Tuesday, June 1, 2010

[ZESTCaste] Caste clubs are vote banks

 

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=/data/opinion/2010/June/opinion_June5.xml&section=opinion

Caste clubs are vote banks

Badri Narayan
& Mousumi Majumder (India)

1 June 2010

All governments, in order to govern their subjects efficiently,
convert the population into homogeneous categories and also try to
transform people into statistics.

These 'statistics' and 'categories' are tools of governance and the
state also imagines them as the basis for planning for development.
Since caste is a vital structure of Indian society, policy makers,
both during the colonial and the post-colonial periods, have tried to
use it as a tool for governance. The colonial government, which never
attempted to reform the society and which understood the obsession of
Indians with caste, tried to accommodate this obsession into
policy-making by documenting caste in all its complexities in the
Gazetteers and census since 1881. In 1931, census commissioner Sir
Herbert Risley went one step forward by attempting to locate each
caste in the social hierarchy.

Based on the census, in 1935 the British passed The Government of
India Act 1935, which brought the term 'Scheduled Castes' into use,
and defined the group as including "such castes, races or tribes or
parts of groups within castes, races or tribes, which appear to His
Majesty in Council to correspond to the classes of persons formerly
known as the 'Depressed Classes', as His Majesty in Council may
prefer." This discretionary definition was clarified in The Government
of India (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1936, which contained a list or
Schedule of castes throughout the British administered provinces.
Reservation of seats for the Depressed Classes was incorporated into
the Act, which came into force in 1937. However, nationalist leaders
like Gandhi and Nehru were not in favour of bringing caste into
political life although they conceded that the lower castes needed to
be provided positive discrimination to compensate for social
injustice. Since the first post-colonial census in 1951, enumeration
of castes was discarded although all the five censuses since then
provided data on SC as a whole.

But it was only when the Backward Classes Commission identified a
large number of non-SC and non-ST communities as backward and the
Mandal Commission report too recommended reservations for Other
Backward Classes (OBCs) in education and jobs did the issue of
caste-based census enumeration, which has not been done since 1931. It
has now been decided that the ongoing census will classify people
according to their castes especially to enumerate the OBCs who were
given a quota of 27 per cent in jobs and education based on a Supreme
Court verdict, in order to ascertain whether the figure is appropriate
to their number. The decision of classifying all the people of the
country by their individual castes will have a deep impact on the
numerically small lower castes living in villages, especially in Uttar
Pradesh where the caste-based hierarchy is still operational. The
lower castes of this state are part of the homogeneous state
categories of SC and also have the political identity of 'dalit' which
is the byproduct of democratic politics that grants new identities to
those communities which they mobilise and try to form homogeneous
categories in their own way.

In Uttar Pradesh, the dalits comprise around 21 per cent of the total
population and of them the Chamars form the largest population. Pasi
is the next largest community while Dhobi, Kori, Khatik, Balmiki,
Shilpkar and Dhanuk are the other numerically important dalit castes.
There are also many other formerly "untouchable" lower castes like
Beladar, Kanjar, Badhi, Rangrez, Bangali, Barwar, Bauriya, Sahariya,
Paradiya in the state but they are numerically very insignificant. At
the grassroots the words 'Scheduled Caste' and 'dalit' as forms of
address are not commonly used by the lower castes.

The coming of the BSP politics in UP has also empowered numerically
powerful lower castes like Chamar and Pasi who now proudly assert
their dalit identity. Today they are powerful enough to claim a larger
share in the development pie if the government decides to dole out
quotas based on population size.

On the other hand, a fear for these small dalit communities is that
due to their small number the political parties working as agencies in
distribution of development schemes and political power might not pay
much attention to them but would try to appease the big dalit groups
such as Chamar and Pasi, as has been the case in this state. The OBCs
like Kewat, Tewar, Garariya, Kahar, Nai, Mali, Bhar, Rajbhar and Bind
and the Backward Castes like Ahirs (Yadav), Gujar, Kurmi, Lodhi,
Kumhar, Darji, Lohar and Sonar too, which are numerically significant,
will be able to claim a larger share in the pie if the government
decides to dole out quotas to different castes in proportion to their
population size.

Dalit castes like Chamar and Pasi too would receive hefty reservations
due to their large population size. In such a situation a numerical
hierarchy of castes might emerge in which the castes that outnumber
the other castes will become more powerful and dominate over the
numerically small castes if population size-based reservations are
provided to all the castes.

Thus while these small marginalised castes, which are still on the
fringes despite the empowerment of dalits will get distinct identities
due to the caste-based census they might also be relegated to the
margins by the state as being numerically too insignificant.

So will these numerically small lower castes remain happy in their
individual caste identity or will they need some more identities to
obtain their dues from the state? We still need to find the answer to
this question.

© Governance Now

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