Volume 6, No. 2, February 2005

"Investment will be more uncertain in an increasingly competitive world, if jobs are given on the basis of my birth and not on the basis of my capability." — Arun Shourie, Ex-divestment minister

"I’m not against reservation, but it should be based on economics and not caste. If a person is hampered by resources, I think those people should be given reservation." — N.R. Narayana Murthy, chairman, Infosys Technologies.

"It’s ludicrous. The entire industry will go down the drain. The dream of a multi-billion dollar business process outsourcing industry, forget about it." —Vikram Talwar, CEO, EXL Services:

"If our hands are tied behind our backs, we cannot race ahead. Many of us employ people from these classes and everyone is treated on merit. Why then create an artificial division within employees?" — Arun Bharat Ram, Chairman, SRF

"We’re looking at a mass scale massacre kind of a situation. The MNCs will never understand this and software contracts to India may start slowing. I need skilled people to develop mission-critical software. There can be no compromise on that just for social reasons." — Vishnu Dusad, MD, Nucleus Software

This is the way the leaders of so-called India Inc. have reacted to the idea of bringing in reservation for dalits and backward castes in the private sector. Outlook, an English newsmagazine has published them in its recent issue (21 June 2004). According to the reporter, "Not a single businessman Outlook spoke to was pro-reservation on caste basis. Most were anti-any sort of reservation, while some felt if it has to be there, it should be on economic and not caste basis. The unanimous view: in a competitive scenario only merit and performance should matter."

The very tone and tenor of these reactions against reservations from the corporate leaders can constitute the reason for reservation in the private sector. The bias and prejudice against the oppressed sections of society that these reactions stink of well illustrate that if not specifically mandated, the private sector will not touch a dalit with a bargepole. The premise of these arguments is so poisonous that it dismisses even a possibility of merit and capability in these people. All of them sing in unison their casteist song that the influx of the dalits and other backward castes in their fiefdom will erode their ‘merit’. None of them seems to consider the possibility that there could be people from these castes with requisite merit and capability. None of their statements remotely appreciate the naked reality that despite possessing these attributes, people from these oppressed communities would not get entry to their fiefdom, would never get their dues from Indian society.

Somehow, reservation is construed as a concession extended with the intent of uplifting ‘low’ caste people. There is never an iota of reference to the intrinsic disability of the Indian society to treat all people equally and justly, which necessitates an externally imposed mandate of reservation. The former, that is, extending a helping hand to uplift these downtrodden people, may have been a consideration but certainly not a major one. Had it been otherwise, there is no justification for restricting the scope of reservations only to the SCs and STs; for there are scores of other communities including the brahmans having people who certainly needed such a helping hand from the State. The real reason for reservations is the latter. It is not the disability of the dalits but the disability of Indian society that necessitate reservation. The former connotes just the economic dimension and implies that when the SC and ST communities statistically come on a par with the rest of the population, reservation should come to an end. Much of the confusion around this issue, including recommendations of Mandal Commission, reservations for the economically poor people maliciously proposed by the BJP or the current controversy on reservation in the private sector stems from this erroneous conception.

Merit is the patent and permanent argument against reservation which is thrown around as though it were self-evident. That is the reason we find every argument against reservation, as sampled above, brings in abstract notions of merit. Surprisingly, none has adequately nailed this lie about merit. If at all, apologetic arguments from pro-Dalit circles, that tended to reason out their lack of competitive merit in terms of their poor material conditions, has only served to reinforce the argument of the opponents of reservation and embolden them to use this specious arguments ad naseum.

And what is the merit of those who are harping on merit? If merit is defined in terms of actual results, actual performance, which it should be, then the merit of the upper caste elites comes out glaringly through the pathetic state of the country in the comity of nations. Shouldn’t their merit be measured by the history of slavery they gave this country. Certainly there were no dalits around then to meddle in their affairs; they were condemned not to have even their shadows pollute the upper castes. What would they say about these hard facts of incontrovertible history? Was it their merit that anybody could just walk in with a handful of people and lord over this vast country not for a year or two, not for a century or so but for over a long millennium? Even after 1947, for almost two decades, despite the Constitutional provision of reservation having come into effect, there was hardly any dalit around to demoralize them with inefficiency. They ran this country virtually without any hindrance. Does it not reflect their merit, or a lack of it that India despite its unique endowments languished at the bottom whereas many similarly or worse placed countries passed it by in terms of every aspect of development?

