As opposed to Marx’s stratification system based entirely on economic criteria, Max Weber postulated three dimensions of stratification, namely class and power, and the Indian ‘caste’ was seen to be the quintessential status group.
According to him, a status group was a group of people within a society who could be differentiated by non-economic criteria such as honour, prestige, ethnicity, race and religion.
Indeed, pre-British India was characterised by numerous status groups called ‘jatis’, which loosely fitted into the hierarchical varna framework of Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaisya and Shudra.
These status groups were defined by diacritical signs such as who was permitted to ride a palanquin, sport a moustache, sit on a charpoy among others. Generally, the lower castes had to abstain from such practices. This is not to say that the system was rigid, far from it.
There was much jostling for power and position, and mobility occurred especially in the middle rungs of the hierarchy.
When the British entered the subcontinent, they were intrigued by the prevailing system of stratification and studied it through intensive fieldwork by their social anthropologists. It is they who first used the term ‘caste’, a Portuguese word, to describe the various groups in the Indian stratification system.
But they went beyond a mere academic study of caste. They brought in notions of equality and parliamentary democracy which challenged the hierarchical ranking of castes. They introduced a universal system of law where earlier punishment for an offence was meted out on the basis of the caste of the individual committing it.
They also found it expedient to encourage the lower castes to challenge the exalted position of the upper castes in land holdings, education and occupation.
These egalitarian measures got a fillip when India attained Independence.
The Untouchability (Offences) Act was passed on June 1, 1955. While the custom of sati or burning alive the widows of Hindus was made illegal in 1829 in Bengal, it was made more effective by passing the Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act, 1987.
The Backward Classes Movement took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Non-Brahmin Movement 1916 begun by the Justice Party in the then Madras Presidency challenged the monopoly of Brahmins in government jobs and sought to reverse this trend by introducing a system of affirmative action or reservation for non-Brahmins.
The Self-Respect Movement of EV Ramaswamy Naicker, founded in 1925, sought to encourage backward or low castes to develop self-respect by engaging priests from their own castes rather than Brahmins and refrain from chanting Sanskrit shlokas.
In Maharashtra, Jyotibai Phule pioneered an anti-caste movement and promoted the education of women. BR Ambedkar launched a struggle for the rights of the so-called untouchables to enter Hindu temples and draw water from the main water tank of the village.
Politically, these changes were backed by the Left parties in West Bengal and Kerala and the centre-left Congress Party at the Centre and in many of the states.
These liberal attitudes gave rise to a system of reserving seats in educational institutions and government jobs for the lower castes. In 1902, the Maharaja of Kolhapur introduced reservation in favour of non-Brahmins and backward classes in education, while Mysore initiated reservation for backward castes in 1921.
In 1950, the Indian Constitution reserved seats for Scheduled Castes and Tribes. In 1990, the Mandal Commission recommended 27 per cent reservation for OBCs, which was implemented by Prime Minister VP Singh.
In 1992, an attempt was made by the Narasimha Rao government to reserve 10 per cent quota for government jobs for the poor among upper castes but it was struck down by the Supreme Court. It stated: “Economic conditions (are) not a criteria for reservation.”
However, in 2014, the fortunes of the lower and upper castes were reversed. By this time, the BJP’s tally in the Lok Sabha had risen from 2 in 1984 to 282 in 2014, while its National Democratic Alliance won a total of 336 seats.
Thus, there was a dramatic change of power with the 2014 election, ascribed in part to the Rath Yatra led by LK Advani in 1990. The BJP has not looked back since. In the present Lok Sabha, it has 303 out of 543 seats while the Congress has 53 seats. The rise of the BJP has had a phenomenal effect on the fortunes of the upper castes, who are the party’s main supporters.
In earlier decades, one could hear them chafe when an upper-caste candidate failed to secure a job. His loss was blamed squarely on the reservation system by which a lower caste person had been accorded the job which, he believed, rightly belonged to him, had there been a quota for the poor among the upper castes.
But the tide turned in Jan 2019 when the Union Cabinet approved a 10 per cent reservation in government jobs and educational institutions for the Economically Weaker Section (EWS) in the General Category through the 103rd Constitutional Amendment.
It pertains to reservations for people who are not included in the ST/SC/OBC category but belong to the unreserved category, and fulfil the economically weaker section criteria of an annual family income of less than 8 lakh rupees and land ownership of less than five acres.
In effect, it reversed the above-felt ‘injustice’ and is a long-standing demand of the upper castes. In November 2022, the Supreme Court upheld the validity of the 103rd Amendment.
Other areas in which the upper caste demands are being met include the abrogation of Article 370, which revoked the special status accorded to Jammu and Kashmir, and the proposed formulation of a Uniform Civil Code.
With the introduction of economic criteria alone to determine 10 per cent of the reservation, a ‘class’ dimension has been introduced in the reservation system. French economist Thomas Piketty had suggested that India should consider income-based reservations to tackle inequality.The EWS quota aims to cover nearly 190 million people from the unreserved category. The upper castes fervently hope that, having got their foot in the door, the rest will follow, namely the remaining portion of the reservation system will also turn from caste to class
(The writer is Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi).
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