Someone asked me what I thought of the video linked here, which was doing the rounds for a while now. By the time I am writing this, Tharoor has slightly expanded on his views in the conversation linked here.
The question raised in the first video is whether merit is often compromised in the name of reservations? Tharoor’s answer seems to be in the affirmative with the rider that no politician will ever touch the issue of reservations today. This bald affirmation of the political rather than moral judgment guiding decisions on the issue is almost refreshing. But, former Chief Justice of India (CJI), Justice Chandrachud does something we need to pay attention to when Tharoor expresses this idea. He intervenes with the claim to have a “different take” on reservations, yet he goes on to repeat, like a child reciting a homily, the old and familiar story of caste oppression without actually saying anything “different”. What that does, is to immediately shift the conversation away from present day challenges, with nothing more than an insistence on dwelling on moral culpability. This actively blocks any possibility of conversation in a context where it is sorely required.
How this moral culpability is built and magnified requires some examination. While there is much more to examine in the former CJI’s comments, let’s begin with a comparison he makes that is quite remarkable, even if fairly familiar. He claims reservations were “introduced in the backdrop of centuries of discrimination against marginalized groups in our society, who did not constitute a minority, but who constitute a majority – that’s the difference between India and the US”.
In the US, the actual institution of slavery existed for a period of less than 100 years. This is an important fact to remind ourselves. In Justice Chandrachud’s terms, this was a “majority-run” institution in the US, and yet, one finds a great deal of historical documentation about the actual mechanisms used for torture and subjugation throughout that history. One would expect that if the situation is flipped, it is a majority that faced similar conditions in India, the accounts of that marginalization and discrimination would be exponentially higher and considering that the length of time attributed to this process of marginalization is at least 20 times greater than that in the US, we would expect accounts that are far more brutal, coercive and far-ranging. Where are these accounts akin to the accounts of slavery? Yes, a few stories about penalizing movement through particular streets, or practices impugning impure status, several more accounts of access to wells. Do these constitute evidence for 2000 (or more) years of discrimination and marginalization akin to slavery? Does any kind of morally opprobrious practice of the past or discrimination immediately allow us to equate conditions to slavery? Yet, the former CJI is neither the first, nor, most likely will he be the last to make this comparison.
What is more interesting is the following: in about half the historical period that this discrimination was purportedly sustained (if one takes it as 2000 years), India had Muslim and British rulers. Now, it is certainly intriguing to ask, what was the motivation of these rulers to keep up a system of discrimination and marginalization of a majority of the population under their rule, especially when supporting the destruction of such a system would obviously give them huge political gains against the purported powerful minority? It is indeed intriguing, is it not, that temples were made the object of destruction, but not the social structures that many scholars claim supposedly held up Hinduism itself?
What makes it much worse is the complete ignorance required to entertain such a claim. If the ‘majority’ of some society faces ‘discrimination’ and ‘marginalisation’, the minority calling the shots on this discriminatory society must have had tremendous mechanisms of control – hoarding resources, mercenary or other kinds of force mechanisms to keep the majority from gaining access to power or resources, spy systems to ensure swift punishment of breaches of any kind, all sorts of well-documented laws and rules prevalent across the length and breadth of the country with a well-entrenched police system to enforce it. Where are these mechanisms? For instance, why did the ‘upper caste’ ruling classes not simply swell up an army of “Dalits” to be fed as cannon fodder every time there was an invasion? Wouldn’t this be the very least one would witness from a system of such slavery?
At least the British ethnographers had half intelligent questions to ask about the caste system, spending resources and decades trying to answer (unsuccessfully) in what way the lower castes must have been clearly physically identifiable (akin to identification race gave in other places), otherwise, how could such a system sustain itself? (Risley’s anthropomorphic measurements were driven towards answering precisely such questions.) Unlike the British, we no longer need to ask any logical questions about the caste system. All we need to do is to consistently display a bleeding heart to gain applause from an audience educated on reality through saas-bahu serials no doubt.
Let us assume for a moment that Justice Chandrachud’s claims about historical injustice towards the ‘majority’ of the Indian population are true for now. What is the logical consequence of a policy which demands that those who are the weakest be given the greatest advantages? A perfectly reasonable policy on the surface, but have we thought the implications through? The best lesson in the logical consequence of such a stance is actually available in a story from the Mahabharata. It is the story of Barbarik.
Barbarik, son of Ghatotkach and the grandson of Bheem had received a boon from Shiva, who awarded him 3 powerful arrows:
1. The first arrow would mark his enemy with red ink
2. The second arrow would mark the things that he wanted to save
3. The third arrow would destroy enemy target marked with red ink in the first step or destroy everything not marked in step 2.
Barbarik’s Guru asks him to swear by 2 promises as guru-dakshina:
a. That Barbarik wouldn’t use the arrows for his personal vengeance.
b. That Barkarik would always fight for the weaker side in a battle/war.
When Krishna hears of Barbarik, he immediately sees a potential problem. The story goes that he visits Barbarik in disguise and gets him to demonstrate his arrows. Barbarik displays the powers on a tree. Krishna asks him to treat each leaf of the tree as an enemy and make a hole through them. While Barbarik meditates in preparation for his demonstration, Krishna plucks a leaf off the tree and hides it under his own feet.
The first arrow Barbarik shoots marks all the leaves in red ink. The third arrow punches holes in every leaf marked with the red ink. Krishna finds that the arrow pierces through his feet to reach for the hidden leaf and realizes nothing can possibly block Barbarik’s arrows.
Krishna then asks Barbarik about the side he plans to fight for in the war of Mahabharat. Barbarik expresses his desire to fight for the Pandavas as they are the weaker side, in order to keep his promise to his guru. But Krishna then reveals the paradox of Barbarik’s impossible promise: since the power of the 3 arrows makes him the most powerful warrior on the battlefield, whichever side he joins would make the other side weaker. Eventually, he would end up switching sides infinitely until he destroys everyone but himself.
The Indian State does not even begin to see the paradox Krishna readily recognises. Of course, Krishna attributes a far more honest commitment to the ideal than the Indian State has begun to conceptualise. Krishna assumes that a real commitment to the ideal of fighting on the side of the weak requires consistent and honest assessment of who the weaker side is after every phase of support is provided. The Indian State has no such compunctions.
While this story ends rather sadly for Barbarik, we expect the same strategy will lead us into a happy and harmonious society. However, as soon as the State provides advantages of all kinds to sections of the population based purely on their birth, it is condemned to do two things: one, while officially abolishing the caste system, it is condemned to keep officially recognising, funding, documenting and legislating caste identities. Two, without Krishna’s wisdom, it is condemned to deem some sections weak forever, no matter what material consequences the actual deployment of government advantages have had on that section. Which means, the State does not actually fight on the side of the weak at all, because it has no mechanisms to actually gauge in real time which of its citizen communities is becoming weaker with its policies on a timely basis.
