Caste based reservations and equality of opportunity

[aneeshm]

Arun Shourie recently gave a speech at the IISC Bangalore ( the premier institute in the country for research ) on Equality of Opportunity .

A bit of the background :

The Mandal Commission

In India , the Scheduled Castes and Tribes have been given a fixed percentage of the seats in educational institutions ( including privately owned and run ones - a gross violation of both the Constution and property rights ) . These reservations were implemented ( with much opposition from the top leaders of the time ) at the time of Indian independence to help the educationally and socially backward SCs and STs , and make them competetive with the normal castes . This was supposed to be restricted to ten years .

But politicians , in order to garner votes from these castes , kept on extending these reservations , and they exist even now , and the politicians of the moment saying that to garner even more votes , they will be extending these reservations to other , non-discriminated castes ( the ones who were traditionally not discriminated against , but remained backward because they enjoyed a high social standing in the villages and therefore did not come to the cities ) called the Other Backward Castes .

The data they use for this reservation is from the 1931 census - because no census after that has enumerated caste as a category . They forget that at that time , India included Pakistan , Burma , Sri Lanks , Nepal , and Bangladesh .

A link to the speech : Google Video .

It's rather long , but well worth watching .

In it , he advocates absolutely secular criterion for deciding who should get aid - economic criterion , mostly - and advocates that the unit of deciding who should get help and who should not should be the individual . He advocates that there be on discrimination on the basis of caste , race , language , residence , gender , or religion .

I'd like to ask your opinions on this issue - and I don't want general opinions , I want you , the reader , to actually watch the speech , and only then comment .

 

[.Shane.]

Sorry, but I don't even understand this. Why not do away w/ the caste system altogether?

 

[C~G]

Why not do away w/ the caste system altogether?

Shhh! Don't remind him about it.

Real reason is because India has backward culture and religion dating back to times only some of their gods know about.

 

[aneeshm]

They did - it is now illegal for private businesses and even religious organisations to discriminate based on caste . But to get votes from the SCs and STs ( who were previously discriminated against ) , politicians say that they will unconstitutionally continue to provide them with reservations in government jobs , education , and the public sector .

 

[C~G]

EDIT: Question to Aneeshm removed. It's been a while since I actually read about indian politics and history closely so I think I'll pass this time so I don't look like complete idiot when Aneeshm starts to question me.

 

[aneeshm]

Do you understand why?

Umm . . . . maybe , as I've already said twice , to get their votes ?


EDIT : Question and answer now redundant .

 

[C~G]

Umm . . . . maybe , as I've already said twice , to get their votes ?.

Yeah, but my main question was really about the interesting concept of how long discrimination of particular group of people affect the society and how politics should react to it so people would have more of equal level of chance for getting somewhere in society.

This is quite important issue especially example when talking about immigrants (remember the muslims) and those social groups that are poor because rich people's kids get usually better education and get rich just by birth while there's no such chance for the poorer people. In modern world the concept of social mobility has become increasingly important one and I believe in many cases societies with low social mobility suffer economically while in some cases it greatly helps certain higher class to keep clearly underpayed social classes exactly where they are. And the same goes for their children. Which is of course like you said clear that politicians use this inequality for their benefit also.

I just find this quite interesting since I'm sure people have quite a lot of misconceptions about the issue (such as american dream or the lack of it in real world) but like I said since my concentration is elsewhere I'm not sure could I comment the issue regarding India.