Reservation in educational institutions

[arunbg]

Next they will be talking about reservations for different religions.

Well, actually this has already begun.
In the examination that I was talking about, the "backward classes" include all Muslims and a majority of Christians apart from "backward caste" Hindus . This is when Kerala has one of the largest relative populations of these religions in India .
I am all for secularism and religious pluralism but this is going a bit too far.

Arun

 

[siddharth]

What do we have to do to make the govt. hear us? A 23-year-old has already tried self-immolation in Delhi. Is the govt. not going to listen?

Self-immolation is a really stupid way. When you're dead, what does reservation matter to you ? To be fair, while I completely oppose any kind of reservation, I think that such protesters are only trying to sensationalise the issue.

I think a major point here is a lack of proper communication. I think that this issue is too emotional and there's a lack of proper, level-headed discussion.

Most of the protesters, in my opinion, are more interested in protecting their rights, than trying to reach a solution where the interests of the oppressed community is also taken into account.

Where are the debates on alternative means to help bridge the social injustice, such as improving the primary educational system? For example, there is a really vast difference between the quality of education that students get in private schools where the medium of instruction is English, and government schools where the medium of instruction is a local language. Where are the talks on how to rectify this gap?

The really sad part is that, this whole issue shows, in my opinion, a profound lack of rational thinking in the country, both among politicians and some protesters.

 

[0TheSwerve0]

Let's build some AI's to take the places of the humans in backward castes. Is the religious aspect of the caste system still in place (that these people are reincarnated into low castes because of karma), or is it more like racism (that they're simply born inferior)? If the latter, then AI's could take the bottom rung of the caste system, which I don't think is going away any time soon.

 

[siddharth]

Let's build some AI's to take the places of the humans in backward castes. Is the religious aspect of the caste system still in place (that these people are reincarnated into low castes because of karma), or is it more like racism (that they're simply born inferior)? If the latter, then AI's could take the bottom rung of the caste system, which I don't think is going away any time soon.

My understanding is that it's like racism. In the traditional caste system you're simply born into a lower caste. Most aspects of your life, such as who you can marry and what jobs you can do, are decided by your caste.

In modern India, the traditional caste system has almost broken down in the major cities, though it is still prevalent in the villages.

I saw a programme today on BBC , which highlighted the extent to which the caste system is still prevalent in India. It showed the plight of women, from the lowest castes, who had the job of cleaning the human waste and excretion in the village for 10$ a month. They had to do it as they were born into the lower castes, and because no one else from the higher castes would.

This is another article written in 2001 speaks more about the injustice to the lower castes
http://aad.english.ucsb.edu/docs/georgesept62001.html"
From the article,

While the media debate rages, the Dalits in Trilokpuri shrug at the notion of change. "My mother did scavenging. I am a scavenger. I don't see my children doing anything else, whatever the politicians may say,'' said Birum. "This is our caste.''

During the U.N. World Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa, most of the participants condemned the caste system as a form of apartheid. The Indian response was as follows

"Condemning the caste system would equate casteism with racism, which makes India a racist country, which we are not,'' Omar Abdullah, India's minister of state for foreign affairs, said in Durban.

 

[0TheSwerve0]

I did some quick research for a class assignment last year and the statistics basically said that every month or so, the higher castes would come pillage, rape, and murder the lower castes. Like you said, this occurred in more rural areas. Plus, apparently the lower caste girls are made sex slaves in temples (is that the gist of it?). There are countless rape stories, including rape by police officers of women who just happen to be in their line of sight.

 

[kant]

affirmative action benefit whites more than blacks. If not for affirmative action, there would be a much higher proportion of asians in american universities. All my asian friend have 4.0 to 4.3 GPA, and engage is competitive exams. Most got into a pretty good school, but there are also plenty that got reject from the schools of their choice. If you are white; you have much more opportunity of getting into a top school, than if you are asian. why? that is injustices

 

[siddharth]

I did some quick research for a class assignment last year and the statistics basically said that every month or so, the higher castes would come pillage, rape, and murder the lower castes.

I don't think that's true, and I have not heard of any such incidents. Do you have any links for that?

Plus, apparently the lower caste girls are made sex slaves in temples (is that the gist of it?).

I've heard of this, but I don't know about the significance of caste. It is true that some girls are made sex slaves in temples, although I don't know how widespread this practice is.

http://www.worldvision.org/about_us.nsf/child/eNews_india_051606?Open&lpos=mainnav&lid=0506"

There are countless rape stories, including rape by police officers of women who just happen to be in their line of sight.

