| Author | Message | ||
     Arjun1234 Side Hero Username: Arjun1234 Post Number: 3753 Registered: 09-2008 Posted From: 198.241.217.15 Rating: N/A |
calling oka Big Man who stated... "caste is mother ...religion father"... inkemo relationship between caste and religion should be like fish and water ... " please put ur opinion here Winners never cheat... even in difficult times. | ||
| Kamal Hero Username: Kamal Post Number: 13285 Registered: 08-2009 Posted From: 98.212.185.162 Rating: N/A |
No offense meant to anyone .. but Christian - Reddies, Christian - Kammas, Christian - Brahmins etc paristhithi enti?  ippudu veellu caste cheppukunte .. true christians/muslims avvaru ga .. aa particular religion tenets prakaaram ..  Bharat Mata ki Jai  | ||
| Vjavasi Side Hero Username: Vjavasi Post Number: 2368 Registered: 11-2009 Posted From: 69.199.68.154 Rating: N/A |
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100512/jsp/nation/story_12439 699.jsp BC, DC or EC? What lies ahead of the census - Haphazard lists and multiple definitions could pose hurdles in establishing identity during the caste count RADHIKA RAMASESHAN Census officials speak to villagers in Bengal’s Lalgarh. The Bengal administration was the only state government to have asked for a caste-based census, a demand initially rejected but accepted later by the Centre. File picture New Delhi, May 11: When officials carrying out the 1931 census, the last to take account of caste, asked a “waterman” on the Coorg border his place in the social hierarchy, the answer left them amazed. The “extremely dark individual”, wrote then census commissioner John Henry Hutton in his report, said he was from the Suryavamsa (family of the Sun). The focus on skin colour probably reflected Hutton’s own prejudice, but the British official anyway thought the waterman would be from a low or intermediate caste, perhaps even an untouchable. He noted in his report that some people were using the census as a ladder to ascend the social order. Today’s census officials, as they carry out a caste count almost 80 years later, could face the opposite problem, with the lure of reservation inflating the Other Backward Classes’ numbers. But that is not the only reason officials say verifying every Indian’s caste identity will take at least five years after the 2011 census simply records citizens’ own claims on the matter. Cataloguing the labyrinth of castes, sub-castes and sub-sub-castes — differing from region to region — will be an enormous task because the key issue of who belongs to the Other Backward Classes has historically meant different things in different places, and to different people and politicians. Mishmash In the beginning, the term Backward Class was too wide, with the OBCs left undistinguished from the Dalits and tribals, sometimes even the Kshatriyas and Vaishyas. One starting point could be 1918, when “BC” first acquired a technical meaning in the princely state of Mysore, says US academic Marc Galanter, author of the seminal Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India. The Maharaja of Mysore was then looking to fix a job quota. However, all communities barring the Brahmins were notified BCs. In 1928, the Hartog Committee tried to narrow down the BCs as “educationally backward” castes/classes. However, already in 1916, another term — the “depressed classes”— had been discussed in the Indian Legislative Council. It initially covered the “criminal and wandering tribes, aboriginal tribes and untouchables”. In 1917, Sir Henry Sharp, education commissioner of India, enlarged it to cover the “backward and educationally poor and depressed and also certain classes of Muhammadans”. Then began an attempt at sharpening the definition, propelled by the so-called lower castes’ resentment at being clubbed with the “untouchables” in the omnibus “depressed classes” label. A memorandum from the United Provinces Hindu Backward Classes League, founded in 1929, suggested that “depressed” carried a “connotation of untouchability in the sense of causing pollution by touch”. It proposed the term “Hindu backward”, that is castes that were “low” socially, educationally and economically. But in 1930, the State Committee of Bombay mixed things up again, recommending that “depressed classes” should refer only to the “untouchables” while a wider term, “backward classes” or “intermediate classes”, should cover even the tribes, whether aboriginal or hill-dwelling. Census & separation Some kind of order was imposed by the 1931 census — just in time too, since it proved to be the last caste census. It separated the Dalits and tribals from its version of the OBCs, whom it called “Hindu backward communities” and whose population it put at 43.7 per cent. The census also counted the backward non-Hindu communities (8.4 per cent). Half a century later, the Mandal Commission primarily used this data to suggest, rather arbitrarily, a 27 per cent OBC reservation figure. But the 1931 figures stayed controversial. Then independent India botched up some more. The term “OBC” was first enshrined in the Constitution through Article 340 in 1953, and efforts began to fix its meaning. The first backward classes commission was set up the same year by a presidential