India College, Job Quotas Reignite Old Caste Hatred

During the day, there is tension in the web of narrow lanes and alleys in the 500-year-old walled sector of this city. Gangs of teen-agers throw bricks, rocks and coconuts at helmeted policemen and at rival gang members.

At night, the violence grows, and this city where Mohandas K. Gandhi perfected his doctrine of nonviolence sinks into a hell of hatred and mayhem.

Muslims battle Hindus with stones and knives. Children of the shopkeeper Baniya sub-caste erect barricades on Gandhi Road and set bonfires to taunt police. Members of the powerful Patel family caste pelt the rooftops of families of untouchables, the people Gandhi called harijans, with bricks and with bottles containing battery acid. The harijans, in turn, throw bricks across barbed wire into Patel courtyards.

Finally, police units arrive to quell the violence by firing into the crowds with World War I-vintage Enfield .303 rifles. Lately, however, despite a mounting death count, not even this always works.

“Tempers are so high they don’t stop even if we shoot at them,” said Deepak Swaroop, the deputy commissioner of police. Sitting in a chair on a deserted street dividing the Hindu and Muslim communities, Swaroop defended the police shootings that have accounted for dozens of violent deaths over the last three months.

That violence continued Saturday in Ahmedabad’s Gujarat state. In the village of Surat, Reuters news agency reported, three people were killed in shooting between groups opposing and supporting a controversial policy designed to help disadvantaged groups gain jobs and an education. Seven people were injured as police opened fire on rioting crowds.

“Any . . . communal flare-up has overtones that can be spread all over India,” Swaroop said. “That is why communal flare-ups must be dealt with firmly and immediately.” In 1969, a similar conflagration of hate resulted in more than 800 deaths here.

Almost from the moment of Gandhi’s assassination in 1948, Ahmedabad, a city of more than 2 million, has mocked the memory of its most famous resident--Gandhi founded his famous ashram here in 1917--with rampant religious intolerance, caste discrimination and violence.

Under Strict Curfew

For much of the time since the trouble began, the old walled part of Ahmedabad, where 500,000 people live in crowded conditions, has been under a strict curfew. About 5,000 Indian army troops have been called in by Gujarat Chief Minister Madhavsinh Solanki to relieve the beleaguered police force.

This latest round of violence began with a protest by upper-caste students against a government quota system that reserves admissions in medical and engineering colleges for untouchables, for tribal people and for so-called “backward classes.”

There are four main castes in India, each with hundreds of sub-castes. The castes (Brahman for priests or teachers; Kshatriya for warriors and nobles; Vaisya for farmers and merchants and Sudra for manual laborers) were outlined in ancient Hindu texts.

Historically, the three upper castes--Brahman, Kshatriya and Vaisya--have dominated society. India’s huge Muslim minority lived outside the caste structure but managed to persist because of its own internal unities.

Left outside the whole social structure, however, are some of the most horribly exploited and backward people in all of human history. These were the tribal people--called Adivasis--and the untouchables, most of the latter group Hindus who fell outside the caste system and were therefore not permitted any interaction with caste Hindus.

Nationally these two groups--which the government terms “scheduled castes” and “scheduled tribes”--make up about 20% of the population. Mostly because of moral pressure from Gandhi and the work of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, the main author of the Indian constitution who himself was from an untouchable family, they have been given special status in Indian society and benefit from programs similar to U.S. affirmative action plans.

For example, since Indian independence in 1948, 20% of all government service jobs and of slots in technical universities have been reserved for untouchables and tribal people. Although the most militant of the fundamentalist Hindu organizations opposed these quotas, they have long since been accepted by the majority of Indian society.

After government studies identified other groups of Indians--including members of impoverished sub-castes and Muslim lower classes--as “socially and educationally backward classes,” 10% of medical and engineering school openings were reserved for these groups beginning in 1978. It was just a start toward equal treatment: These groups are said to account for about 35% of the country’s population.

However, this addition of new classes to the university and government job quotas outraged members of the upper castes, who dominated university admissions because of their consistently higher test scores. In 1981, the higher-caste protests resulted in 40 deaths in Ahmedabad.

