Becoming Backward: Preferential Policies and Religious Minorities in India

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Becoming Backward: Preferential Policies andReligious Minorities in IndiaL.D. JenkinsPublished online: 06 Sep 2010.

To cite this article: L.D. Jenkins (2001) Becoming Backward: Preferential Policies and Religious Minorities inIndia, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 39:2, 32-50, DOI: 10.1080/713999550

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Becoming Backward: Preferential Policiesand Religious Minorities in India

LAURA DUDLEY JENKINS

Official categories imposed by the state shape religious and casteidentities but do not determine them. Various protest groups in Indiaare challenging the classifications of citizens used to implementpreferential policies, known as reservations, for disadvantaged or‘backward’ groups. Muslim and Christian demands to be included inthe officially backward categories have sparked dissent within theseminority communities. The resulting controversies over who should beallowed to become backward illustrate ongoing politicalconstructions of religious, caste and national identities. India’s cross-cutting identities lead to frequent disagreements over group-basedpolicies, but competing demands may also prevent the reification ofstate categories and the dangers of dichotomised conflict.

A growing number of citizens in India are demanding to be declaredofficially ‘backward’.1 An ironic outcome of India’s protectivediscrimination policies to uplift various disadvantaged, or backward,groups, this trend illustrates how official categories can shape politicalconsciousness. In a world characterised by increasing identity-basedconflicts, political scientists and policy makers struggle with a dilemma:group-based policies may be necessary to address inequities, yet they mayfurther reinforce the boundaries between groups.2 India is a telling case inthis regard. Indian society is characterised by cultural pluralism along caste,religious, regional, linguistic and countless other lines, and the Indian statehas long been committed to preferential policies to uplift certain groups,primarily lower castes. How have group-based policies influenced groupidentity claims and political activism? What is the relationship between theofficial identification of citizens and unofficial identities as defined by thegroups themselves?

Laura Dudley Jenkins, Department of Political Science, University of Cincinnati

Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, Vol.39, No.1 (July 2001), pp.32–50PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON

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These questions are addressed in the following case studies of recentMuslim and Christian efforts to become backward or, in other words, to beincluded in the official categories used for protective discriminationpolicies. Building on scholarship that traces the impact of colonial states ongroup identities, these case studies demonstrate that contemporary group-based policies, like their colonial precedents, influence identity claims. Onthe other hand, the Muslim and Christian demands also highlight the agencyof individuals and groups, which often push the boundaries of officialclassifications, challenging recurring arguments that group-based policiessimply reinforce or freeze social fault-lines.

India’s ‘reservation’ policies reserve a quota of central government jobsfor groups officially recognised as backward, namely, the Scheduled Castes(SCs), the Scheduled Tribes (STs) and the Other Backward Classes (OBCs).Additional benefits, such as university admissions quotas, are directed at the‘scheduled’ groups and, in some states, the OBCs as well. The Indianconstitution specifically allows such special measures for backwardcitizens. The Scheduled Castes are the lowest, ‘untouchable’, castes, nowalso known as Dalits, meaning the ‘oppressed’ or ‘ground down’. TheScheduled Tribes, also known as Adivasis, are ‘those groups distinguishedby “tribal characteristics” and by their spacial and cultural isolation from thebulk of the population’.3 The Other Backward Classes are othereconomically and socially disadvantaged castes or communities, such aslower castes that are not considered untouchables or similarlydisadvantaged non-Hindu communities. These official categories andreservation policies have precedents prior to Independence, such as Britishpolicies of reserved legislative seats for certain protected groups, includingreligious minorities and Scheduled Castes and Tribes. Other precedents arethe preferential policies for non-Brahmins in the princely state of Mysoreand the Madras Presidency.4

Many have critiqued India’s past and present caste-based policies forfurther dividing the nation along caste lines rather than alleviating castediscrimination. According to one media account, ‘with more and moreclamoring to be categorized as backward . . . the quota system has come toacquire a self-perpetuating character … widening the scope to covercommunities that hardly need such props is nothing but the height ofinequity, which will only aggravate social tension by deepening castedivision’.5 This conclusion is a common one in contemporary accounts ofreservations by journalists, politicians and academics. In order to implementgroup-based policies, the state has categorised Indian society and tried todefine and monitor the boundaries of the beneficiary groups. Although themotivation is quite different, this classification exercise is, in practice,disturbingly reminiscent of colonial initiatives in India, when the

33PREFERENTIAL POLICIES AND RELIGIOUS MINORITIES IN INDIA

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imperatives of empire led many administrators to attempt to classify Indiansociety in order to control and exploit it.6 Nevertheless, state edicts alone donot reify social identities, as colonial and post-colonial political movementsto revise official categories demonstrate. Caste associations lobbied toincrease their official status on colonial censuses.7 After Independence,some colonial caste categories persisted as part of reservation policies.Rather than pressing for higher classifications, groups increasinglydemanded to become backwards.

The countless cross-cutting identities that characterise Indian societyhave resulted in many competing claims for reservations benefits. Refusingto be boxed in by official categories, a wide variety of protest groups lobbyfor revisions of their classifications. Although such demands have arguablycontributed to some tensions between groups, at the same time, thecompeting critiques of official classifications have challenged reifiedcategories and may diminish the dangers of dichotomised conflicts overreservations. In short, protest groups defy the categorical imperatives of thestate, although their claims continue to be for a state category, albeit of theirown definition.

Religious minorities’ challenges to the state’s current reservationpolicies are striking examples of the interplay between state and societalcategories. Some Muslims are demanding Other Backward Class (OBC)status for their entire religious community, and certain Christians arearguing to be recognised as untouchables or, to use the official term,Scheduled Castes. Since Muslim and Christian religious doctrines do notrecognise caste, such claims are quite controversial, among current (largelyHindu) beneficiaries of reservations, as well as among factions within theseminority religions themselves. Low-caste Hindus fear that their benefitswould be diluted by a larger pool of eligible beneficiaries, and Hindunationalist politicians have opposed expanding the policies to include moremembers of religious minorities. Debates within minority communities arethe major focus of the following case studies. Some Muslims and Christiansare opposed to recognising caste within their supposedly egalitarianreligions; some disagree on the most salient categories for reservations orare wary of categorising themselves with backward groups. Because thesedebates challenge both the existing distribution of material benefits andwidely held assumptions about the link between Hinduism and the castesystem, this policy debate is both politically and religiously explosive.8

The politics of reservations in India provide illuminating case studies ofthe give and take between official categories and political consciousness inthe ongoing definition of identities. This article first sets the theoreticalcontext for these questions of social identities and state identifications, andthen illustrates these dynamics through case studies of some current

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Scheduled Caste Christian and Backward Muslim movements in India.Finally, the conclusions address the broader implications of such societalchallenges to state schemata for identity politics in culturally diversedemocracies.

