The spectre of violent anti-caste demonstrations loomed over India on Tuesday night after the government vowed to press ahead with plans to reserve almost 50% of seats in colleges and universities for lower-caste and other disadvantaged Indians.
After four days of street demonstrations that have halted work at many of the country’s hospitals and led to clashes with police, the Indian Education Minister, Arjun Singh, ruled out withdrawing the proposal. The protesters said they would not stop until the government relented.
The government said it was merely implementing a constitutional amendment, which aims to reserve a quota of seats to untouchables, tribals and ”backward classes” in higher education institutions. At present 22,5% of all places at India’s universities are guaranteed for indigenous peoples and dalits, or untouchables, found at the bottom of the Hindu caste ladder. The government wants to extend this scheme to secure seats for the remaining ”backward” sections of society, who make up 27% of the country’s one-billion people.
The debate over the affirmative action programme has bitterly divided the country, with students at many elite Indian colleges complaining that such a move would lower the quality of the student body by admitting the academically less qualified at the expense of clever applicants.
At Delhi’s prestigious All India Institute of Medical Sciences more than 100 medical students are on hunger strike and all but the most urgent cases have been turned away from the hospital.
”We feel very strongly that the student intake should be based on merit, not on birth,” said Sajanjiv Singh, a 20-year-old medical student who is on hunger strike. ”We do not even know what caste people are here, yet the politicians want to label us and use this as a factor in university admissions. It will mean fewer places for the talented.”
The protests have disrupted hospital services across northern India, with the student shutdown supported by doctors. In Delhi television crews filmed babies being refused medical treatment because of a lack of staff. In Kolkata effigies of politicians were burned. Over the weekend police used water cannon and baton-charged protesters in Mumbai.
Supporters of the affirmative action scheme say India’s booming economy, which is growing by 8% a year, has only entrenched the inequalities of Indian society and drastic remedies are required.
India’s Industry Minister, Kamal Nath, told reporters over the weekend that growth needed to be ”inclusive”. The congress-led government is also considering laws to reserve jobs in private companies for people from disadvantaged groups.
Although the changes would affect all education institutes, the battle centres on India’s best academies, which have alumni including the head of Vodafone, some of the world’s best surgeons and the inventor of Hotmail. These universities are heavily subsidised by the government, which spends about $76 000 per student per year — 50 times that spent in ordinary colleges. The competition to get into the elite Indian Institute of Technology is much more intense than in Britain or the US. One in 40 of the 200 000 applicants is successful, compared with a fifth of those who apply to Cambridge University.
”The upper castes have been able to buy their way into the country’s best colleges by going to private schools and learning English. They can chase dollar jobs in Silicon Valley while the poor are left to rot,” said Kancha Ilaiah, professor of politics at Osmania University in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad. ”Quotas are a proven way of correcting historical caste discrimination.”
There has been a trend in Indian politics to use positive discrimination to level social hierarchies. In the early 90s the government implemented a 27% quota in government jobs for ”backward” classes in the teeth of widespread protests, resulting in the immolations and suicides of dozens of upper-caste demonstrators.
However, many argue that the time for affirmative action has passed in India. Dipankar Gupta, professor of sociology at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, says that as currently defined the quota system simply enables the ”rural elite to get access to urban jobs”.
Gupta points out that on the rating scale devised by the government, factors such as whether a person works in the fields or whether a community feels other castes resent it are rated to be three times more important than a group’s poverty level. Such factors are also one and half times more important than if a community sends its children to school.
”Being a member of a backward class is not about economic or education backwardness but a perception of social status. It is a bogus way of assessing need. The only utility is a political calculation designed to attract votes. If you really wanted to help then why not improve the appalling state of primary education in India?”
Explainer: The system
The Hindu caste system defines a highly stratified society with four classes, which are best understood as being derived from a person’s historical occupation. At the top are brahmins (priests), followed by kshatriyas (warriors), vaishyas (merchants) and sudras (farmers, peasants). Beneath these are the untouchables, or dalits. Within these are many sub-castes.
The leaders of newly independent India attempted to correct the thousands of years of caste discrimination and wrote into the Constitution a clause which allotted a minimum representation for certain communities. That was supposed to help the most discriminated against in Indian society: tribals and dalits.
The affirmative action scheme was supposed to last a few decades but instead of being repealed it has been extended. Many state governments have already implemented wide-scale reservations in education. In the southern state of Tamil Nadu, which is the country’s most urbanised region, 69% of all jobs in the administration and places at state-run universities are guaranteed by caste. Muslims are included in the affirmative action scheme. More than 10% of government jobs in Kerala are reserved for Muslims. – Guardian Unlimited Â