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What Justices Sachar and Misra knew, but ignored
By Radha Rajan
Under the Gandhi-Nehru-inspired secular political dispensation, Hindu OBCs and Hindu Scheduled Tribes are being systematically disempowered economically. The economic and political disempowerment of the Hindus is directly proportional to the empowerment of the two most well-organised so-called global Abrahamic minorities.
Economically backward Hindus are kept out of the empowering quota regime because of their ‘caste’ but Christians and Muslims are brought into the fold in the guise of ‘class’. What is not known at all is that Muslims and Christians continue to retain their specific caste and community identities even after conversion to Islam and Christianity thus nullifying the dishonest justification for religious conversion due to caste oppression.
Keeping Hindus out of reservation on the basis of caste but bringing in the Christians and Muslims into the quota regime with the fig-leaf of community and class is disempowering more and more socially and economically backward Hindus. Classifying Christians as backward is a stratagem just to enable them to corner the empowering benefits of affirmative reservations in higher education and government employment.
It is a measure of the success of the ‘secular’ propaganda machinery that few know of the underlying dishonesty governing our policy on reservation in educational institutions and government employment. Tamil Nadu best exemplifies Indian polity’s Machiavellian manipulation of the minority religions and their covert caste and sub-caste identity for electoral gains.
In all government and government-aided institutions, including institutions of politics and administration and institutions of higher learning, elevation to top posts at any level or grade hinges on government-decided reservation policy which gives people access to higher education and employment. What goes into the assembly line at the point of entry in any job determines what comes out of it at the end and at the top.
The writer was present at the Judicial Academy, Chennai, in February 2009, to depose before Justice Srikrishna who was appointed to look into events leading to the violent lawyer-police clashes on February 19 inside the precincts of the Madras High Court. The writer had been carefully observing the hordes of lawyers who had thronged the venue; the bulk comprised Christians and anti-Hindu Dravidian Tamil chauvinists. This triggered the question how did RC Paul Kanagaraj and S Prabakaran heading the Madras High Court Advocates Association and the Tamil Nadu Advocates Association become presidents of these organisations?
The answer to the ‘why and how’ the state’s advocates’ associations slipped into their control is rooted in the peculiar reservations policy of successive Dravidian Tamil Nadu governments, both DMK and AIADMK. Reservations which stand at 69 per cent, is way above the national policy of 50 per cent reservation quota for the socially and economic non-forward castes. So far, attempts to challenge this abnormality in the courts and bring it on par with the national numbers have met with ferocious opposition from all Dravidian Tamil parties. Justices Sachar and Misra while making their recommendations for more reservation for the Abrahamic minority religions and equal opportunities in employment have wilfully ignored the data from Tamil Nadu.
Brahmins and other non-Brahmin forward castes in TN, like pujaris, vaidikas and the utterly poor who carry the dead to the cremation ground, even if the families live in penury, are kept out of the reservation quota in higher education and government jobs. When the Hindu forward castes, despite in crippling poverty, are kept out of the quota regime, it would be expected that those brought into the quota spectrum would belong to the socially and economically backward ‘castes’. But is that the case?
How many of us know that the ‘c’ in the OBC and MBC is not caste but ‘class’ here and ‘community’ there. Economically backward Hindus are kept out of the empowering quota regime because of their ‘caste’ but Christians and Muslims are brought into the fold in the guise of ‘class’. What is not known at all is that Muslims and Christians continue to retain their specific caste and community identities even after conversion to Islam and Christianity thus nullifying the dishonest justification for religious conversion due to caste oppression.
The hidden face of caste-based religion behind reservations:
Muslims
Let me cite the much-acclaimed Sachar Committee’s report, Table 10.3:
Around 40 per cent of all Muslims are already enjoying the benefits of reservation under the OBC quota The percentage of Muslims and Christians who are cornering the benefits of reservation in the BC and OBC quota vary from state to state West Bengal-2.4 per cent Uttar Pradesh-62 per cent Kerala, where the Muslims constitute 25 per cent of the total state population, 99 per cent are classified as OBCs and are claiming reservation quota. In Tamil Nadu 93.3 per cent Muslims have been notified as OBC by the state government in 2004-2005, whereas in 1999-2000 83 per cent of Muslims were notified as OBCs-a steep increase of 10 per cent in just five years!