IDENTITY POLITICS: THE MEETING POINT OF STATE AND

SOCIETY

The study of identity transcends disciplinary boundaries. A variety ofscholars in the social sciences and humanities are united by a constructivistapproach, which emphasises the multi-layered and inter-subjective nature ofgroup identities. Identities are not fixed but, rather, are constantly beingdefined and redefined through interactions at all levels of states andsocieties.9 The central premise of constructivism – that people interactivelycreate meanings and identities which shape their lives – has long beenrecognised by anthropologists and other social theorists. As Clifford Geertzwrote, drawing on Max Weber, ‘man is an animal suspended in webs ofsignificance he himself has spun’.10 Recently, the idea of social constructionhas experienced a resurgence in work ranging from cultural studies tointernational relations; yet some scholars of comparative politics,particularly the increasingly salient field of identity politics, have shiedaway from this approach.

For example, although Amrita Basu and Atul Kohli recentlyacknowledged the importance of gaining ‘understanding of the sociallyconstructed nature of identities’, they go on to argue that ‘given disciplinaryproclivities, our “comparative advantage” lies more in tackling issues ofexplanation than in unraveling complex social constructions’.11 Theyunderplay the potential contributions of political scientists to the growinghistorical and anthropological scholarship on the role of states inconstructions of identities.12 Basu and Kohli’s own insightful work on ‘the“political conditions” that mold community identities’ demonstrates thatstandard topics of political science research, ranging from state actions tomovement politics, are integrally involved in identity constructions. Recentarticles exhort more political scientists to apply a social-constructivistapproach to contemporary studies of states and identities.13

Political scientists are in a unique position to examine the interplaybetween state and societal constructions of identity. Some have alreadymade valuable additions to the literature on colonial states’ involvement inconstructions of identities, analysing how colonial recruitment, education,missionary work, cartography, legal codification and ethnographicclassification contributed to the hardening of ethnic fault-lines.14 This articlebuilds on such historical work on colonial states and identity by focusing on


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the current politics of reservations, while recognising that these policies,and the group boundaries they depend on, had precedents in India wellbefore Independence. Are current group-based policies as divisive inpractice as colonial ‘efforts to render fluid and confusing social and politicalrelationships into categories sufficiently static and reified and thereby usefulto colonial understanding and control’?15 This article argues thatcontemporary Muslim and Christian protest groups are shaped by thestructure of the state reservation categories but also demonstrate agency bychallenging static classifications. The resulting melange of competingdemands helps to prevent the entrenchment of such classifications.

THE DEBATE OVER MUSLIMS AS OTHER BACKWARD CLASSES

In the 1990s, Muslims renewed their demand for backward status for theirentire population in India. Muslims benefited from group policies during thecolonial period, in the form of reserved legislative seats, provided in 1909,as well as separate electorates and a quota of 25 per cent of civil servicepositions, introduced in 1926. Although the Indian Constituent Assembly’sAdvisory Committee on Minorities and Fundamental Rights consideredcontinuing the reservation of legislative seats for Muslims afterIndependence, Muslim reservations ultimately were a casualty of Partition.As Theodore P. Wright describes, ‘after the communal carnage followingindependence, neither were Hindu representatives willing to continue thisconcession nor were the remaining Muslim committee members prepared topress for it’.16 Partition, the ultimate reification of communal politics, alsorenewed the commitment of Indian politicians such as Jawaharlal Nehru tothe construction of a secular state. This vision of secularism wasincompatible with reservations on the basis of religion. The end of Muslimreservations coincided, however, with a renewed need to uplift the Muslimminority, now decreased and decapitated, since much of the elite with themeans to go to Pakistan had left.

There is constitutional support for affirmative action for ScheduledCastes (a category from which Muslims were disqualified), ScheduledTribes (which are rarely Muslim), and the poorly defined catch-all, OtherBackward Classes (which can include Muslims). Due in part to thevagueness of the category, reservations for OBCs were relegated to a backburner to be taken up, or not, on a state-by-state basis. Reservations forOBCs were put into practice at the national level in the 1990s, after PrimeMinister V.P. Singh dusted off and championed the 1980 MandalCommission Report on Backward Classes. With some modifications, newreservations for OBCs in central government jobs were eventually approvedby the Supreme Court.


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The Mandal Commission declared over 80 Muslim groups to bebackward. According to the data they used, backward Muslims made upabout 8.4 per cent out of the total 11.2 per cent of the Indian population thatwas Muslim; those specified as backward include groups such as weavers,oil crushers, carpenters and dhobis (clothes washers).17 Some southern stateshave gone farther, as when Kerala classified all Muslims as backward for thepurposes of state-level affirmative action in 1994.18 The current demand fornational-level reservations for all Muslims was jump-started in the mid-1990s, although rumblings of such a demand had occurred from time to timein previous years.19 Now different Muslim groups are at odds, some pressingto be classified purely along religious community lines and othersdemanding that class- or caste-based categories be retained and strengthened.

‘In my view the entire Muslim community in the country forms abackward class … Moreover, I do not think you would like yourGovernment and Party … accused of dividing the Muslim community’,wrote Syed Shahabuddin, a founder of the Association for PromotingEducation and Employment of Muslims, in a letter to the Welfare Ministerin 1995.20 In conferences on the issue in Delhi and Hyderabad, theAssociation demanded ‘the recognition of the Muslim community, as acommunity, as a Backward Class . . . and for the consequent extension ofreservation to the community, in proportion to its population and level ofbackwardness, both in higher and professional education as well as in publicemployment’.21 In his research on the leaders of the renewed demand forMuslim reservations, political scientist Theodore Wright argues that ‘theyfeared that if Muslims did not get on the backwardness bandwagon, theywould be left competing for an ever diminishing proportion of open(unreserved) seats with an ever larger pool of Forward (twice-born Hindu)rivals’.22 Concerns about both Muslim political unity and proportionalopportunities for Muslims underlie this campaign.