Reservation began in right earnest only in late 1960s and with it Dalits started barely entering their exclusive domains. It was still preponderant in clerical jobs, at the most. Only in Group D, comprising the lowest jobs including sweepers, did the representation of dalits far exceed the prescribed percentage. Needless to say their presence in Group A posts was negligible. Not many people understand that the so called Group A service is a collection of all the posts within an officer or management cadre. Entering Group A and being counted against it does not necessarily have a relationship with power. Power lies at the other end of the spectrum, some seven to twelve steps from the entry point, which a junior Group A person had to climb by way of promotions. Secondly, mere entry in the cadre does not automatically obviate caste oppression; dalits have to earn the favour of their upper caste bosses. It is only through this process that they can reach positions of real power and in return be acknowledged as meritorious. The fact however remains that they are turned comprador to their community; while schizophrenically chanting about dalit interests, they unconsciously or consciously serve the interests of the existing power structure.

With time, many Dalits reached various positions in the power ladder. Even in this process, Dalits cannot be accused of lowering merit or eroding the efficiency standards of the upper caste elites. What then is the merit of these people that this country shamefully lay at around the bottom of the scale of the human development indices or had a dubious distinction to have more than half of world’s destitute?

The discourse on reservation in the private sector has begun with a wrong implicit premise much like that of the original reservation itself. The premise behind reservation as a mechanism to render a helping hand to the people who were oppressed socially for centuries is basically wrong. It should have been projected as a countervailing force against the socio-cultural disability of Indian society to treat people from the avarna (untouchable) castes as its own. It is a mechanism to ensure that the deserving people from these oppressed castes get their due share because otherwise the deep entrenched socio-cultural prejudice will never let them have it as can be seen in the sectors where this mechanism does not exist. Reservation being the anti-dote to the societal disability; it should have been applicable to all the sectors of society (economy). There is absolutely no logic for restricting it to the governmental or public sector or a few spheres like education and employment within them.

As the premise behind reservation was wrongly conceived so also is the current premise behind reservation in the private sector. The latter is being articulated in terms of the need in the context of decimation of the public sector which is happening under the pro-globalization policies of the government. The corollary of this conception will mean that if the government does not privatize the public sector, there may not be any need of reservation. The right premise behind reservation in private sector would necessarily follow the re-articulation of the basic premise behind Constitutional reservation as stated above—that it is a countervailing measure by the state against the socio-cultural disability of Indian society. Since this disability pervades the entire society, reservation is imperative in all the spheres of its sectors. The premise behind reservation in the private sector thus should be restored as the belated correction to the original premise behind reservations as a mechanism with which the rights of certain sections of society are protected, because left to itself society is incapable of doing it.

Thus there cannot be any question about reservation for dalits in the private sector or any other sector so long as these sectors belong to India. Dalits have their inalienable right of due share in whatever exists in whichever sector until the societal disability is done away with. This is not open for negotiation. If the upper caste elites want reservation to go, they should come forward to work for removing this societal disability rather than crib against reservations.

Reservations are like a bitter pill for some chronic disease and hence cannot be perennially good for anyone, except those who develop a vested interest in it like a drug company or an unethical doctor. Nobody likes to take bitter pills without reason. One stops taking them only after the disease is gone. Reservation is not in the interests of dalits either. It does not come without cost to them. Unfortunately, dalits do not realize that they are already paying a huge cost for reservations; so huge that in the ultimate cost-benefit analysis, it may be disputable whether reservation has been beneficial to them in net terms. Reservation, for instance has marred their rebellious zeal and coopted them into the system. Reservation has created a class of upwardly mobile dalits and made it a comprador class which parrots anti-Brahmin abuses in abstract, but in reality serves the interests of brahmanism. They have led dalits astray from their long-term emancipatory project of annihilation of castes. Dalits have developed genuine vested interests in continuing with castes so that the crutches of reservations are perennially available to them.

