With the peasant castes in northern India and elsewhere — variously known as OBCs (other backward castes) in India’s contemporary political lexicon or intermediate castes in politics-neutral contexts — becoming a powerful interest group in the country in recent decades, the government has succumbed to their demand for a caste census, a practice that had been stopped in 1931. This became unavoidable when the BJP, the principal Opposition party, tipped the scales in favour of a caste census after some internal debate. In the Congress, too, the OBC sections made it known that they stood alongside the so-called backward caste regional parties on the issue. Fears of a possible backward caste backlash in future elections clearly became the decider. In free India, the enumeration of caste did not figure in the decennial census exercise. This was in keeping with the democratic sentiment with which the freedom movement generation was infused. But as we can see, there is a yawning gap between the high ideals of the political visionaries who aspired to a caste-less society in the social and political space, and the crassness of political practice on the ground. The next step to be expected is that the backward caste parties will now press for a bigger share of the national pie in every sphere in proportion to the numbers of the OBCs in the overall population. The corollary of this is that deprived sections of the population that do not fall within the OBC framework, or those that do not belong to the SC/ST category (for whom reservations in perpetuity have come to be the norm) may be hard done by. This is far removed from the republican Constitution envisaged after Independence.
There can be no question that about a third of India can be categorised as suffering from extreme poverty, and all governmental efforts — at the levels of the states and the Centre — must accord priority to pushing these sections out of the poverty trap. Clearly this proportion is way below the population numbers that the OBCs, and SCs/STs claim for themselves. Thus, there is no getting away from the fact that a new paradigm must be arrived at, through the method of consensus involving give-and-take, to spread the fruits of prosperity in the country. If this process is not set in motion, hair-splitting will not cease on the question of whether or not members of the OBCs and SCs/STs that are well-to-do (and this is a rising graph) are not automatically “socially and educationally backward (SEBC)” as well. Thus, every effort needs to be made to render the SEBC status of a community of people dependent on income, rather than their caste origin.
Hopefully, in the long run, reservations or positive discrimination in education and jobs will not be needed if the national economy is a continually expanding one. The question really is how long that wait is going to be. In the interim, ways need to be found to get the “creamy layer” out of the scheme of reservations. After all, the Constitution had envisaged reservations for the SCs and STs only for the first 10 years. Clearly such a time scheme was not adequate and many of our SC/ST citizens still suffer from the consequences of poverty, as do many OBCs. But, for that matter, so do many who are in neither category. There is no reason why these sections should languish unattended. It is for this reason that class offers a better classification for determining governmental support than does any other, although in India class and caste coincide to a considerable degree. Now that we seem to be reverting to the British-era caste census, a simultaneous attempt needs to be made to take those OBCs and SSc-STs out of the reservations paradigm who have successfully made the transition out of poverty.