the congress' end is the bjp's end is the communists' end

the karnataka poll results remind me of a few weeks old post, on by-polls in a few u.p., assembly constituencies, by adnan- an excerpt:

Amid the blue hue that has swept UP, the humiliating defeat of BJP and its absolute marginalisation in the state has been totally overlooked.

In the three Assembly by-polls, the share of votes in Muradnagar, Colonelganj and Bilgram, the party has been extraordinary low. It could get just 1.35%, 3% and 5% votes in the elections, the results for which were announced two days back. The BSP won all the three constituences, as also the two Lok Sabha seats. Surprisingly, the Lotus has wilted in the state where it emerged in the mid-80s pitting Hindus and Muslims against each other. And today it seems both Hindus and Muslims have forgotten this party in India's most populous state.

well, as adnan points out, the four weeks old good news is: the bjp seems to be dying in uttar pradesh. and the bad news, fresh off the presses, is: the bjp has emerged a winner in karnataka, on its own.

i know analysts would interpret the bjp's diminishing stature in u.p., as a triumph of the ordinary indian's secular spirit, and the karnataka results as a major threat to the health of the ordinary indian's secular spirit. in most liberal analysts' minds, the fortunes of secularism in the country are inextricably linked with the fortunes of the congress, the bjp and the communists, the national parties.

how true or tenable is that theory?

if you look at the recent communal history of u.p., and of tamil nadu, you'll notice two similarities: a) the significant absence (or insignificant presence) of the congress, the communists and the bjp in those states and b) the significant absence (or insignificant presence) of communal strife in those two states.

what does that tell you? the indian liberal doesn't usually connect those two phenomena in the way i am going to now: i believe that (a) leads to (b). none of those three national political parties/groups are secular on caste, so i don't think they can be secular on religious issues.

which means the bjp is dying in u.p, because the congress is already dead in the state. and the congress is dead because there are no communists in the state. similarly, in tamil nadu, however hard it may struggle, the bjp has very little chance of creating any waves as long as the congress has very little chance of reviving itself. and again, there are no communists in tamil nadu. what do all these factors add up to? peace across religions. or near total peace across religions.

and peace across castes? caste is much older than the religious divide, so it'd be a longer struggle. and karnataka is essentially playing out struggles against caste. the marginalized castes in india have been voting for alternatives in every election since the sixties, voting in those who seemed to be secular (on caste issues), and voting those alternatives out again when they realized they were not as secular as they seemed (on caste issues)- the process started earlier in some states. this opened opportunities for the janata parties in the seventies and eighties and the bjp later. u.p, tried both the janata parties/dal and the bjp, karnataka flirted with only the janata dal. it has voted for the bjp now- which essentially means, this is the beginning of the end of the congress. and then of the bjp in karnataka, eventually.

here's some advice for the upper caste, indian liberal: true secularism begins at home. check how secular the track record of y.s. rajashekhar reddy, chief minister of the only congress ruled state in south india is. i haven't read a single liberal analyst in the country expressing doubts about his secular credentials until now- but most of them, i do remember, celebrated the return of the congress in the state as a great victory for the secular forces in the country. here's an indicator of how non-secular his government actually is: a majority of top posts in corporations, autonomous oganizations functioning under the aegis of the state government, are occupied by reddies: how secular is that? the marginalized castes don't like this reddy raj which seems to be much more disgusting than the kamma raj of the naidu government earlier. some of them are preparing to vote for new, little known alternatives like the actor chiranjeevi's party- no, he hasn't launched it yet. yes, the marginalized castes are that desperate.

the marginalized castes in india don't understand secularism in the same way as the liberal does. and the secular liberal, of course, isn't interested in the marginalized castes' understanding of these issues. so he doesn't understand that the dalit who voted for the bjp in the recent polls didn't actually vote for hindutva. he was looking for secular (on caste issues) alternatives to the parties that had ruled until now: so, in the not so distant future, when he realizes that the bjp too is not so secular (as he definitely will), he will vote for another, untried alternative. and this will go on...