Christians
All-India population as per 2001 census- 2.3 per cent or 24.2 million. About 1/3rd of all Christian population is tribal. Of the remaining 2/3rd, around 70 per cent claim backward class (BC) status. The North-East-Around 5.3 million tribal Christians, which is 1/4th-1/5th of the total Christian population. The North-East Christians are all tribal people. Orissa-Eight lakh tribal Christians. Bihar and Jharkhand-About 1.1 million tribal Christians. Of the remaining 16 million Christians, 60-70 per cent of all Christians in the southern states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Orissa are notified as OBCs with percentages varying from state to state as indicated earlier. Only 10 per cent of all Christians in the country are not availing of any kind of reservation and these would be largely the Goan and the Syrian Christians, the majority of whom belong to the forward castes.
Now let us look at some hard facts about the politics and religion behind reservations.
All-India reservation-Total 50 per cent. STs 7.5 per cent, SCs 15 per cent, OBCs 27.5 per cent. All-India tribal population stands at 8.2 per cent while all-India SC population is 16.2 per cent. Christians constitute only 10 per cent of the total tribal population but they corner 90 per cent of all ST reservation quotas in higher education and government employment. J&K has 11 per cent tribal population but they probably get nothing. Around 70 per cent of Christians and Muslims have been brought into the quota regime as backward communities or backward classes. There is no category called Scheduled Caste Christians or Muslims. When the church demands reservation for so-called dalit Christians and God forbid, that it may ever happen, then the church will de-notify large segments of the OBC Christian population and re-classify them as Scheduled Castes so that they can corner all the benefits of Scheduled Caste reservation just as they are cornering all the benefits of the Scheduled Tribe reservation quota.
This cornering is made possible only because of the constitutional right provided to minorities to start and run educational institutions. There is a move now afoot to equate degrees obtained from Muslim madrasas to the CBSE board so that the Muslims in the OBC spectrum may be enabled to corner another major chunk of the benefits of reservation just as the Christians are doing now.
Under the Gandhi-Nehru-inspired secular political dispensation, Hindu OBCs and Hindu Scheduled Tribes are being systematically disempowered economically. The economic and political disempowerment of the Hindus is directly proportional to the empowerment of the two most well-organised so-called global Abrahamic minorities.
To get back to how the likes of Paul Kanagaraj and S Prabakaran have ascended to the powerful positions they now hold, we will have to look at the face of the religions behind the Tamil Nadu reservation quota regime. The bulk of advocates who register themselves in the Bar enter the courts directly from law colleges where admission to the courses is governed by Tamil Nadu’s distinctively caste-based, and pro-minorities reservation policy.
What is true of admission to law colleges is true of medical colleges, engineering colleges, IITs, IIMs, and admission to all under-graduate and post-graduate courses in the sciences and humanities. Let us now look at the reservation quota regime in Tamil Nadu.
Tamil Nadu totals 69 per cent reservation
Fifty per cent of the total quota reserved for BC + MBC-which can be broken down to 30 per cent for BC, 20 per cent for MBC. Eighteen per cent for SC can be broken down to 15 per cent + 3 per cent where the 3 per cent is exclusively reserved for the Arundhatiyar community. One per cent for ST. About 90 per cent of all Muslims and Christians have been included for reservation under the 30 per cent BC category. Around 70 per cent of all Tamil Nadu population are considered BC, a very unusual and high percentage. Around 50 per cent of the 70 per cent BC population are qualified for reservation.
Now let us see how this works in real terms by taking admission to medical colleges as an example. There are altogether 3000 medical seats of which 30 per cent or 900 seats are allotted to the BC and 600 seats or 20 per cent of the total are allotted to the MBC.