But the biggest and most violent demonstrations came this year after governments in two states, Madhya Pradesh and here in Gujarat, moved to greatly increase the quotas for backward classes. In the case of Gujarat, the quota was raised from 10% to 28% of the medical and engineering school places.

Version of U.S. Debate

Although clearly more violent and emotional, this conflict is India’s own version of the American debate over reverse discrimination. High-caste student leaders, in fact, regularly refer to the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of Allan Bakke, a white, middle-class applicant who was denied admission to the medical school at UC Davis, even though he had higher grades and test scores than some minority students who were accepted. (On a 5-4 vote, the justices invalidated the medical school’s special admissions program in 1978 but held that universities could give blacks and other minority groups special consideration as long as quotas were not used.)

For the first time, high-caste Indians started complaining of lower-caste prejudice against their people. In March, members of a student group here declared a “death knell” for government admissions policies. They vowed to use “Gandhian” techniques of nonviolence to fight the quotas.

“Why should you treat the citizens of India as guinea pigs for a social experiment?”asked student leader Gaurang V. Shah, an upper-caste medical student.

“We want everyone to take admissions on the basis of ability,” said Rajput Jiram Singh, 21, an upper-caste science student whose grades are not good enough for him to qualify for medical school even though harijans scoring much lower on examinations are admitted.

‘We Have to Fight’

“In the higher castes, there are also poor people,” he complained, speaking at a soccer stadium where arrested students, himself included, were taken by police. “In the higher castes, we have to fight to get into medical school. In the lower castes, they have rich and famous people who are taking advantage of reservations to get in.”

This is a common complaint among upper-caste students who say that university admissions should be determined by financial need and by ability, not caste divisions. Barely concealed beneath their “anti-reservation” movement, however, are some of the old caste hatreds.

“Just as a single polluting chemical factory upsets the ecology of the whole surrounding natural environment,” said student leader Shah, “such unnatural reservations pollute, corrode and ultimately destroy the very social fabric of Indian society.”

The limited-scale protest by medical and engineering students quickly spilled over into other segments of Indian society, kindling widely held prejudices.

In the Red Mill industrial area, site of many of India’s largest textile plants, untouchables live next to middle-caste members of the pervasive Patel family. In the Gajara colony, Patels have three-story homes that loom above shacks where the harijanfamilies live.

On recent nights, a rain of bricks and stones has come down on the shacks from the Patels. The homes of the Patels also bear the scars of stoning. Both sides say the other side is the aggressor. Both the Patels and the shanty dwellers say they were asleep when the stoning barrages began.

Reporters were led to the site by leaders of the Dalit Panthers, an organization that fights for the rights of the oppressed people, called dalits.

The dalits reject the term harijan. Gandhi, who never entirely opposed the concept of castes, chose the name because it means “God’s children,” or children of a mating between a god and a mortal.

According to the Gujarat dalit leader, Romeshchandra Parmar, such a name is an insult to the dalits because it makes them illegitimate offspring.

So far in the conflicts here, the dalits and other untouchable groups have stayed out of the agitation. “They are still kind of holding themselves back,” said Swaroop, the deputy police commissioner. “They have not openly come out to fight.”

They are part of yet another layer in Indian society. They claim to suffer the traditional abuses from the upper castes, yet they watch as other “backward classes” fight for a part of the special education quotas normally reserved for them.

The acrimony here has made some people reflect on what Gandhi would have thought of all this.

“Gandhi-ji (a reverent and affectionate way of referring to Gandhi) said he would be speaking to us from his grave with the greatest voice and the strongest voice,” said Ramlal Parikh, a Gandhi scholar who is vice chancellor of Gujarat Vidyapith University, founded by Gandhi in 1920. But Parikh admitted that many of the teachings of Gandhi--who advocated nonviolence, removal of untouchability and religious equality--have been ignored by modern Indians.

“It is a shame about these communal problems,” said Parikh, sitting at a legless, floor-level desk of the type used by Gandhi and wearing the homespun cotton garments that modern-day India’s spiritual founder favored. On Parikh’s wrist was a strip of white cotton to keep the plastic band of a digital watch from touching his skin.

“This violence is the result of the structural violence we have in the system in India,” he said. “ . . . This is because of our disregard of Gandhi.”