Caste and Reservation in India

Abstract

Reservations in India, specifically, in the context of social and educational backward classes (SEBC) have been undergoing constitutional setbacks in the recent years. The increasing politicization and subsequent echoes of scraping down reservations in appointments and promotions to SC, and STs, sporadic discontinuation of fellowships for socially backward students, absence of accurate data on backlog vacancies, reserved positions vacant in employment, and finally, in most cases under-representation in the 49.5-50 per cent quota out of which 15 per cent for SCs, 7.5 per cent to STs and 27 per cent to OBCs that have been earmarked, lays bare the institutional breach in the promise of social justice. Reservation in this context, calls for a renewed perspective on how and why it not only suffers alienation and conflicts from within the minority sections it so represents, but increasingly projects out as exclusive and exclusionary a category to the majority. The paper attempts to project the double bind within which reservation attempts to articulate the voice of the non-represented. The paper further, draws in the recent judicial judgment of the Uttarakhand High Court in matters of promotion, which arguably bear out contradictory responses to reservation, analyzing in the process a decadal shift in the substantive power of reservation that is being increasingly understood to be a threat to the majoritarian class and caste interests.