Yes, there are many incidents of rape in India, but isn't this unfortunately present in all human societies? For the specific case of police officers, I remember one such incident which caused a national outcry, and then was quickly forgotten.(In fact I'm struggling to find the link to the story). Ok, here are two links, which give differing opinions.

link 1:http://www.indiadaily.com/editorial/09-17b-04.asp"
link 2:http://www.rediff.com/news/2004/aug/26mani.htm"

 

[Gokul43201]

Siddharth, you're missing the political aspect of this. Even a level-headed discussion between politicians will reveal that implementation of improvements in funding education in rural areas is a long-term project that takes time, money and perseverance, while implementing a bribe that is the proposed reservation requires none. The latter clearly has more political bang for the buck. Politics comes with a 4 year mindset.

TheSwerve, I'd be a little surprised if what you mentioned above is true. While there is definite casteism in many rural areas, the brunt of the force is actually being perpetuated by the government through these quotas. It's a system that, in my opinion, keeps people rooted in the past and prevents evolution. As for the sex slaves in temples, I know this is very true in Calcutta and a few other places, but again, I'm not sure if the selection is based on caste. Business - even prostitution - does not generally let arbitrary labels get in the way of making a profit.

 

[neutrino]

Siddharth, you're missing the political aspect of this. Even a level-headed discussion between politicians will reveal that implementation of improvements in funding education in rural areas is a long-term project that takes time, money and perseverance, while implementing a bribe that is the proposed reservation requires none. The latter clearly has more political bang for the buck. Politics comes with a 4 year mindset.

Slightly off-track, but regarding the money part, I was just watching the news sometime ago. The 2010 Commonwealth games is going to cost India an estimated US$ 1.1B (5145 Cr @ the present rate). Already a couple of hundred crores were spent in the finale at Melbourne. [Idealisation]We wouldn't have this debate if all of that were to be spent properly in primary education throughout the country[/idealisation].

 

[0TheSwerve0]

http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/india/India994-02.htm#TopOfPage"

Dalit women face the triple burden of caste, class, and gender. Dalit girls have been forced to become prostitutes for upper-caste patrons and village priests. Sexual abuse and other forms of violence against women are used by landlords and the police to inflict political “lessons” and crush dissent within the community. According to a Tamil Nadu state government official, the raping of Dalit women exposes the hypocrisy of the caste system as “no one practices untouchability when it comes to sex.”7 Like other Indian women whose relatives are sought by thepolice, Dalit women have also been arrested and tortured in custody as a means of punishing their male relatives who are hiding from the authorities.

Laws designed to ensure that Dalits enjoy equal rights and protection have seldom been enforced. Instead, police refuse to register complaints about violations of the law and rarely prosecute those responsible for abuses that range from murder and rape to exploitative labor practices and forced displacement from Dalit lands and homes.

Which is why it may not seem that widespread.

Lacking access to mainstream political organizations and increasingly frustrated with the pace of reforms, Dalits have begun to resist subjugation and discrimination in two ways: peaceful protest and armed struggle. Particularly since the early 1990s, Dalit organizations have sought to mobilize Dalits to protest peacefully against the human rights violations suffered by their community. These movements have quickly grown in membership and visibility and have provoked a backlash from the higher-caste groups most threatened—both economically and politically—by Dalit assertiveness. Police, many of whom belong to these higher-caste groups or who enjoy their patronage, have arrested Dalit activists, including social workers and lawyers, for activity that is legal and on charges that show the police’s political motivation. Dalit activists are jailed under preventive detention statutes to prevent them from holding meetings and protest rallies, or charged as “terrorists” and “threats to national security.” Court cases drag on for years, costing impoverished people precious money and time.In some states, notably Bihar, guerrilla organizations advocating the use of violence to achieve land redistribution have attracted Dalit support. Such groups, known as “Naxalites,”8 have carried out attacks on higher-caste groups, killing landlords, village officials and their families and seizing property. Such attacks on civilians constitute gross violations of international humanitarian law. Naxalite groups have also engaged in direct combat with police forces.

