Examining Reservation

(An examination of the history, need and controversies regarding the implementation of reservation.)

Caste and caste based politics has been the bane of Indian society. The ruling and elitist classes in all societies have always found some means or the other to maintain the large part of the population as impoverished and suppressed. In the west it was race and colour of the skin, in India it was caste. Kerala was one of the worst affected states of caste sectarianism, evident from the words of Swami Vivekananda who described Kerala as a ‘lunatic asylum’ on seeing the plight of the untouchables.
The origin of the caste system and caste discrimination in India has its beginnings from the time of the Aryan invasion. The light skinned Aryans looked down upon the local dark skinned population. Organized religion in the hands of the affluent classes has always backed the need for this discrimination. The Vedas state that the Brahmins were born from the head, the kshatriyas from the hands, the Vaishyas from the thighs and the Shudras from the feet of the Brahma.
Christianity is also severely immersed in racism. Though the largest share of the Christian population comes from the Africas there has not been a single black pope in all these years. 70% of Indian Christians are Dalits but it is the rest 30% that control the church’s administrative reforms. Out of the 156 Bishops in the catholic community only 6 belong to the lower caste. The Nasrani Christians, who are the descendents of the first Brahmins to convert to Christianity, form the upper caste. They are found in Kerala and are the most influential among the Christian sects and the positions of bishops are to this day entitled to them.
Among the Muslims of India too, a strong caste system persists, the community being divided into two sects namely the Ashraff Muslims, who have a superior position owing to their foreign ancestry, and the Ajlaf Muslims who are of indigenous origin. Certain sections of the ulemas support the caste system and have provided it with religious sanctity. The Ajlaf Muslims have been discriminated against since the time of the Mughals and even denied their fundamental rights of education.
The upper classes denied all forms of knowledge to the untouchables; throwing them into a world of darkness and ignorance. The ‘Manu Smrithi’ dictates that a Shudra who even accidentally hears a Sanskrit word is to be punished by molten iron being poured into his ears.

It is in the light of this background, that ‘historically and educationally backward societies’ are identified and means of their upliftment, sought.







Nehru and Ambedkar on reservation.
The French thinker Andre Malraux once asked Nehru what the greatest difficulty he faced after independence was. With not a moment of hesitation the prime minister replied, ‘creating a just state by just means, perhaps too, creating a secular state in a religious country”. As a humanist and democrat Nehru had rooted for the system of positive reservation to be enacted in India in favor of the historically and socially oppressed societies .But like other members of the constituent assembly, that framed the constitution he wanted the same to be in force for only around a decade. During which time, he wanted the power of the state to be deployed to alleviate poverty, reduce illiteracy, accelerate economic reforms and bring about land reforms that would enable the underdogs of our society to access education, health services and government jobs.

Ambedkar, father of the Indian constitution and chairman of the constituent assembly; believed that reservations should be time bound and in the due course of time eliminate all caste prejudices so that the reservation system itself can be done away with.

The Kaka Kalekar committee, appointed by the Nehru government in 1955, recommended reservation of 15% of seats for SCs and 7.5% for STs in education and civil services which was embodied in the constitution

THE MANDAL COMMISION

The Janata party that assumed office in 1979 established a commission to determine the educationally and socially backward communities in the country under parliamentarian Bindeshwari Pratap Mandal. The aim of the commission was to redress caste discrimination prevalent in the country.
.The Mandal commission identified the backward classes in the country by adopting three types of indicators namely social, economic and educational.

SOCIAL: Castes where a large part of the population depend on manual labour, where the average age of marriage was less than 17 and the percentage of employed females was atleast 25% below the state average was classified as backward.

EDUCATIONAL: Those castes where the number of children attending or dropping out of school or never attended school was more than 25% below the state average were placed in the category of educationally backward communities.

ECONOMIC: Indicators such as households having assets less than 25% of the state average, access to drinking water and those taking consumption loans were used to determine the status of various castes.




Recommendations and findings
“Today we have performed the ritualistic immersion of a historic document”
-B.P. Mandal

The Mandal commission identified over 3700 castes as backward and recommended an additional 27% hike in reservations from the existing 22.5% which would take the total reservation seats to 49.5%. The commission also reported that 52% of the population was backward on the basis of the indicators it had chosen.
The proposed reservation was to be implemented in all public sector institutions, nationalized banks, and those private institutions that had acquired financial assistance from the government in any form and also all central and state universities and colleges. Although educational reforms did not fall in the preview of the commission it did recommend the following measures to increase literacy rates in the country.