individuals caught in a grand fiction

anoop saha (read his full comment on my previous post) says:

Large numbers of migration occur not just from Bihar, but also from Chhattisgarh, MP, UP, Orissa and West Bengal.

yes, there is also large scale migration from andhra pradesh and other states in the country. i'd also consider the migration of a significant portion of kerala's working age population to the gulf a similar sign of distress. perhaps, anoop had read p. sainath's article: the bus to mumbai. you'll find it on many liberal sites on the net, but it was first published (in june 2003), i think, in the hindu wih this introduction:

Chandrababu Naidu is India's most celebrated Chief Minister. But parts of rural Andhra Pradesh, like Mahbubnagar, not 100 kilometres from where the seat of power is, are in big trouble. The crisis is driving large numbers of people to leave the State in search of work. The government though, does not concede to a major exodus. P. SAINATH and two others tour the villages in Mahbubnagar district and join migrants on a bus to Mumbai. Is the problem just drought? (italics mine).

yes, the article does portray a major exodus, or a major distress. mr.sainath and a lot of other liberal journalists in the country would like to pin the blame of these migrations from mahbubnagar and other telangana districts on politicians like naidu and the evil neo-liberal policies followed by governments at the centre and in the states since 1991. but the truth is: they have been happening from long before naidu ever entered politics and mr.sainath became a journalist. labourers from nizamabad and other north telangana districts, reportedly, had worked in the building of the victoria terminus station in mumbai more than a hundred years ago. the migrations haven't stopped since.

i've seen construction workers from mahbubnagar in mumbai more than twenty years ago, tamil restaurant and hotel workers in bangalore, banarsi taxi drivers in mumbai, workers of all kinds from bihar and u.p., in delhi, oriya brick kiln workers outside hyderabad- and none of these migrations actually started after 1991. they had been happening for a long time- and even now, many liberals find nothing unusual about these migrations.

it's not just lack of access to land- many farmers in mahbubnagar, with holdings of over ten acres, can't generate, individually, an income equivalent to a 12 year old hotel worker's annual earnings in hyderabad. things aren't much better in the neighbouring district of nalgonda. most farmers in nalgonda too do not have access to canal irrigation- that might not be seen as a major problem unique to the district- 70% of india depends on the rains, anyway. neither nalgonda nor mahbubnagar and a few other districts can depend even on the rains- they fall in a rain shadow region. many districts in india fall in rain shadow regions- that isn't a major problem? well, farmers in these districts mainly depend on underground sources of water- farmers in large parts of nalgonda, mahbubnagar and other districts in andhra can't depend even on groundwater now. the fluoride content in the groundwater has been steadily rising over the past two decades and is now so high that groundwater, which was found unfit for drinking purposes some time ago, can't even be used to irrigate the fields now- whatever grains or vegetables that are produced in those areas now contain unacceptable levels of fluorides. sometime in the foreseeable future many parts of these districts would've to be emptied of people by a decree of the state, perhaps, if the migrations hadn't completed the job by then.

large parts of anantapur and parts of other districts, in the rayalaseema region, have been slowly turning into a desert. there have always been steady streams of migrations from rayalaseema into bangalore and chennai over many decades. there have also been migrations from south coastal andhra districts and the north coastal andhra districts too- to hyderabad, chennai, bangalore and even bhubaneswar.

and it's not just the illiterate, landless agricultural labourers or the farmers from the dry, arid regions who are migrating: semi-literate young people from not so dry regions are also migrating. around 70,000 unemployed young workers from andhra pradesh were deported from the u.a.e., a few months ago because they did not have valid work permits. they were mostly from the relatively prosperous north telangana districts of nizamabad and karimnagar. when i say relatively, i mean that those two districts receive much better rainfall than mahbubnagar and nalgonda- rural distress in those areas is of a slightly different variety. farmers in those two disticts are killing themselves in large numbers not because of low rainfall but because of low returns from agriculture.

