May 11, 1998

If yoy have caste-based reservations , you can't escape from a caste-based census.

True to expectation, the announcement that the 2001 census will also record a citizen's caste has been greeted with moral indignation. To criticise the Union Government's decision as a regressive measure calculated to reinject casteism into daily life is to be supremely unrealistic. Granted, everyday transactions in urban -- and, to be fair, even large parts of rural -- India are no longer governed by caste factors. Granted, many Indians have relinquished, even forgotten their caste identity and there is confusion about how the census will tackle them. Even so, caste remains fundamental to the larger Indian existence. For instance, it is the most convenient category for political mobilisation. This is not a wholesome situation, in fact it is downright disgusting -- but there is no getting away from it. The immediate provocation for a caste-based census is of course Mandalisation -- the process unleashed after V.P. Singh decided to reserve government jobs for Other Backward Castes (OBCs). Those who welcomed such a policy -- and today there seems to be a consensus -- reasoned caste was a better indicator of social inequity than class. A caste-based census only takes this idea, cogent, unconvincing or plain disingenuous as it may be, to its logical conclusion.

The Mandal Commission's report drew from the census of 1931, India's last comprehensive caste-specific census. Since then, the country's population has ballooned, its demographics have changed. Yet, the reservation of a chunk of state and Union government jobs and of educational seats is based on outdated and thereby flawed statistics. This is what makes a fresh caste-wise enumeration imperative. The real battle must be against casteism, the system of prejudice which discriminates between appparently upper and lower castes. The aspiration must be for a truly rational quota mechanism linked to economic parameters. To simply ask for the next census to be free of the question on caste is to fight the symptom. The disease lies elsewhere.

Big Brother's Framing You

The ISRO case speaks for the Kerala Government's vendetta rather than espionage

Spies and sex always make for sordid politics. In 1994, some imaginative police officers in Kerala and, regrettably, some elements in the Intelligence Bureau sought to use the potent mix to malign a colleague close to the Congress. In the process, they created an incredible case that placed six innocents behind bars for allegedly stealing secrets of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Somewhere in between, the case got tangled in the hard ball CPI (M) versus Congress politics of the state and caused the E.K. Nayanar Government to behave in a manner -- as the Supreme Court has been constrained to observe -- not in conformity with "the known pattern of a responsible government bound by the rule of law". The apex court judgement scotching the state Government's efforts to re-open the case and the Rs 1 lakh compensation to the six, who include two top ISRO scientists and two Maldivian nationals, cannot really undo what the victims have undergone -- even if it has sent a salutary message to those who think that being in office entitles them to do what they like.

It is not just the six who suffered. The country's space programme did too. In the years S. Nambinarayanan, one of those persecuted, spent in jail, India lost his services as the leader of the team handling the critical cryogenic rocket motor for the geo-stationary satellite launch vehicle (GSLV) project. Had the Kerala Government accepted the acquittal in June 1996, based on the CBI's finding that there was no truth in the allegations, the case would have been seen as an unfortunate lapse of judgement. Instead, the state administration mixed it up with its anti-Congress agenda. It tried to get the CBI off the case and pursue the investigations on its own. Somebody should tell Nayanar that he has been elected to govern, not pursue vendetta.

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