1) An intensive time-bound programme for adult education should be launched in selected pockets with high concentration of OBC population;

2) Residential schools should be set up in these areas for backward class students to provide a climate specially conducive to serious studies. All facilities in these schools including board and lodging should be provided free of cost to attract students from poor and backward homes;

3) Separate hostels for OBC students with above facilities will have to be provided;

4) Vocational training was considered imperative

The commission also noted that there should be fundamental changes in the land tenure system and patterns of production through systematic land reforms.
The need to create institutions that would financially assist village artisans of the backward communities to set up their own small scale industries was also emphasized as a prerequisite if the recommendations were to have a permanent impact.

Shortcomings of the Mandal commission..
The Mandal commission appears to be a very amateur report as seemingly non venial errors have crept into the report.

1. The list of OBC categories prepared by the report is startling. An astonishing number of communities have been placed in this category.
For e.g. the community Urao, in West Bengal, has been listed as an OBC, but this community is already listed by the state government as ST under a slightly different name, Oraon. The report if implemented as such, will entitle Urao’s to double reservation.
And this is not the only community, where ambiguity in spelling has been overlooked. The commission has listed several communities like the Kherwar, Bhotia, Brijia etc as backward but these are already present in the ST list of the Bengal state govt under the names of Kharwar, Bhutia and Birijia respectively.
It startles the lay man, how a committee acting with constitutional authority could have overlooked such details.

2. Not only alternative spellings of STs have been listed as OBCs, but some communities have been listed twice in the list.

3. Various tribes living in the north east states have been listed in the OBC list of west Bengal. This can only be the act of an infertile brain and raises doubts as to whether any real survey was conducted at all.

4. Totally incomprehensible is the inclusion of the Taga tribe in the list of OBCs of Haryana. The Taga is actually a forward caste. With the general trend of Sanskritising caste names, the Tagas adopted a new name, Tyagis .In the remote areas of Haryana, the Tyagi’s are still called Taga’s and they have been included as OBCs.

5. The affluent Anglo-Indians have been listed in the OBC list of Kerala for seemingly no reason.

Protests against the implementation of the Mandal report.
It was the V.P. Singh ministry in1989 that decided to implement the Mandal commission report, a decade after it was completed. The decision sparked unprecedented protests across the country from the student community and disruption of normal functioning of all major universities and colleges ensued.
A scar in the face of the country’s history was the self immolation of Rajiv Goswami (1990), a student of Delhi University, protesting against the attempt to implement the Mandal report. Goswami’s action sparked a series of self immolations in protest against the reservation policy.
The protests ultimately led to the resignation of Prime Minister V.P. Singh.


RECENT CONTROVERSY

The Minister for human resource development Arjun Singh, on April 5, 2006 stated that his ministry intended to implement the Mandal commission report.
Apprehensions that the minister was playing caste politics prior to the state assembly elections in Kerala, W.Bengal, Tamilnadu, Pondicherry and Assam cannot be dismissed.
The implementation of the report would result in a 27.5% reservation of seats for OBCs in all government institutions and institutes of national importance like the IITs and IIMs.
It was immediately argued that this would work against merit.
Prime Minister Man Mohan Singh made his own suggestion that corporate leaders should take steps to blend their commitment to excellence with commitment to social equity.
The confederation of Indian industries (CII) and FICCI (federation of Indian chamber of commerce and industry) replied in the negative.



The left’s stand.
The left parties led by the CPI (M) were among the first to back the decision of the central government. Reinstating their long standing demand for the same.
Pointing out that the system of capitation fee prevalent in many institutions was infact a reservation for the rich, the left parties observed that merit became an issue of debate only when it came to providing historically oppressed communities, access to education.
Education has for long been afflicted by its perennial quest to balance the eternal triangle quality, quantity and equity.
As economist Prabhat Patnaik pointed out in a talk hosted at the Jawaharlal Nehru university, there is a tendency among the elite to arrogate powers to decide on the policy of discrimination rather than leaving it to the state. The support of the faculty of elite institutions shows that they value institutional merit – understood in terms of their global standing - rather than individual merit. A tendency to disconnect institutional merit from empathizing with ordinary people seems to be a characteristic of anti reservation agitations.