backwardness or distress or widespread despair isn't unique to bihar- i'm aware of many continuously distress-prone regions in andhra pradesh. many others, i'm sure, are also aware of similar situations in other states. and maharashtra isn't a stranger to backwardness and distress either: think of all the suicides in vidarbha in recent times. and i repeat what i said in my previous post: u.p., and bihar are much better endowed, in terms of natural resources like water, than many states in central and peninsular india. governance or lack of it is also a major cause of migrations.

every one of those migrations represents a world scale disaster, in my view. the overcongestion in mumbai or bangalore is a minor consequence of those disasters. so why the extreme focus on what raj thackeray says or does (instead of discussing the causes of those disasters and not just their effects) when he isn't, directly, the cause of those migrations, or disasters? it's like blaming the vultures for the famine.

anoop goes on to say:

I guess you should also take into account at the kind of central assistance and public investments that were made in Mumbai/Western Maharashtra earlier and New Delhi now. So harking on Mr. Lalu Parasad Yadav for proposing public plants in Bihar is just not very smart. Being ignorant is not an excuse of being stupid.

ignoring anoop's intemperance (if it was someone else, i don't think i'd be discussing the comment at such length), i'd like to focus on the flaws in this argument: are national public investments an issue to be settled between a couple of states like maharashtra and bihar? if they aren't, can a union minister from a particular state or region use his powers to divert a major portion of the national resources at his disposal to his own state at the cost of many other backward states? especially when the union minister's home state doesn't lack any resources of the kind he is showering on it?

professor chitta baral of arizona state university has been conducting a campaign of sorts on the neglect of orissa, with particular reference to the koraput-bolangir-kalahandi region, for the past few years. he's written extensively on the skewed distribution of public invesments, among states, in a number of fields. discussing railway investments in one particular post on his blog, he says:

There is a great disparity in terms of railway density -- Route kms per one thousand sq km -- across various states of the country. Using the 2004-05 figures, the average rail density for India is 19.13. The rail density is highest in Delhi (138.2) followed by West Bengal (43.4), Punjab (41.6), Haryana (36.1), Bihar (35.9), Uttar Pradesh (35.8), Tamil Nadu (32.1), Assam (31.9), Kerala (27), Gujarat (26.9) and Jharkhand (24.3). Among the major states outside Northeast and Jammu and Kashmir the lowest rail density is in Himachal Pradesh (5.1), followed by Uttarakhand (6.4), Chhatisgarh (8.6), Orissa (14.6), Karnataka (15.5), Madhya Pradesh (15.9), Rajasthan (17), Maharashtra (17.9), Goa (18.6) and Andhra Pradesh (18.9).

anoop's justification of laloo yadav's actions probably stems from an urge to emphasize the importance of devoting special attention to backward regions, considering, such special attention had earlier been focussed on now prosperous regions, like mumbai etc., we'll never know for sure whether any special attention had actually been focussed on the prosperous regions, earlier, but i'd accept it for the moment- if special attention is to be justified on the grounds of tradition, or precedent, it's even more imperative now that such traditions be given up. because special attention creates not just prosperous regions but it also gives birth to backward regions. if greater investments, earlier, in mumbai had created prosperity they had also resulted in backwardness in bihar.

on the modi-thackeray scale, i wouldn't like to offer my judgment on how big a fascist laloo yadav is- there were enough hints in my previous post to indicate that i wasn't talking of just a couple of always-in-the-news political personalities or regions. my intention was to convey the message that mr.yadav's actions speak louder than mr.thackeray's words. and the indian liberal should recognize the fact that mr.yadav's secular posturing doesn't mean that his regional chauvinism needs to be overlooked. and also that mr.thackeray isn't being purely a regional chauvinist when he talks of the mumbaikars' rights.

think of it this way: if most of us didn't believe in this grand fiction called the indian nation, or to put it more simply, if there wasn't any india, wouldn't you see large migrations from bihar to mumbai in a completely different light?

more on this later.

