Discrimination for dummies: V 2008
Increasingly, job quotas are cited as 'discrimination' - in reverse. But the word discrimination in terms of caste means something very different that the media mostly do not, or choose not to, understand, writes P Sainath.
A signal achievement of the Indian elite in recent years has been to take caste, give it a fresh coat of paint, and repackage it as a struggle for equality. The agitations in the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and other such institutions were fine examples of this. Casteism is no longer in defensive denial the way it once was. (“Oh, caste? That was 50 years ago, now it barely exists.”) Today, it asserts that caste is killing the nation - but its victims are the upper castes. And the villains are the lower orders who crowd them out of the seats and jobs long held by those with merit in their genes.
This allows for a happy situation. You can practise casteism of a visceral kind - and feel noble about it. You are, after all, standing up for equal rights, calling for a caste-free society. Truth and justice are on your side. More importantly, so are the media. Remember how the AIIMS agitation was covered?
The idea of ‘reverse discrimination’ (read: the upper castes are suffering) is catching on. In a curious report on India, The Wall Street Journal, for instance, buys into this big time. It profiles one such upper caste victim of ‘reverse discrimination’ with sympathy. (“Reversal of Fortunes Isolates India’s Brahmins,” Dec. 29, 2007.) “In today’s India,” it says, “high caste privileges are dwindling.” The father of the story’s protagonist is “more liberal” than his grandfather. After all, “he doesn’t expect lower-caste neighbours to take off their sandals in his presence.” Gee, that’s nice. They can keep their Guccis on.
A lot of this hinges, of course, on what we like to perceive as privilege and what we choose to see as discrimination. Like many others, the WSJ report reduces both to just one thing: quotas in education and jobs. No other form of it exists in this view. But it does in the real world. Dalit students are routinely humiliated and harassed at school. Many drop out because of this. They are seated separately in the classroom and at mid-day meals in countless schools across the country. This does not happen to those of “dwindling privileges.”
Dalit meetings are always measured in caste, even racist, terms. This, although Dalits are not a caste but include people from hundreds of social groups that have suffered untouchability.
• The discrimination curriculum
Students from the upper castes do not get slapped by the teacher for drinking water from the common pitcher. Nor is there much chance of acid being thrown on their faces in the village if they do well in studies. Nor are they segregated in hostels and in the dining rooms of the colleges they go to. Discrimination dogs Dalit students at every turn, every level. As it does Dalits at workplace.
Yet, as Subodh Varma observes (The Times of India, December 12, 2006), their achievements in the face of such odds are impressive. Between 1961 and 2001, when literacy in the population as a whole doubled, it quadrupled among Dalits. Sure, that must be seen in the context of their starting from a very low base. But it happened in the face of everyday adversity for millions. Yet, the impact of this feat in terms of their prosperity is very limited.
The WSJ story says “close to half of Brahmin households earn less than $100 (or Rs.4000) a month.” Fair enough. (The table the story runs itself shows that with Dalits that is over 90 per cent of households.) But the journalist seems unaware, for example, of the report of the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector. Which says that 836 million Indians live on less than Rs.20, or 50 cents, a day. That is, about $15 a month. As many as 88 per cent of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (and many from the Other Backward Classes and Muslims) fall into that group. Of course, there are poor Brahmins and other upper caste people who suffer real poverty. But twisting that to argue ‘reverse discrimination,’ as this WSJ story does, won’t wash. More so when the story admits that, on average, “[Brahmins] are better educated and better paid than the rest of Indian people.”
Oddly enough, just two days before this piece, the WSJ ran a very good summary of the Khairlanji atrocity a year after it occurred. That story, from a different reporter, rightly suggests that the economic betterment and success of the Bhotmange family had stoked the jealousy of dominant caste neighbours in that Vidarbha village. But it ascribes that success to India’s “prolonged economic boom which has improved the lot of millions of the nation’s poorest, including Dalits.” Which raises the question: were other, dominant caste groups not gaining from the “boom?” How come? Were Dalits the only “gainers?”
As Varma points out, 36 per cent of rural and 38 per cent of urban Dalits are below the poverty line. That’s against 23 per cent of rural and 27 per cent of urban India as a whole. (Official poverty stats are a fraud, but that’s another story.) More than a quarter of Dalits, mostly landless, get work for less than six months a year. If half their households earned even $50 a month, that would be a revolution.
