Caste articulation
April 2010
By: Satish Deshpande
Three lessons from the creation of the OBC category.
Jayalal
What is new about caste today is that, whether as idea or as
experience, it is now articulated – in both senses of the word. Used
as a verb, articulated means 'made distinct', 'set forth' or
'expressed'; used as an adjective, it describes something 'having
segments united by joints', or 'consisting of elements joined in a
flexible arrangement'. Thus, caste today is spoken, expressed, made
explicit – it is no longer silenced or repressed as it was in the
Nehru era. And caste today is very much a jointed, segmented or
multi-layered reality – it is no longer something singular and
homogenous. The problem is that these two aspects are in active
tension with each other. The political language in which caste has
been spoken is unable to acknowledge its segmented nature; indeed, it
even seems as though caste assertion is only possible by insisting
that it is singular and indivisible. This is not a problem unique to
caste, it reappears in other contexts as well. To fashion new
political languages that can voice concerns without evading fractured
and contradictory realities – this is the crucial challenge of our
time.
The loudness and omnipresence of caste in India's public arena today
needs to be contrasted with the mute marginality that preceded it.
What might be called the 'silent era' of caste stretches across the
five decades that separate the Poona Pact of 1932 and the emergence of
the 'caste atrocity' in the 1980s. Of course, the silence is only in
the so-called 'national sphere', and in public discourse. At the
regional level, caste was always prominently public; and outside
public discourse, in everyday life everywhere, caste was an integral
if constantly changing part of social existence.
The Poona Pact is the name given to the arrangement by which the
Depressed Classes (as the 'untouchable' castes were then known), led
by B R Ambedkar and others, were forced by M K Gandhi to forego a
separate electorate and agree to be represented by the Indian National
Congress. In return, they were promised special concessions, later
included in the Indian Constitution and popularly referred to as
'reservations' – caste-specific quotas in the legislatures, in
government jobs and in education. The shift from the flawed but
fertile mechanism of separate electorates to the politically
emasculating device of reservations manoeuvred the untouchables into
the position of supplicants dependent on the largesse of the very
society that had excluded them. Thus, well before Independence, Gandhi
had almost singlehandedly 'settled' the caste question at the national
level. This settlement involved two crucial moves – equating caste
inequality and oppression with untouchability; and presenting
reservations as a sort of 'full and final payment' of the material
debt owed to the untouchables.
The Nehru era simply cemented the Gandhian settlement by insisting on
a 'caste-blind' state. Apart from reservations – which it treated as a
regrettable political-moral compulsion – the new state refused to see,
hear or speak caste, in deference to the formal equality decreed by
the Constitution. Both oppressors and oppressed were exhorted to join
the virtuous conspiracy of silence about caste, or risk being
denounced as 'casteist'. Whether it was due to naive idealism or an
upper-caste conspiracy, the fact is that such even-handedness was not
just ironic or unfair, but politically unviable.
Mandal's advance
It took a spate of spectacular violence for the caste question to
reappear on the national scene as the 'caste atrocity'. Beginning with
Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (Pipra, Paras Bigha and Belchhi), through the
southern states (notably Chunduru and Karamchedu in Andhra Pradesh),
and on to more recent incidents in Maharashtra (Khairlanji) and
Haryana (Jhajjar, Gohana), murderous pogroms against Dalits in
villages and small rural towns acquired an undeniably 'national'
character. By the 1980s, the atrocity had demolished the belief that
caste oppression was a relic of the past, a historical debt discharged
by reservations.
If the 'caste atrocity' ended the era of silence and sanctimony, the
dynamic encompassed in the term Mandal inaugurated a new era of caste
assertion in the 1990s. Derived from B P Mandal, the chairperson of
the Second Backward Classes Commission, the popular term Mandal refers
to the forces unleashed by the Indian government's 1990 decision to
(partially) implement the Commission's recommendation to provide
reservations for the Other Backward Classes, or OBCs. In the last two
decades, this acrimonious acronym has transformed the landscape of
Indian democracy, altering not just the strategies and tactics of
parties and movements but the very shape of politics itself.
Accepting the risks involved in a simplified summary, one may say that
Mandal advances the theory and practice of Indian democracy in three
main ways. First, it demonstrates the integral (rather than
exceptional) place of caste in Indian society; second, it foregrounds
the complexities of aggregative social groups; and third, it prompts
us to revisit the terms of the social contract on which our republic
was founded.
Post-Mandal politics has undermined the dominant common sense of
caste. Aided by the Gandhian reduction of caste to untouchability,
this common sense presented Dalits (and, in a different sense,
Adivasis) as the caste-marked exception to the universal norm of the
unmarked, casteless citizen – the 'general category'. This allowed the
upper castes to occupy the universal, to speak for and as 'we the
people', while simultaneously positioning Dalits and Adivasis as the
particularistic, aberrant category. The political assertion of the
OBCs has exposed the close congruence between the upper castes and the
privileged minority. It is now clear that the privileged 'few' are
overwhelmingly upper caste (though some upper castes may be
underprivileged), just as the underprivileged 'many' are
overwhelmingly lower caste (though some lower castes may be
privileged). With the exit of the OBCs from the general category, this
category is now no more than a euphemism for the upper castes, and
cannot sustain its earlier claims to representing the nation.