order, and was headed by a Gandhian, Kaka Kalelkar. The panel tried to define the OBCs by their low social position in the caste hierarchy, lack of “general educational advancement” and inadequate representation in business and government service. Its report, submitted in 1955, listed 2,399 OBCs, classifying 837 of these as “most backward”. It put the OBCs at about 32 per cent of the population. Deep flaws Critics said the report was “deeply flawed” because it was mainly based on a list of castes prepared by the education ministry in 1949 to award scholarships. Additionally, the panel relied on the “general impressions” of bureaucrats, opinion-makers and social workers. It did not carry out an independent survey, nor did it spell out the basis on which it calculated the reservation percentages in jobs and education. The panel recommended 70 per cent reservation in technical and professional institutions for “qualified” students, and 25 per cent job reservation in Class I, 33 per cent in Class II and III, and 40 per cent in Class IV posts. The panel admitted to being “deluged by communities claiming to be backward”, and was later charged with, of all things, mixing up the OBCs with the Scheduled Castes. Back to square one. Jawaharlal Nehru rejected the report for its unverified findings and “unexplained adherence to caste as the principal index”. Then home minister, Govind Vallabh Pant, a Kumaoni Brahmin, had a different reason. He said: “The recognition of specified castes as backward may serve to maintain and perpetuate the existing caste distinctions.” Bowing to pressure from the Congress’s Brahmin lobby, Nehru passed the responsibility for classifying OBCs to the states in 1961. States join party How did the states go about the job? Haphazardly and ad hoc, mostly, thanks to the lack of a clear definition of OBC. For instance, the southern states and Maharashtra had a long history of backward-class reform struggles and reservations from pre-Independence days. They included a huge chunk of their population (from 38 to 55 per cent and more), while Jammu and Kashmir selected the OBCs on a religious basis. US academic Galanter noted: “Caste lists range in magnitude from those which include a substantial portion of the state’s population to those comprising a narrow stratum just above the untouchables.” By the time the Mandal Commission’s (1980) recommendations were implemented by then Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao in the early 1990s, the report’s anomalies had been highlighted by Neelam Yadav in her Encyclopaedia of Backward Castes. Mandal’s data-gathering was random: he covered only two villages and one urban block in each district, for the rest depending on the states’ lists and the 1931 census. His findings were a little of this and a little of that, raising the number of OBCs to 3,743 castes while sticking to the 1931 figure of 43.7 per cent of the population. Yadav observed that the Mandal commission had made the “impossible assumption” that the various OBC castes had grown at the same rate as the all-India population over half a century. Although much of the confusion is historical, a lot of it still lingers and could tie up the current caste count in knots. The count of the Scheduled Castes never suffered from such ambiguity, their physical untouchability, as vouched for even by the lowest of the other castes, setting them clearly apart. Denoted “depressed classes”, “excluded castes” as well as the “backward classes” at various times, their “SC” identity was established with the Government of India Act in 1935. | ||
| Vjavasi Side Hero Username: Vjavasi Post Number: 2367 Registered: 11-2009 Posted From: 69.199.68.154 Rating: N/A |
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/my-caste-and-i/617530/0 The decision to, in principle, enumerate caste in the Census is a monumental travesty. At one stroke, it trivialises all that modern India has stood for, and condemns it to the tyranny of an insidious kind of identity politics. The call to enumerate caste in the Census is nothing but a raw assertion of power wearing the garb of social justice, an ideological projection of Indian society masquerading under the colour of social science, and a politics of bad faith being projected as a concern for the poor. It is not news that India is deeply structured by hierarchies of various kinds, including caste. These hierarchies still appallingly define structures of opportunity and oppression. But the vision of a just and modern India was founded on an aspiration to promote justice without falling into the same pinched up identities that had kept us narrow and bigoted for so long. The premises of a caste census reproduce the very things we had so long laboured to fight. The precise contours of the Census are still not clear, and much of the debate has been on the practical difficulties of this exercise. But there is little doubt how enumerating caste will condemn us in a normative sense. First, a caste census condemns us to the tyranny of compulsory identities. The premise of enumeration is that we can never escape caste. Our identities are not something we can choose; they are given as non-negotiable facts which we can never escape. The state has