The policy of reservation creates its own caste vortex in which the long-term issues tend to get obfuscated. No, reservations will do no good to dalits; they are just a tactical measure to safeguard their livelihood concerns; they are a kind of fortification to protect their rights from communal onslaught of the upper caste elites. Dalits certainly need them but they cannot be a panacea. Dalits too want reservations to go more than the others but the onus of creating the prerequisite conditions for its exit unfortunately but squarely lies with the upper caste hegemons; not with Dalits. After all, this viciousness of Indian society is their creation!

The real question about reservation in the private sector is not whether it is required or justified much so whether they erode the so called merit and affect the prospects of holy FDI (foreign direct investment) into the country. These are all spurious arguments. It is the diseased mind of the Indian bourgeoisie that yet cannot see capitalist virtue in demolishing feudal vestiges in the society. People could reconcile with its comprador logic at the beginning to strike a compromise with the feudal forces under the umbrella of colonial rule. But persisting with the same thinking even after 50 years, when they claim to be competing globally does not gel with their claims of maturity. The feudal character of Indian bourgeoisie is not as such hidden; of late it is being unashamedly exhibited, be it a communitarian issue of Hindu communalism or nauseating display of personal riches in weddings and living. These things are not unconnected with caste and reservation issues; they are the proxies for the latter. The feudal outlook of the Indian bourgeoisie has hindered its comprehension that it is in the interest of capital to expand the market to create demand; de-segmentise labour market for getting competitive wage rates. They should reread the history of development of capitalism in Europe. They should revisit the rationale of political economy behind the affirmative actions operated in the capitalist El Dorado of the world—the US of America.

The affirmative action in the USA for instance is not restricted to the public sector alone or in certain specified spheres of activities; it extends everywhere. Reservation, after all does not mean sitting people merely by birth without cognizance of their capability as it is mischievously made out to be in public. There are enough qualified people among Dalits in every discipline who can shoulder any responsibility. The point is they are denied the opportunity to show their talent. Can these votaries of merit show a single case of dalit failure on account of lack of merit? Surely, over the last five decades they must have amassed a lot of examples to bolster their prejudice; they may just present a single example to illustrate their point. The fact is they have none. They just want to talk in air with casteist rhetoric. It is this attitude of the upper caste elite that drives Dalits inwards to take shelter under their identities and create hurdle in breaking the caste barriers; it damages their psychic frame and alienates them. Thus, the bogey of merit, efficiency, foreign direct investment etc. being raised by the business leaders in unison is just a subterfuge for persisting with their feudal privileges to maintain local hegemony.

While this paper would not differentiate between sectors or spheres therein insofar as reservation is concerned, it may be interesting in the context of the reactions of business leaders to ask "how private is their private sector?" It is well known that the most organized private sector companies have a paltry fraction, which rarely exceeds 20 %, of the equity from the people who control it. The rest is contributed by financial institutions and the public. Needless to say, the debt which usually exceeds total equity and can go as high as two or three times the latter, if not still more, comes from banks. If one reckons the fact that the capital coming from financial institutions and banks is after all public money, the so called private enterprise will no more appear as private. Leave aside its capital structure; do these private companies not benefit from the State? Do they not get land, utilities and infrastructure at the throw away price? Are they not given a plethora of concessions in tax, duties etc. in the name of investment incentives. Do they share the cost of education with the State when it draws its human resources? It can be easily found that the private sector in India gets far more benefits from the State than the Public sector. The entire profitability of the Reliance refinery, for example, is based on the sales tax deferment it received from the Gujarat government for 16 years which none of the PSUs has ever enjoyed. If it is so, then with what face can the business leaders throw tantrums over the issue of reservation?

The issue behind reservation in the private sector is of sanatan nature. The issue is whether there is a political will behind this move? How will such reservation be implemented? Will such reservation amplify costs rather than accruing benefits to Dalits? These issues are not new; they were associated with the kind of reservation already in place. Over the years they have only been validated by the practice.

