The Coming Caste Wars

The growing clamour for reservation to society's shrinking ability to fulfil the dreams globalisation unleashes

- Suhas Palshikar

FROM violence to silent marches, the unl­ikely warriors —the intermediate castes of north and west India, in particular, Jats, Patels and Marathas—are on the war path over reservations. So, the nagging questions emerge: why does everyone want ‘reservations’? Why have certain communities become restless at the present juncture? Where do we go from here?

A short detour of ‘Mandal’ is necessary to put things in perspective. OBC reservations and share in power were the essence of the Mandal issue, though the latter point was not formally part of the recommendations or the policies. By the latter half of the 1990s, it looked as though a consensus had finally emerged on the Mandal (or OBC) question. No political party was opposing OBC reservations and all of them were also keen to accommodate the political claims of communities identified as OBC.

Mandal, of course, was a double-edged weapon. It had possibilities of transcending caste by building caste blocs and opportunity for democratic expansion. Yet it also contained the possibility of strengthening caste awareness and narrowing the concept of democracy to group claims. Its supporters (this writer was among them) expected the former to happen. The way politics played out over the past quarter of a century, the former possibilities were outweighed by the latter. Thus,the unintended consequences of Mandal constitute the larger context in which the present spate of agitations by the middle peasantry castes needs to be understood.

Four processes have coincided in producing the present moment of unrest. Let us first look at the process not directly involving caste. Nobody seems to be wanting to talk about this aspect—the effects of the economic policy process. But it is relevant at two levels.