In my opinion, purely caste-based reservations do perpetuate caste divisions in the short term. However, they also uplift untouchable and backward castes, to a large extent, though it is at the expense of the upper castes. If (social and economic) upliftment of the lower castes is the sole objective behind reservations, rather than doing away with caste altogether, then caste based reservations do work. Tamil Nadu is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Since many decades, Tamil Nadu has had up to 69% reservations for admissions to colleges and in state government jobs. There has been a great degree of social and economic mobility as a result of this. Sadly the Tamil Brahmin community has been largely driven away from the state as a result of this reservation policy (coupled with the vehement anti-Brahmin rhetoric of various Dravidian parties).

Are reservations at the expense of the upper castes? As the majority of students in all the elite educational institutions in India have been the upper castes, through the years, at whose expense have those institutions been thriving all these years? And at whose expense were/are those students studying at those institutions? And has the Brahmin community of Tamil Nadu truly been ‘largely driven away from the state’? Didn’t know we have caste-based censuses which made such information easily available.

Some of the arguments justifying reservations in the post are good, some are weak. My primary grouse is against the thinking that suggests ‘reservations’ need to be justified. Who exactly needs the justification? The majority, of the castes and the population, who are underrepresented in higher educational institutions and jobs or the minority, of castes and the population, who are grossly overrepresented?

[Thanks, Harini]

Anand Teltumbde recalls his association with his ‘dearest friend and comrade’:

I knew Balagopal since 1980s and admired him for his sharp intellect and deep commitment to human rights. Not many in the movement knew that he was a brilliant mathematician and could have easily shone himself in the galaxy of great mathematicians of the country. However, he easily gave it up and threw himself into the movement to expose the spate of human rights violations by the state to crush the then CPI (ML) PWG movement. He rather studied law in order to equip himself to fight cases of human rights violations more effectively.

Most times he acted as a one-man army against the state and rushed to the spot of such a state crime by whatever means. We used to be always worried for his safety for he could be individually marked to be most responsible for causing embarrassment to the state in its diabolic mission. Many a time, he did face such moments of danger but nothing deterred him from his resolve.

Jayati Ghosh says:

It is rare nowadays to come across people of unflinching and unquestionable integrity. It is even rarer to find in such people a strong sense of personal and intellectual honesty that demands that they interrogate their own actions and arguments with as much sincerity as they turn on others. And it is rarest of all to find such people engaged in public life, where they would constantly have to face the possibly unhappy consequences of such honesty.

Dr K. Balagopal, the eminent human rights activist whose untimely death has shocked a very wide range of people across India, was one such extremely rare person. While there is much else that can be said to praise him (such as his extraordinary commitment, his patient persistence, his personal courage, his completely selfless attitude to the causes he believed in and the simplicity of his manner of living) it may be that this special kind of honesty was at once his finest and most inconvenient attribute.

There are other tributes from activists and organizations.

The sociologist, Andre Beteille, delivered a lecture in Calcutta in March which I attended.

He touched upon academic quality versus inclusion (e.g. through reservation or affirmative action), and said quality need not be compromised. At the end of the lecture, I asked him to elaborate a bit on this issue of quality versus inclusion; some may think inclusion compromises quality, while others may assert that quality itself is arbitrarily defined around certain privileges. What is the meaning of quality in a democratic and inclusive society?

I did not find his answer interesting.

A relentless crusader for human rights for three decades now, Andhra Pradesh HC lawyer Balagopal has fought cases from extra-judicial killings of political dissenters to atrocities against Dalits and women. And he has often suffered personal attacks for his efforts, by the police and others shamed by his exposes. But he has never faltered. His reports on encounter killings, backed by painstaking investigative work, had such credibility that even the state could not ignore it. He doesn’t take legal fees from poor clients. And he travels endlessly across rural India, giving a voice to the opinions and problems of the poor—from farmers and tribals being displaced by SEZs in Nandigram or Visakhapatnam, to beedi workers seeking minimum wages, to tribals trying to protect their homes and forests. One of the most respected civil liberties activists in the country, Balagopal has inspired an entire generation to engage with the causes he espoused.