Youth for equality
The protests against Arjun Singh’s decision to implement reservation of seats to OBCs in central institutions was spearheaded by the ‘youth for equality’ movement. Following the ministers decision, the students of the university college of medical sciences, new Delhi met at the boys hostel there and formed the organization, christened ‘youth for equality’.
Soon they were joined by like minded friends from all over the country studying in IITs, IIMs and various colleges of art, medicine, law and science.
Within a month of its formation on April 5th, the movement had already organized a mass rally at the Ramila grounds in Delhi( the rally attracted a mass crowd and the speakers at the venue included former IITM director P.V.Indireshan, Navjot Singh Sidhu, and former secretary general of the lok sabha subhash kashyap). There was also an attempt at self immolation staged by a misguided youth, that attracted media persons. The layman was left to ponder: From where do they get their funds?
Common sense dictates only one possible answer, they are financed by the corporate sector, greedy for undue profits, for which they will not hesitate to ignore social interests
The involvement of the corporate sector became more and more obvious in the succeeding days as the website of the YFE announced the launching of their unit in the united states!!!. As the elitist , neo liberal, pro-globalisation character of the movement became more pronounced the role of corporate money no longer needed to be doubted.
The events of the anti reservation protests found wide media coverage.

Reaction from the IITs
The fact that the institutes of excellence in higher education such as the IITs and the medical colleges of Delhi served as the nerve centers of the anti-reservation protests speaks volumes of the biased mind set in their campuses. The IIT, faculty and students alike, have never had a good history of responding to social issues, let alone those concerning the student community in the rest of the country.
The nature of these protests indicates how the corporate powers have succeeded in making them one of the most right minded campuses in the country. A brute majority of the IITians find employment abroad or serve the interests of the private sector leaving the government little or nothing to benefit from the vast resources spent.
Besides, no real breakthroughs in our understanding of science has come from these institutes. They are more concerned with catering to the needs of the private businesses that fund them. (Small changes in the design that will help multinationals sell their products in the Indian market etc.)
The de linking of state funding from the research sector has accelerated a plummeting of the quality of research and discoveries that benefit humanity as a whole are now a rarity. Further, the standard of research in the pure sciences has assumed alarming devaluation as businesses fund only product base research.
The aloofness of the state to fund university level research is part of a wider agenda of capitalist domination of the third world in the globalization era.
As the Ambani –Birla commission observes “education is not a public good but a private good”
The early 20th century witnessed an explosion of scientific discoveries from men passionate about science and committed to nothing more than the cause of ‘the discovery of the underlying forces of nature’. They were funded and promoted by the state by offering them posts of professors and research scholars.
In the post globalization era however the need for the de linking of scientific research from the universities was felt by international businesses to allot more attention and resources to product based research and marketing methodologies. Since then and till date, activity in the scientific arena is dormant.
IIT and IIM administrators therefore owe more to corporate and multinational businesses than to the common man, thus denying the fruits of scientific knowledge and human progress to a vast population.

Forceful state interference in IITs / IIMs
The issue of allotting quotas in centers of excellence has been accompanied by the argument that forceful interference by the government is against the spirit of autonomy enjoyed by these institutions, vital for their growth.
A careful study of the history of the functioning of these institutions show that, it was not as much the government that interfered, as it was the IIT administration that forced the interference.
A splendid e.g. of this was the refusal of the IITs to increase their intake for nearly two decades and ultimately the government was forced to issue an order telling them to double the same in five years starting from 1990. Had our citadels of learning been more responsive to the needs of the society they would have embarked on a project to increase their intake by 2-3% every year rather than swallow the bitter pill forced on them.

It is illogical to argue that the state should give these institutes funds from the tax payers money and then close its eyes on how they function.




AFFIRMATIVE ACTION.

The United States in the early 20th century was in no better a state than India of the 19th century as far as social reforms were concerned. Discrimination against the blacks were rampant and protected by law. Separate schooling for the whites and blacks was universal, seats in public transport, parks and enjoyment rides was fully reserved for the whites. The murder of Emmet Till, a black teenager in 1955, and the acts of the Ku Klux Klan speaks volumes of the extent of racism and provides one of the greatest examples of man’s atrocities against man.
It was only as late as in 1963 that the demands of the civil rights movement was recognized and life long dreams of philanthropists such as Martin Luther king junior
materialised. The cause of the blacks in the birthplace of modern democracy gained world wide sympathy. Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic speech in Washington, as he addressed a mass rally pressing for an end to racial discrimination has been recorded as among the most moving speeches in history. “I have a dream” he spoke, “ that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood…….”
It was President Lyndon Johnson who in 1965 enacted an executive order(Civil Rights Legislation) bringing into force reservations for blacks in universities, colleges and in public/private sector jobs. A system known as affirmative action.