the bihar end of the problem

if you ignore raj thackeray's ugly tactics, you'd realize that he's actually less jingoistic than laloo prasad yadav- yadav routinely siphons away whatever major, new investments that are being made by the railways to chhapra or madhepura or other places in bihar. mr.yadav and mr.paswan before him, together, have also ensured that the overwhelming majority of new jobs in the railways, in the last one decade, went to job seekers from bihar. if mr.yadav thinks national investments should serve regional interests, what's wrong with mr.thackeray advocating that regional investments should create regional jobs?

why can't young people from bihar find more jobs without a) cornering an undue portion of the jobs in the national public sector, b) or migrating to mumbai or other prosperous cities and regions? and why can't mumbai stop hosting migrants if its infrastructure can't accommodate them? the usual answer from the liberals, that we're a nation where all people have the right to work anywhere solves neither the biharis' problem nor the mumbaikars'. but that's the facile line most of the media seems to take when dealing with these issues. like sagarika ghose in this article, for instance:

Three years ago when Raj Thackeray broke away from the Shiv Sena and launched his own Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, he promised to create a modern version of the Sena. Three years after being in the political wilderness,after being wiped out in the Mumbai municipal polls, Thackeray has realized that modern politics is hardly ever successful in a modern economy.Instead, the best way to win votes in a reforming economy is not to join hands with the forces of change but with regionalists and cultural chauvinists, who are unwilling to compete in the open economy, but instead want the benefit of other peoples' hard work by simply the privileges of their birth in a particular state. (italics mine)

an open economy. other people's hard work. privileges of their birth. she sounds so much like a commenter on my previous post:

Ramadoss - the champion of SC/ST and OBCs (aka the incompetents who hanker for handouts) subverted the Parliament to satisfy his ego, and on the Supreme Court striking down his subversion, he is shameless to not want to resign.

the incompetents who hanker for handouts.

if india were an open economy, paddy and wheat farmers in the country would right now be cashing in on the upward trend in world grain prices. and foremost among them would have been farmers from u.p., and bihar, states with the best access to large, perennial sources of water. if india were an open economy, the mumbai metro would've been built more than three decades ago when it was first proposed.

if india were an open economy, young people from bihar would find more jobs without a) cornering an undue portion of the jobs in the national public sector, b) or migrating to mumbai or other prosperous cities and regions.

if india were an open economy mumbaikars would follow economic logic and respect the value of the cheap labour provided by the migrants more.

why don't the indian liberals or the media look at the bihar end of the mumbai problem? or dig deeper into the cultural and political issues involved? or examine closely the economics of the problem? it's easy to dismiss thackeray or the pro-kannada activists as regionalists and cultural chauvinists: but karnataka has been trying to implement the three language formula in the country much more sincerely than many states in the north and maharashtra produces more ph.ds in hindi than, possibly, some hindi speaking states.

does the problem actually begin or end with raj thackeray and other such almost filmi villains? or are the indian media and the liberals incapable of looking any deeper?

t.r.baalu, thevar or brahmin?

was caste conceived in a world of shortages? india still faces shortages in many fields: is that the reason why caste works so well today? nearly half the country still doesn't have regular access to electricity, and almost all gas based plants in the country are hungry for fuel. the babus from the former soviet union would know better about how goods and services get distributed when they're rationed out- the weak stay in the lines, forever, while the powerful get those goods without ever stepping into any line. our own planning commission would also know a lot about it: the government stores enough food in its godowns, for everyone, but the poor never get enough.

if the true principle of socialism is the elimination of hierarchy, caste espouses the merits of hierarchy. if socialism is about equality, caste is about separation. then why, in practice, do both end up looking like each other? the problem is with looking at hierarchy and separation separately: hierarchy would remain as long as there is separation, or inequality, and not just along class lines, but along ethnicities. and if you wish to eliminate ethnic divisions, say, which ones would you eliminate, first? yeah, hierarchy. across the world, people progress towards democracy by eliminating the nobility first. physically, or by stripping them of all privileges. is it possible in the hindu world? prachanda is trying to do that in nepal? yeah, with a tilak, most probably applied by a brahmin, on his forehead. i don't think i've seen an image more loaded with irony, hypocrisy and deceit in recent times.