Me1084 posts an extract from an article (‘Beyond violence and non-violence’) by Balagopal that shows his clear thinking and deep commitment to the marginalized- here’s the extract:

The plain and stark fact is that while all strategies have been effective in curbing some injustice, none has succeeded in forcing the government to take back a single major policy in any sphere. And none has been able to reverse the trends inherent in the structures of society and economy.

The general understanding is that governance of the country – and may be the systemic infrastructure of society – is fundamentally wrong and needs remedying, maybe overturning. Do we know of any effective strategy for that? I am not talking of political strategies, but strategies of struggle that will successfully put pressure upon the State and the polity to stop them in their tracks. The struggle may be built around class or caste or any other social combination. It may in the end seek reform or the upturning of the polity. It may operate mainly or in part within the polity or keep out of it altogether. Whichever it is, the common problem is this: the experience of this country is that governments do not stop doing some thing merely because it has been demonstrated to be bad. Or even contrary to constitutional directives and goals. They stop only if going along is made difficult to the point of near impossibility. No democratic dispensation should be thus, but Indian democracy is thus. Short of that, you demonstrate the truth of your critique till you are blue in the face or shout till you are hoarse in the throat, it is all the same.

This is the question that haunts all movements, and none has an answer. All strategies, whether violent or peaceful, have found that they are not without success, if by success is meant stemming of local forces of oppression or the local manifestation of global forces, and improving the situation of its victims at the margin or even more. One does not wish to belittle these achievements, and in any case its beneficiaries are grateful, and belittling makes no difference to them. But any attempt to go beyond that has been faced with an insuperable wall which defines the limits of Indian democracy.

The naxalites – in particular the largest of them, the Maoists – are generally credited with having used strategies of violent struggle to great effect. That they have had substantial effect on the local social and political structures is beyond doubt. From Telangana to Bihar, local society would not be what it is but for their effect in turning much of it upside down. That they have often acted as a very effective deterrent to knavery and charlatanry of all kinds too is true. But looking back on nearly forty years of the naxalite movement, one is surprised how few are the important policy decisions of the State or tendencies inherent in the logic of unequal development that the naxalites have been able to stall. In fact, one cannot off-hand think of even one. They themselves may answer that it is because they have not tried. It is true that their strategic thinking does not turn around defeating the State politically but mobilizing against it militarily. Hence inflicting major political defeats or reversing trends of unequal or destructive development is not on their agenda. Yet it is also true that even if they tried they would not know how to go about stalling such decisions or forces.

To put it simply, you can hold a gun to a landlord’s head but Special Economic Zones or the Indo-US Nuclear Deal have no head to put a gun to. This degree of simplification of the issue may be criticized as unfair, and one would readily agree that Maoist violence is not just the armed action of individual Robinhoods. Nevertheless, after dressing up this skeleton with sufficient flesh and blood to make it real, you still do not get away from the basic truth of the caricature.

Peaceful mobilization has one advantage over violent mobilisation. A larger number of people can participate in it, and it can choose its targets and devise its methods of agitation more subtly. It gives space for dialogue even the while agitation goes on, dialogue not so much with the establishment as with society, and so the vital dimension of critique is alive without suspending the agitation to clear space for it, and this is essential in any struggle against an opponent who operates in a universe of intelligent rationality. This is one reason why peaceful methods of struggle are not only morally but also politically healthier. But in terms of its effectiveness in reversing policy decisions or structural trends, peaceful methods are even more ineffective than violent methods. Quite plainly, dharnas and street plays and hartals and half-an-hour-at-a-time road blocks and street corner speeches and jathas can go on for ever and ever and neither the State nor the Ambanis lose any thing. This is what often makes activists cynical and gives them that urge to seek an appointment with the Maoists. When they are so tempted they think the only problem they have had with violence is that it is morally problematic and physically unsafe. It is assumed that it is necessarily more effective. It isn’t, and it has not been.

