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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | A quota for farmers -Harish Damodaran

A quota for farmers -Harish Damodaran

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published Published on Jan 14, 2019   modified Modified on Jan 14, 2019
-The Indian Express

It would have made more sense — economically, legally, politically, morally, constitutionally — to have limited 10 per cent EWS reservation to those with farming or rural backgrounds

The last few years have seen the so-called dominant farming communities — especially the Jats, Marathas, Patidars and Kapus — mount violent agitations demanding quotas in government jobs and higher educational institutions, whether under the OBC (Other Backward Class) or any specially created category.

In all these instances, the standard government response was, “look, we want to grant you reservations, but doing it entails breaching the 50 per cent limit set by the Supreme Court in the 1992 Indra Sawhney judgment. And including you within the 27 per cent OBC quota isn’t practical, since that would be at the expense of the communities already in the list”.

This feeble narrative has, however, undergone a sudden transformation now, with the Narendra Modi government introducing and passing in Parliament a Constitution amendment bill that creates a new economically weaker sections of citizens (EWS) category entitled to 10 per cent reservation, over and above the 15 per cent for Scheduled Castes, 7.5 per cent for Scheduled Tribes and 27 per cent for OBCs.

Such alacrity and boldness to defy Indra Sawhney is striking for two reasons.

First, this zeal wasn’t evident when the demand for creating similar quotas came from dominant farming communities. At least 10 deaths were reported during the Patidar OBC quota stir in July-August 2015, while protests by the Jats in February 2016 claimed some 30 lives and practically paralysed Haryana for 10 days. While those, and the massive Maratha mook morchas (silent marches) in September-October 2016, did result in the respective state governments enacting laws making these communities eligible for reservations, they were all quashed by high courts. And there wasn’t any attempt at challenging the rulings by amending the Constitution itself (specifically Articles 15 and 16) to provide for additional quotas beyond 49.5 per cent.

This links up to the second point, concerning the readiness to nullify Indra Sawhney via the Constitution amendment route when it comes to the EWS (read upper castes). The willingness to bend backwards in their case is extraordinary, given that the savarna demand, if at all, has largely been for scrapping caste-based reservations. Even the clamour for quotas for the “poor among upper castes” has been nowhere comparable to the movements by the dominant farming communities.

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The Indian Express, 14 January, 2019, https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/a-quota-for-farmers-job-education-reservation-ews-5536650/


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