You f*** with us, We f*** with you...

I was going over my macroeconomics book while preparing for an exam, and something caught my eye - "Disadvantages of using GDP growth rate as a yardstick to measure economic welfare of the residents of a country" - one of them being GDP not being able to measure income disparity. 'Aah', I said to myself, 'some frank admission!'

My mind went into a flash back - last year, there was a huge uproar on national scale against the new reservation policy stipulating higher quotas for SC/ST/OBC categories. Merit was the new buzzword - students protesting with banners held high was a common scene outside AIIMS and some DU colleges in Delhi. The IIT Delhi guys too woke up from their slumber and decided to stage a protest outside the main gate of the institute. I was there, and watched them do that, protest that is - a few of them were cleaning windshields of the parked cars, a couple of them opened up fake cobbler shops and were cleaning shoes of the bystanders. Another group held banners, stating that this is all what they, the best minds of the country, were destined to do due to increased reservation quotas, since merit won't be the criteria to get admission to IITs, the incompetent ones getting the ticket riding on the wave of reservation. There was a roaring applause from the amused audience, and the media covered it alrite.

Personally, I felt disgusted as an IIT alumnus, as a person born to "high-caste" parents, and as a fellow human being. After all this pomp and show, the only argument I could see being made was that cleaning cars and shining shoes is the only job fit for the so-called lower caste guys, the premise being that these guys were quintessentially low on their IQ. To me, these bright IIT minds were doing exactly the same thing what the current reservation policy is doing, widening the social divide. You f*** with us, We f*** with you...

My objective of writing this post is not to argue in favor of reservation. Or against it, for that matter. For, I do not support the blanket x% quota for SC/ST/OBC. But then, I am also against the idea of doing away with the concept of reservation, or the alternative being suggested i.e. to provide reservation on the basis of economic condition and not caste. And my arguments against each of these are based on one simple fact - the Indian history. (And no, it is not that garbage of you-screwed-my-grand-grand-grandfather-and-hence-I-demand-reservation-to-screw-you, the same old You f*** with us, We f*** with you).

But more on that some other day. One thing I would like to mention though, we cannot shy away from the fact that social status and economic welfare go hand in hand, there is plethora of empirical data available to support it. Which one's the cause and which one's the effect, I really don't know, it's the same thing as who came first, chicken or the egg - doesn't matter.

To that end, India's position is unique - the complex social hierarchy as defined by caste system is found only here. A much-celebrated paper even cited caste system as the underlying reason why India didn't witness the economic cycle of feudalism->socialism->capitalism and the associated (government-aided) civil atrocities observed in whole of the Europe, US, Russia, China, Japan etc. What can be other, not-so-visible, consequences of caste system? What can be the toll of keeping a section of society deprived of education for several centuries? Add to that the literal ban on inter-caste marriage which confined some things that can be passed on only through genetic means, and the picture doesn't look good any more. A vicious circle is in place - you are born poor in your doomed caste, you don't inherit anything - material or abstract - from your parents, you don't get good education due to your poverty, you don't get a decent job and hence a living due to your dismal education, and then you marry someone from a similar socio-economic class and proceed to have children to follow exactly in your footsteps.

The current reservation policy is not a solution to it, as it bestows its benefits upon the already well-off creamy layer of the lower caste population. But instead of crying hoarse against it in the name of merit, we should first think of some other means to bridge this caste-borne income disparity. Merit isn’t something you earned completely through your own efforts, most of it is the IQ you were born with. So why do the kids born in the Indian ghettos not up to the IQ levels of an average kid born to a brahmin/baniya family? Why is that the low-caste students from the creamy layer who get into IITs/IIMs based on reservation perform poorly in academics in general, despite having received decent primary/secondary education? The last question, incidentally, also serves as an argument as to why an economic status based reservation system would not work.

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The need of the hour is to find answers to these questions through in-depth research and analysis, and take steps to correct for the same. But until then, the Arjun Singhs of this world would continue playing vote-bank politics through ever-new reservation announcements, the benefits of the quota-system would keep on accumulating in the laps of the undeserving creamy layer of low caste section, the high-caste guys would continue hating those from low-caste due to the adverse impact of reservation on the former, while the real oppressed ones would remain confined to the lowest rung of socio-economic ladder as they had always been. Then, some day, a couple of them will take up guns and raise the same old slogan, "You f*** with us, We f*** with you".

P.S. The title of this post is inspired from a tee-shirt I just bought. I can't seem to remember the manufacturer's name for acknowledgement - it's not viral marketing anyways.