Can we turn to the law to make governance answerable to popular disapproval other than at election time? Constitutional democracy as we know it in India gives little scope for such a hope but PILs have held a lot of fascination for activists. Much of it is born of out of ignorance of the law as much as the sociology of adjudication. The average intelligent Indian thinks of PIL as the modern equivalent of the bell which the better kind of king is reputed to have strung outside his palace for the desperate citizen to tug at and get an instant hearing and instant justice. The average intelligent Indian also thinks that all the limitations of judicial power that he or she is otherwise familiar with will vanish when the Courts sit to hear PILs, namely that they become benign despots who can set every wrong right by passing a condign order. Desperation can be the only reason for these illusions. Less excusable is the ignorance of the sociology of adjudication. Judges, taken as a class, are at one with most of the political and economic tendencies since liberalisation for no more subtle reason than that they belong to the social class that has benefited and will benefit much more from these tendencies. Extremely derisive comments about PILs are made with juvenile exuberance by the Supreme Court these days to send out a signal that the activist or desperate citizen need not take the trouble to go all the way to New Delhi. Law journals report some divergence of opinion and even snide comments about judicial activism in the Supreme Court, but the divergence is between conservative judicial activism and conservative aversion to it.

There is no option but to devise ways of stopping the system in its depredations. Since Indian democracy has not learnt to respect reasoned criticism unless it is armed with the strength to physically prevent the execution of the policies criticized, ways of achieving such strength must be sought by agitational movements. In principle the best method is to mobilize the people likely to be affected in large numbers and physically sit in the path of the State and Capital. But then the people in their concreteness are driven by diversity of interests and insularity of communities, crushed by poverty and misery, weakened by the disease of opportunism even at the lowest levels which has been the greatest contribution of the Congress party to Indian political culture, enfeebled by attachment to their political patrons, and disillusioned with empty rhetoric and moral corruption of agitations and movements. In particular, they see that activists who were in an earlier generation characterized by sacrifice of personal concerns are no longer the same. To my mind, this is the greatest disservice done by the NGOs, but this culture is now common to a large section of political activists, too. On the other hand, the very effect of politicization has been that the people have lost their innocence and often weigh the costs and benefits of struggle with greater caution than in the past. One cannot blame them, especially when the caution is reinforced by the fact that activists themselves exhibit the same attitude these days. All this combines to make strong mobilisation difficult and tempts honest activists to look for short cuts, ranging from armed action to PILs. But there are no short cuts.

Seems to me more like an attempt to start a private, exclusive debate among a select group of elites in the academia, lawmakers and the enforcers, among others.

If the ruling party is so keen to uplift downtrodden women, it should first think of  the likes of Sukka Pagadaalu (picture below), who at 64 is the same age as Meira Kumar. For those of you who  came in late, she’s a tribal woman and was an MLA of the ruling party in Andhra Pradesh in the late 1970s. But now she is a daily wage labourer earning Rs 60 per day. Her husband is employed along with her as a construction labourer in the remote Srikakulam district. She gets an MLA’s pension but to make both ends meet she has to do a labourer’s job in her village, far away from what is called “civilization”.

Outsiders (meaning of course long-nose plains people) are called “vais” in Mizoram. “Vai” is a Mizo word and the term is used in contempt towards the people who look “different” from “us” in Mizoram. The people of Mizoram may contest my claim but I have seen how the socalled “vais” from Silchar and elsewhere are asked to take seat in the backside of the MST bus by the Mizos or for that matter even the Chakmas in Chakma dominated areas.

Prior to award of Bodo Territorial District Council in Assam, a Bodo friend of mine had told me how the Assamese majority discriminated against the Bodo tribals. Even the Mizos of Mizoram had similar grudge against the state of Assam prior to formation of Mizoram.

Sahariya tribe is a nomadic tribe in Madhya Pradesh that deals with poverty of the magnitude that mothers buy saris and tear them in half so that their daughters have something to wear. These people have little money available for essentials, let alone luxuries like education. The women are typically very badly treated, often turning to prostitution or collecting dry wood to sell to neighbouring towns and villages to make ends meet.