Conventional wisdom presented the OBCs as a negatively defined
residual category – neither upper caste, nor Dalit or Adivasi – that
receives meaning passively from the other elements of the caste
system. On the contrary, OBC turned out to be an active,
meaning-giving category that has forced the other elements to redefine
their identities. Thus, in the post-Mandal era, there is a renewed
effort by Dalit activists and intellectuals to foreground the 'excess'
– loosely expressed as untouchability – that is unique to Dalits and
makes them the quintessential 'other' for both OBCs and upper castes.
The pressure to do this is generated by the emergence of the OBCs, who
also claim to be victims of caste discrimination. This prompts Dalits
to try to capture the difference between the kind of
inequality-producing discrimination that OBCs may have suffered from,
and the kind of deeply humiliating and oppressive caste prejudice that
only Dalits face.
By contrast, the upper castes are responding to post-Mandal pressure
by defining themselves as having no caste, or being 'casteless'. This
may seem on the surface to merely reiterate what liberal upper castes
have been saying since the Gandhi-Nehru era, but it acquires an
entirely different meaning after the advent of the OBCs. Now, the
claim to be casteless is itself a sign – it is instantly recognisable
as the unmistakable mark of upper-caste identity, because the
experience of apparent castelessness has been available only to the
upper castes.
In sum, the OBC category has taken us from a situation in which caste
was repressed and no one was supposed to have it (Dalits and Adivasis
being an aberrant residue of the past), to a situation where everyone
has caste and is talking about it, even when they are claiming to be
casteless. Despite its short-term costs, this is much healthier than
being in denial, as India has been for most of the six decades of
Independence. It is only by confronting caste and working through it
that the country can hope to get beyond it. This, after all, is the
difference between mere censorship and true transcendence.
A second lesson offered by the OBC category concerns the inevitable
complexity of aggregative social categories. The OBCs remind us that
it is not the ritual-religious hierarchies of purity and pollution
that keep caste alive today, but the material inequalities that it
systematically reproduces, which eventually invite political
mobilisation. The OBC category is crucial for the understanding of
caste inequalities because it discourages presumptions based on caste
membership alone. Since their relative status is more ambiguous than
either the lower or upper castes, the OBCs encourage us to investigate
– rather than take for granted – the relationship between caste and
privilege or disprivilege. The complex, multi-dimensional profiling
required to determine the material status of specific segments of the
OBC category is now becoming the norm for all caste groups. For
example, a relatively 'good' position in one sphere, say land
ownership, may be offset by a 'bad' position in another sphere, say
education or employment. This raises questions about appropriate
standards of comparison and procedures for aggregating across
different dimensions of material status to arrive at a 'net' result.
State interventions for social justice in today's world cannot avoid
these issues, and the OBCs provide useful testing grounds for policy
design.
Because it is so clearly an artificial construct, and so obviously
heterogeneous and segmented, the OBC category alerts us to the
presence of similar traits in other groups, including those wrongly
perceived as 'natural' or homogenous. It teaches us that, in the
modern world, all large social groups are constructed by a complex
mixture of past inheritance, colonial or imperial intervention, and
contemporary mobilisation. The OBCs remind us that internal disparity
is simply an empirical fact about all large groups – it cannot be used
to de-legitimise their political claims, even if it inevitably
complicates the response to these claims.
Renegotiating the social contract
The third lesson taught by the OBC category is diametrically opposed
to the managerial metrics of measuring group disadvantages. It urges
us to 'return to politics' and revisit the terms of the social
contract on which the nation is founded. Rights and entitlements in a
democracy are of broadly two kinds – the unconditional (eg,
fundamental rights) and the conditional (eg, deprivation or
needs-based rights). Conceptually, the nation state is defined by an
absolute and unconditional distinction between citizens and
non-citizens. But within the nation state, the question of whether and
to what degree a particular right is treated as conditional or
unconditional depends on the distribution of power – in short, on
politics. Whatever their problems, separate electorates emphasised the
unconditional aspect of power-sharing among the different social
groups that were to constitute the nation. By contrast, 'reservations'
reposition lower-caste rights as a conditional entitlement, a special
exception to the rule of equal citizenship. This formulation
completely erases the power-sharing dimension inherent in any group
right. Translated into the cruder terms of popular common sense,
reservations become a gift from 'the nation' to the lower castes, who
must produce proof of their deservingness.
Whatever their own motivations, the OBCs have made India collectively
and self-consciously aware of what the country has always known –
namely, that the lower castes and Muslims are a largely disprivileged
aggregation constituting roughly three-quarters of the Indian
population, while the largely privileged upper castes account for the
remaining quarter. That is why post-Mandal politics packs a new punch
into an old question: Who constitutes 'the nation'? Asking this
question today promises a political re-education. It enables us to see
that, in effect, the Gandhi-Nehru dispensation positioned the upper
castes as the casteless 'owners' of a nation of lower castes. It also
makes visible the bad faith in 'merit' arguments that confuse group
entitlements with individual qualifications.
Can a democracy founded on the promise of nation-sharing survive the
public awareness that a large majority is being systematically
excluded? If the majority consists of disparate and conflicting
groups, are its political-moral claims invalidated? If not, how are
these claims to be settled – how is the nation to be shared? Can the
seemingly indivisible form of sovereignty on which nation states are
founded be transformed into a shareable form? If political voice can
only be acquired by mimicking the grand, implacable rhetoric of
nationalism, then how is nation-sharing possible? How do we go about
inventing a post-national political language that can be
uncompromising without being secessionist, and can articulate demands
that are compelling yet circumscribed? Obviously there are no easy
answers to these
questions, but not asking them is no longer an option.
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