POLITICS OF POSITIVE DISCRIMINATION FOR THE IDEA OF INDIA

The Bihar caste census may presage a change in the political chemistry between communities and parties at the coming elections in the state. It revealed some faultlines too

- D M DIWAKAR

THE caste survey conducted by the government of Bihar in 2023 set off a series of political aftershocks. First, the state cabinet decided to enhance caste-based reservation from 50 percent to 65 percent, and added 10 percent for the economically weaker sections. Then it formed the basis for the INDIA bloc, especially the Congress, to take it up as a national issue. The moves are efforts at achieving development with justice through positive discrimination.

The Preamble to the Constitution embodies the considered idea of India, which emerged through rigorous informed deliberations during the freedom struggle and was consolidated in the Constituent Assembly debates. After independence, India adopted a course of democracy and moved ahead step by step to realise those dreams of liberty, equality and fraternity through the creation of democratic values, institutions, laws and policies to address the challenge of correcting historical discriminations.

In order to bring the marginalised into the mainstream of development, the numbers of the caste census of 1931 were taken into consideration, as there was no other authentic data available—that is, till the Bihar census. The initiatives of positive discrimination got space, and many committees and commissions were put in place at the Centre as well as in states towards achieving this goal.

The initiatives included reservation for the Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST) and the Other Backward Classes (OBC). Further re-categorisation of the OBCs into the so-called creamy and non-creamy layers, extremely backward classes (EBC) and non-EBCs was also based on such extrapolation.