Non-discrimination and Equality in India

Contesting Boundaries of Social Justice

Vidhu Verma

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781136515002
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Social Justice is a concept familiar to most Indians but one whose meaning is not always understood as it signifies a variety of government strategies designed to enhance opportunities for underprivileged groups. By tracing the trajectory of social justice from the colonial period to the present, this book examines how it informs ideas, practices and debates on discrimination and disadvantage today.

After outlining the historical context for reservations for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes that began under British colonial rule, the book examines the legal and moral strands of demands raised by newer groups since 1990. In addition the book shows how the development of quota policies has been significantly influenced by the nature and operation of democracy in India. It describes the recent proliferation of quota demands for reservations in higher education, private sector and for women and religious minorities in legislative assemblies. The book goes on to argue that while proliferation of demands address unequal incidence of poverty, deprivation and inequalities across social groups and communities, care has to be taken to ensure that existing justifications for quotas for discriminated groups due to caste hierarchies are not undermined.

Providing a rich historical background to the subject, the book is a useful contribution to the study on the evolution of multiple conceptions of social justice in contemporary India.

1 The context of social justice in
modern India

Introduction

Substantive ideas of justice or the principles to assess the distribution of benefits and burdens translate into different practices and strategies in diverse socio-historical situations. A theory of justice has to demonstrate its political relevance by elaborating those arguments that will be recognized in public debates on concrete issues. This means that there is no concept of social justice that stands outside history, culture or society. What makes the subject matter of justice so different in India is that its first formulations arose in a colonial context against the hierarchy of castes. While certain aspects of these ideas may have been present at various points in the past, nothing resembling the debates of the nineteenth century have been assembled before. Today these normative claims of social justice embodied in our political discourse have a foothold because they have been contested and asserted over a period of time. They hold great force in our imagination because answers to questions about why individuals are accorded special treatment because of their membership in a disadvantaged group or groups have been expressed at various points in our nation's history. As we look back on the history of social justice, then we can trace the perseverance of certain critical terms such as equality and non-discrimination but we can also see developments or shifts in them as well as other fundamental concepts.

This chapter explores the intellectual history of ideas regarding social justice and provides the political context of compensatory justice. Social justice is rooted in the enlightenment that privileged a critical reflection on society and its traditions but due to India's colonial context it brought to the fore certain arguments that were specific in scope. To begin with the social justice discourse was a shifting, ‘hybrid configuration consisting of conflicting theories’, norms, ideological commitments and utopian fantasies (Gaonkar 2001: 15). Later, it raised questions about fixed accretive positions and religious practices and about whether individuals or groups would be recipients of entitlements.

Many liberal democracies began with the assumption of abstract equality for their citizens but discovered politically indefensible inequalities and discriminations as groups acquired the strength to protest against them. The individualistic norms of liberalism have only recently begun to negotiate with a concept of group-specific rights (Young 1990). One of the reasons for the earlier lack of interest in social groups was that in classical liberalism, social justice was interpreted from the perspective of individual freedom; scholars disagreed about liberalism's relationship with other values such as equality, justice and rights, but the core was viewed as the pursuit of individual autonomy, that committed all citizens to exercise freedom of choice in their life plans to as great as possible an extent.¹ Second, in contrast to debates in liberal political theory with their focus on distribution of material goods (wealth, income, social positions) among individuals, social justice discourse in India emphasized access to institutional structures and cultural locations along with a need for non-material goods as dignity and self-respect. Third, reflections on colonial history become also a lesson in ‘difference’ as the constitution recognized the collective rights of groups to participate in decision-making processes by overcoming their under-representation.²

Both the terms of the debate and the intellectual genesis of the concept were contested in the early Indian National Congress (INC) deliberations where emphasis was more on individual rights against arbitrary rule and freedom to participate in the making of a new nation. While the idea of equality of opportunity, that removed barriers based on direct and indirect discrimination, was empowering for most groups, dalit-bahujan discourse attacked inequalities that arose from oppressive social and religious structures. Eventually ideas expressed in the constitution, to be discussed in Chapter 2, were a selective adaptation of values and principles that seemed alien to the liberal tradition which ignored social groups at the time.