Syed Hamid, the President of the Association, argues that the entireMuslim community in India is depressed and discriminated against, so somepositive action must be taken by the government.23 Shahabbudin emphasisesthe necessity of ‘cutting the cake’ not just horizontally by caste and class,as in current reservation policies, but also vertically, by religion, in order todistribute opportunities evenly.24 Shahabuddin argues that those Muslimsalready declared backward shall have ‘first claim’ to benefits, but is thisenough to protect the more disadvantaged Muslims?25 OBC Muslim andDalit Muslim groups are sceptical. They have their own ideas on how thecake should be sliced.

Those Muslim groups already officially listed as backward have a vestedinterest in keeping the competition, including upper-class Muslims, off thelists. ‘While Islam may be casteless, our society is divided on the basis of


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castes’, argued Shabbir Ansari, President of the All India Muslim OBCOrganisation, at their first national convention in New Delhi in 1996. Amajor goal of this organisation is to get more Muslim groups which arearguably backward onto the official lists of backward classes. According totheir estimates over 90 per cent of Muslims should be considered backwardbut not all Muslims. The OBC lists already contain several low-statusMuslim communities. R.N. Prasad, who headed the National BackwardClasses Commission which oversees OBC lists, pointed out that,theoretically, non-Hindu religions take away the caste basis of socialstratification, but, in reality, there is a ‘hangover of caste sticking to them’.26

Thus, the official OBC lists continue to include only some Muslimcommunities rather than Muslims in general. In response to official stateand national-level lists of backward groups, the All India Muslim OBCOrganisation has carried out surveys in order to compile its own unofficiallists of Muslim backward classes, including additional SCs and STs inaddition to OBCs. For example, in the state of Maharashtra, where theorganisation started, they have demanded that 42 Muslim groups be addedto the official backward lists.27

An activist in this organisation, Vilas Sonavane, argues that ‘Religionhas been used to suppress the basic contradictions in Indian society, whichis caste [sic]’.28 Rather than emphasising monolithic religious communitiesas a basis for political mobilisation or public policies, he is most concernedwith caste and class inequities. In contrast to the Association for PromotingEducation and Employment for Muslims, which he says has accused him of‘dividing Muslims’, Sonavane argues that reservations should be an OBCissue, not a Muslim issue. Using caste and class categories to underminearguments for reservation categories based on religion, he describes thismovement as ‘deconstructing the myth of religion in India’, namely theperennial polarisation of majority versus minority religions. Because he isfocusing on overlapping axes of identity, he describes his movement as ‘thefirst postmodernist movement in India’.29

Although caste contradicts some tenets of Islam, ‘which implicitlyemphasises equality and universal Muslim brotherhood’, caste-likestratification persists in Muslim societies in India.30 The status distinctionsbetween immigrants’ and converts’ descendants, the pre-existing castedistinctions of those who converted, and hierarchies derived fromoccupation have all resulted in a complex system of categories withinMuslim society. The Muslim OBC Organisation complicates the notion of a‘Muslim community’ and ‘takes the stand that secular social structures andclass/caste hierarchies transcend and come prior to religious identities’.31

The organisation tries to work across religious divides, drawing parallelsbetween Muslims, Hindus and Christians in its arguments and agenda.


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For example, in their efforts to get Scheduled Caste status for MuslimDalits (or untouchables), the All India Muslim OBC Organisation alignsitself with the Dalit Christian organisations making similar demands. TheScheduled Caste category, originally only open to Hindus, has beenexpanded to include Sikhs and Buddhists, a point to be considered in moredepth in the case study below, focusing on SC Christians. In a memorandumto the Welfare Minister, the President of the All India Muslim OBCOrganisation, Shabbir Ahmed Ansari, pointedly asks why the Christian andMuslim Dalits have been excluded from SC benefits.32 This questionsuggests the potential for a pan-religious lower class movement. In contrastto the Organisation for Promoting Education and Employment of Muslims,with its purely Muslim agenda, the All India OBC Organisation complicatessimple religious categories with its class- and caste-based critiques. Bothmovements are responding to the state’s classifications; neither organisationis satisfied with the boundaries of the official categories.

Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has noted the dangers of classifyingand counting people on a religious basis:

The process by which separate Hindu and Muslim identities wereconstructed at a macro-level, and transformed not just into imaginedcommunities but also into enumerated communities, is only the mostvisible pathology of the transfer of the politics of numericalrepresentation to a society in which representation and group-identityhad no special numerical relation to the polity.33

This is a telling critique of the way (colonial or post-colonial) state-sanctioned identities can become embedded in societies. Does simplydemanding to be enumerated and represented along different lines get awayfrom this dynamic? If enough groups raise objections to official categories,they are not getting away from categorisation per se, but they may beexposing the fallacy of essentialised communities, the assumption that thosewho share a religion or caste necessarily have shared interests or form thebasis for logical political units. Replacing rigid caste classifications withrigid religious classifications may not be the answer, yet the dialogue withinthe Muslim community over the future of reservations challenges facileassumptions stemming from historically oversimplified categories.