In retaliation Higher-caste landlords in Bihar have organized private militias to counter the Naxalite threat. These militias, or senas, also target Dalit villagers believed to be sympathetic to Naxalites. Senas are believed responsible for the murders of many hundreds of Dalits in Bihar since 1969. One of the most prominent militias, the Ranvir Sena, has been responsible for the massacre of more than 400 Dalit villagers in Bihar between 1995 and 1999. In one of the largest of such massacres, on the night of December 1, 1997, the Ranvir Sena shot dead sixteen children, twenty-seven women, and eighteen men in the village of Laxmanpur-Bathe, Jehanabad district Bihar. Five teenage girls were raped and mutilated before being shot in the chest. The villagers were reportedly sympathetic to a Naxalite group that had been demanding more equitable land redistribution in the area. When Ramchela Paswan returned home from the fields, he found seven of his family members shot: “I started beating my chest and screaming that no one is left...”9 When asked whythe sena killed children and women, one sena member responded, “We kill children because they will grow up to become Naxalites. We kill women because they will give birth to Naxalites.”10

Further down in the report Excessive use of force by the police is not limited to rural areas. Police abuse against the urban poor, slum dwellers, Dalits, and other minorities has included arbitrary detention, torture, extrajudicial executions and forced evictions. Although the acute social discrimination characteristic of rural areas is less pronounced in cities, Dalits in urban areas, who make up the majority of bonded laborers and street cleaners, do not escape it altogether. Many live in segregated colonies which have been targets of police raids. This report documents a particularly egregious incident in a Dalit colony in Bombay in July 1997, when police opened fire without warning on a crowd of Dalits protesting the desecration of a statue of Dalit cultural and political hero Dr. B. R. Ambedkar.12 The firing killed ten and injured twenty-six.


As for it being a problem of government, this seems to be because the government is run by higher castes. Plus, the corruption of those carrying out laws cannot be overcome even if the government tried.

The potential of the law to bring about social change has been hampered by police corruption and caste bias, with the result that many allegations are not entered in police books. Ignorance of procedures and a lack of knowledge of the act have also affected its implementation. Even when cases are registered, the absence of special courts to try them can delay prosecutions for up to three to four years. Some state governments dominated by higher castes have even attempted to repeal the legislation altogether.

The numbers
Between 1994 and 1996, a total of 98,349 cases were registered with the police nationwide as crimes and atrocities against scheduled castes. Of these, 38,483 were registered under the Atrocities Act for the sorts of offenses enumerated above. A further 1,660 were for murder, 2,814 for rape, and 13,671 for hurt.15 Given that Dalits are both reluctant and unable (for lack of police cooperation) to report crimes against themselves, the actual number of abuses is presumably much higher. The National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes has reported that these cases typically fall into one of three categories: cases relating to the practice of “untouchability” and attempts to defy the social order; cases relating to land disputes and demands for minimum wages; and cases of atrocities by police and forest officials.

An estimated forty million people in India, among them fifteen million children, are bonded laborers, working in slave-like conditions in order to pay off a debt. A majority of them are Dalits. According to government statistics, an estimated one million Dalits are manual scavengers who clear feces from public and private latrines and dispose of dead animals; unofficial estimates are much higher. An activist working with scavengers in the state of Andhra Pradesh claimed, “In one toilet there can be as many as 400 seats which all have to be manually cleaned. This is the lowest occupation in the world, and it is done by the community that occupies the lowest status in the caste system.”16 In India’s southern states, thousands of girls are forced into prostitution before reaching the age of puberty. Devadasis, literally meaning “female servant of god,” usually belong to the Dalit community. Once dedicated, the girl is unable to marry, forced to become a prostitute for upper-caste community members, and eventually auctioned off to an urban brothel.

http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/india/India994-04.htm#TopOfPage"
As Human Rights Watch was told by a government investigator in Tamil Nadu, “[n]o one practices untouchability when it comes to sex.”36 Rape is a common phenomenon in rural areas. Women are raped as part of caste custom or village tradition. According to Dalit activists, Dalit girls have been forced to have sex with the village landlord.37 In rural areas, “women are induced into prostitution (Devadasi system)..., which [is] forced on them in the name of religion.”38 The prevalence of rape in villages contributes to the greater incidence of child marriage in those areas. Early marriage between the ages of ten years and sixteen years persists in large part because of Dalit girls’ vulnerability to sexual assault by upper-caste men; once a girl is raped, she becomes unmarriageable. An early marriage also gives parents greater control over the caste into which their children are married.

And http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/india/India994-06.htm#TopOfPage"is the page that documents the overwhelming frequency of violent attacks on lower castes, which I think is concentrated in certain areas.

