The C in Congress
Pratap Bhanu Mehta Posted online: Tue Dec 27 2011, 01:57 hrs
Should the Congress party be described as casteist and communal? This
is not merely a rhetorical question. It goes to the heart of the kind
of India the Congress has imagined.
Both caste and religious identities are social realities. They are
also the axes along which a range of deprivations are structured.
Despite progress, the marginalisation of Dalits in India remains
morally obscene. And we have produced a politics that increasingly
marginalised Muslims. Good social policy has to address these
realities. It will warrant affirmative action. The case made at the
time of Independence that reservations may be necessary for Dalits
remains strong; in the current paradigm it is unfair to deny backward
Muslims reservations.
But social justice has been reduced to mere political opportunism. The
price is being borne by the very groups we are trying to empower. The
negative consequences of our discourse on social justice are
immeasurable. First, a discourse of discrimination and oppression that
was specific to the history of Dalits has been hijacked by all kinds
of groups. So any discourse on social justice is now seen, not as
rooted in ethical imperatives, but in an open grab for power. The
specificity of morally appalling discrimination has been lost under
the fog of demands for representation. Second, reservations, in their
current form, have produced the worst of all worlds. They are a cheap
gesture that disguises the root causes of marginalisation. In
politics, they have diverted energies from addressing the root causes
of deprivation. If politics had the same unanimity over quality
education as it did over reservation, India would be a different
place. Third, they have perpetuated an interest in conflict. Lalu
Prasad's big crime in Bihar was not just that he kept it backward. It
is that the state encouraged violence so that caste polarisation would
remain a factor of mobilisation.
But there are other subtleties as well. Arguments that invoke merit in
the context of attacking reservation are bad faith arguments. The
problem is not necessarily that reservation is a deviation from
something called merit. It is that the only form of inclusion that the
state can come up with is one in which it is easy to mark groups like
Dalits as less competent. Reservation has, in the form it is
structured, increased rather than decreased prejudice. And everyone
has an interest in perpetuating this vicious cycle. There are other
subtle issues as well. The Indian private sector's record on inclusion
is very weak. But in an economy where labour laws are rigid,
informalisation rampant, educational institutions do not perform
signalling functions, Dalits will find it harder to get entry.
Take another issue which should concern us all. Muslim youth are often
unfairly and unconscionably targeted by the police. A lot of this may
have to do with discrimination. But it is equally likely that the
roots of this are the same as those that make custodial violence in
India so common: the weakness of the police force. Impunity in police
often has roots in weakness, not prejudice. When it does not have the
adequate means, social esteem is low and it is put under pressure,
police forces will do all kinds of things to be seen to get results.
So discrimination against Muslims will be better addressed, not by
reservations, but by police reform. It is not insignificant, for
example, that at the level of high courts, quantitative evidence,
judged by acquittal rates, suggests that minorities are not
discriminated against, once the case comes to trial. This same
judiciary has upheld every measure on reservation. But now we want to
give members of constitutional bodies a caste and a religion.
These are complex issues. But under the slogan that caste and religion
are realities in India, we want to straitjacket every issue through
the prism of caste and religion. Ashis Nandy once made the powerful
point that communalism was not about the "facts of religion". It was
about its self-conscious use as a political tool, often by people who
did not believe in it. Casteism, is also not about the fact of caste.
It is about the use of caste to make three claims. First, that people
have compulsory identities which they cannot transcend, ever.
Institutions should act as if no one can be more or less than their
caste. Second, the point of social policy is not to empower
individuals to escape the deprivations of caste, but to trap them in
it. Third, that the only possible test of the legitimacy of
institutions is if they mirror social reality, not if they transform
it into something better. All of the Congress's actions, from its
support of the methodologically dubious caste census to its policies
on reservation, suggest that it has become casteist in this sense.
It has also become communal in the sense that Hamid Dalwai so
presciently diagnosed decades ago. It perpetuates the idea of minority
as a political category, so that it can keep them in its place and use
them. And, in the context of the Lokpal bill, it has cynically used
them again. The Congress has ruled India for more than 50 years. But
if India is more unjust along caste lines, minorities are more
marginalised, surely the Congress is to blame. What is it about its
paradigm of politics that it can effectively help neither Muslims nor
Dalits? The caste parties may have narrow agendas; sections of the BJP
may be pathologically incapable of thinking beyond identity. But what
is the Congress's excuse?
The Anna movement has rightly been castigated for the morally obscene
use of the caste of children. Recently, it was reported that Rahul
Gandhi referred to Sam Pitroda's caste in an election rally. Is this
really the party of Jawaharlal Nehru or even Rajiv Gandhi? We ought
not to disguise the appalling realities of caste, where appropriate.
But using them in this way? Someone remarked on reading this story,
"Rahul ne to Sam Pitroda ki bhi jaat dikha di." Even if the intention
was benign there is a truth in this. Is it not appallingly diminishing
when we create an institutional culture where the first thing we want
to point to is someone's caste? I thought the idea of India was to
escape precisely this original sin. And now Lokpals, tomorrow judges,
all will be identified through caste.
Perhaps the Congress is in love with the "C" in its name. Corruption
was not enough. It had to become corrupt, casteist, communal and
cynical. India's tragedy is that there is no national level challenger
to this party that is diminishing us all.
The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi
express@expressindia.com
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