Let us face it, though. Most of the Indian media share the WSJ’s ‘reverse discrimination’ views. Take the recent Brahmin super-convention in Pune. Within this explicitly caste-based meeting were further surname-based conclaves that seated people by clan or sub-group. You don’t get more caste-focussed than that. None of this, though, was seen as odd by the media. Almost at the same time, there was another high-profile meeting on within the Marathas. That is, the dominant community of Maharashtra. The meeting flatly demanded caste-based quotas for themselves. Again, not seen as unusual.
But Dalit meetings are always measured in caste, even racist, terms. This, although Dalits are not a caste but include people from hundreds of social groups that have suffered untouchability. The annual gathering in memory of Dr. B R Ambedkar on December 6 in Mumbai has been written of with fear. The damage and risks the city has to stoically bear when the noisy mass gathers. The disruption of traffic. The threat to law and order. How a possible exodus looms of the gentle elite of Shivaji Park. (In fear of the hordes about to disturb their polite terrain.) And of course, the sanitation problem (never left unstated for it serves to reinforce the worst of caste prejudice and allows ‘us’ to view ‘them’ as unclean).
But back to the real world. How many upper caste men have had their eyes gouged out for marrying outside their caste? Ask young Chandrakant in Sategaon village of Nanded in Maharashtra why he thinks it happened to him last week. How many higher caste bastis have been torched and razed in land or other disputes? How many upper caste folk lose a limb or even their lives for daring to enter a temple?
How many Brahmins or Thakurs get beaten up, even burnt alive, for drawing water from the village well? How many from those whose “privileges are dwindling” have to walk four kilometres to fetch water? How many upper caste groups are forced to live on the outskirts of the village, locked into an eternal form of indigenous apartheid? Now that’s discrimination. But it is a kind that the WSJ reporter does not see, can never fathom.
In 2006, National Crime Records Bureau data tell us, atrocities against Dalits increased across a range of offences. Cases under the Protection of Civil Rights Act shot up by almost 40 per cent. Dalits were also hit by more murders, rapes and kidnapping than in 2005. Arson, robbery and dacoity directed against them — those went up too.
It’s good that the molestation or rape of foreign tourists (particularly in Rajasthan) is causing concern and sparking action. Not so good that Dalit and tribal women suffer the same and much worse on a colossal scale without getting a fraction of the importance the tourists do. The same Rajasthan saw an infamous rape case tossed out because in the judge’s view, an upper caste man was most unlikely to have raped a lower caste woman.
In the Kumher massacre which claimed 17 Dalit lives in that State, charges could not be framed for seven years. In a case involving a foreign tourist, a court handed down a guilty verdict in 14 days. For Dalits, 14 years would be lucky. Take contemporary Maharashtra, home to India’s richest. The attention given to the Mumbai molestation case - where 14 arrested men remained in jail for five days after being granted bail - stands out in sharp contrast to what has happened in Latur or Nanded. In the Latur rape case, the victim was a poor Muslim, in Nanded the young man who was ghoulishly blinded, a Dalit. The Latur case was close to being covered up but for the determination of the victim’s community.
The discrimination that pervades Dalit lives follows them after death too. They are denied the use of village graveyards. Dalits burying their dead in any place the upper castes object to could find the bodies of their loved ones torn out of the ground. Every year, more and more instances of all these and other atrocities enter official records. This never happens to the upper castes of “dwindling privileges.” The theorists of ‘reverse discrimination’ are really upholders of perverse practice.
