The end of the prolonged and violent agitation by the Gujjar community in Rajasthan and Delhi, following the signing of a peace accord between the state government and 35 leaders of the Gujjar community in Jaipur on June 18, has rung down the curtain upon another manifestation of a peculiar malady which distinguishes the 21st century Indian state with absurd superpower aspirations. At issue in the 27-day stir which resulted in the forced blockage of road and rail traffic across large swathes of western and north India and caused 39 deaths in riots and police firing, was the community’s demand for constitutional classification of Gujjars, traditionally a shepherd community whose number is estimated at 53 million across the Hindi heartland, as a scheduled tribe.
It’s a sad commentary that in a country whose political leaders are negotiating India’s inclusion in the G-8 and Security Council of the United Nations, tens of millions of people in the bottom reaches of its iniquitous social pyramid are clamouring to be classified as backward and tribal, in the hope that some of them can avail reservations in institutions of higher education and government jobs. Quite clearly, entire communities and groups with common identities lack the confidence to be able to compete on the basis of merit for college seats and jobs in contemporary India’s booming marketplace.
After half a century down Freedom Road, millions of citizens believe they require legal reservations and special quotas to access decent education and jobs. And such is their desperation that they don’t mind being classified as ‘backward’ castes, communities and tribes in the process.
Ingenious arguments have been advanced — and continue to be advanced — to refute the obvious logic of fall in academic standards and government services due to quotas and reservations. Regretably the learned justices of the Supreme Court whose duty it is to protect the spirit of the Constitution while interpreting it in the public interest, have tended to equivocate rather than forthrightly condemn the new provisos added to Article 15(1) which stringently enjoins the State to eliminate discrimination and differentiation on the basis of caste, religion, sex etc. In the process the noble ideal of the founding fathers of the Constitution to rid independent India of the dreadful iniquities of the caste system have been sabotaged by an unholy coalition of a myopic political class, and pandering justices of the apex court.
As has often been argued on this page, the antidote to the virus of casteism and other forms of discrimination is provision of education and more education. Only when and if the supply side of the education supply-demand imbalance is successfully addressed, will the caste tensions and narrow particularisms which are sharply manifesting themselves within Indian society, abate. It’s plain as a pikestaff that the current clamour for backward status is rooted in pervasive fear of failure in Indian society, rather than in caste pride per se. It’s the supply-demand imbalance in Indian education that needs to be addressed and corrected to counter the caste incubus spreading within Indian society.