RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s statement that there should be a review of who benefited from reservation and how much, has found support from groups of Scheduled Castes who have for years been demanding sub-quotas in favour of the most deprived Dalit groups.
These are associations of castes like Valmikis (sanitation workers) in North India, who cite data from government committees to argue that they have been swamped out from the benefits of quotas by the better-off leather workers’ caste.
“What is wrong in saying that reservation be reviewed? Everyone has a right to know what each caste got in these 68 years. We welcome this effort by RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat,” Rashtriya Dalit Bachao Andolan president O.P. Shukla, a retired bureaucrat of the Valmiki caste, said in a statement on Thursday.
Longstanding demand The movement’s longstanding demand for a separate quota for Ati Dalits within the Scheduled Caste quota has not made much headway as some State governments’ efforts to provide this was judicially struck down.
For, the Constitution envisages a homogenous category of Scheduled Castes without providing for sub-division of it.
Mr. Shukla said the organisation is now demanding a review of reservation so that those who were “overrepresented” because of quotas could be excluded, and those who had been swamped out may benefit.
“Rather than excluding castes, it should be found out which groups have not benefited at all from Scheduled Caste quota and these should be given the first priority within the quota, after which there should be an open competition among all Scheduled Castes,” Y. Chinna Rao, who teaches Social Exclusion at JNU, told The Hindu .
There are over 1,200 Scheduled Castes in India.
Politics Politically, this demand has been crucial for decades. For, while advanced and populous Dalit groups have been Scheduled Caste leaders in most States, and have already settled their political affiliations, political parties have sensed fresh opportunities to expand their votes into the most deprived groups’ demands.
In Bihar, Nitish Kumar as Chief Minister created the Maha Dalit Vikas Mission to reach out to Scheduled Castes other than Ram Vilas Paswan’s Dusadh caste. Ironically, Jitan Ram Manjhi, whom Mr. Kumar made Chief Minister in 2014 as a symbolic gesture, and who rebelled later and is now in the NDA camp, is jeopardising Mr. Kumar’s Maha Dalit experiment.
The Punjab government in the 1970s, and Haryana in 1990, provided sub-quotas. Rajnath Singh, as Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, tried to create a sub-category for the most deprived Dalit castes.
The Supreme Court, in the EV Chinnaiah case (2004), struck down such initiatives.
Tightrope walk For parties such as the BJP or the Congress, it is a tightrope walk. They can’t afford to be seen as “anti-reservation”, particularly because “low caste” groups have often spawned regional parties that have challenged the two national parties, but at the same time, they sense the possibility of new vote banks in the smaller groups among the most deprived Dalit castes.
