[Reader-list] Meeting the challenge of Mandal II - first part

[Trisha Gupta]

This is the first of a two-part article, published in the Hindu.
Please click on the link to see the tables, which are crucial to
the argument. The sanest, most thoughtful, most
thoroughly-substantiated argument I've read on the topic so far...
Trisha


http://www.hindu.com/2006/05/22/stories/2006052202261100.htm

Meeting the challenge of Mandal II

Satish Deshpande & Yogendra Yadav

Is there a way forward where both merit and social justice can be
given their due? This two-part series attempts to find one.


THE CENTRAL Government's move to introduce reservations for Other
Backward Classes (OBCs) in elite institutions of higher and
professional education — popularly known as Mandal II — seems to be
heading towards a stalemate. In this article, we propose a possible
solution that might take us beyond the debilitating standoff
between `merit' and `social justice'.

This is clearly an ambitious and optimistic agenda, especially
because Mandal II proves that some mistakes are destined to be
repeated. Once again the Government appears set to do the right
thing in the wrong way, without the prior preparation, careful
study, and opinion priming that such an important move obviously
demands. It is even more shocking that students from our very best
institutions are willing to re-enact the horribly inappropriate
forms of protest from the original anti-Mandal agitation of
1990-91. As symbolic acts, street-sweeping or shoe-shining send the
callous and arrogant message that some people — castes? — are indeed
fit only for menial jobs, while others are `naturally' suited to
respectable professions such as engineering and medicine. However,
the media do seem to have learnt something from their dishonourable
role in Mandal I. By and large, both the print and electronic media
have not been incendiary in their coverage, and some have even
presented alternative views. Nevertheless, far too much remains
unchanged across 16 years.

Perhaps the most crucial constant is the absence of a favourable
climate of opinion. Outside the robust contestations of politics
proper, our public life continues to be disproportionately
dominated by the upper castes. It is therefore unsurprising, but
still a matter of concern, that the dominant view denies the very
validity of affirmative action. Indeed the antipathy towards
reservations may have grown in recent years. The main problem is
that the dominant view sees quotas and the like as benefits being
handed out to particular caste groups. This leads logically to the
conclusion that power-hungry politicians and vote bank politics are
the root causes of this problem. But to think thus is to put the
cart before the horse.

A rational and dispassionate analysis of this issue must begin with
the one crucial fact that is undisputed by either side — the
overwhelming dominance of upper castes in higher and especially
professional education. Although undisputed, this fact is not easy
to establish, especially in the case of our elite institutions,
which have always been adamant about refusing to reveal information
on the caste composition of their students and faculty. But the more
general information that is available through the National Sample
Survey Organisation clearly shows the caste-patterning of
educational inequality. Some of the relevant data are shown in
Tables 1 and 2.

Table 1 shows the percentage of graduates in the population aged 20
years or above in different castes and communities in rural and
urban India. Only a little more than 1 per cent of Scheduled
Tribes, Scheduled Castes, and Muslims are graduates in rural India,
while the figure for Hindu upper castes is four to five times higher
at over 5 per cent. The real inequalities are in urban India, where
the SCs in particular, but also Muslims, OBCs, and STs are way
behind the forward communities and castes with a quarter or more of
their population being graduates. Another way of looking at it is
that STs, SCs, Muslims, and OBCs are always below the national
average while the other communities and especially Hindu upper
castes are well above this average in both rural and urban India.

Table 2 shows the share of different castes and communities in the
national pool of graduates as compared to their share of the total
population aged 20 years or more. In other words, the table tells
us which groups have a higher than proportionate (or lower than
proportionate) share of graduates. Once again, with the exception
of rural Hindu OBCs and urban STs, the same groups are severely
under-represented while the Hindu upper castes, Other Religions
(Jains, Parsis, Buddhists, etc.), and Christians are significantly
over-represented among graduates. Thus the Hindu upper castes'
share of graduates is twice their share in the population aged 20
or above in rural India, and one-and-a-half times their share in
the population aged 20 or above in urban India. Compare this, for
example, to urban SCs and Muslims, whose share of graduates is only
30 per cent and 39 per cent respectively of their share in the 20
and above population.

It should be emphasised that these data refer to all graduates from
all kinds of institutions countrywide — if we were to look at the
elite professional institutions, the relative dominance of the
upper castes and forward communities is likely to be much stronger,
although such institutions refuse to publish the data that could
prove or disprove such claims.

Although it is implicitly conceded by both sides, upper caste
dominance is explained in opposite ways. The upper castes claim
that their preponderance is due solely to their superior merit, and
that there is nothing to be done about this situation since merit
should indeed be the sole criterion in determining access to higher
education. In fact, they may go further to assert that any attempt
to change the status quo can only result in "the murder of merit."
Those who are for affirmative action argue that the traditional
route to caste dominance — namely, an upper caste monopoly over
higher education — still remains effective despite the apparent
abolition of caste. From this perspective, the status quo is an
unjust one requiring state intervention on behalf of disadvantaged
sections who are unable to force entry under the current rules of
the game. More extreme views of this kind may go on to assert that
merit is merely an upper caste conjuring trick designed to keep out
the lower castes.

What is wrong with this picture? Nothing, except that it is only
part of a much larger frame. For if we understand merit as sheer
innate ability, it is difficult to explain why it should seem to be
an upper caste monopoly. Whatever people may believe privately, it
is now beyond doubt that arguments for the genetic or natural
inferiority of social groups are unacceptable. If so, how is it
that, roughly speaking, one quarter of our population supplies
three quarters of our elite professionals? The explanation has to
lie in the social mechanisms through which innate ability is
translated into certifiable skill and encashable competence. This
points to intended or unintended systemic exclusions in the
educational system, and to inequalities in the background resources
that education presupposes.

It is their confidence in having monopolised the educational system
and its prerequisites that sustains the upper caste demand to
consider only merit and not caste. If educational opportunities
were truly equalised, the upper castes' share in professional
education would be roughly in proportion to their population share,
that is, between one fourth and one third. This would not only be
roughly one third of their present strength in higher education; it
would also be much less than the 50 per cent share they are assured
of even after implementation of OBC reservations!

If the upper caste view needs an unexamined notion of merit that
ignores the social mechanisms that bring it into existence, the
lower caste or pro-reservation view appears to require that merit
be emptied of all its content. While this is indeed true of some
militant positions, the peculiar circumstances of Indian higher
education also allow alternative interpretations. In a situation
marked by absurd levels of "hyper-selectivity" — 300,000 aspirants
competing for 4000 IIT seats, for example — merit gets reduced to
rank in an examination. As educationists know only too well, the
examination is a blunt instrument. It is good only for making broad
distinctions in levels of ability; it cannot tell us whether a
person scoring 85 per cent would definitely make a better engineer
or doctor than somebody scoring 80 per cent or 75 per cent or even
70 per cent.

In short, it is only a combination of social compulsion and pure
myth that sustains the crazy world of cut-off points and second
decimal place differences that dominate the admission season. Such
fetishised notions of merit have nothing to do with any genuine
differences in ability. The caste composition of higher education
could well be changed without any sacrifice of merit simply by
instituting a lottery among all candidates of broadly similar
levels of ability — say, the top 15 or 25 per cent of a large
applicant pool.

But the inequities of our educational system are so deeply
entrenched that caste inequalities might persist despite some
change. We would then be back where we started — with the apparent
dichotomy between merit and social justice in higher education. How
do we transcend this dilemma? Is there a way forward where both
merit and social justice can be given their due?

(Satish Deshpande is Professor of Sociology at Delhi University;
Yogendra Yadav is Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of
Developing Societies, Delhi.)