Terms used for discussing policy of reservations covered the idea of compensation for indemnity for loss or damage done to certain social groups in the past; the dominant concern was whether differences amongst groups should be taken into account to ensure substantive equality within a similar historical context, i.e. the postcolonial state. These complex issues expanded the very concept of social justice with respect to admissibility of groups as appropriate subjects of justice and their placement in a diverse society. From this perspective, social justice was not so much about negotiating individual claims on distribution of material goods as it was to place discrimination and under-representation of groups on the agenda of nationalism to which most individuals otherwise owed their ultimate loyalty.

Nationalist discourse contained an array of ideas which were also inscribed in several other discourses, whose origins can be traced back to several traditions of thought prior to the rise of nationalism itself.³ In addition to accepting principles of representative democracy and liberal constitutionalism, nationalism introduced elements such as state intervention, interest for depressed classes, minority rights and individual rights. The constituent assembly squarely faced a practical difficulty when it confronted ‘minorities’ which were divided not only by interests but by cultural differences and therefore unlikely to agree about either principles of right, conceptions of the good or what I call the ‘social question’.⁴ Amidst such disagreements, principles of social justice that emerged did not add up to a compelling, comprehensive moral theory valid for all times to come. Nevertheless one way to understand the issues raised by the Indian case of conflicting conceptions of justice – as the situation in which claims for universal rights by the INC seem to contradict claims for particular justice – is to go back to the streams of thought that shaped the major tenets of egalitarianism and social justice in the constitution.

According to Christophe Jaffrelot, the nationalist discourse on social justice had its origin in the ‘socio-religious movements which developed during the nineteenth century within the hindu community’. These movements arose as a reaction to the ‘proselytisation of Christian missionaries and the criticism of Indian society by the British’ (Jaffrelot 2003: 13). Despite their misgivings the Hindu socio-religious reformers tried to legitimize hierarchical principles of the caste system rather than question them in a radical way. Later, several strands of social reform appeared as different streams of the nationalist discourse approached the problems of inequality, discrimination and unfair treatment. Apart from similar social and religious origins of the elite in the INC, the material interests of high-caste educated groups cohered in their acquisition of English education. With the emergence of English education that fostered a liberal impulse they soon discovered a gap between the theory and practice of British rule in India.

The dalit-bahujan discourse drew out ideological contradictions within nationalism by analysing the latter's relation to a series of key moral and political concepts and practices: namely, equality, freedom, justice and self-respect. What is significant is that for the first time ideas that unfolded in opposition to caste hierarchies, took a collective and political meaning. A common feature of their theories was a critique based on the social origins of the national movement that was engineered by the national elite, who had in their view the promotion of particular interests of their own caste, and not the general interests of the people.

The main objective of this chapter is to trace the trajectory of these ideas of social justice as they moved from the margins of Indian society to get incorporated in a nationalist discourse.⁵ Given the history and diverse approaches in this school, it makes sense to drop the assumption of coherence that is central to more systematic and unified writings, and instead focus on tracing the development of specific arguments. Towards this aim, I will focus on selected themes in discourses on social reform, bhakti (devotion) and dalit-bahujan and the traditions of thought they are located in and assess the weakness and strength of their arguments.