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P Sainath (2008) ‘Discrimination for dummies: V 2008’, India Together, 19 January 2008. https://indiatogether.org/discrim-op-ed/
8 reader responses
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Pilid · 19 January 2008
Sainath has a point discrimination has not gone away and Dalits continue to suffer it. But his caustic rebuttal misses all the points of that article in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that he mentions. Firstly, his argument is that Dalits have suffered worse. That is not in dispute - there is nothing in that article to suggest otherwise. Secondly, all his arguments appear to be premised on the idea that Dalits are the sole beneficiaries of quotas. That, as everyone knows, is not the case. In Tamilnadu the major beneficiaries have been the so-called middle castes/OBCs who have had a major role in oppressing Dalits in that state where Brahmins are a miniscule minority. And, quoting from the same table, at 74% earning over $100, they are not doing that badly either. But all his ire is directed (or should I say mis-directed) at the upper castes alone. Thirdly, I fail to recognize what he is trying to prove is it that reverse discrimination is not an issue or is that the quota system in TN is justified? Both issues are somewhat connected and here is why. The one party/government most adamantly opposed to the introduction of economic criteria for reservations is the DMK/Karunanidhi government. The same kind of outrage was even greater when the issue was specifically about extending this for Dalits. So, are all these instances of atrocities being committed predominantly against the wealthy cream of Dalits? Or, as I think is more likely, against the impoverished? The fact remains that the years of governmental privileges have created a bourgeois in every caste group who now enjoy a privileged status in their communities and are now unwilling to let others obtain the same. Is it not fair to ask that quotas are implemented strictly for the sections that continue to suffer today? If that was the case, would the high figure of 69% continue to have political legitimacy? Is it too much to say that the primary reason for this fight to continue the current quota policy has less to do with uplifting backward castes and more to do with caste-based apportionment of opportunities with the focus entirely on political mobilization and its anticipated electoral dividends? Since there is so much resistance to any change, it is hardly surprising that reverse discrimination is something of an issue. Mr. Sainath is right to say that dalits are still being discriminated against. But his critique goes off on a tangent by failing to address whether the oppressed groups that he champions are actually being helped by the infirmities of the policy that the theme of the WSJ piece highlighted.
Raj · 22 January 2008
To cite all these examples of discrimination doesn't really make "reverse discrimination" false. I agree with the author that Dalits suffer far more inhuman modes of discrimination than the upper castes. But to say that the discrimination faced by the upper castes is not significant enough, is not acceptable. A group of people are facing drastic economic consequences because of being in a certain group, and if this not DISCRIMINATION, what is?. It has to be seen in the context of what is expected of an egalitarian society and what has been denied here. One discrimination does not justify the other and does not even solve it efficiently. Let's say that the salary of writers in India like you, are taken away to be given to poor, and you get to eat only one rich meal per day. The argument and statistics would not suffice that there are lot more poor people in India who could only afford one puny meal a day or not even that, and that you are much better off. Your suffering does not solve anything, is totally uncorrelated and is not the effective way to solve the main issue, even though your suffering might be less. It is these misplaced priorities, ineffective solutions and new discriminations that the article highlights and not any denial of the Dalits' discrimination. In fact, WSJ periodically publishes articles on casteism, as if India is still being ruled by some Hindu supremacists. I don't understand the author's issues with the Brahmins' convention. If every other caste in India could group itself to gain something politically or economically, why not Brahmins? If you look at all the recent legislations, has anything benefited them? It has only made things worse for them. So what is wrong in grouping to protect themselves as a group, when the same grouping is used to deny opportunities to them? The whole issue has been addressed in a way as if there are some huge acres of land that they have hoarded in the past, that could be distributed back. Wish it was that simple. Most of the time, the international media focuses on the atrocities on the Dalits and very less on the proposed stupid remedy, which no other country practices on such a scale as in India.
sam · 23 January 2008
Any effort (small or large) to reserve equal opportunity for dalits would lead to loss of opportunity for a non-dalit (because resources though expandable are not infinite). Does that mean, do away with all forms of reservation? Reservation exists precisely because of discrimination and monopolization by upper-caste elites as enumerated in the article. Since when did resistance to discrimination become "reverse discrimination"??? There is no such thing as "reverse discrimination". There are only "victims of limited opportunities", so to say! And the victims happen to be both upper-caste and dalits.
sandeep · 1 May 2008
i donot agree with the two critiques that have been presented. "positive discrimination" is meant for those who have been marginalised for generations. the dalits are a section of our population who have seen the worst forms of deprivations--social, economic and potitical. these has been nothing like reservations in any other country. but there has also not been anything called caste--a discrimination based merely on birth--in ay other country. special problems call for special solutions. reservations are one such solution. as for the term reverse discrimination, i think what the author meant was the sense of victimisation that the people from upper castes are feeling. but the fact of the matter is that brahmins have enjoyed a position of privelege all through their existance. they have had the advantage of superior education and other facilities. true, there are some brahmins who are really poor. but that does not mean that the community as a whole falls into that category. so, i fully concur witht the author that the whole thing about reverse discrimination is being given mroe improtance than it deserves and the real issues of dalit discrimination hardly receive the kind of mention in today's media.