THE DEBATE OVER CHRISTIANS AS SCHEDULED CASTES

The call by Prime Minister Vajpayee for a national debate on conversionsand the Pope’s visit to the subcontinent have drawn attention to anotherreligious minority in India, the Christians. Numerically smaller, thisminority’s demands for reservation rights has received as much, if not more,


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attention than the Muslim demands, although a rise in violence againstChristians in India, accompanied by increasing ideological attacks by Hindunationalists, have caused SC Christians to mute these demands recently.Such critics argue that missionaries are ‘targetting weaker sections’ ofsociety for conversion and suggest that granting SC Christian reservationswould only reward this practice.34 Although Christianity is anotherpurportedly caste-free religion, several Christian organisations are focusingon opening the Scheduled Caste category and associated protections andbenefits to Christians. They argue that caste discrimination persists andshould be recognised.35

The Scheduled Castes category originated with the Simon Commissionand was used in the Government of India Act of 1935.36 In 1936, theGovernment of India (Scheduled Castes) Order made clear that ‘no IndianChristian ... should be deemed a member of a Scheduled Caste’.37 This rulewas not met with major objections at the time, for the purpose of thelegislation was to assure special electoral representation for certain minoritycategories, and Christians had these benefits in their own right. Thisseparate representation for religious minorities was eliminated atIndependence, however, and the purpose of the Scheduled Castes list shiftedto include the administration not only of elections but also other social andeconomic benefits and protections, including reservations. Nevertheless, anOrder of the President (1950) retained the rule that ‘no person professing areligion different from Hinduism shall be deemed a member of a ScheduledCaste’.38

In the years leading up to Independence, the Scheduled Castes weregiven two more names. Gandhi’s term, Harijan, or ‘children of god’ (usinga Hindu name for god), included them in the Hindu fold. Untouchableleader B.R. Ambedkar rejected that term in favour of Dalit and encouragedhis followers to take his example and convert to Buddhism. The boundariesof Hinduism and untouchability and the relationship between thesecategories continue to spark debate.39 In 1956 disadvantaged Sikhcommunities were allowed to be included as SCs, followed by neo-Buddhists in 1990. These decisions have been justified by an inclusive legalnotion of ‘Hinduism’, a category broadened to subsume such indigenousreligions, while still excluding Christianity and Islam. Legal scholar MarcGalanter feels that the court’s continuing acceptance of a legal theory thatcaste is coterminous with Hinduism (or, at most, Sikhism and Buddhism)‘reflects the continued force of a view of caste groups which sees them asunits in an overarching sacral order of Hinduism ... From this view of castederived the long-standing reluctance of the courts to give legal effect tocaste standing among non-Hindu communities’.40 This selective inclusion ofSCs into the Hindu category indicates a shift in post-Independence


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reservation policies from their more secular framing towards anincreasingly Hindu nationalist articulation, in both legal and politicalarenas. In response to competing identifications of SCs, Hindu nationalistshave been more eager to subsume SCs of certain ‘Indian’ religions.Sikhism, originally an egalitarian reformist response to Hindu traditions,and Buddhism, the religion to which Ambedkar and many in his Dalitmovement converted in the 1950s, were legally reabsorbed as ‘Hinduism’,whereas Islam and Christianity, constructed as ‘foreign’, remain politicallyuseful ‘Others’.41

Lobbying for the ‘SC Christians’ benefits extends back to 1950, the dateof the Presidential Order that made them ineligible, and a few states haveextended state-level benefits to this group similar to the benefits extendedto SC Hindus.42 In the 1990s, the movement for revision of the SC categoryat the national level has been the subject of increasing political activity byChristian organisations.43 A controversial SC Christian protest, inconjunction with a prayer meeting attended by Mother Theresa, drewnational attention to the controversy in November of 1995 but elicited muchcriticism from Hindu nationalist organisations.44 As one SC Christianmovement leader lamented about his cause: ‘Until today only words aregiven, promises are given, assurances made by the Prime Minister, WelfareMinister, and the government officials, but in practice they are not doinganything. We don’t believe that they will do it.’45 The Common MinimumProgramme agreed on by the 1996 United Front coalition governmentincluded SC status for Dalit Christians, but this promise, too, failed tomaterialise. Subsequently, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’sformation of a coalition government at the centre took even more wind outof the movement’s sails.

In addition to the more publicised Hindu nationalist critiques of SCChristian demands, there is controversy within the church over officiallyrecognising low caste Christians. Caste inequalities persist withinChristianity in India, where there are cases of separate seats, communioncups, burial grounds and even churches for lower castes.46 In addition tocaste discrimination among Christians, in many cases converted Dalitscontinue to face the social and economic disadvantages associated with theircastes in regard to housing, education, employment and practices ofuntouchability.47 Ironically, public policies such as reservations were, inpart, inspired by Christian egalitarian ideals taken up by indigenousreformers. Historian Robert Frykenberg notes: ‘The critique of caste begunby Protestant Christians from abroad was increasingly taken up in thetwentieth century by Indians, whether national secularist or nationalChristian in ideology.’48 The tension between egalitarian Christian ideologyand stratified Christian society is at the root of the controversy over the


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status of the SC Christians. Some Christians argue that untouchableChristians are not a contradiction in terms and that SC Christians should beofficially recognised; others respond that such a stance is dangerous andwill divide the Christian community or push it further into the communalistpolitics pitting Hindus against minorities in India.

The SC Christian movement is in the awkward position of having toargue that its own religious community discriminates on the basis of caste.On this basis, it argues that excluding Christians from the SC affirmativeaction category is religious discrimination. The emphasis on division withinChristianity leads to an alternative vision, the unity of SCs of all religions.In the words of one SC Christian activist, S. Lourduswamy: ‘Dalits of allreligions are living together. They are also equally undergoing all thedisabilities – social, educational and economic disabilities – due to thetraditional practices of untouchability.’49 Their strategy is to embrace theofficial SC category. Several organisations, such as the NationalCoordination Committee for SC Christians, are trying to expand the SCcategory to include Christians by lobbying politicians, holding seminars andorchestrating protests, ranging from Christian school closures and signaturecampaigns to relay hunger fasts and mass rallies. A striking example of suchactivism was a protest held in New Delhi, where protesters staged thesymbolic crucifixion of a Christian Dalit.50

This movement embraces the SC category at the same time as it critiquesit, desiring the benefits it can confer while lamenting its inadequateboundaries. In a pamphlet distributed to Members of Parliament, theNational Coordination Committee for SC Christians makes the followingargument about Christian Dalits:

Except for the (wrong) records in the revenue offices he is a Dalit inevery sense of the word viz. Ethnically, lineally, racially, socially,economically, culturally, vocationally, geographically, relationally,contextually, and emotionally. HE CONTINUES A FULL DALITEVERYWHERE EXCEPT IN THE IGNORANT MIND OF THEEXECUTIVE.51

