Over at Dancing With Dogs Shanti (her name means “Peace” if my brown-speak memory is correct) has a great post on anti-upper-caste affirmative action in India:
Let me make this a little clearer – my husband had to get a rank of 486 out of the hundreds of thousands of people who wrote the exam with him, to barely make it into computer engineering at a local university – his classmate? a girl with 16000 rank, who happened to hit the double jackpot, since she also belonged to the lowest of low castes as they are categorized. Did she deserve it? She failed every subject in the finals in her first year, except English – she took between 5 and 6 years to complete a 4-year course. Poor thing! she must have been so poor…hold it – she was rich enough to attend one of the best private schools that money could buy for her high school education….
Let me make also it clear-as someone from a Muslim background, I find caste abhorrent. I’ve gotten on Hinduism’s case because frankly it makes a rather poor showing in terms of preventing its own marginalized members from jumping ship for Islam or Christianity (and I’m not a big fan of the Abrahamic god as most of you know). But despite past and present injustices non-upper-castes in India have to endure, quotas that establish different rules for various castes will institutionalize caste distinctions for future generations (assume that a Brahmin marries a Dalit, and their child marries a Brahmin, will the 1/4 Dalit taint be enough that this 3/4 Brahmin individual competes in the pool with Dalits?).
Esteem from upper-castes will be earned only through enduring the high standards set for others and succeeding against odds. Affirmative action only reinforces stereotypes and prejudices when applied beyond the most ginger levels, it perpetuates itself and continues to self-generate the social injustice that its existence is contingent on. Over the generations, Dalits and “Other Backward Castes” will become masters of the skills of government manipulation-their children will know that they must prepare themselves for a different set of standards than their classmates [1]. They will start (and are) packing the bureaucracy because the private sector will assume that Dalits and “Other Backward Castes” that graduate with engineering degrees are morons that can’t hack it in comparison to their upper-caste colleagues that received no preferences [2].
Sound familiar?
[1] Just like the United States where the term “people of color” has expanded affirmative action beyond blacks, other non-upper caste groups besides Dalits are clamoring for quotas, and quite often because of their greater social standing manage to get more resources from the government.
[2] The grotesque level of quotas that India seems to have established simply makes rational discrimination a necessity for private sector firms from what I can see. By this, I mean that even if a Dalit engineer is competant, they will be discriminated against because the vast majority of Dalit’s are so below-standard that it makes more sense in terms of Human Resource man-hours to eliminate all Dalits out of the candidate pool. By further explication: if quotas were dropped, and the % of Dalits from an engineering school dropped to .5% from 15%, I would not be surprised if the number of Dalits hired increased in the private sector, because those .5% would be at the same level as their classmates. On the other hand, if the 15% quota was continued, than the other 14.5%, over 96% of the Dalit graduates, would be simply not worth the effort to take on or possibly even interview. The cost might be too high to look for the 1 out of 30 that would be worth hiring. On the other hand, the majority of the 85% that were admitted without quotas would almost all fit minimum requirements.
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