As for political will, it has always been calibrated by considerations of electoral politics. There is no doubt that reservation was a containment strategy of the landlord-bourgeois ruling classes. Without reservation, it is inconceivable how such a large mass of ‘proletariat’ could have been managed under such an open unjust order. Reservation was a stratagem to create a stake for the upwardly mobile Dalits in the system, which as we see it, has been more than successful. Today, when the demand for reservation in the private sector is raised by Dalits, all the ruling class political parties are rushing forward to grab it. The BJP did it saying they will start discussions with all concerned. The Congress said the same thing. Even the Common Minimum Programme of the United Progressive Alliance has it. By far, the Shiv Sena is the only party which has characteristically come out in the open to oppose it. No political party would like to risk being seen as anti-Dalit and take a deliberate dent in its votes. If a bill on this issue is brought to Parliament, there is no doubt that it would be easily passed. However, it is equally clear that internally all these parties will work to sabotage its implementation. Unlike the existing policy of reservation where the resistance is manifested only through the bureaucracy, here the private money bags, influence of which pervades the entire power sphere, shall be in direct opposition to this move. Therefore the amount of resistance to its implementation is bound to be far greater than ever before.

Political will which is a prerequisite in any policy implementation displays its characteristic schizophrenic trait vis-à-vis reservation in the private sector. It cannot afford to oppose it in the open and cannot really support it in reality. What lie underneath this schizophrenia is the fear of reaction from the Dalits on one side and their own class-caste interests on the other. The relationship between these two that is manifested in the schizophrenic symptoms is a function of the political organization of these two camps. If communal polarization intensifies and Dalit movement gets further weakened, the political schizophrenia of the ruling classes may disappear with a manifest anti-Dalit onslaught, eliminating thereby the space for any kind of reservations. On the contrary, if the Dalit political movement gains in strength and communal forces are held at bay, which is very likely to happen if the former takes place, the requisite political will can be created for the implementation of reservation.

Even the reservation mandated in the Constitution suffers from a lack of political will. If there had been a political will behind reservation, its implementation would not have been so poor. Even after decades of its implementation, the representation of the SCs and STs in the Group A and B which may be considered as the margins of power is still much below the prescribed level. It took decades for the upper caste elites to reconcile with them and realize that their compliance does not necessarily mean devolution of their power. Now they do not mind filling up vacancies in a much depreciated organization structures at the levels sans power. The new recruits anyway have to climb up nine to ten rungs of the organizational ladder to reach positions of power. This process of progression is extremely opaque and entirely in the control of the traditional upper caste elites. They naturally ensure only such SCs and STs members to rise who will be internally aligned with the upper caste elite. It is akin to the Macaulay strategy to create a clerical class Indian in appearance but English in attitudes during the colonial times.

The entire process is run so callously that there is hardly any hope of correction. This process converts the SCs into three basic categories: one, those who are mediocre but ambitious and hence demonstratively submissive and obedient to authorities; in other words, those who display behaviour according to their caste dharma, are ungrudgingly favoured by the system and elevated as demo pieces to prove that there is no caste. The second category is of those who may fall in the range from relatively poor to mediocre, and who did not have an opportunity to or could not display subservient behaviour to the authorities are just ignored and tolerated in the system. They become the demo pieces for the lack of merit of dalits. This middle band comprises majority of the SC/ ST employees in any organization. The third category is of those who are certainly a minority but who are really meritorious and who by virtue of being so refuse to bend unprofessionally before the authority and on the contrary tend to raise uncomfortable questions. They are taken as a threat to the system and are invariably harassed. There is no remedy to this organizational dynamics because it is opaque to public. Business organizations are supposed to be intrinsically fascist in their orientation and so are out to crush any dissent beyond their tolerance limits. Even the courts fail to fathom this dynamic and get justice to the aggrieved dalit employees who muster courage to challenge their management in approaching them. The plethora of institutional mechanisms has proved utterly useless in the absence of the crucial political will. If this is the state of constitutionally mandated reservation, what may happen to the proposed reservation in private sector can best be left to the imagination.