As one leader of the movement describes Dalit converts to Christianity,‘their conversion has not converted them from the caste system, castemindedness, caste consciousness’.52

Highlighting the divisions in the church, these activists turn to SC orDalit identity for unity. Some recognise that the SC category is really aconstruction of the state rather than a community of people. For example,Father Jose Kananaikil deconstructs the SC category even as he advocatesthe inclusion of Christians within it: he recognises that Dalits are separategroups ‘artificially brought together’, and notes that ‘culturally they have


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separate identities’, although some solidarity is developing.53 Nevertheless,in their public demands, activists often emphasise pan-religious SC or Dalitidentity and play down the material benefits associated with officialbackwardness. A case in point is S.K. Chatterjee’s Presidential Address atthe National Convention of the All India Christian People’s Forum in 1996.‘The demand for SC status on equal terms with other dalits is not a questionof jobs or scholarships. It is a question of their identity itself.’54 A DalitSolidarity Programme, launched in 1992, engages leaders from Christianity,Buddhism, Islam, Sikhism and Hinduism in meetings and discussions.55

Beyond these elite-level interactions, however, broader political co-operation is limited.

Some Christians are sceptical about demands for SC status, asrecognition of caste within Christianity not only goes against Christiandoctrine but, they fear, might further divide the church. Unlike theAssociation for Promoting Education and Employment of Muslims,however, there is no comparable movement advocating reservations for allChristians as a religious minority. Many opposing SC Christian reservationsalso oppose reservations on a religious basis, due to fears that Christians arebecoming more ‘communalist’ in this matter.56 Pastor of a Protestant(Church of North India) congregation, Salim Sharif feels that, due to SCChristian demands, ‘We are becoming another class and caste’. This is aninteresting comment, perhaps reflecting a fear that Christianity, too, willbecome absorbed as just one more group within a broadly definedHinduism. The remark also expresses concern that Christians are becominginvolved in the politics of division rather than unification. Instead ofdemanding SC status, he argues that Christians should ask ‘unitedly’ forhelp for all the poor. Sharif argues that anybody who is poor should beeligible for reservations, whether they are Christian or non-Christian.57

Church Counsellor Shakuntala David goes beyond the multi-religious Dalitcategory advocated by some SC Christian organisers to suggest that theterm Dalit transcends both religion and caste: Dalit means downtrodden, sheargues, and it could even refer to a downtrodden Brahmin.58 In this wayclass-based arguments further complicate religious- or caste-based claimsfor backwards status.

These competing demands coming from factions of Christians andMuslims are only the tip of the iceberg. Other demands for new or revisedreservation categories are flying fast and furious. In addition to thoseperspectives already mentioned, some are proposing a separate reservationcategory for Dalit Christians (DCs) as opposed to incorporating them intothe SCs.59 In the debate over Muslims as OBCs, some Muslims are opposedto a religious category not because of concerns for lower class Muslims, butbecause they are uncomfortable with the association between their religion


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and other backward populations.60 Another kind of reservation has alsobecome involved in the complex debate over categories: the demand forreserved seats for women in India’s parliament has failed repeatedly, largelydue to objections that a gender-based category does not recognise class- andreligious-based disadvantages. Demands for sub-reservations for Muslimand OBC women have mired the women’s proposal in politicalcontroversy.61 In addition to all these subgroups within variousdisadvantaged categories challenging reservation policies, Hindunationalists are a publicised and powerful voice regarding the definitions ofofficial categories. Muslim and Christian activists face a backlash fromHindu nationalists, who oppose extending reservations to religions that donot doctrinally recognise caste, especially if these benefits would rewardconverts to those religions seen as ‘foreign’, namely Christianity andIslam.62 Official attempts to categorise the disadvantaged have spurredmany groups into political action. At the same time, claims and counter-claims on the basis of religion, caste, class and gender suggest that officialand unofficial constructions of identities may never coincide. What do allthese contested categories say about group-based policies for diversedemocracies?

CONCLUSIONS

Policies to assuage ethnic tensions may spark them anew, but tension overcompeting identity claims is not necessarily destructive. It is precisely thevariety and number of groups protesting their official classifications thatmay prevent such classifications from sticking long after their purpose hasbeen served. It is the cross-cutting competition between and within groupsthat can prevent a large-scale mobilisation of ‘us’ versus ‘them’.

When the state identifies certain groups of its citizens as the targets of apolicy, as it must for affirmative action or reservations, identity andidentification become intertwined. Charles Taylor recognises this‘dialogical’ nature of identity construction: ‘our identity is partly shaped byrecognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others’. On theimportance of state recognition of identities, he argues that ‘the supposedlyfair and difference-blind society is not only inhuman (because suppressingidentities) but also, in a subtle and unconscious way, itself highlydiscriminatory’.63 According to this line of argument, states which use socialcategories for reservations or other affirmative action policies risk‘misrecognising’ some people, but the alternative, the non-recognition ofany particular group, may be even more damaging to groups and theiridentities. In keeping with this, the groups discussed above which feel theyhave been misrecognised (or inaccurately classified by the government)


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protest against the boundaries of state categories, but most still prefer theuse of the categories to non-recognition. This conclusion highlights theimportant role of state recognition in constructions of group identities.

Groups continue to point out when they think they have beenmisrecognised by the state, and competing claims prevent the solidificationof group boundaries. The very cross-cutting nature of identities in Indiamakes it impossible for any religious organisation to present a united fronton the issue of reservation categories. Those that do demand revisions in thecurrent official categories, such as those wanting reservations for allMuslims, continuously problematise the official lists and keep them frombecoming cemented into the public consciousness. Those that engage incounter-demands, such as OBC or Dalit Muslims, in turn prevent thereification of a notion of a homogeneous ‘Muslim community’. In short,although these movements challenging the current reservation schemesundeniably contribute to some social and political tensions, taken as a wholethey are not simply reinforcing community fault-lines, but rather proposingmany alternative and often conflicting categorisations of Indian society.

