Socio-economic takeaways from Bihar caste survey

THE release of the caste survey data by the Bihar Government on October 2 has stirred up a political hornet’s nest across the country. Despite the fact that petitions challenging the constitutional legality of the survey were pending before the Supreme Court, the state government went ahead and released most of the data. On October 6, the court refused to restrain the government from publishing the remaining details of its survey, with the clarification that it would intervene primarily if there were issues with regard to the data. Now, whether the survey was needed in the first place or not is a question of the past. Since it has already been conducted, there is a need to look at key takeaways from the exercise.

The politics of competitive backwardness and the rhetoric and discourse of social justice are as old as modern democratic politics in India. There have been consistent efforts to add administrative grist and policy substance to the idea of social backwardness — from the Kalelkar Commission in the 1950s to the Mandal Commission in the 1970s, not to mention the several Backward Classes commissions constituted by various state governments from time to time. The latest survey can very well be seen as part of the long history of identifying and redressing backwardness in a caste-based society.

However, calling the exercise a caste (socio-economic communities or SECs) survey is something of a misnomer. In fact, what we have now are the demographic profiles of not only SECs but also socio-religious communities (SRCs) that, incidentally, the Sachar Committee report talked about in 2006. This survey counts Muslims in terms of differentially placed social groups and includes three Muslim ‘castes’ in the general category. Interestingly, the Mungeri Lal Commission, constituted by the Bihar Government in 1971, had already included various Muslim castes in its list of 128 Backward Castes requiring reservation in jobs and admissions. And, the implementation of the commission’s recommendations by then Bihar CM Karpoori Thakur in 1978 did pave the way for legitimising the inclusion of social groups belonging to non-Hindu communities in the list of the Backward Classes in other parts of the country. So, we have, for instance, Muslim groups in Kerala and West Bengal as beneficiaries of the OBC quota and Christian groups in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana classified as OBCs. In this sense, of course, the recent announcement has the potential, as similar announcements had in the past, to extend the increasingly narrowed-down idea of (Hindu) caste-based reservation to other religious communities. In another way, by connecting SECs with SRCs, the survey has some scope for countering sharper religious (communal) polarisation in future.

The release of the socio-economic profile of various SRCs can bring back the lost focus on the ‘economic’ aspect of social justice. For a variety of reasons, social justice in India has come to stand for community-based reservation. Political leaders and activists championing the socialist cause are equally responsible for this gradual, and almost irreversible, slide from the ‘socio-economic’ to the ‘social’ (read as caste-based) reservation alone. Interestingly, reports concerning backwardness talk about an array of economic measures in terms of access and equity to public services and enabling economic conditions. Quite conveniently, these ‘economic’ recommendations have been either quietly bypassed or symbolically addressed by tokenism like the establishment of scholarships or the finance and development corporations for backward categories. Be it political expediency or the intention of changing the narrative of Indian politics by focusing on the upwardly mobile dominant groups among the OBCs, recent times have seen the emergence and political assertiveness of the numerically preponderant upper backward castes, particularly at the state level. The apparent logic of challenging entrenched upper-caste dominance has bestowed these newly powerful social groups with the same unfettered control over public resources. As a consequence, they have turned into the new usurpers of power and patronage vis-à-vis most backward castes or extremely backward castes. The ever-growing conflicts between Dalits and OBCs are a manifestation of the same process of appropriation of political power by a handful of relatively prosperous groups in the name of social justice.

Lastly, there is a refreshing possibility of bringing the idea of graded social backwardness to the centre of political and policy discourse. If there is one straight takeaway from the Bihar survey, it is the explicit and unambiguous presence of layered backwardness cutting across the SRCs. It would only be logical to reorient the existing reservation policies towards increasing socio-economic differentiation among their intended beneficiaries. This means further sub-categorisation of groups and communities which are already included in various lists of OBCs, SCs and STs. Since the OBC, by all reckoning, is an umbrella category including a disparate range of caste and (religious) communities, a beginning can be made by making public the Rohini Commission report and possibly acting on some of its policy recommendations. The much-talked-about Karpoori formula of reservation through two annexures of backward classes and most backward classes can be further refined at the Central and state levels. Surely, it would be an inclusive step for the politics of social justice in our times.

In any case, it is premature to speculate whether the brouhaha around the caste survey data will help check further rise of the BJP by reinforcing the politics of Mandal against that of the ‘kamandal’. After all, the BJP is much more than the politics of the ‘kamandal’, and the politics of Mandal itself has undergone a metamorphosis. We tend to forget that the much-decried Mandal report had an equally detailed blueprint of the ‘economic’ aspect, which was rendered irrelevant by the dominant ‘social-centric’ rhetoric of social justice championed by upper backward classes.