legitimised the principle that we will always be our caste. This is a way of diminishing our freedom, agency and dignity in a way that even votaries of tradition could not dream of. It takes away the fundamental freedoms we need to define ourselves. Is there not a deeper indignity being inflicted on those to whom emancipation is being promised? You will be your caste, no matter what. There is a risk of gracelessness here. But we have too many purveyors for whom social justice is endless stratagem to assert the power of compulsory group identity, rather than finding the means to escape it. In the name of breaking open prisons, they imprison us even more. Second, a caste census condemns us to misidentify the remedies of injustice. Caste has, particularly for Dalits, been an axis of deprivation. And discrimination needs to be addressed. But it does not follow from that fact that you need a census to attack injustice. Make a list of all the things that are necessary to empower the disempowered: education, resources, food security, economic resources, political participation, etc. Not a single one of the major things that need to be done to make an impact on people’s empowerment requires a caste census. The instruments of justice are ready at hand, if we only shed diversionary illusions. The focus of justice should be on universalising basic provision, as is now possible. It is simply false to say that building a just India requires Census data on caste. Third, giving in to a caste census is giving in to a discourse of raw political power. The blunt truth is that designing remedial measures for Dalits, including addressing discrimination does not require a census. This demand has rather been fuelled by politically assertive groups like OBCs, who first hijacked the Dalit discourse on deprivation to their own ends. Fourth, a caste census is the basis for a self-destructive politics. The consequences of a caste census depend a lot on the terms on which a census is carried out: whether it enumerates all jatis or counts OBCs. Which particular groups solidify and mobilise their identities may be an open question. But what is not an open question is that mobilisation will take place only along caste lines, displacing other and more consequential axes of stratification. It will also reinforce an inordinate emphasis on the politics of reservation, pitting one group against the other for purported benefits. Fifth, a caste census invites misrecognition. Census did not create castes and the deprivations associated with it. But it is naive to think that a caste census is an enumeration of an objective reality. In a context where the state privileges certain categories over other, gives incentives to certain group identities, enumeration based on caste creates its own reality. Caste pre-existed the classifications of the modern state; but the classifications we use fundamentally transform the institution. In that sense, the Census will bring into being a new social reality; it will not simply describe an objective one. Caste facts are shadows created by our politics. Sixth, the politics of caste has diminished our sense of self. Imagine what society has become: a vast web of enumeration and suspicion. Dealing with discrimination is one thing. But testing the legitimacy of every institution by seeing how many of what caste there are undermines both the purpose of the institution and our own relationship to it. The project of enumerating caste in Census is fundamentally inspired by a cast of mind that measures the legitimacy of everything largely through caste. What more pinched up conception of citizenship can we imagine? Seventh, the politics of caste has also largely become the politics of cowardice and hypocrisy. It has not produced much justice, and has in fact diverted attention from things that are more consequential. But what it has produced is a fundamental distortion of our character, where the variance between what we privately acknowledge to be true and what we profess in public increases by the day. Indeed, the subtle corrosion of reason and character alike that the tyranny of caste categories is producing by displacing reason with identity, reciprocity with group narcissism, is a price we are already paying. Finally, the manner in which the Congress took the decision betrays its fundamental casualness about all the values that form our moral compass. A well-considered decision, taken by nationalist leaders whose understandings of both moral values and our infirmities as a nation far surpassed ours, was overturned in a matter of minutes at the altar of political expediency. It sends the message of crass political instrumentalism. The backlash may not be immediately apparent, in part because the opposition has also stopped thinking. But the Congress’s casual caving in to a retrograde demand is reminiscent of all reactionary politics it spawned in the ’80s, pitting one group against another. And what does it say about its character, that its young MPs, exemplars of India’s modernity, have no will to resist? It is already a sign of how small caste makes it. And now we will count it at every step. The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi express@expressindia.com |