coming back to the original question: when gas is rationed out, would the rationing work in any other way? and should t.r.baalu feel guilty about jumping the line? he says, he did it for the shareholders. that's a secular reason the prime minister finds nothing wrong with. did t.r.baalu act out of secular motivations? his grihastha dharma enjoins him to focus on his extended family first, the world later. that's what he was doing. if a hypocritical democracy finds comfort in secular excuses- interests of cheated shareholders must be good enough.

if nepal wishes to promote equality, it should start thinking of eliminating the privileges of those at the top (and not merely those, nominally, at the top), first. would there be any lower castes without any upper castes? and if the dmk, a party that has long championed the cause of social justice and reform, wishes to destroy the caste system it can't harbour members such as t.r.baalu who practise caste so very openly. hell, it can't harbour even folks such as karunanidhi. every secular excuse that they offer in defense of according special privileges to their kin would strengthen caste. special privileges and hierarchy go together- if you acquiesce to a system of privileging, you would consolidate the position of those at the top of the order, more than justify their practice of caste, and not bring them down.

a lot of champions of lower caste politics, especially those of the obc kind, act like fools cutting down branches of the trees they're sitting on. if you're a thevar seeking special privileges for your kin, you're not just separating yourself from others lower down in the hierarchy, you're also separating yourself from other thevars, less fortunate than you. will your actions, in any fashion, dent the whole hierarchical order? no, they will only strengthen it. other thevars would find it that much more difficult to secure their rights, forget privileges, because those traditionally at the top would not need any excuses to continue to practise caste. remember, their right to privileges is divinely ordained while your right to equality is the result of secular, democratic struggles. when you uphold privileges, don't you strengthen the divine writ (and weaken your secular right to equality)? how can you begin to question their privileges when you seem to accept, willingly, other portions of the divine writ?

everyone should look after their own kind, right? first the kul, or the family, then the jati, then the varna and finally, if there's any time left, the world. as long as you defend privileges, mr.baalu, you defend caste. and as long as you defend caste, don't nurse any illusions that you can always secure all your rights. there'd be other people stealing your rights most of the rest of your life, who wouldn't even need to defend their actions: caste has already accorded them privileged positions.

lastly, those thevars who show scant respect for the dalits, lower down the caste order, aren't very different from baalu, are they? someone would always reign over them as long as they try to reign over the dalits.

the larger picture: the state's missing

Any OBC family with an annual income above Rs 2.5 lakh would be treated as part of the creamy layer. Families where the key bread-earner is either a doctor, engineer, lawyer, son of present or past MP and MLA or working in 11 equivalent professions will also be part of the creamy layer.

The verdict has set off a demand among regional parties that the creamy layer criteria be changed.

from what would perhaps be called an incisive news report in the telegraph (italics mine). if the reporter had bothered to check the creamy layer categories and criteria (read appendix x in this ncbc annual report) a little more carefully, he'd have realized that not all obc doctors, lawyers, engineers fall in the creamy layer category. nor do all past mps, mlas and others working in 11 equivalent positions- the income criteria would apply to every one of them.

it's not just the upper caste dominated academia that does shoddy work- the media overdoes it all the time. all their reporting/analysis of dalit/obc issues displays a poor grasp of facts, an unwholesome appetite for drama and a penchant for sweeping conclusions. is this how the reporter's mind worked? 1) obcs: largely undeserving, 2) hence, large creamy layer 3) therefore, large-scale discontent. how many obcs could the reporter have possibly met in such a large state (both in terms of population and size) as uttar pradesh, keeping in view that the deadlines on such issues are possibly shorter, to draw such a large picture?

here's a part of the larger picture of the obcs: according to the third census of the small scale industries in the country, 57 % of the unregistered 91, 46, 216 ssi units in india were managed by businessmen or entrepreneurs from the socially backward classes.

that little factoid, along with other information i've discussed in my earlier posts, should tell you a lot of things about the obcs- but i do hope you've noticed one significant feature that characterizes their existence: i refer to their relationship with the state. it's very tenuous. the state would like to ignore them, mostly, and they'd like to keep away from it, mostly.

