Reservations and India Inc.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh hinted at ‘quotas’ or ‘reservations’ or ‘affirmative action’ in his speech last night to industrialists at CII Annual Session. How did the media react to it? NDTV called it a ‘political’ issue and cautioned against the menace of ‘reservations’ entering Indian industry. NDTV also showcased two industrialists who opposed these ‘reservations’.

This is how Rahul Bajaj. Chairman, Bajaj Auto, responded: "I don't know if reservations are the ultimate goal or not but I can tell you that I am completely opposed to mandatory reservation.”

Now, what did Manmohan exactly say? Read the text below:

“I urge industry to seriously consider enhancing education and employment opportunities for weaker section and investing in their skill enhancement and promoting their employment in an affirmative manner.” "I urge you to assess at a firm level that diversity in your employee profile and commit yourself voluntarily to making it more broad-based and representative."

Did Manmohan talk about ‘mandatory reservation’? He urged the industry to promote lower classes voluntarily. Is this something wrong? Why do we elite Indians abhor the concept of ‘reservations’, ‘quotas’, or ‘affirmative action’ in all forms, and discard it right away?

I will tell you why.

When we got Independence, India was ripe with favoritism, nepotism, partiality, in the form of casteism, communalism, regionalism, and various other forms very unique to India. Most often, this treatment was in favor of the elite classes. As a government, India started its fight against all these discriminatory and preferential treatment. To achieve this- they brought objectivism as a weapon – by shunning privy purses to maharajas, enforcing land reforms to dispossess landlords of their ridiculously vast land assets, and for all other selections and admission, they resorted to conducting tests. For a while, this resulted in combating off the preferential treatment, but there were too many loopholes, and soon it was clear that rich remained rich through ‘alternate’ methods, elite classes could continue filling the colleges, institutes, universities, jobs, positions, despite the tax laws, land reforms, and reservations.

B.P. Mandal created a report in late 1970s to illustrate how lower classes of India remained low in spite of all the measures taken up by Indian Government. That is now known as a controversial ‘Mandal Commission’. Indian elite fought tooth-and-nail but had to accept it. But the elite and rich still held their sway resorting to many other methods.

One of the interesting aspects to this is the much touted and over hyped word called ‘meritocracy’. The objectivism that tests & entrances introduced was now pushed to an extreme form to be called as ‘meritocracy’, a convenient word coined especially to defend India’s elite in promoting their own kin. This concept is simple. The poor go to poor schools where teachers never show up. They have no text books and can’t go to the ‘cramming-and-mugging tutorials like rich and elite classes do. They said: ‘Conduct tests as you wish, and we will get in there anyway because we will definitely fare better than those lower classes, and the in the interviews it will our guys selecting our guys again.’ This was the new approach to continue the preferential treatment using the system- now you know why nepotism, favoritism, and partiality continued to be part of us for thousands of years- we always knew how to beat the system.

The new concept also gave certain legitimacy to promote one’s own creed- now, ‘fighting for merit’ appeared very noble, unlike old times. ‘Merit’ is considered one of the virtuous values. Even Indian Industry seems to take on this mantra. The elite classes in India now responded: ‘Look, we wrote the test as you asked, and we got better marks, so take us in.’ Reservations became anathema to ‘merit’, and in the same vein they equated this ‘merit’ with ‘progress’, and ‘competitiveness’. Now you have a completely different look at ‘reservations’. It is as archaic and barbaric as ‘sati’, an abhorrent concept that should be shunned right away to pave way for the newer and better concepts called ‘meritocracy’ and ‘competitiveness’. There are people out there who believe that students who are selected through reservations become poor doctors (though they have to pass through the same stringent exams as any other student). There are some professors at IIM & IIT who believe that ‘reservation’ students will decrease the quality of its institutions, though they would have to go through same tests, interviews and discussions as other students.

Why is it that US institutes promote diversity by taking up students with lower GMAT scores if they come from challenged backgrounds? Why are so many US companies proud that their employees have different ethnic and minority groups? Are they not promoting diversity through voluntary affirmative action and still be competitive with the world companies on every level? And for some reason you will never hear the word ‘merit’ or ‘meritocracy’ in that country. I wonder why!