Devangshu Datta: Reservation reality

VIEWPOINT

Give a man a fish and he is hungry again tomorrow; give him a rod and teach him how to fish and he's set up for life. That old truism holds just as true in the reservation debate as it does in any other. In fact, it is at the heart of caste-based reservation.

The point is that professional politicians do not want to set people up for life. It is not possible to build a reliable, self-perpetuating vote-bank on the basis of teaching people to be independent. You cannot rely on their gratitude to vote you back to power time and again.

Gratitude is not a reliable driver for votes, certainly not over generations. If it had been, the Congress would still have held absolute majorities on the basis that it was the political party most closely associated with winning freedom at midnight.

An earning citizen may or may not feel grateful for the person who helped set him up. And he may or may not choose to express that gratitude by voting for the fishing instructor. Whether he does or not, it is very unlikely that his children will feel any sense of gratitude at all.

Within a generation at the most, the political gains from empowering people on the basis of simple economic need are liable to be dissipated. And, let us give credit where it's due, India's politicians think in the long term. Any self-respecting politician hopes to hold on to power through his lifetime and to hand over the reins to his children when he must leave this vale of tears.

Voting decisions are based on a combination of assessments of past performance and future expectations. Caste reservations are the perfect lever to exploit this. If you offer reservations on the basis of caste, you earn the gratitude of the lucky recipients. If you combine that largesse with a promise that the children of the lucky parties will continue to be beneficiaries so long as you stay in power, well you've got a vote-bank.

It sets off a vicious cycle once one party has cemented its base in this fashion. Every other party then starts scrambling in search of new vote-banks constructed on the same model. If caste A has been suborned by promises from X party, then Y party will find caste B and try to suborn them. It's a fun game with high stakes, everyone knows the rules, and it can be played over generations. There will always be some disempowered caste somewhere.

The sad thing is that the whole concept of affirmative action based on need is distorted in the process. If reservations were handed out on the basis of below the poverty line statistics, lower income group statistics, etc, poor, intelligent and talented children from non-favoured castes would also get a leg up when they needed it. But economic status is mutable in a way that caste is not""the children of somebody who makes good under affirmative action will not vote for you unless there's something in it for them.

Speaking of the 1940s, when the whole system was launched, caste-based reservations probably did make more sense at that point of time. The set of people living below the BPL almost totally included the set of lower-caste people. That is, almost everybody from the lower castes was probably in a BPL group or at best an LIG group, circa 1950. More to the point, very few would have worked their way up the socio-economic ladder without laws that corrected the crippling biases of millennia. But right from inception, caste-reservations perpetrated injustice in ignoring the needs of the multitudes of BPL high castes.

Now, like most people who've followed the debate, I suspect that there's far less of an economic rationale for perpetuating the model. But of course, we don't know. And we never will, because India's political masters lack both the means and, above all, the motivation to gather and collate current data on the subject.