and another feature that i'd also like to point out: agriculture is not the whole of their culture.

this is what i mean by jnu gyan

check this interesting article by chandrabhan prasad: a critique of buffalo nationalism that kancha ilaiah seeks to promote. i'd not like to attempt here a critique of the critique (i think it'd be useful), but i'd definitely like to point out some factual inaccuracies and inconsistencies that many knowledgeable folks from indian academia seem to consistently indulge in. especially those articulate folks who work, or have spent a few years (like prasad), in jnu.

for instance, the jats. the jats from uttar pradesh are not obcs- not according to the national commission for backward classes (check the u.p. list). neither are the jats from punjab. nor haryana. only the jats from rajasthan (excluding jats from bharatpur and dhaulpur districts, where nearly half of the state's jats live) are in the central list of backward classes.

which means around 95% of the jats in the country are not obcs. which also means: the jats cannot be taken to represent the obcs.

let me quote here a paragraph from this excellent article, in frontline, on why some jats from rajasthan are in the central list):

The NCBC further reasoned in its advice: “No doubt, after the effective abolition of jagirdari and zamindari systems, the condition of Jats in Rajasthan have begun to improve, but considering the time-span required for advancement of a community as a whole from a position of backwardness, the time that was available for Jats in Rajasthan (excluding Bharatpur and Dholpur) to move up from a position of social backwardness to that of social advancement, cannot be reasonably considered as adequate. The exceptional circumstances dating at least from the late medieval age through the modern period, which were available for communities like Kamma and Reddy of Andhra Pradesh and the Jats of Punjab, etc., have not been available for Jats of Rajasthan (excluding Bharatpur and Dholpur). (italics mine)

so, if you wish to place the jats in any category, place them alongside the reddies and kammas of andhra pradesh, or the marathas of maharashtra or the patidars of gujarat. they don't belong in the obc category. their ascendancy- social, economic, political- is not recent: it has been happening over the last three, four centuries at least. and in the non-aryavarta states, these castes have emerged, as if naturally, to assume the place of the absent kshatriyas.

call them the intermediate or intermediary castes, or the middle castes: in most indian states they're the upper castes. but that news doesn't seem to have reached jnu until now. for a lot of the tv stars from jnu, and other universities across india, the intermediate castes (or upper castes not of upper varna origin) are quintessential obcs.

there is not just socio-economic, but also a consistent historical logic to the castes in the central list. it's another matter that there have been reports from some state commissions for backward classes that have found inconsistencies pertaining to a few castes in the respective states' lists (but not in the central list). prominent among doubtful inclusions are a couple of castes from tamil nadu and karnataka and uttar pradesh. but by and large, there have been more, many more, non-inclusions, of small unknown castes, than inclusions, of large, prominent castes.

look at this way: if the obc population of india, let's assume, is around 50 crores. what would be the average size, in terms of population, of the 2000 odd obc castes? around 2,50,000. if we exclude those few castes whose numbers run into lakhs and a few times, a couple of millions, what would be average size of the average obc caste? many wouldn't even reach the one lakh mark. no, you've never really met the average obc, even though you've met him hundreds of times: he might be the hawker who sells vegetables at your door, the janitor in the lift, the plumber or the electrician, the thelawallah selling plastic goods, the mechanic, the paanwallah...but how would you recognize him if he isn't a yadav or a jat or a kurmi or a lodh? most likely, not even the government has heard of the name of the plumber/electrician/janitor's caste.

why does the focus of the committed academia (and the media and most of the chattering classes who follow their performances in the media) in india remain fixed on the few prominent intermediate castes at the top of the social order in many states, historically, even when most of them are not even obcs, according to the ncbc? considering, even those among them who are obcs, probably constitute around 5% of the obc population in the country, and less than 1% of all obc castes?

and the popular myths propagated by this set of jnu led dons is based on such poor research- it's ages since most of them have actually done any field work, i think. most of the best research has been done by researchers from outside india. and even when they do do field work: they seem to know beforehand what to find.

