'Fuel To The Fire'

Pratap bhai,

Let me begin by complimenting you on your letterof resignation to the Prime Minister, not just for its craft, but forthe rare courage it displays. An intellectual upholding his convictions andstanding up to political power fills me with admiration even when, as in thiscase, I don’t quite agree with the cause. Your letter enabled me to think moreclearly than I would otherwise have; it gave me the courage to state mydifferences with you.

Before I turn to the many differences, let me begin by noting one fundamentalpoint of agreement with you. I share your despair about there being little roomfor thinking about social justice in a new paradigm. It is sad that politicaland intellectual advocates of social justice are simply not prepared to thinkbeyond reservation as the only instrument and caste as the sole criterion. Ialso agree that the government’s proposed solution — phased introduction ofa quota and expansion of the numbers of seats — sidesteps some of the mostserious questions: substantial differences within different jatis belonging tothe OBCs from different regions, relative disadvantage of women within OBCs andthe disadvantages faced by non-OBCs.

I would have liked to extend this area of agreement, if only I knew whatexactly you and your majority colleagues in the National Knowledge Commissionstood for. In operational terms all we got was a cryptic verdict: continuing thepractice of no affirmative action in higher education is better than caste-basedquota. I know the NKC said it firmly believed in affirmative action. You saythat you recognise the reality of caste. But I don’t know what to make ofthese statements as long as there is no scheme or proposal to give effect tothese. As you know ProfessorSatish Deshpande and I have been involved in an exercise that addressedthese concerns and have proposed a scheme of calculating disadvantage pointsthat takes into account caste and other inequalities that exist in our society.The NKC could have given a more carefully worked out solution.

While agreeing with some of your criticism of the government, I kept lookingfor an equally searching critique of the other player in the game, theanti-reservation agitation that seeks to question the very idea of socialjustice. Here we have a protest led and sponsored by a small but powerful urbanprofessional elite and lionized by the media (both of which aredisproportionately dominated by the upper caste) that uses rather crudearguments and even more crass symbolism to stall a scheme threatening theirprivileges.

Your silence on this matter, not just in this letter but through your manyinterventions in the last few weeks, has worried me. You know that I have seenyou as one of the intellectual leaders of this country; you can understand myagony when I see you being portrayed as the intellectual mascot for thisagitation. Let me propose a hypothesis to you: this shrill and powerful campaignagainst the very idea of social justice is one of the reasons why there is solittle space left for thinking about social justice in a new paradigm.

Let me turn to the more substantive differences.

You say that the government’s proposed measure goes against the freedom ofacademic institutions and the principle of diversity, that each institutionshould be ‘left free to devise their own programmes’ for affirmative action.Pratap, how many elite medical, engineering or management institutions in thiscountry can you think of that have used their freedom to introduce any seriousmeasure of affirmative action? I need not remind you of the number of times thatthe SC/ST Commission has documented the tales of how all these elite and not soelite institutions of higher education have dodged legal provisions ofreservation for SC/ST. I can’t believe that you want to give these veryinstitutions the freedom to decide on affirmative action.

Similarly, your stray remarks about alternatives to quotas suggest that youwould like the state to play less and less of a role in affirmative action. I amsurprised at this suggestion coming from a careful student of history like you.You know better than I do the lesson of the history of struggles for socialjustice all over the world: more often than not radical measures of socialjustice result from state intervention, that too from the top.

Initially I was baffled at your remarks about ‘politicisation of theeducational process’. I thought this loose expression was not available toprofessional students of politics like you and me who know that democracy is andshould be a political process, that politics is as much a source of good as thatof evil. On second thought I have come to appreciate your point better. I thinkyou meant to point to a deep malady in our educational institutions, namelytheir vulnerability to political masters with their narrow-minded agenda. Butsurely the Ministry of HRD formulating guidelines for implementation of anational policy on social justice does not fall in this category.

There was no doubt a good deal of ‘politicking’ involved in what theministry was doing. No doubt, the ‘clever’ political move by Arjun Singhviolated an institutional norm of parliamentary government and reduced the spacefor fine-tuned policy on this matter. But the same can be said about theill-timed, hastily executed and unfortunately publicised move by the NationalKnowledge Commission. Far from tempering the debate and facilitating a solution,the NKC’s intervention added fuel to the fire, appeared as a partisanintervention and accentuated the artificial urgency that reduced the space forthinking afresh. To outsiders like me it appeared that instead of becoming avital link in a possible solution, the NKC became part of the problem.

This is no reflection on the rest of the work the NKC has done, nor on theintegrity of its members. This simply illustrates something your own work onpublic institutions in India has brought to our attention: the best of ourinstitutions suffer from lack of self-restrain leading to institutionalindiscretion. The NKC’s role in Mandal II was no exception.

Towards the end of your letter you remind us, and quite rightly so, of howcritical ‘public reason’ is to democracies. This encouraged me to go publicwith this letter to you. I look forward to carrying this exercise in publicreason,

I remain, your friend and admirer

Yogendra Yadav

(The author is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of DevelopingSocieties. This letter was published first in the Indian Express todayand is carried here with permission from the author.]