Affirmative action in education.
Affirmative action is a form of positive discrimination, the term coined by President Lyndon Johnson. It involves a policy of giving preferences to certain under represented groups. In the United States the most prominent action of affirmative action centers on admission to educational institutions. Race, ethnicity, gender, native language, geographical origin, social class, parental education, etc are the criterion. This system has found to be beneficial to African-Americans, women and Hispanics. Different universities have different norms for admissions. Studies on the most popular private universities reveal that they implement affirmative action by admitting students after giving additional points above their SAT scores. The number of additional points are based on the category they belong to.
Blacks having the lowest share in education are given an additional +230 SAT points, Hispanics +180 points and athletes +200 points. Asian Americans on the other hand, are given ‘-50’ points owing to their higher level of competence.

Outcome of affirmative action
Studies relating to affirmative action, have shown that blacks admitted under affirmative action have high dropout rates and rank at the bottom after one year of studies. A study by Richard S Sander suggests that there would be an increase by 8% in the number of black lawyers if affirmative action is ended in law schools, as this would encourage black students to enter less prestigious law schools where their standard is at par with that of their classmates. The study also pointed out that the graduation rates among blacks is a meager 41% compared to the 73% graduation rate of whites.
Affirmative action and class stratification.
The American experience tells us of the limits of identity politics and group rights. Affirmative action has been accompanied by the denial of the basic rights of education, health and jobs to millions of poor blacks and whites as well, benefiting only the elite category of the former. It can only be concluded that positive discrimination in favor of the blacks has created a substantial black middle class but it has also created a desperately poor and deeply alienated black middle class. As collateral damage, a large mass of whites simmering with the anger of the opportunities denied to them has also emerged. The civil rights movement of the 1960s only aimed at an end to racial discrimination, however it was soon realized that something more than a good will statement was needed to bring the blacks to the forefront of the economy and nullify the effect of years of discrimination.
AA has been implemented in the predominant private sector of the USA and has enabled many blacks to make inroads into the corporate world. As an example, Lockhead Martin employs 124,000 people of which 21% have entered through affirmative action.
But the sad part of the story is that, half a century of AA has divided the black community itself into an ‘aristocracy’ comprising the black elites and professionals and a ‘ghettocracy’ of poor blacks doing low earning jobs(transcription and call center jobs). This have gone from bad to worse for the latter after outsourcing of jobs off-shore became rampant.
The black community that survived slavery and fought the civil rights movement together is today sharply divided across class lines. The middle class blacks have begun to ape the middle class whites and look down upon the low class blacks.
Sharply divided on racial lines, and facing a poor white community bitter against the blacks for their plight, these poor blacks are unable to build a solidarity with the low class whites. The rich therefore stand united but the poor in each community suffer alone.
‘Affirmative action is therefore color conscious but class blind.’

Demand for affirmative action in India.
The private and corporate sectors have vehemently opposed reservations in the private sector in the style envisaged by the Mandal commission. They however, have proposed a plan similar to that of affirmative action. The main proponent of this type of caste redressal is industrialist Rahul Bajaj. The manner of AA they propose is such that there should be no mandatory implementation of quotas but corporates and private firms must ensure that a certain percentage of their work force belongs to the minority community. And this percentage should be left to the firm or the corporation to decide.
This replicates the American model where big businesses have found that racial diversity actually enhances diversity of ideas within the company.
It is obvious that the offer by Indian corporates to do the same is nothing more than something that will benefit their own businesses.

They also present a toothless picture of affirmative action and try to highlight only the examples of the middle class blacks keeping in the dark facts on the class divide in American society bred by affirmative action. This is nothing more than a form of window dressing.
It appears that the Indian businesses are deliberately trying to create a strata of middle class Dalits, that shall soon cut off from the remaining sections of the community and identify themselves with the cause of business profits.


An analysis of the reservation law enacted by the parliament.

The parliament, displaying rare unanimity, enacted the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in admissions) Bill in the winter session of the parliament,2006 to provide legal backing to the system of reservations and to extend the same for the OBC category in central government institutions . The demand by the BJP to extend the reservation to minority institutions was disregarded, as was the Communist party’s suggestion to exclude the creamy layer from the purview of the law.
The necessity of legal backing arose, following the Supreme court verdict in the PA Inamdar V/s state of Maharashtra case that reservations in private, unaided institutions was unconstitutional. Ironically though, the central legislation has excluded private unaided institutions along with minority institutions from its ambit. The explanation offered by the government being that , a separate Bill exclusively for unaided institutions will be brought forward.

