False Economy - Alan Beattie [146]
Caste prejudice could not, in any case, be wished away by a written constitution, any more than the end of slavery in the United States after the Civil War could instantly end discrimination against blacks. Attitudes, as they do, endured. The first commissioner's report, in 1951, spoke disparagingly of Dalits, in similar terms to that of the "uplift" campaigners of previous decades: they were, it said, "lazy in mind and body and callous to [their] own condition."
The result of slicing up the population by caste classification and handing out benefits on that basis was, unsurprisingly, to encourage politics to align itself in the same way. To begin with, Nehru's broad-based Congress Party dominated postindependence politics. But when it started to falter in the 1960s, a growing swarm of regionally based parties came to use caste as an electoral tool. Before too long, a majority of Indians were clamoring for the same exceptional privileges granted to the minority of Scheduled Castes and Tribes.
At independence, there were not quite 50 million in the Scheduled Castes and around another 25 million in the Scheduled Tribes, totaling around 20 percent of the population. But continual agitations on behalf of other castes led to the invention of a huge new grouping, "Other
Backward Classes," and to positive discrimination extended toward them. In the 1950s, the Backward Classes Commission identified nearly 2,400 communities, constituting another 32 percent of the population, as victims of "backwardness."
Until the 1980s, the Indian economy generally crawled along at the wryly termed "Hindu rate of growth" of 3 to 4 percent annually, which did little more than keep pace with the rise in the population. Indian society was thus essentially a zero-sum game. Anything you got had to be taken from someone else, and the common good could go hang. It was an ideal ground for clientelist politics to flourish.
For many, politics became a game of cultivating "vote banks"—electoral blocs defined by caste, religion, or ethnicity. Any caste that got reserved jobs or reserved places at college fought hard to keep them; those that did not, fought hard to get them. Forming state or even national governments often became a matter of piecing together temporary alliances of special interests. Frequently this meant cutting across income divisions: a successful coalition might well include a pincer movement of a "high" caste and a "low" caste ganging up against a middling one.
The effect of this system on redressing the enormous imbalances in Indian society has been at best minimal, and more likely negative. The reserved jobs and college places tend to be scooped up by the most affluent within any given caste—the gloriously named "creamy layer." The allocation of jobs by politicians is a superb opportunity for corruption: many are simply auctioned off to the highest eligible bidder. Since government jobs are a source of power and money to politicians, the system creates a strong incentive for them to resist any attempts to make government run more efficiently, to allocate positions on the basis of merit, or, heaven forfend, to privatize state-run industries. India's history has taken it down an economic and social path from which it is politically hard to leap.
Meanwhile, the country is far from creating the kind of society that would provide genuine opportunities for all, regardless of birth. More Dalits—perhaps a third—can now read and write than could before independence, when the percentages were miserably low. But India's overall literacy rate remains low. The official rate is around 65 percent, though many of those can probably