Donald Horowitz proposes several formulas to alleviate or avoid ethnicconflict. One way he addresses is the ‘dispersal of conflict’ or the creationof ‘a new, lower layer of conflict laden issues’. He discusses this in thecontext of federal systems that geographically disperse national level ethnicbifurcations into the more complicated context of many states, resulting in‘a more complex – and therefore less tense – politics at the center’.64 Thecases examined in this article illustrate a variation of this principle. Ratherthan dispersing the polarised politics of religion or caste in a geographicsense, the above debates over reservation categories can help to shatterdichotomised conflicts by constantly questioning the boundaries of castesand religions and their relationship to each other. In this sense, inter-grouptensions do not disappear but become certainly more complex and arguablyless tense than conflicts between clear-cut and unambiguous groups. Theongoing debates over who is in which category, as opposed to nation-widefighting between clearly defined sides, is a lower, and generally lessexplosive, form of conflict over reservations.

In recent years the growing power of Hindu nationalism, based on acertain conceptualisation of the boundaries of religion, caste and nation, andbacked with organisational and political power, threatens to run roughshodover such societal complexity. Moreover, the benefits of multipleperspectives within minority religious groups may, arguably, be outweighedby the dangers of disunity in the face of Hindu majoritarianism. Ifminorities are beset with cross-cutting and competing subgroups, what hopehave they of standing up to Hindus, who make up over 80 per cent of thepopulation? On the other hand, the complexities of what political scientist


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Ashutosh Varshney calls India’s ‘ethnic configuration’ may also be theHindu nationalists’ biggest challenge: the Bharatiya Janata Party strugglesto appeal beyond their northern, Hindi-speaking, upper-caste base and, inorder to get power at the centre, has been forced by coalition partners to giveup the very planks of their party’s platform which are most threatening tominorities.65

Although very astute at manipulating interests and identities, the Hindunationalists are not immune from the dilemmas of balancing their ideology ofidentity with their interest in gaining political power in a democracy. TheBJP’s moderate party president, Bangaru Laxman, an untouchable, was a casein point. Not only did he try to appeal to lower castes but also, in his firstspeech as party president, argued that the party needs to make ‘sustainedefforts to reach out to Indian Muslims’. He even suggested that the issue ofadding more Muslims to the OBC rolls might be examined.66 Balancing theneed to expand their constituency with the need to hang on to their morehardline supporters, the BJP has drawn on its family of related Hinduorganisations, known as the Sangh Parivar, as well as a variety of politicalfigures, ranging from Laxman to the militant Lal Krishna Advani, to put forthmany faces of Hindu nationalism. Whether moderate voices will havemeaningful influence remains to be seen, but the complexity of India’s cross-cutting identities clearly has an impact on both minority and majority religiouscommunities and may prove to be the best antidote to Hindu chauvinism.

State institutions are integrally involved in the social construction ofidentity; likewise society influences the state’s methods of identification.Even in cases of colonial states, ‘the novel communal partitioning of societywas not simply implanted from above and beyond. An intricate dialecticunfolded’.67 Although the ‘new institutionalism’ in the 1980s rejuvenated avaluable state-centred approach to the study of politics, we should not swingtoo far in one direction, giving undue explanatory weight to state-relatedvariables, especially when studying identity. A scholar notable for ‘bringingthe state back in’ observes that ‘the collective forms through which groupsbecome aware of political goals and work to attain them arise, not fromsocieties alone, but at the meeting point of states and societies’.68 BackwardMuslims and Scheduled Caste Christians are liminal groups, falling betweenthe cracks of the state’s reservation classification schemes. Their strugglesoffer a unique view of the meeting point of state and society, where abstractstate identifications and complex social identities coincide or clash.

NOTES

1 . ‘Backward’ is not my term but, rather, official jargon which is also being used by politicalactivists. The term will appear in the rest of this article without the repeated use of quotation


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marks, which does not imply that I agree with its negative connotations regarding the groupsgiven this label.

2. For a balanced perspective on the ways these group based policies both overcome groupdisparities and cause group tensions, see S. Mitra, ‘The Perils of Promoting Equality: TheLatent Significance of the Anti-Reservation Movement in India’, Journal of Commonwealth& Comparative Politics, 25/3 (1987), 292–312, and ‘Caste, Democracy and the Politics ofCommunity Formation in India’, in M. Searle-Chatterjee and U. Sharma (eds.),Contextualizing Caste: Post-Dumontian Approaches (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 49–71.

3. M. Galanter, Competing Equalities (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), 147. In manycases, Scheduled Tribes are hardly as isolated as they are often assumed to be. See S. Guha,Environment and Ethnicity in India 1200–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1999).

4. The historical development of these policies is discussed in L. Jenkins, ‘Preferential Policiesfor Disadvantaged Ethnic Groups: Employment and Education’, in C. Young (ed.), EthnicDiversity and Public Policy: A Comparative Inquiry (London: Macmillan, 1998), 192–235;S. Parikh, The Politics of Preference (Ann Arbor: Michigan, 1997); M. Galanter, CompetingEqualities (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984); E. Irschick, Politics and Social Conflictin South India: The Non-Brahman Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916–1929 (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1969).

5. Hindustan Times, 9 March 1996. This assumption pervaded many media and academicanalyses of the decision to extend central government reservations to the OBCs in 1990. Forexample, G. Singh and H. Sharma, Reservation Politics in India: Mandalization of theSociety (New Delhi: Deep & Deep Publications, 1995).

6. T. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 1995).7. L. Rudolph and S.H. Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1967).8. Government officials and citizens are now struggling with the policy ramifications of a

debate which has raged among academics, classic examples being Louis Dumont and F.G.Bailey: is caste a religious institution rooted in Hinduism or a sociological phenomenoncharacteristic of a variety of societies? L. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1980); F.G. Bailey, Caste and the Economic Frontier (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1957), and Tribe Caste and Nation (Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press, 1960).

9. C. Young, The Rising Tide of Cultural Pluralism (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press,1993); V. Tilley, ‘The Terms of the Debate: Untangling Language About Ethnicity and EthnicMovements’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 20/30 (1997), 497–522.

10. C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).11. A. Basu and A. Kohli, ‘Community Conflicts and the State in India’, Journal of Asian

Studies (1997), 323.12. Some notable examples of such scholarship involving India include B. Cohn, Colonialism

and its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), and G. Pandey,The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press,1992).