The Bill that was tabled on the last day of the monsoon session of the parliament and later discussed in the winter session, reflects many of the concessions that the Union cabinet had to give into, in the wake of protests from vested interests.
The law is therefore, very much dissimilar from the initially proposed 93rd amendment .

The drafting of the bill.
Human resource minister Arjun Singh’s announcement that a central legislation to implement the Mandal commission report was being proposed, was followed by high drama in various parts of the country especially the national capital.
The government in January 2006 proposed the 93rd constitutional amendment act before parliament. The amendment was aimed at providing reservation to OBCs in all institutions -aided and unaided alike-to the extent of 27%.
The play nor the playmakers did not withdraw from their public expression of dissent until an Oversight committee headed by M. Veerappa Moily was appointed to monitor the government program. The committee was aimed at assessing the feasibility of developing new infrastructure so that the total intake capacity of central institutions could be elevated and the general category seats would not have to sink.

The Educational Institutions Bill (Reservation in admissions),2006 is thus an outcome of the recommendations of the oversight committee.





SHORTCOMINGS OF THE BILL.

How much ever the drafters of the bill might herald it as the salvation of society’s underdogs, there is ample room for scepticism. The very differences between the proposed 93rd constitutional amendment and the final law makes it evident that elite sections backed by corporate finance have snatched away various concessions.
The very fact that the law is not meant for private unaided institutes speaks volumes on its biased nature. The reason provided for the exclusion being that the government will not be able to cope with the rising protests of students.

Now how does one deal with such levels of lunacy? The protests were clearly an extraneous issue that ought not to have guided the drafting of a law.

1.Cut-off marks:
While the decision of the central government to expand the intake in all central institutions by 54%, to prevent a fall in the general category seats, remains a remarkable achievement, the final outcome of the decision is likely to prove adverse to the purpose of reservation.
The respective institutions have been accorded the power to determine the threshold of admissions commensurate with their level of excellence. The oversight committee is therefore, not in agreement with the need for a relaxation in cut-off marks to go alongside with reservation.
Reservation without relaxation in cut-off marks, is bound to lead to unfilled seats and unlike in the public services where unfilled posts are carried over to the next year, unfilled seats in educational institutions will be filled by the general category.
The purpose of reservation stands to be foiled by a rigid posture on the threshold marks, born out of an irrational concern for institutional merit.

2.Right to differ implementation of the Law for three years:
In view of the need to develop greater infrastructure, to meet the demand for greater number of students, the respective institutions have been bestowed upon the right to differ the implementation of the law for another three years. This amounts to an expenditure of Rs. 16,563 crores .
Again the need to increase the intake cannot be questioned as there is a definite need to make higher education more accessible to the common man. But to link the expansion of seats to the implementation of reservation appears unjust.
Apart from the fact that opportunities to weaker sections of the society will be denied during the initial years, linking expansion of seats with reservation has never happened before. In the various state government run institutions, the implementation of reservation was not accompanied by an increase in intake. How the central institutions are different is a question that requires a legitimate answer.
To delay the implementation of reservation for three years in the name of expanding opportunities is unreasonable and the two must be implemented parallely but independently.

The above mentioned facts read together, implies that these elite institutions can snatch funds in the name of furthering intake, insist on irrational cut-off marks, keep the seats unfilled and pass it onto the general category students.

3. Failure to identify alternative methods for intake expansion
The oversight committee has failed to identify any other method to increase the intake into elite institutions, apart from an expensive development of infrastructure.
In an article in Economic and Political Weekly , a senior faculty member of IIM, Ahmedabad, Ramesh Gupta, has argued that quality is a matter of perception and depends on the parameters one uses to measure it. Parameters could be those that are acceptable to or valued by Wall Street recruiters or the ones that would be acceptable for managing the best Indian companies, he says. Increasingly, he says, training at the IIMs is at variance with what is required by domestic companies except for a few.
Making a micro-analysis of the requirements of IIM, Ahmedabad, he says it can increase the intake for its Post-Graduate Programme in Management substantially by better utilisation of its physical infrastructure, better faculty time management by restructuring programmes and active faculty recruitment in deficit areas, and by defining its priorities more sharply.
National Professor in Management and founder-director of IIM, Bangalore, N.S. Ramaswamy, has in a note to the Oversight Committee, maintained that the faculty in all the IIMs contribute just about half the number of hours of work they are supposed to put in as per a decision taken by the faculty four decades ago. He has suggested that the work of evaluation and preparation of course material be delegated to teaching assistants and research assistants, thus making more time available to the faculty for teaching.
4. The law is inapplicable to Minority Educational Institutions(MEIs).