Not unconnected entirely with the political will is the issue of implementation. How will reservation in the private sector be implemented? The Public sector is a well organized entity with established structure, processes and systems. One can easily see and verify the quantum of reservation there. A large part of the private sector is unorganized without any established structure, systems and processes. Even the organized part of it, comprising big industries, of late adopts a flexible structure which is dynamic enough to make it uncongenial to implement reservation. Many people work on projectised organization in which the teams are formed in matrix for a set of tasks and then dismantled. Even the remuneration packages of people holding similar designation could vary a great deal. It is not reservation but the order in the organization, which is a prerequisite for reservation that the private sector is primarily scared of. This peculiar order that keeps the employees of the private sector always on tenterhooks and thereby ensures compliance behaviour in them, characterizes the private sector. The private sector can ill afford to discard this important aspect of control.

The business class must realize that their arguments against reservation basically stem from age-old prejudices in Indian society vis-à-vis the lower castes. There is absolutely no rationale in them. There is no connection of merit with reservation. Reservation never meant accepting anyone just on the criterion of birth. Reservation simply means that a person having requisite qualification for the job should not be denied it just because he or she is born in a certain caste. Reservation does not have any connection with efficiency too. The latter is an outcome of many variables, such as organization culture, employee motivation, systems and processes, technology, training etc. Most of these variables depend upon the management which is virtually monopolized by the upper caste elites. If a person in the organization is not efficient, the onus must shift to the manager and not to an individual. Reservations do not have any connection with foreign direct investments. The foreign investments do not flow by seeing the caste of employees. Foreign investors appear enamored with India today because of its huge market, its infrastructure, its trained manpower available at paltry wages, its high interest rates, its political stability and consequently expectation of high rate of returns. Who has created this market; it is not a handful of upper caste ‘meritorious’ people but evidently the majority belonging to ‘meritless’ lower castes.

Before taking the debate on reservation in the private sector further, there is a need to rearticulate the concept of reservation in India. Reservation, in viable terms, can only be conceived as a Constitutional contrivance against the disability of Indian society to treat dalits equally and justly. Any other way, it will prove to be a veritable carrot that can be endlessly dangled before the masses in order to engage them in perpetual cold war in the name of archaic castes and communities. Moreover, only this premise can have a promise to end reservation by removing the disability of the society, any other way reservation will remain perpetually contentious. This premise will clear much of the confusion and motivate people to strive for the annihilation of castes. It will catalyze the right appreciation of these policies and largely eliminate the cause of social conflict.

If this conception takes root, it will be easy to reconcile that Reservations cannot be artificially restricted to the government and Public sectors and they should be applicable naturally to all the other sectors. Going by the labour theory of value the lower caste people as the labouring class can rightly stake claim to the entire wealth of this country. But they are not doing so. The upper caste elites better understand that it is the born right of all such people who are socially discriminated against to avail reservation. Mere policy is never enough. There needs to be a genuine political will backing the policy to get it implemented. This political will not come without pressure from the beneficiaries. The importance of a potent Dalit movement here gets underscored. Such a Dalit movement today may sound as a far cry but then one should also reconcile that reservation in the private sectors will also remain a far cry without a dalit movement.

Dalits must realize the limitations of any kind of reservation. The greatest damage reservations have done to dalit interests is to effectively eclipse the dalit struggle for emancipation. Paradoxically, it is the very struggle that can create the requisite political will for the effective implementation of reservation too. The technological advances have lowered the employment elasticities to near zero, which means that there is not going to be a big space for reservation within the prevailing system. The capacity of reservation to benefit dalits can be gauged from the fact that less than 1.7 % of dalits have benefited from it over the last 50 years. Notwithstanding the justification of all pervading reservation until the societal disability is removed by complete annihilation of castes, the talk of catalyzing the dalit bourgeoisie in some circles is not saying the same. Emergence of a dalit petty bourgeoisie through the reservation process has already been problematic; although nobody can deny its potential utility to the dalit movement. But promotion of an adversary parasitic class within shall be absolutely suicidal to dalit interests. There is no alternative for a potent dalit movement against the present system with its neo-liberal ethos.

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