13. A. Schneider and H. Ingram. ‘Social Construction of Target Populations: Implications forPolitics and Policy’, American Political Science Review, 87/2 (1993), 334–47.

14. P. Brass, Ethnic Groups and the State (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Books, 1985); D.Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); C.Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1994).

15. A. Stoler and F. Cooper, Between Metropole and Colony (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1996), 1–56.

16. T. Wright, ‘A New Demand for Muslim Reservations in India’, Asian Survey, 37/9 (1997),852–8.

17. Times of India, 18 Jan. 1996. Author’s interview with Syed Hamid, President of theAssociation for Promoting Education and Employment of Muslims, Delhi, 2 Sept. 1996.Hamid is a former Vice-Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University. A career Indian


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Administrative Service officer, he was formerly Chair of the Staff Selection Board, thelargest civil service recruiting agency for junior posts. Report of the Backward ClassesCommission 1978–80, B.P. Mandal, Chairman (Delhi: Akalank Publications, 1981).

18. See S. Bayly, ‘State Policy and “Reservations”’, in her Caste, Society and Politics in Indiafrom the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1999), an excellent overview of the politics of extending the backward label.

19. I. Ahmad, ‘Job Reservations for Muslims?’, The Hindustan Times, 25 Jan. 1980. 20. Muslim India (Feb. 1996), 78. Other groups have made similar demands for Muslim

reservations, such as the Islamic Council of India and the All-India Milli Council. See TheHindu, 13 April 1996 and Indian Express, 22 July 1996. An even larger group of Muslimorganisations has included the demand for reservations for Muslims as a religious minoritygroup in their Agenda 1999 for Muslims. See ‘Backward, Dalit Muslims Campaign to SecureRights Sparks Controversy’, Times of India, 12 Sept. 1999.

21. Association for Promoting Education and Employment of Muslims. Resolution onPromotion of Employment, Reservation in Public Employment and Management of WakfProperties. Distributed at Third National Conference, Hyderabad, 18 Aug. 1996 (emphasisoriginal).

22. Wright, ‘A New Demand for Muslim Reservations in India’, 852–8.23. Author’s interview with Syed Hamid, Delhi, 2 Sept. 1996. 24. Author’s interview with Syed Shahabuddin, Delhi, 11 Sept. 1996. Shahabuddin is one of the

founders of the Association for Promoting Education and Employment for Muslims and oneof the organisers of the Convention on Reservations for Muslims, held in Delhi in 1994. Hehas also been an MP and the editor of Muslim India.

25. Ibid.26. Author’s interview with R.N. Prasad, Delhi, 18 Sept. 1996. Justice Prasad was then Head of

the National Backward Classes Commission. He also headed the committee which pennedthe ‘creamy layer’ rules to make well-off individuals within the OBCs ineligible forreservations.

27. Author’s interview with Vilas Sonavane, Delhi, 2 Dec. 1996. Sonavane is a member ofAdvisory Board of the All India Muslim OBC Organisation. See also V. Date, ‘ReservationDemand for “Muslim OBCs” Gains Momentum’, Times of India, 10 Dec. 1999.

28. Author’s interview with Vilas Sonavane, Delhi, 2 Dec. 1996.29. Ibid.30. G. Ansari, ‘Muslim Caste in Uttar Pradesh’, Eastern Anthropologist, 8/2 (1960). See also I.

Ahmad, Caste and Social Stratification Among Muslims in India (Delhi: Manohar, 1978),and E.A. Mann, Boundaries and Identities: Muslims, Work and Status in Aligarh (NewDelhi: Sage, 1992).

31. P. Bidwai, ‘Age of Empowerment: Muslim OBCs Discover Mandal’, Times of India, 12 Sept.1996.

32. Memorandum from Shabbir Ansari, President of the All India Muslim OBC Organisation, toWelfare Minister B.S. Ramoowalia, 16 Sept. 1996. Other organisations have made similardemands, including the All India Muslim Congress. See ‘Reservation for Dalit MuslimsSought’, Times of India, 16 Dec. 1999.

33. A. Appadurai, ‘Number in the Colonial Imagination’, in C.A. Breckenridge and P. Van derVeer (eds.), Orientalism and the Post-Colonial Predicament (Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 1993), 332.

34. See, for example, ‘Missionaries Targetting Weaker Sections: VHP’, Times of India, 31 July2000.

35. For discussion of the debate over the relationship between conversion to Christianity andsocial mobility, see G. Oddie, ‘Christianity and Social Mobility in South India 1840–1920:A Continuing Debate’, South Asia, 19 (1996), 143–59; D. Kooiman, Conversion and SocialEquality in India: The London Missionary Society in South Tranvancore in the 19th Century(Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1989).

36. As mentioned earlier, ‘Scheduled Castes’ is an administrative title for the lowest castes, oruntouchables, which have been officially listed or scheduled. These groups are also knownas Dalits. For a discussion of even more names, see S. Charsley, ‘“Untouchable”: What is in


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a Name?’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2 (1996), 1–23.37. Quoted in J. Massey, ‘Scheduled Castes: A Special Reference to Christians of Scheduled

Caste Origin’, Religion and Society, 38/1 (1991), 28. 38. Galanter, Competing Equalities, 144.39. A powerful example of the tension between low caste identity and Hindu identity is K. Ilaiah,

Why I am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture and PoliticalEconomy (Calcutta: Samya, 1996).

40. Galanter, Competing Equalities, 318. Notably, there is no corresponding religious bar toScheduled Tribe or Other Backward Class membership, perhaps because non-Hindu tribalsor lower classes are less of a challenge than non-Hindu untouchables to this associationbetween caste and Hinduism.

41. Limiting SC status to Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists, argues Dieter Conrad, can ‘only beunderstood as a sanction against apostasy from Hinduism’, part of a worrisome trend towardwhat he calls legal Hindutva. D. Conrad, ‘The Personal Law Question and HinduNationalism’, in V. Dalmia and H. von Stietencron (eds.), Representing Hinduism: TheConstruction of Religious Traditions and National Identity (New Delhi: Sage, 1995). Formore discussion of political and legal definitions of Hinduism, see L. Jenkins. ‘Personal Lawand Reservations: Volition and Religion in Contemporary India’, in G. Larson (ed.), Religionand Personal Law in Secular India: A Call to Judgement (Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 2001).