 

[0TheSwerve0]

And yes, rape persists in every human society, though in different ways - as a shameful, infrequent act where the perpetrator is ostracized, normally seen in smaller societies where this would actually be a deterrent; as an institutionalized form of violence against a group, as we see with the Dalits; as a weapon of genocide, as seen in Darfur.

What about our own society? My anthropology teacher has said that normally men (for they are the most common rapists) rape women of their own "race," yet in the U.S., Native American women are disproportionately raped by "white" males. Not surprising, this may be a continuation of the genocide perpetrated against Native Americans in the last couple of centuries. We no longer have slavery, but there does seem to be some degree of institutionalized rape still going on - in women's prisons, for example, this has been said (not sure how true it is) to be a huge problem. It's helpful to look at rape in both a cultural and phylogenetic context to understand it.

 

[MeJennifer]

I think the best thing to do is that the best students get the admission.

 

[neutrino]

I think the best thing to do is that the best students get the admission.

Oh, no. Wouldn't that be the correct thing to do?

 

[klusener]

Let's build some AI's to take the places of the humans in backward castes. Is the religious aspect of the caste system still in place (that these people are reincarnated into low castes because of karma), or is it more like racism (that they're simply born inferior)? If the latter, then AI's could take the bottom rung of the caste system, which I don't think is going away any time soon.

If the religious aspect of this system was to be considered, the system wouldn't exist. How could a religion in itself discriminate against those of a different colour (if we're talking about racism), when the name of the one considered to be God (Krishna) means black/dark? The general history of the caste system I've read about is that in the beginning, the varna system classified people according to their profession (the basic order of Indian society) and during those days, careers/professions were passed down from father to son, through the family, so over the centuries, the once fluid system became rigid/hereditary. Unless someone has found a lost scroll of Hindu scriptures per se, there are none currently positing that those in the 'low castes' are there due to karma. I will say that I don't accept the Laws of Manu as part of the Hindu scriptures, for they're what the title says, merely man-made laws, societal laws, not religious.

Of course, the above paragraph is purely from a religious perspective. Few will deny that the lower castes have been mistreated, but that again is a part of Indian society, rather than a part of the Hindu religion (not the way it's practiced by some), for it infiltrates even the Muslim and Christian sections of society. You have Nadar Christians, etc. within TN itself. I hope there is an interfaith initiative to combat the remnants of this unneeded, toxic system, but as some of the other members have said, the politicians depend on this issue to survive and further their own careers, so they have exacerabated and aggravated this matter for most of the 20th and 21st century. And again, leaving just 50.5% of college seats to the general population can hardly be viewed as a solution, but it's a quick-fix for political careers, because it can be immediately implemented. The alternative, improving the primary educational system would take decades.

That's what I like about America, the politicians, no matter how corrupt and dishonest some are, the majority of them just don't do this to their own people. I know my post has predominately engaged in Hindu apologetics, and if this in someway violates the forum rules, I apologize.

 

[siddharth]

There's been a new development in this.

http://www.ibnlive.com/news/india/03_2007/supreme-court-stays-quota-in-pvt-aided-institutions-37225.html

In what could be big a blow to the Government's pro-reservation stance, the Supreme Court on Thursday stayed the 27 per cent reservation for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in educational institutions

Why did the supreme court suspend the plan? It seems that the Indian government actually used data from the 1931 census to determine the current number of people in the so-called OBCs! How desperate can the government get ?

The Court ruled that the 1931 census could not be a determinative factor for identifying the OBCs for the purpose of providing reservation.

The Bench said, "We are of the view that the impugned notification and enforcing the reservation for OBCs in the educational institutions must be put on hold as the Government has failed to provide any authentic or reliable data to justify its policy of reservation.”

SC held that Section 6 of the Constitution was not applicable since no data on who constitutes OBCs in India has been collected in the last 76 years.

But wait, It gets even better!

The Court reprimanded the Centre, saying that the Centre should stay away from dividing the society on caste basis and should behave in a more responsible way.

It added the Government's decision to implement the quota system was full of flaws.

"Reservation cannot be permanent and appear to perpetuate backwardness," the Bench observed.

the Bench said that the OBC quota was just vote bank politics and said it was forced to take the decision against the Government as the Government did not implement the SC's last two orders.

Finally! Common sense at last.

 

[Gokul43201]

Hear, hear!