The Hindu Business Line : Reservation through the lens of future

With the reservation controversy raging, Arvind Sharma's Reservation and Affirmative Action lends context to arguments for and against the policy. Documenting how caste continues to thrive in villages is Caste in Question: Identity or Hierarchy. And detailing the US experience with affirmative action is Greg Stohr's A Black and White Case. Relevant reading, says D. MURALI.

Vacation season is well on, but the word reservation doesn't seem to elicit travel-related recall these days. What with images of striking doctors and suffering patients, cops on the attack and a Minister on a high ground, all tied to that one vexing word.

"On September 19, 1990, a student from Delhi University poured kerosene over his body and set himself on fire," begins Arvind Sharma in the intro to Reservation and Affirmative Action, from Sage Publications (www.indiasage.com). You may remember, that student was Rajeev Goswami, whose self-immolation bid was in protest against the implementation of Mandal Commission recommendations by V. P. Singh. Photos of his burning body adorned the front page of every newspaper and magazine, and Goswami battled with severe burns in the critical care ward of Safdarjang Hospital.

He survived and lived on till February 24, 2004. However, the dangerous mode of protest caught on. "In quick succession, youths in a series of cities across northern India, from Ambala to Lucknow, followed Goswami's example and set themselves on fire," is a quote from Nicholas B. Dirks, cited in the book. More than 150 young people attempted self-immolation; "63 succeeded... another 100 people were killed in police firings and clashes."

Sharma's book looks at the highly charged issue of reservation in India, and also its US counterpart, `affirmative action.' As you know, there are arguments both for and against reservation. The `against' group says that we can't claim nil discrimination based on sex, race, caste and so on, and at the same time ask for positive discrimination on those very grounds, thus trying "to have one's cake and overeating it too."

The `for' group maintains that "to restrict policies to the enforcement of merely formal equality, in a society beset with structural inequalities, merely perpetuates inequality in the name of equality." Treating unequals as equals in this way constitutes the greatest of injustices, they'd say. Sharma studies the topic under four angles, in what he calls religious, moral, ethical and human rights discourses.

The ethical discussion has a section on the `merit' argument. The book cites Iris Marion Young thus: "The merit principle holds that positions should be awarded to the most qualified individuals, that is, to those who have the greatest aptitude and skill for performing the tasks those positions require." The merit principle is central to legitimating a hierarchical division of labour in a liberal democratic society, which assumes the equal moral and political worth of all persons, says Young.

To counter it, is the argument from equality, wherein "justice is made the basis of merit." Some prefer to use the word `equalisation' instead of equality. For, "what the inclusion of people who are otherwise below the cut-out point in the selection pool accomplishes is to equalise for past discrimination."

Sharma provides an interesting US statistic: That nationwide university admissions on the basis of affirmative action stood at around 10 per cent in the early 1990s. "The figure for favoured admission of children of alumni and donors is about the same. So, one has almost matching rates of admissions of both victims of deprivation and perpetuators of privilege!"

Reservation is too much a bone of contention to let us all get talking in the same voice. To complicate matters, the lenses can be varied. "To those whose eyes are set on the past, the lens through which the whole landscape is viewed tends to be the that of reparation or compensation. For those whose eyes are fixed on the present, the lens tends to be one of equality." What about those who look to the future? To them, "the lends tends to be one of diversity."

Well argued.

Race still matters

Let us now set our eyes on Greg Stohr's compelling read, A Black and White Case, from Bloomberg (www.bloomberg.com). The book is about how affirmative action survived its greatest legal challenge in the US.

"In the late 1990s, two lawsuits by white applicants who had been rejected by the University of Michigan began working their way through the federal court system, aimed at the abolition of racial preferences in college admissions," begins the blurb. "The stakes were high, the constitutional questions profound, the politics and emotions explosive." No different now, when things are explosive closer home, which is why the book is so apt for the times.

"For three decades — from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s — universities operated their admissions programmes behind closed doors," narrates Stohr. "Publicly, they provided few details about their admissions policies," but privately, they were enrolling `significant numbers of capable black and Latino students.'

The US Supreme Court had occasion to consider the issue in University of California Regents vs Bakke (1978). The varsity's admissions programme of setting aside seats for minority applicants was held to be `a violation of the US Constitution's equal protection clause.' Yet, "five of the Court's nine justices said that schools could use race in at least some contexts to make admissions decisions." Of significance was Justice Lewis Powell's opinion. He endorsed affirmative action "for the purpose of ensuring a diverse classroom."

Powell's view was widely followed till "a little-known Washington, DC, public-interest law firm, the Centre for Individual Rights, pressed a lawsuit on behalf of white students who were rejected when they applied to the University of Texas Law School." It could warm the hearts of protesting doctors to know that in March 1996, the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the Texas Law School programme in the Hopwood case. "The panel said not only that the separate admissions committee was unconstitutional but also that race couldn't be a factor in admissions at all."

Litigation timeline begins from December 19, 1995, when Michigan professor Carl Cohen filed his first request under the Freedom of Information Act and asked for `documents describing the university's affirmative action policies.' Analysing the data, Cohen found that whites with 3.00-3.24 GPAs (grade point average) and LSATs (Law School Admission Test) from 148 to 163 (out of a possible 180) were accepted 2.2 per cent of the time, while "blacks with those numbers were accepted at a 74.3 per cent rate."

Meet Jennifer Gratz, Barbara Grutter, and Patrick Hamacher,' in chapter 3. Gratz and Grutter were the two women who symbolised `the national campaign against university racial preferences.' Both were rejected applicants, as much as Hamacher. Were you to fast forward to the penultimate chapter, you'd know that, after all, `Race unfortunately still matters.'

As a long-time Supreme Court reporter for Bloomberg, Stohr chronicles the legal battle, weaving in the personalities and also events of the time, making the book an eminently readable narrative.

Urbanisation as the solution

One other book on the week's theme is Caste in Question: Identity or Hierarchy? edited by Dipankar Gupta, from Sage. "To be able to go beyond caste identities is not something that either democratic policies or market economics can accomplish with ease," concedes Gupta. "Only urbanisation and its logic of anonymity can accomplish this task."

Caste identities are everywhere, but they are more forceful in villages, he points out. "The identity expressions of the poorer, subaltern castes remained suppressed under the conditions of a closed village economy. Once outside such rural confines, caste identities get much greater scope to play themselves out."

The book has chapters that dwell at length on how caste thrives in villages. Prem Choudhry writes on caste panchayats and the policing of marriage in Haryana. Lucia Michelutti's article is on caste politicians `in a north Indian town.'

On Jains in north Gujarat is John E. Cort's chapter, while Gaurang R. Sahay discusses hierarchy in rural Bihar. G. K. Karanth's focus is on Karnataka, Surinder S. Jodhka discusses the politics of Dalits in Punjab, Badri Narayan looks at caste history, and Anuja Agrawal writes about the Bedias.

Three books to reserve for weekend reading.

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