42. J. Kananaikil, Christians of Scheduled Caste Origin (New Delhi: India Social InstituteMonograph Series, 1983), 15.

43. For an excellent overview of the Dalit Christian movement and its ideology, see A. Wyatt,‘Dalit Christians and Identity Politics in India’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 30/4(1998), 16–23. For a list of some of the rallies, strikes, bills and meetings with publicofficials over this issue, see the National Coordination Committee for Dalit Christians’spamphlet (for distribution to Members of Parliament), ‘Demand for Restoration ofReservation for Christian Dalits’ (1996), 17–18. On the United Front Government’s 1996Common Minimum Programme including the extension of reservation benefits to DalitChristians see Deccan Herald (Bangalore), 16 July 1996.

44. The Hindu nationalist critiques of the SC Christian rally in conjunction with a prayer meetingattended by Mother Theresa is another case in point. Times of India, 21 and 24 Nov. 1995.

45. Author’s interview with S. Lourdeswamy, New Delhi, 19 Dec. 1995. He is VicePresident/Organizing Secretary of the All India United Christians Movement for EqualRights and National Coordination Committee for SC Christians and Executive Secretary forSCs/STs of the Catholic Bishop’s Conference.

46. D. Forrester. Caste and Christianity: Attitudes and Policies of Anglo-Saxon ProtestantMissionaries in India (London and Dublin: Curzon Press, 1980); S. Japhet, ‘CasteOppression in the Catholic Church’, in M.E. Prabhakar (ed.), Toward a Dalit Theology(Delhi: ISPCK, 1988); N. Koshy, Caste in the Kerala Churches (Bangalore; The ChristianInstitute for the Study of Religion and Society, 1988); J. Webster, A History of the DalitChristians in India (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1992).

47. J. Kananaikil, ‘Discrimination Against Dalit Converts: With Specific Reference to DalitConverts to Christianity’, Religion and Society, 37/4 (1990), 60–64.

48. R. Frykenberg, ‘Caste, Morality and Western Religion under the Raj’, Modern Asian Studies,19/2 (1985), 321–52.

49. Author’s interview with S. Lourdeswamy, Delhi, 19 Dec. 199550. The National Coordination Committee for SC Christians is sometimes called the National

Coordination Committee for Dalit Christians. Other organisations involved in these issuesinclude the All India Christian People’s Forum and the All India United ChristiansMovement for Equal Rights. A photograph of the symbolic crucifixion, which took place on30 November 1995, is in Network News (June 1996).

51. National Coordination Committee for Dalit Christians, Demand for Restoration ofReservation for Christian Dalits (1996), 8 (emphasis in original).

52. Author’s interview with S. Lourdeswamy, Delhi, 19 Dec. 1995. 53. Author’s interview with Jose Kananaikil, Delhi, 11 Jan. 1996. Kananaikil is Former Director


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of the Programme for Scheduled Castes, Indian Social Institute, and Director of Bihar DalitVikas Samiti. In addition to the works by him in previous endnotes, see also his ‘ReachingInward from the Periphery: The Experience of the Scheduled Castes in India’ (Ph.D. thesis,University of Chicago, 1981).

54. Quoted in the All India Christian People’s Forum newsletter, Network News (Nov. 1996).Author’s interview with Saral K. Chatterjee, President, All India Christian People’s Forum,22 Nov. 1996.

55. Examples of speeches and information about the Dalit Solidarity Programme can be foundin the following book, written by two of the Programme’s founders, Bhagwan Das, aBuddhist, and James Massey, a Christian. B. Das and J. Massey, Dalit Solidarity (Delhi:ISPCK, 1995).

56. Author’s interview with Salim Sharif, Delhi, 17 Nov. 1996. Sharif is the pastor of the FreeChurch in Delhi (Church of North India).

57. Ibid. 58. Author’s interview with Shakuntala David, Delhi, 17 Nov. 1996. 59. Indian Express, 26 Sept. 1996; Network News, Nov. 1996.60. At the Third National Conference on Reservations for Muslims, organised by the Association

for Promoting Education and Employment of Muslims, Hyderabad, 18 Aug. 1996, thisperspective came out in more informal afternoon discussion sessions. Audience membersraised objections to backward status for all Muslims (paraphrased): We don’t want to betreated as backward, like SCs and STs. Dalits and Brahmins will definitely put their ownperson forward, but our approach is altogether different – fairness. A Hindu tailor may betreated as backward, but a Muslim tailor is not backward, etc.

61. L. Jenkins, ‘Competing Inequalities: The Struggle Over Reserved Legislative Seats forWomen in India’, International Review of Social History, 44 (1999) Supplement, 53–75.

62. For example, the Adhivakta Parishad, a BJP legal cell, held a meeting specifically to opposethe growing demands for SC Christian reservations (Delhi, 4 Sept. 1996).

63. C. Taylor, ‘Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition’, in A. Gutman (ed.),Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition: An Essay (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1992), 25, 34, 43.

64. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 604–5. See also the thoughtful application ofHorowitz’s discussion of dispersed ethnic configurations by Ashutosh Varshney in hisassessment of the survival of India’s democracy and the challenges such dispersion poses forHindu majoritarianism. A. Varshney, ‘Why Democracy Survives’, Journal of Democracy,9/3 (1998), 42–6.

65. A. Varshney, ‘Why Democracy Survives’, Journal of Democracy, 9/3 (1998), 3–25.66. M. Rahman, ‘Conversions: “We Need to Bring India’s Muslims into the BJP’s Fold”,

Interview with Bangaru Laxman, President of India’s Ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’, TimeAsia, 26 Sept. 2000.

67. Young, African Colonial State, 234.68. T. Skocpol, ‘Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research’, in P.

Evans, D. Rueschemeyer and T. Skocpol (eds.), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1985), 27.


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Documents

Becoming Backward: Preferential Policies and Religious Minorities in India