Stating that MEIs already provide for reservations to SC and ST categories, and that they are safeguarded by the sacred provisions of article 30(1) of the constitution, the law has exempted minority run institutes from implementing the law.
However it must be scrutinised whether the government has done enough to monitor the conditions of the students and applicants in these institutes,(Regarding the procedures for admissions and exorbitant fees charged) without which, any other measure in the name of guarding the sanctity of the constitution would prove futile.


THE CREAMY LAYER ISSUE

The concept of creamy layer and the term itself was first introduced in the landmark judgment of the supreme court in the Indira Sawhney case of 1992. The apex court in reply to the petitioners, who had challenged the V.P Singh ministry’s decision to reserve 27% seats to OBCs, arguing that there was an elite class among the designated OBCs who were just as advanced socially, educationally and economically, ruled that the government should exclude this elite class of OBCs or the ‘creamy layer’ from the purview of reservation.
The court also added that the judgment was applicable only to the OBCs and there was no need for a corresponding action in the case of SCs and STs for whom the verdict was totally irrelevant.

This was needless to say a U turn from the observations of Justice Chinappa Reddy in the Vasanth Kumar case. An excerpt from his verdict reads,

"... .One must, however, enter a caveat to the criticism that the benefits of reservation are often snatched away by the top creamy layer of backward class or caste. That a few of the seats and posts reserved for backward classes are snatched away by the more fortunate among them is not to say that reservation is not necessary. This is bound to happen in a competitive society such as ours. Are not the unreserved seats and posts snatched away, in the same way, by the top creamy layers amongst them on the same principle of merit on which the non-reserved seats are taken away by the top layers of society? How can it be bad if reserved seats and posts are snatched away by the creamy layer of backward classes, if such snatching away of unreserved posts by the top creamy layer of society itself is not bad?"

On October 19th 2006, the supreme court once again deviated from its verdict on the Indira Shawney case when a five member bench declared in the M. Nagaraj v/s Union of India case, that the concept of creamy layer be extended to SCs and STs as well.
The verdict in the Indira Shawney case involved an interpretation of article 16, clause 4 of the Indian constitution.
That backwardness of a class meant group backwardness and not individual backwardness was generally agreed . The presence of a few economically forward members in a generally backward caste, does not suggest that the class itself is forward. ‘A lone swallow does not make a summer.’ The final verdict by the court in the Indira Sawhney case construed that Article 16(4) can rise to its meaning only when socially advanced members are excluded from a backward class and the government was given a four month deadline to identify and evolve the criterion (on the basis of income or extent of holdings) to identify the creamy layer.

The findings of the Narasimha Rao government appointed committee, to examine the criterion for creamy layers had ascertained that in the case of SCs and STs it was not mere economic status but untouchability that should be taken as the decisive factor to determine the eligibility for reservation.
The ruling in the M. Nagaraj case therefore raises a legitimate apprehension as to what changes had taken place in the social conditions since the Indira Sawhney verdict, so that the concept of creamy layer be extended to SCs and STs as well.

Whether the verdict can be considered as direction to parliament to impose the criterion of creamy layer, remains to be seen, as debates on the interpretation of article 16(4) have yet to cease and the ambiguity in the verdict has paved the way for a direct conflict between the judiciary and legislature.
CONCLUDING REMARKS

This essay aims atleast in part, to establish primarily that reservation is a necessity in the Indian context and in the light of a long history of a class divided society.

Secondly it must also be recognized that the Mandal proposals are nearly three decades old and will have to be revisited and its shortcomings dealt with. The haste shown by political parties to implement nothing but the Mandal report is simply because they are more concerned with quick action rather than long term goals.
A new commission to enquire into the conditions of the minorities will have to be established. The findings of the Sachar committee must also, be taken into consideration.

Affirmative action in the western model, creates class divides and if we are sincere to our goal of creating a classless society we must realize that the method will fall short in achieving the ‘annihilation of caste’ and caste prejudices.

The Central educational institutions Bill is bound to prove to be a failure in achieving the proclaimed aim of justice for the Dalits and is nothing more than a palliative cure , that fails to address the crux of the issue.

THE END