The denial of equal opportunity⁶

With the onset of British colonialism, remarkable transformations took place in the political economy, political institutions and lives of many communities in India. What we learn from the considerable body of historical research is that the British were never ‘a monolithic group with a single imperialist policy’ but were a ‘honeycomb’ of interest groups (civil servants, army personnel, international traders, small-scale entrepreneurs and missionaries) (Brown 1984: 69; Cohn 1997). Despite such disparate elements, there was a tendency to view India as a fundamentally static and degenerate society in which there was no place for social change or economic development; all arguments about the rule of ‘colonial difference’ and hence about the ‘inherent incapacity of Indian society to acquire the virtues of modernity and nationhood, tended to converge upon this supposedly unique Indian institution’ (Chatterjee 1995: 173).⁷ Although they wholeheartedly accepted the centrality of caste as an organizing principle for Indian society, what caste actually consisted of remained a source of controversy (Singer and Cohn 2007: 6). Initially British administrators described Indian people through a variety of classificatory systems but later they tried to conceptualize them through the census. Such views gained force from the textual studies of the early oriental scholars who adopted as their own a brahmanical view of India as a land whose people were forever fixed into positions defined by the caste system. Differences existed between the British orientalists who began the process of privileging certain written texts in their reconstruction of the Indian past and the Evangelical utilitarians that viewed oriental society with contempt (Kopf 1969).⁸ Later, James Mill's claim in History of British India, that the company had the task to civilize the Indians, was put into practice in Thomas Babington Macaulay's Minute on Indian Education (1935), which proposed an educational system for natives: ‘English in taste, in opinions, in morals and intellect’.⁹

The emergence of social theorists, individual rights’ activists, and Anglophone intelligentsia constituting India's high-caste literati exerted a strong influence on the formation of colonial knowledge in the mid-nineteenth century. The introduction of ‘new principles of justice and administration as equality before the law’ and ‘recruitment on the basis of merit’ led to a substantial ‘fluidity into the social system’ in terms of opportunities (Frankel 2006: 7).These principles challenged the caste system ‘by an alternative status system based upon secular norms of individual equality and achievement’ (Frankel 2006: 6). But the substantial continuity between traditional elite castes and westernized classes of professionals and administrators created under the colonial regime remained; even though scattered outside traditional employments, their old occupations continued to predispose them to new skills.

The educated nationalist elite had initially competed and collaborated with British rulers in their search for power and privilege. The most successful built careers in law, medicine, publishing; routinely founded and supported libraries, debating societies and voluntary associations (Bayly 2005: 149). The relationship with colonial rulers was premised on subordination but during the 1870s and 1880s came the ‘beginnings of a mutation in Indian politics’ which was to ‘convert many of the western-educated from collaborators into critics of the regime’ (Seal 1968: 23).

A number of factors may be outlined for the quickening pace of the sense of injustice of British rule. B. B. Misra claims that colonial interest ‘bred discrimination in the services on racial grounds as well as differentiation in respect of social status’ (Misra 1977: 157). Most significant in increasing the tempo was the structural unification that took place along with the introduction of ideas inspired by Locke's political theory about all men being equal under a representative government, and the increasing use of English as a common language of higher administration, education and communication. The expansion of a democratic public sphere got linked to the increasing self-confidence of a large and growing Indian intelligentsia, expanding since the 1850s.

From the last quarter of the nineteenth century a language of rights was available for use in several forums. Coming from higher castes, with traditions of literacy and government service, these Indians were discontented with British reluctance to induct them into administration. Surendranath Banerjea raised the issue of discrimination in 1877 against the age limit, reduced to 19 years, to sit for the entrance examination that effectively excluded many Indians.¹⁰ For these reasons, the experiments in political organization seemed to revolve around the sense of inclusion or exclusion from the opportunity structures that gave rise to competition and collaboration with the government (Seal 1968: 15).

Another crucial point of revision was the approach towards Hindu tradition and society that took place as western religious and secular values became available as a source of comparison. The urban bourgeoisie were influenced by western political theorists, who apart from upholding liberty and equality as ideals, viewed the nation as a natural form of political identity that transcended barriers of creed, religion, caste and region. Critical to the concept of nationalism was the premise of independence or liberation from all kinds of subjugations and constraints upon individual autonomy. There arose a crisis in cultural legitimacy as scholars and reformers questioned ‘the very grounds on which Hindu religion and society seemed to be constituted’ (O'Hanlon 1985: 51). Christian missionaries challenged Hinduism and Islam at a religious level – questioning beliefs, posing new and critical problems, such as the nature of religious revelation, or the relationship of reason to belief and practice.¹¹ According to O'Hanlon, ‘the social groups most disadvantaged by the ascription of social roles in Hindu society formed a special subject of concern in missionary polemic’ (1985: 72). The missionary view of Indian society contained in Charles Grant's Observations on the State of Society (1813), for example, argued that the caste system and the despotic role of brahmans were the cause of the degraded system for Hindus.¹² As harsh criticisms mounted of Hindu society they too began to question social practices such as sati, prohibition of widow remarriage, treatment of widows and age of marriage along with Hindu scriptures.

