Caste, 3,000-Year-Old Curse, Still Haunts India: Andy Mukherjee April 24 (Bloomberg) -- Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh opened a Pandora's box last week by asking businesses to ``voluntarily'' commit to greater diversity in their workforce. The captains of industry were spooked, seeing in the apparently gentle appeal a precursor to pernicious caste-based reservations of jobs. The fear isn't irrational. Singh's coalition government, upon coming to power in May 2004, stated clearly in its work program that it ``is very sensitive to the issue of affirmative action, including reservations, in the private sector.'' The reason Indian industry hasn't yet been slapped with state-mandated job quotas is that such a move, as the attorney general has advised the government, is legally untenable. ``India Inc. will seek judicial intervention if the government forces it to offer jobs based on caste and not on merit,'' the Economic Times, an Indian daily newspaper, reported April 21, citing corporate sources it didn't name. A constitutional amendment, which would take care of the legal challenge, will need the support of two-thirds of parliament; Singh's Congress Party may not be able to carry the change without roping in the Bharatiya Janata Party, the main opposition grouping that refuses to back the proposal. So the government's strategy appears to be to somehow hoodwink the private sector into self-imposing a caste-based quota regime by thrusting on it a completely distorted interpretation of affirmative action in the U.S. Curse of Caste The caste system is India's 3,000-year-old curse. In its purest form, it categorized all Hindus, according to their family occupation, into four groups: priests, warriors, merchants and artisans/peasants. The Brahmins -- or the priests - - were at the apex of the pyramid, while menial laborers and those born in hunting-gathering tribal communities were, in the eyes of the four main castes, simply ``untouchables.'' In the 1930s, Mahatma Gandhi fought this brutal social, economic and cultural ostracism of a large section of society. In 1950, two years after Gandhi's death, the writers of independent India's Constitution adopted a policy of reserving jobs in the government and seats in state-funded educational institutes for the ``scheduled castes and tribes,'' as the people marginalized by the caste system were then known. The idea was to integrate them with the mainstream in 10 years. Since then, the quotas, set at 22.5 percent, have been renewed every 10 years. In 1990, amid violent nationwide protests, a further 27 percent of government jobs were reserved, this time for the artisan-peasant communities, which were recognized as ``other backward castes.'' Quotas The government now has a twofold agenda. On the one hand, it wants to extend the 22.5 percent quota for the scheduled castes to the private sector, and, on the other, it wants the Indian Institutes of Technology, the Indian Institutes of Management and all federally funded universities to retain 27 percent of seats -- over and above their present 22.5 percent quotas -- for the other backward castes. It's undeniable that more people must benefit from India's economic growth. The danger lies in using caste to make growth more inclusive. A worse folly is for politicians to pretend that caste-based quotas would encourage diversity. ``I urge you to assess at a firm level the diversity in your employee profile and commit yourself voluntarily to making it more broad-based and representative,'' Singh told businessmen at a conference in New Delhi on April 18. Caste-based quotas are the antithesis of affirmative action. India has to obliterate caste-based identities from the national consciousness. It shouldn't be the country's goal to make lower-caste Hindus more prosperous while they continue to be identified as members of a distinct group. The Merit Argument Indian businessmen oppose quotas on the grounds that introducing factors other than ``merit'' in the hiring process will hurt their competitiveness just when they are beginning to make a mark on a global scale. Those who support reservations say concerns about the dilution of quality are overstated. They cite the example of the Indian Institutes of Technology, which are among the world's most exclusive engineering schools and yet have lived with 22.5 percent reservation without damage to their credibility. The point there is that the IITs have protected their standing with the help of a tailor-made quota system. They have the flexibility of not filling reserved seats if suitable candidates aren't available even after lowering the entry barrier and providing extra coaching to the students. This has an implicit cost, which is borne by the taxpayer. Old Prejudices In the private-sector labor market, this cost will be carried by investors and show up as erosion of national competitiveness. Even if the process is voluntary, as it is in the U.S., companies are bound to get embroiled in expensive litigation. The price may still be worth paying for the sake of putting a long-neglected section of society on a faster track to a dignified life. A much bigger worry is that once employers start discriminating, Indians will, instead of forgetting about their own and their coworkers' castes, become more conscious of it, and this awareness will reinforce old prejudices. The curse of caste will live on. _http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000039&cid=mukherjee&sid=aidObEqk. wBM_ (http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news? pid=10000039&cid=mukherjee&sid=aidObEqk.wBM)
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