Dalit scholar wants political reservations abolished: 'Constitution helped caste system'

By Rajiv Shah
Well-known Dalit rights expert Anand Teltumbde is all set to trigger hornet's nest by insisting on the need to "revamp" the reservation policy for scheduled castes (SCs), scheduled tribes (STs), and other backward classes (OBCs), allegedly meant to "empower" the underprivileged sections in India. Teltumbde wants reservation to be "delinked from castes", saying, this should be done by "creating a separate schedule."
While it is not clear how does he seek to arrive at a "separate schedule", which, he says, should have "definitive metrics to be phased out within a definite time frame", he insists, reservations should be "revamped to be family based", and "families within the schedule, defined as a unit of married couple with their children, would get preference over those who already got reservation."
Pointing out that this would "dampen the public struggle that exists for reservations and pave the way for their abolition", Teltumbde, in his paper on "Envisioning Dalit Futures" -- a collection of articles in the voluminous 683-page "Alternative Futures:India Unshackled", edited by Ashish Kothari and KJ Joy -- further wants that political reservations should be "scrapped immediately", as even Dr BR Ambedkar, father of Indian Constitution and Dalit icon, was "sceptical about it."

Providing other steps towards "alternative futures", which he says are necessary for what Ambedkar called "annihilation of castes", Teltumbde says, "The contemporary castes are sourced more from Constitution than any Hindu religious scriptures", adding, Dalit conversions to other religions have only "infected the new religious societies with castes".
Given this framework, he says, there is a need for the "abolition of castes in the Constitution", which would lead to "abolition of caste identifies from public spaces". Calling SC is just an "administrative category", he adds, "I am aware, millenia-old social structures may not be merely with public policy but it can surely be choked to its eventual demise."
The scholar explains, "The Constitution outlawed untouchability but not castes. On the contrary, castes were consecrated in the Constitution as the basis of of extending the affirmative action policies in favour of the Dalits, the tribals and the OBCs. With castes surviving, untouchability, which was just an aspect of caste, was not expected to disappear", one reason why even today, "untouchability is prevalent in both rural and urban India, in both visible and subtle ways."
He say, "The Constitution basically reflected the Congress thinking... All upper caste reformers, best represented by Gandhi, vehemently spoke against untouchability but defended castes. Untouchability was too crude a practice to defend and hence needed to be abolished. Caste could, however, be a potential weapon in their hands to divide people and hence would not be done away with."
Among other recipes, Teltumbde says, because caste in rural India is integrated with the village power structure, and land being its signifier, holding "the key to the caste question", the issue should be addressed by nationalising cultivable land by "abolition of private property in land beyond homesteads". Wanting "compensation for taking over the lands" should be worked out, he adds, it should ensure that over "a certain period" the title is "fully passed to the state."