Christians constitute 6.5 per cent of the total Tamil Nadu population while Muslims constitute 5.5 per cent. Of the total 6.5 per cent of Christians, 6.1 per cent or around 80 per cent of the total Christian population have been classified as BC. This is 1/9th of the total population. BC Christians were cornering 300 seats out of the 900 medical seats every year; that is 1/9th of the population was claiming 1/3rd of the share of seats. And that is why Christian politicians and the Christian clergy met the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister to ask him to rescind the order granting 3.5 per cent reservation for Christians. The Tamil Nadu government promptly rescinded the order and allowed the Christians to come back into the 30 per cent BC quota segment which was getting them phenomenal returns. Christians must be removed from the 30 per cent BC quota unless we want a situation someday in the near future when they may rampage across the entire BC spectrum. Giving this super-forward religion even 3.5 per cent quota is bad enough but allowing them to occupy the elephant’s space in the BC quota segment is wilful betrayal of the cause of Hindu backward classes.
The same would be true of all professional colleges and in admissions to all under-graduate and post-graduate degrees too. We must not be beguiled into thinking that the remaining seats go to Hindu BCs and MBCs. Reservation benefits are being hogged by the minorities and anti-Hindu Dravidian Tamils. Tamil Hindu SCs, BCs and MBCs are being increasingly marginalised and alienated from the mainstream.
The Tamil Nadu government had announced 3.5 per cent exclusive reservation for Christians and Muslims. This 7 per cent minority reservation quota was supposed to have been hived off the 30 per cent BC reservation quota. In the beginning, the church welcomed the move but soon beat the retreat when it realised that under the 3.5 per cent exclusive quota, Christian BCs were eligible only for 105 seats as against the 300 seats it was snatching from the mouths of Hindu BCs.
Now let us look at the last government deception which is proving fatal to Hindu backward classes and castes. According to the 2001 census report, which for the first time was collecting such data on the basis of religion, if we consider urbanisation and literacy as indicators or indices of forwardness, then in Tamil Nadu-
Male literacy in Christians is 90 per cent, Muslims also 90 per cent, Hindus 81.5 per cent. Female literacy in Christians is 82 per cent, Muslims 76 per cent, Hindus 62.5 per cent. Urbanised percentage-Christians 56 per cent, Muslims 73 per cent, Hindus 41 per cent.
If we have to avert instability in society caused by growing discontent among the majority populace, then Indian polity must begin to define forward and backward and also address the anomaly of the ‘c’ in FC and BC. Keeping Hindus out of reservation on the basis of caste but bringing in the Christians and Muslims into the quota regime with the fig-leaf of community and class is disempowering more and more socially and economically backward Hindus. Classifying Christians as backward is a stratagem just to enable them to corner the empowering benefits of affirmative reservations in higher education and government employment.
The Sachar Committee’s report and the Tamil Nadu reservation policy rest on some fuzzy all-India misconceptions and deceptions about caste, class, community and religion, whereas the truth of the backwardness of the Hindus, if one goes by the 2001 census indices of forwardness, is more acute and visible. Economic deprivation alone must form the basis of all future reservation quota criteria. The silence about the manipulation of caste and sub-caste in Muslims and Christians to serve political interests has to be broken in the national interest.
"Fifty years ago, such a revolting outrage, committed upon the religious sensibilities of the Hindus, would have resulted in grave complications and Government would have left no stone unturned to propitiate the Hindu Chiefs and the Hindu population, and last, though not the least, the Hindu section of the native army. Today Government officials openly side, presumably with the approval of the head of the Provincial Administration, with those who break Hindu images, desecrate Hindu temples, plunder the houses and shops of Hindus and ravish Hindu women....Have we Hindus become so craven-hearted, so utterly incapable of self-defence, that the Government no longer thinks it necessary to avoid wounding our tenderest feelings or even to keep up appearances? Verily, a nation gets precisely the kind of treatment it deserves." (Aurobindo, Bande Mataram, May 6, 1907)
(The writer is Editor, Vigil Online.)
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