the majority is the creamy layer

i have gone back to this paper (that i found here, ), Caste and democracy: Reservations and the return to politics by Susie Tharu, M. Madhava Prasad, Rekha Pappu, K. Satyanarayana, quite often in the past few months. yes, it does articulate some scholarly insights that seem to reflect some of my own not-so-scholarly views. abi's answer prompted this latest excursion:

Thus an entire range of contributions is marked by one shared presupposition: that there exists a coherent and hegemonic political subject who is interested simultaneously in maintaining the standards of merit and excellence naturally assumed to be of primary interest to a majority, and rendering social justice to the rest (assumed to be a “minority”) through policies of positive discrimination. In keeping with this strict policy orientation, these arguments rarely pause to question the categories such as majority and minority that are fundamental to the very possibility of such an orientation. While some have noted that the ‘general category’ itself functions as reservation for the upper castes (Ghosh), the political significance of the fact that this “majority” which is fabricated by negation and represented symbolically by the 50 percent limit on reservations, is an artificial majority without demographic or political foundation, is rarely discussed.

the debate was over a policy that the majority needed to be convinced about: the government was convinced, but the majority would rather believe in the courts, in this particular instance. so the court spoke for them. where does the minority come into the picture?

the debate was about the efficiency of the policy:

The primary orientation of the debate is toward policy, and the discourse is strewn with terms like costs, benefits, efficiency, and with demands for more accurate information about population segments, and a multiplicity of other factors that affect access to opportunities, etc. They remain within an academic-bureaucratic framework where the question of the right policy measures is already assumed to be the shared ground on which to stage the debate. They have differences about what policies should be adopted, but rarely do they question the assumption that what we have here is basically a question of policy.

i guess the americans, ranged on opposing sides, were as vocal about their government's policy on iraq. and the chinese, though not overtly, are as engaged over the autonomous region of tibet. but somewhere in the back of their minds, the iraqis and tibetans do figure, i'm sure. what occupied/s the minds of the majority in india is deprivation, not obcs:

The shift from discrimination—which points to social divisions with structural consequences—to deprivation—a lack that may be compensated—is symptomatic of the policy approach. The policy approach does not examine social divisions or inquire into the consequences for an understanding of Indian society/democracy. It attempts to find a solution to a crisis. The fundamental question is: how do the state and its advisors perceive the crisis generated by the struggle for reservations, and, by contrast, how might it be perceived from the point of view of a democracy to come? (italics mine)

the americans wanted to deliver democracy to the iraqis (by invading their country), the chinese want to take the tibetans along on the road to progress (by flooding the region with prosperous chinese)- what does the majority in india wish to address through reservations? deprivation, not caste. and the court has sought to reassure the majority that they shall indeed address deprivation: check this news report on how the majority is still not convinced that the government, a political creature, will implement the verdict 'in its right spirit' (they would dilute the creamy layer!):

If there is one community, then within that community what would count as an indicator of social distress or disadvantage to be remedied would be economic, i.e., that which can be brought under a common measure. If on the other hand there are many communities, and their separate existence is taken as the starting point, then the application of a common measure is out of the question. A single community – such as a homogeneous national community – would take account of the distress of its own members and seek to redress it. It would not then be a matter of providing for reservations, but of acting to relieve distress with effective measures. If then, there are reservations in a nation-state, we can read this as a sign that there is no unified community that coincides with the national population.

there were two major arguments thrust before the court: a) many of the castes included in the lists might not be as deprived as they were in 1931, b) many individuals among those castes were not as deprived as in 1980. primarily, the court was asked to verify claims of deprivation. the court ordered a review, every five years, of the level of deprivation of castes in the list [seeing merit in argument (a)] and the exclusion of the creamy layer [upholding argument (b)] . clearly, the objective was to prevent the few from cornering the rights of the many (what was the evidence before the court to substantiate this fear?)

why didn't the court ponder over the question: how can the majority be prevented from cornering the rights of the castes/communities that have been compressed into a deprived minority? the need for reservations itself constitutes sufficient evidence on that issue. that question was not answered in 1993 too. nor in 1947.