The language and vocabulary of political liberalism opened up to the disad-vantaged groups a discourse of rights and freedom to contest exclusion. The spread of education through the second half of the nineteenth century ensured that more and more non-brahmans, especially in South India, were brought within the ambit of western learning. They relied upon a language of rights through the caste association as it was the ‘caste petition or memorandum addressed to government officials – census commissioners, collectors, the governor himself – which actualised felt grievances of particular castes’. These included among others demands for ‘a superior varna status and for equality in the eyes of the law’ (Geetha and Rajadurai 1998: 57). Some of these memorandums listed the key humiliations suffered and appealed to values of freedom and equality that also led to a quickening of the tide of anti-brahman anger. Although sometimes linked to movements for ‘sanskritization’ they held great significance in questioning group identity and enabling experience of new types of voluntary associations through formation of caste sabhas.¹³ Consequently the provincial political arena became crowded with organizations that claimed to represent interests of caste groups and many appeals to caste solidarity became established in the vocabulary of modern politics (Rudolph and Rudolph 2008a: 6–7).¹⁴

In the twentieth century, it was these groups that became active in politics to demand recognition in the legislatures and official employment. Rudolph and Rudolph argue that with time, instead of demanding temple entry and prestigious caste names, the associations began to press for ‘places in new administrative and educational institutions and for political representation’ (Rudolph and Rudolph 2008a: 6). These associations became secularized as they claimed ‘new advantages from the state, principally in terms of reservations (quotas) in educational institutions and in the civil service’ (Jaffrelot 2000: 758). In this way, sanskritization and new forms of associations were attempts to subvert positions in the existing hierarchy. In addition to concessions from the British, the most important social change through ‘ethnicisation of castes’ was the ‘unity of caste groups’ which provided ‘alternative non-hierarchical social imaginaires’, a key issue as far as promoting an ‘egalitarian alternative identity’ was concerned (Jaffrelot 2000: 758).

Distinctive regional trajectories were noted as caste associations arrived early in north India but remained trapped within the ‘logic of sanskritization’ as opposed to non-brahman movements that emerged in southern and western India, where distance between the brahmans and the middle to lower castes was most keenly felt (Jaffrelot 2000: 762). Non-brahman movements gathered urgency as British policies of positive discrimination expanded opportunities for high castes which already had disproportionate and early access to the new education and employment institutions. Large coalitions like the Dravidian non-brahman groupings were formed, which were later to be known as other backward classes (OBCs) in independent India.

Social reforms: caste as an impediment to nationhood

In the late nineteenth century, many intellectual developments contributed in shaping modern understandings of equality and social justice. Rejecting traditional ideas, a generation of reformers called for a new social consciousness in order to reconsider Hindu traditions and religious practices. The involvement with social justice came to be defining ‘weak points in the social organization of Hindu society’ (Ambedkar 1989b: 38). One of the most influential voices against caste injustice was that of the progressive reformers, mostly ‘privileged male upper-caste western educated intellectuals who were fearless in condemnation of what they considered culturally decadent’ (Sarkar and Sarkar 2008: 1–2). They recognized the ‘indigenous as well as the extraneous sources of Indian degeneration’ that included religious ritualism, idolatory, brahmanic elitism and social discrimination (Pantham and Deutsch 1986: 14). In addition to absorbing AngloSaxon intellect...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Non-discrimination and Equality in India
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms
• Introduction
• 1 The context of social justice in modern India
• 2 Constituent assembly debates: the limits of liberal constitutionalism
• 3 Equality and non-discrimination
• 4 Expanding domains: democracy and the vernacularization of social justice
• 5 Higher education at crossroads
• 6 Reservations in the private sector
• 7 Gender justice and quotas
• 8 De-clustering disadvantage: the case of religious minorities
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index