Pjoseph · 26 August 2008
Mr. Sainath, thank you for writing this article; by doing so you have shed light on a rather subtle, and yet in my opinion, a rather insidious problem in media articles concerning India, especially those composed by foreign (read, American) dailies and weeklies these days. It is ridiculous for the WSJ to have run the article that it did. An example of bad journalism, one can only wonder at its author's intent, or if he/she did any actual research into the matter. Publishing such a declarative piece was and is as presumptuous an act as one undertaken by an Indian newspaper if it ever attempted to chart the voting patterns of Caucasian males above 50 in rural Massachusetts in the upcoming U.S presidential elections. As you have pointed out, the uni-dimensional angle of the WSJ article only serves to increase misconceptions regarding the intricate nature of India's social ills among those who take the publication's word to be the final law in all things. I do not dispute that "reverse discrimination" exists in some form. And yet one has to look for instances of it, while examples of low caste men and women becoming the victims of extortion, beatings, unsanctioned jail sentences etc tend to slap one in the face. The fact remains that when you compare the degree of harshness as well as the frequency of discriminatory acts perpetrated against people of low castes vs. those of higher castes, the imbalance still shows that folk of the FCs are in a far better place. My issue is with the WSJ article, and the ignorance it highlights; as a student of Public Administration and Policy in the U.S, I have been privy to many discussions and arguments relating to "reverse discrimination" as seen in American Institutions. Basic fact: equating discrimination based on race (which is what occurs across America) and that based on caste is erroneous. Both types of discrimination are terrible, but the conditions under which they occur are not the same. Whether the WSJ was trying to ingratiate itself with certain sections of the Indian population, or whether it was trying to illustrate to possible American investors how similar India's scene might be to something they are used to, its readers need to understand that the history of both countries are different; always have been. Their cultural realities have been different too and though in a new world, India and the US will share many common paths, their social issues cannot be compared in an offhand manner. If anything, perhaps the comparison may be studied closely in an academic setting to see if there is an answer that can be derived. A process that is, obviously, outside the scope of the WSJ.
R.Narahariseti · 7 October 2008
Dear Mr. P.Sainath, Thank you for pointing out one of the inevitable realities of implementing quotas for lower castes in India. One thing that has not been mentioned in the previous comments is the history of India and especially that of Dalit people. Although creating quotas for poorer populations instead of Dalits may seem intuitive, it would not serve the intended purpose. As mentioned above, the poor in India are overrepresented by Dalits, but the poor in India are also vast. Dalit families have been denied access to education, health and employment for decades. The accumulation of wealth is lacking in these families, and that is what caste based quotas could address. Class based quotas are equally necessary but they have a different outcomes. The beneficiaries of purely class based quotas (benefiting the vast number of poor in India) would overwhelmingly be families that have more familial ties to wealth than those of Dalits.
ls · 21 December 2008
It is no one's case that Dalits are not discriminated against. The question is whether reservations have addressed the problem or not. Twenty years ago, while driving past the Tughlakabad fort, I used to see families of workers breaking stones at 6am in the morning ... whole families, including children. I am quite sure they are still there doing the same thing twenty years later. The fact is the children do not go to school because they are migrants and in any case need to earn some money. should they feel happy that they can get 15% reservation for their caste at IIT, IIM and AIIMS? The fact is that over the past 60 years, politicians have let them rot. If anyone had their interest at heart, there would have been schemes to ensure they went to school and then the meritorious amongst them would have anyway qualified the entrance to these institutions on their own steam. That is what an egalitarian society would do. You will only give crutches because you do not want him to walk on his own. By now after 60 years he should be walking on his own if the policies had been aimed at that instead of only giving crutches. Universalise and enhance primary education today and then in 15 years reservation would become unnecessary ... Dalits would enter IITs and IIMs on their own merit.
suppressed · 24 September 2009
I agree fully with Is. I am from dalit background but have made everywhere on merit without using any quotas. But since I have the background everyone takes for granted that what I have achieved is with help of reservation crutches. I have to go out of the way to tell them that I am from the general category and I don't know how many believe that. I wish dalits were provided opportunities to study rather than quotas. Also the same few families keep taking advantage of the quotas and those who actually need them are not benefited. so it seem s to be a lose-lose situation for all castes.