#dnaEdit: Jats lose out

The Supreme Court judgment scrapping the inclusion of Jats from nine states in the central government’s Other Backward Classes (OBC) category is an indictment of vote-bank politics which undermined the rationale behind reservations and affirmative action. Faced with overwhelming anti-incumbency, the decision was a last-gasp measure by the UPA government in March 2014, just before the model code of conduct for the Lok Sabha polls kicked in. However, the gimmick failed and the Congress was blanked out in all the Jat  dominated areas like Western UP, Haryana, Delhi, Rajasthan and Punjab. Interestingly, the NDA government has proved to be no different and defended the UPA’s decision when the matter came up in court. The NDA’s stance is illustrative of how successors are saddled with the bad decisions of earlier governments. Such politics has weakened reservation as a tool for social and economic justice. Far from helping discriminated groups find their feet, in hurriedly conferring backward status on a dominant community like the Jats on election-eve, the government has effectively reduced affirmative action to a race between competing castes.

The biggest infirmity of the UPA government’s decision was that it was taken without the consent of the National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC), the statutory body entrusted with ascertaining the claims and counter-claims of various groups for inclusion in the OBC category. In its report on February 26, 2014, the NCBC, resisted the governmental pressure mounted on it to give a favourable report. “If Jats are included even though they are not the backward class, they will corner all the posts of the OBCs, and the Most Backward Classes will be totally deprived of their opportunities in the central government services and admission in educational institutions,” the NCBC report had said. The Supreme Court noted that the expert body of the Indian Council of Social Sciences Research, which had been commissioned by the NCBC to do a survey, had not returned any positive recommendations for Jat reservations. In fact, the main criteria for inclusion of Jats in the OBC category was their educational backwardness, without looking at other criteria like land ownership and political influence. 

But in scrapping the reservation, the court has also urged the polity to look beyond caste and social and educational backwardness and look at emerging forms of backwardness. In this context, the bench cited its earlier verdict on including transgendered persons as the third gender and granting them reservation under the OBC category. This is a welcome suggestion but the judgment’s advocacy for looking beyond caste is premature at this stage.

The judgment notes: “An affirmative action policy that keeps in mind only historical injustice would certainly result in under-protection of the most deserving backward class of citizens...It is the identification of these new emerging groups that must engage the attention of the State and the constitutional power and duty must be concentrated to discover such groups rather than to enable groups of citizens to recover ‘lost ground’ in claiming preference and benefits on the basis of historical prejudice.” Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims, and certain backward castes  continue to lag behind other Indians in their access to education, jobs and public services. Caste oppression is still prevalent and discrimination on the basis of caste widely prevalent. Now that the Supreme Court has spoken, the Centre must ensure that there is no repeat of the rail and road blockades that characterised earlier Jat agitations for OBC reservation. More importantly, it must review the socio-economic status of groups included in the OBC category, to ascertain their eligibility and progress.