For the poor, however, the polling booth is one place – in my opinion, the only place where democracy functions. This again, when you exclude cases of booth capturing or rigging. Democracy, otherwise, doesn’t exist for the underprivileged in India. The country’s healthcare sector is one of the most privatized ones in the world, even worse than that of the US’. A series of articles in the EPW dated Nov 22 2008, on the 30th anniversary of the Alma Ata revealed the glaring failures in India’s healthcare policy post 1991 reforms – things just went from bad to worse. And as a result, you have thousands of people dying of curable diseases for the sole reason that they can’t afford treatment. As far as education is concerned, apart from a few states that had a tradition of reform movements, India’s progress has been abysmal. Even primary schools don’t exist in 1000’s of villages across the country. Add to this feudal notions of caste superiority, pollution et al that prevail in society that have been minimally addressed by the state, in some cases, reinforced by it. So by the time a Dalit/Tribal student reaches collegiate education, she would have undergone thousand untold sufferings. But yeah, the chief argument put forth by the privileged classes against affirmative action is merit. A comparison with social progress achieved by ‘dictatorial’ Cuba should put the ‘world’s largest democracy’ to shame, if it has any.

It is because the BJP and the ‘Friends’ stresses this coded language of the club, that they appeal to the middle-class constituents of the ‘minority’ groups in India. ‘We are one of you’ is the message that the ‘Friends’ seek to convey, ‘not like those barbarous, unwashed, unlettered natives who abound in the filth of India. It is our duty to educate (read civilize) them and take India forward’. So as to make a point, the bouquets to the guests at this meeting in Panjim, were presented by two Catholics, both middle class, and almost certainly upper-caste. It is for this reason, that all of Catholic Fontainhas votes convincedly for the BJP. This civilizing mission is common to all the upper-caste elements of all religious groups in India, be it Christian, Muslim or Hindu. They all believe in the need for the lower elements to be educated and civilized, failing which, policed.

The clash of cultures was most acute in the Northeast of India, where the Japanese rapidly advanced upon Nagaland. The British had been scrambling desperately to stem the rout of their forces in Burma, and attempting alliances with the nationalist Chinese in the border areas. At the same time, they tried hard to co-opt the warlike Nagas and Lushai to their side. This proved especially hard, because only two or three decades earlier, they had brutally suppressed rebellions against their rule by these same peoples. For the average Naga chief, the main question was: why should they fight for the British when they hadn’t fought for the local Hindu ruling dynasties or even the local Naga bosses? They considered themselves neither Indian nor British, and had attachments mainly to their tribe.

we came across a sign board on the right side of the road reading “Patalkot”. We were reminded of the people living in the bottom of the earth and indeed it was!. We alighted from the van and saw an extremely deep gorge surrounded by high mountain ranges…

All of us climbed down carefully using the stairs provided but when we reached the bottom of the 3000 feet cliff, we were told that we need to walk for about 3 km’s to reach the nearest human habitat.

Yesterday, November 15, 2008, the day Jharkhand was born, was the most satisfying and happy day of my life since on this day our organisation, Jharkhand Alternative Development Forum, with the active help and guidance of Dr. Mithilesh Dangi of Azadi Bachao Andolan, installed and put in operation a micro-thermal power plant in a remote village inside the jungle in Jharkhand, 68 kilometres from Hazaribagh. The village, Kekoria Tand in Keradari Block of Hazaribagh district, is quite inaccessible and perhaps has not been visited by any poitician or bureaucrat since the independence of the country.

Read the whole heartwarming story at the Aid Awareness blog.

[Thanks, Saurabh, for the tip].

IIT, AIIMS , JU, Shibpur, never produced anyone of highest intellect and wisdom. They might have produced CEO’s, but in other part of the world CEO’s are the best profession for the college drop outs. In terms or research , IIT’s like all the other institutes of national importance fails badly. Then why we support them financially. do we think about India whne we do that ? Is Indians are meant to debug programs or becomnig yes sir type corporate after learning in all these iits and iims ? why dont we ask this simple questions to all these engineers and doctors , what is their contribution to this country or to this world , other than mediocricity and cheap labour offered to the west ? If there is no west to take care of their mediocricity what will happen to them ?