Why reservations are such a disaster

The way to hell, we are told, is paved with good intentions. It appears that some such folly has been committed with regard to reservations policy — whether for scheduled castes, scheduled tribes or with other backward classes/castes — in this country. When it was mooted at the time the Constitution was adopted in 1950, none other than BR Ambedkar had viewed the reservation measure as a short-term affair which needed to be reviewed at the end of 10 years.

He did not envisage reservations as a permanent system of entitlement. The authors of the reservation policy knew what they were doing. They saw it as a way of remedying an imbalanced situation. They meant well, but it turned out to be something else.

It is unfortunate that in this country there were not enough people to voice honest criticism against the idea both at the time it was launched and in later years. Long before the term ‘political correctness’ was coined, India’s chattering classes seem to have observed a conspiratorial silence about a key issue in the life of the country.

Had there been honest criticism and debate about reservations, it would have served as a good counterpoint. What was needed was a periodic review of reservations and a report on what was achieved and what was not. But it was not done. It was an act of national intellectual cowardice.

Even today, the opposition to reservation does not emanate from public intellectuals but from upper class and upper caste students who do not understand the implications of the reservation policy. So it becomes easy to knock down their half-baked objections.

The case against reservations needs to be made on behalf of those who are supposed to benefit from it. If people say that there is a case for reservation after decades of a positive discrimination policy, there is a need to question the efficacy of affirmative action as such.

It is true that the entrenched upper castes and upper classes in this country would not welcome any policy measure that would break their privileged perch. But they would not have been able to hold on to their blinkered position because of the natural expansion in the economy.

The country would have needed more skilled people than could be provided by the small number of the traditional elites. It was the compulsion of markets that opens the doors for outsiders. At the beginning of the industrial revolution, women and children became part of the factory workforce not just for the cheap wages but because there was need for those extra hands. It is the same in the case of immigrants in Europe and in the United States.

India’s economic growth cannot be sustained by a quarter of the population as constituted by the upper castes and upper classes. The logic of economic expansion requires that those from the other strata, classes and castes have to enter the mainstream of education, jobs and consumers.

Unfortunately, growth has never been considered a factor in social progress in political debates in this country. The reason is that political leaders took upon themselves the role of enlightened reformers who wanted to share their privileges with the deprived masses in a gesture of generosity, and they wanted to appear as knights in shining armour. It is a case of rhetoric more than anything else.

A look at the reservations policy over the decades shows that it has been a rather inefficient model because it was not accompanied by expansion of educational and job opportunities. The remedy does not lie in perpetuating reservations but in finding a more effective way of opening up opportunities for all.

Instead of fighting over smaller slices of a small pie of national income, what is needed is the expansion of the national pie which would help everyone to get their rightful and bigger share of the slice. The oppressed and the marginalised people need expansion of opportunities rather than favours from the state.