Go beyond the quota rhetoric

The Maharashtra government’s struggle to provide OBC reservation offers some lessons

The Supreme Court, for the third time, rejected Maharashtra’s plea to allow reservations for Other Backward Classes (OBC) in local body polls — after scrapping the provision last year, and then refusing to review its verdict on the issue. The state government is now considering its options and has said it is committed to holding the elections only when seats are set aside for OBCs. That the state executive is again willing to risk a potential clash with the judiciary should be instructive in understanding how important the issue is politically for the ruling dispensation.

The Supreme Court, for the third time, rejected Maharashtra’s plea to allow reservations for Other Backward Classes (OBC) in local body polls.  (HT Photo)

But why? The answer lies in the predictable, if somewhat unfortunate, proclivity of political parties to use affirmative action to paper over cleavages emerging from social and economic churn. In Maharashtra, eroding economic and social heft precipitated the agitation by the Marathas for quotas, which, in turn, sparked push back from OBC groups. The government possibly sees quotas as a way to stave off OBC discontent over Maratha demands, and hopes that by freezing their representation — a quota means a certain number of OBC members will always be elected no matter what the political mood – they won’t face ire from the communities that make up roughly half the state’s population.

Reservations were introduced in India as a way to correct historical wrongs but now seek to be deployed by governments as a stop gap measure to ease economic pain (domicile quotas in jobs) or reverse perceptions of crumbing dominance (hence the agitations by Jats, Patels, Gujjars and Marathas, among others). As previously noted by this newspaper, this not only yields indifferent results but also dilutes the core philosophy of affirmative action. Moreover, as the experience of political reservation for Scheduled Castes shows, quotas can get more leaders elected without any real devolution of powers from the hands of upper caste leaderships of political parties. This is not an argument against political reservations but a call for wider democratisation of political power. It should be instructive that there appears to be political consensus on OBC quotas — the Bharatiya Janata Party government in Madhya Pradesh is attempting to enforce the same rule — while such agreement eludes the demand for counting these communities. Political power is important for marginalised communities in charting their own social, economic and political destinies. They deserve an honest attempt at democratisation of political power, not just efforts driven by electoral considerations.