-labelled `Forward Class.' Both the faculty and the administration of these markedly autonomous institutes have expressed no views publicly on the matter.
Does this not imply that a concern regarding the dilution of merit as a consequence of the reservation is groundless? Either that or, as is more likely, the faculty at these institutes is too blasé to view any change as making a difference to the commercially guided ethos that prevails.
Suggestion
Thus, the argument against reservation ought to be viewed for what it is — a self-serving, pompous plaint. A parallel could be drawn, without much exaggeration, with the righteous indignation of the French aristocracy at the time of the Revolution. While a caste-based reservation system may be opposed on other principles, the argument that it would dilute the quality of the intellectual product it offers India is flawed because it presupposes that such quality actually exists. This is an extremely narcissistic claim.
(The writer is a student at IIT Madras)

Backwardpeople

2006-05-04T08:17:00.000-07:00

I am posting an article written by Vivek Kumar, a sociologist from JNU, which was published in Times of India few days back.

I hope it will make an interesting reading on this issue. The other side of merit & Mandal II CITIZENSPEAK/Vivek Kumar Whenever the issue of reservation comes up for public debate, the entire Dalit and backward community is painted as devoid of any merit without caring about the fact that a majority of them survive without reservation.
On the other hand, the debate declares the so-called upper castes as meritorious. Therefore at this juncture when the debate on reservation is rife, let us gauge merit on both sides. The merit of upper castes can be evaluated by assessing their performance on the basis of the traditional social structure. Looking at history the Varnas-Brahman, Kshatriya and Vaishyas were assigned with particular functions.
The Brahman had the privilege of teaching, the Kshatriya of protecting all creatures and the Vaishya living by commerce. The Dalits could ask the Brahmans if they were so meritorious why then half of the country's population is illiterate.
If the Kshatriyas were so meritorious then why could they not defend our borders? The Shaka, Huns, Tartars, Mughals, Dutch, British etc. all defeated them and subjugated us. Similarly, if the Vaishyas were so meritorious then why is trade and commerce of India in shambles?
In the same vein, if Arjuna of Mahabharata was so meritorious then why did Dronacharya demand Eklavya's thumb. In contemporary times, look at the low Human Develop Index (HDI). India is placed at 127 in the group of 174 countries.
In the Corruption Perception Index for the year 2004, India ranked 90 in the group of 146 countries (Transparency International India report 2004). Above all, the external debt of India is at a whopping Rs 5,11,861 crore (Economic Survey 2003-4: p.128). If meritorious economists and administrators are managing the affairs of the country without any reservation, why are we so economically poor? Why are farmers committing suicide as if it is rural India's ritual? Why do we have hundreds and thousands of legal cases pending at higher levels of our meritorious judiciary? Science and technology is considered the realm of super specialty and hence kept out of the bounds of reservation in India.
In this regard, Professor Nian Chai Liu and his colleagues at the Shanghai Jio Tong University in China spent two years collating and analyzing the output of 2000 universities worldwide and published their results by ranking 500 universities. Only three universities/ institutions from India figured in the top 500 -- The Indian Institute of Sciences at 260 and the Indian Institutes of Technology at Kharagpur and Delhi, respectively at 459 and 460. IIT Madras, Kanpur, Mumbai and Roorkee did not figure at all and of course there is no reservation for OBCs yet at these centres for learning.

There is something intriguing in the relationship between merit, commitment and contributing to a nation as seen by reservation bashers. Why is that career becomes more important than service to nation to many IITians and IIMians, who wait to go abroad even before they pass out? Let us look at the merit of the doctors working in the most prestigious hospitals of the country.
If the Indian doctors and medical specialists are so meritorious than why is that most of the VVIPs run away to foreign countries at the simplest of illnesses. Even the former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, an ardent supporter of Swadeshi had to call an NRI orthopedic surgeon for his knee operation.
Further, is it not logical to evaluate the merit of the professionals passing out from the various private universities, engineering, medical and management colleges where a seat can be bought for a few lakh rupees? There is no reservation in sports even then a nation of over a billion has not been able to produce a single individual gold medalist in Olympics.
Similarly is it really a case of meritocracy that all the progenies of film stars are given a chance to act and sing in the film industry even though they do not have any experience? Are these cases of merit or pedigree reservation? The answer is self-evident, as most of them have been one-film wonders.

But the fact remains that most of them could reach there just because of their pedigree. A fact often neglected. We can asses the merit of the private sector by the contribution it makes to the world export market; it is just a trickle, just 0.7%. But still, it beats my imagination why the same private sector is vehemently opposed to reservation, has been demanding a level playing field for itself with the onset of the process of liberalization.
How can even then the private sector boast of its efficiency and merit? If the Indian industries are so meritocratic, why is it that they have not produced a single brand or item which can be internationally prescribed or has become an international commodity? What right do industrialists of today have to call themselves meritorious when most of the owners of established business houses have inherited their business from their parents? None of the top industrialists is a first generation industrialist.
They might have expanded the business but they could do so because they belong to a certain pedigree only. According to the Ministry of Company Affairs (MCA), 122 vanishing Companies have run away with Rs 838 crore of public money. That is why a number of social scientists have argued that the rewards in the educational and economic system are not based on merit.
The educational and occupational attainments are related to family background and a number of circumstantial parameters rather than talent and ability. That is why people with the same educational qualification do not get the same type of jobs and those in the same jobs do not get equal remuneration.

Vivek Kumar is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University

Backward people in India

2006-05-04T08:11:00.000-07:00

This is an attempt to connect with the backward people of India. Who are oppressed, poor and need justice. Lets get together.