Mandalites fail Mandal

Even the most ardent Mandalites will concede that the question holds up a mirror to a movement that has lost its way. That ‘‘social justice’’ can be so glibly hijacked to serve upper caste interests speaks of an idea hollowed of all recognisable meaning. This failure was not inevitably written into the script. It follows from an ideology squeezed of all internal critique. Mandal’s failure must be owned, above all, by the Mandalites.

When the Mandal Commission Report was implemented in 1990, it was more than V.P. Singh’s master tactic. He was responding to the reconfiguration of politics that had begun in the mid-1960s. OBC reservations in government jobs would open up institutions of the state to those castes that had been denied access. These castes could be refused no longer; they had gathered political clout from their participation in electoral politics. Mandalisation of the polity, then, was more than the politician’s expedient gambit. It was the irresistible challenge mounted by the subaltern forces. They would use a secularised caste identity to fight the privileged.

But Mandal demanded a pact of restraint. It was foretold that there would be a race among groups to be included in the OBC lists. Part of the challenge of running a meaningful programme of affirmative action, therefore, lay in resisting sectional pressures for backwardness benefits.

What was required was for political parties to respect the tentativeness with which the Constitution spoke even of SC/ST reservations. And the careful caveats inserted by the court. In clearing the way for the implementation of the Mandal recommendations in 1992, the Supreme Court had ruled that the Central and state governments should set up permanent commissions to review the list of beneficiaries continually. As Justice T.K. Thommen put it: “Identification of backwardness is an ever-continuing process of inclusion and exclusion. Classes of citizens entitled to the constitutional protection of reservations must be constantly and periodically identified for their inclusion and for the exclusion of those who do not qualify. To allow the undeserved to benefit by reservation is to deny protection to those who are meant to be protected.” The National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC) was formed in the wake of that judgement.

But Backward Classes Comissions in the states and at the Centre have functioned only as agencies of inclusion. They have proved they can be relied on to protect all quotas and party votebanks in particular. Exclusions are made only at the individual/household level (“creamy layer”), that too under direction from the Supreme Court.

The commissions function in deep ambiguity. There are no transparent procedures for defining and operationalising criteria; petitions are taken up on a case-by-case basis. Even the NCBC has not gone beyond this ad hoc approach; state commissions are much worse. They lack the mechanisms or resources for conducting independent surveys and monitoring field equations. While some southern states have developed a relatively stable enumeration of beneficiary groups because of long experience with backward class politics, chaos rules in the north. Here, the taxonomy of castes and estimates of their numeric strength are still derived from the 1931 census.

It’s the old chicken and egg teaser: Does the political class take advantage of this ambiguity or does the incoherence exist for the political class to take advantage of it? But the results are unambiguous: the commissions’ decisions are supposed to be ordinarily binding on the government but, by and large, state governments dictate the lists. In Uttar Pradesh, then chief minister Rajnath Singh set up the Hukam Singh Committee on election-eve to subdivide the OBC and SC quotas. The commission complied in an impossibly short period of time. With the influential Jats thrown into the same basket as the poor Mallahs, the entire exercise was Singh’s transparent bid to divide his rivals’ votebanks and create his own. In Rajasthan, even as the state Backward Classes Commission was adjudicating their claim, prime minister Vajpayee promised the Jats OBC status during a campaign speech in Sikar. Unnerved by the BJP’s good showing in the ensuing Lok Sabha polls, the Gehlot government announced its intention to include the community in the OBC list soon after.

Yet, the functioning of the commissions is never a subject of public debate. Under cover of this silence, they continue to betray the faith with which they were constituted.

In the last instance, the responsibility for the failure of Mandal lies with the Mandalites. This is because compulsions of electoral arithmetic had rendered the anti-Mandal argument politically impotent long ago. As public debate on Mandal shrank to only the one position, even the upper-caste dominated BJP and Congress were forced to loudly Mandalise.

The critique could only have been heard, then, if it had come from within. It is here that the helmsmen of the movement let it down. As they became parasites on Mandal as electoral strategy, the Mandal messiahs failed Mandal the democratic idea.

This failure has allowed job quotas to become irreversible doles. It permits reservations to strut as the Total Solution To Backwardness. In the name of Mandal, backward castes continue to be cheated of genuine empowerment—through greater investment in primary education, health facilities, access to pure drinking water, empowerment of the girl child.

Is it possible that the bizarre drama now playing in Rajasthan serves as a wake-up call?