This means that one cannot add the experiences of all low-income individuals, Muslims, and women to understand the lived experiences of a low-income Muslim woman. Intersectionality has been practiced across different contexts including India for a long time. The term, however, was coined by the US legal scholar Kimberley Crenshaw in Crenshaw highlighted how Black women face double discrimination due to both their race and gender. In the Indian context, the efforts of social reformists such as Savitribai Phule and Jyotirao Phule, who worked on abolishing simultaneous discriminations based on caste, gender, and even religion, can be called intersectional.
Now let us look at the system of reservations in India from an intersectional viewpoint. In some cases, such as seats for municipal bodies, reservations are also provided to women. Each of these factors affords certain advantages to some people while creating barriers for others, thereby preventing the latter from getting the benefits of reservation.
For example, if caste-based reservation is afforded to a group, it is more likely that men from that caste will be the significant beneficiaries of that reservation as compared to women leaving behind women from that caste. Similarly, if reservation is afforded to women in a certain job, there is a higher chance of a woman from an upper-income group getting that job due to the skills that she could gain because of her economic status, which excludes women from low-income groups.
While the first wave, which climaxed in the s, was driven by relatively wealthy, large OBC groups such as Yadavs, under the BJP, smaller OBC groups have rallied under the saffron umbrella.
The overall effect of both the Mandal phenomenon of the s as well as the rise of BJP under Modi has been to cement the OBCs as a politically critical group.
Share your perspective on this article with a post on ScrollStack, and send it to your followers. Contribute Now. Shoaib Daniyal Ever since it became independent, India has had a significant system of affirmative action based on reserving seats in educational institutions as well as government jobs for Dalit and Adivasi communities that have been historically disadvantaged by caste.
Why is there a cap on reservations? A man walks inside the premises of the Supreme Court. There is a pattern. The Centre told the Lok Sabha that the representation of SC and ST members in central government services is more than the prescribed percentage of reservation. The following three facts need to be appreciated. B R Ambedkar was then in the Executive Council.
Even before, as early as , the non-Brahmin Justice Party government in Madras province passed the Communal Order providing for reservation the one declared unconstitutional by the Court in the Champakam case, Second, during the freedom struggle, Dravidian parties and a number of tribal leaders were demanding separate countries for themselves. Dalits, under the leadership of Ambedkar, demanded a separate electorate.
This reservation is an unfair deal enforced on oppressed communities, who are now made to be defensive even for what little they get. Third, when the Attorney General makes a claim in the Court that political parties use reservation for vote bank politics, the wrong political parties are being called out for using reservation for electoral gains.
The Justice Party and Dravida Kazhagam demanded and claimed reservation benefits before independence, much before the electoral politics based on universal franchise even existed.
Similarly, certain parties have been seeking reservation right from their inception. The Socialist Party under Ram Manohar Lohia resolved to secure 60 per cent reservation for backward and depressed castes as early as Its offshoot, the Janata Party constituted the Mandal Commission, in , to explore reservation for socially and educationally backward classes in government services.
Gandhi, however, announced a fast unto death against the award, and Ambedkar modified his stance and the result was the Poona Pact, which did away with separate electorates, but reserved a specific number of legislative seats for members from the depressed class. What the Poona Pact did was to bring the issue of class and caste into the public domain, and the nationalist movement began to include the issue of untouchability.
Government commissions on backward classes The Poona Pact had more to do with political representation. The depressed classes were still not given the same treatment when it came to education or social affairs, and the practice of untouchability was rampant. The British reserved jobs for upper caste Indians, delegating manual work to the lower castes.
Post Independence, the government began to reserve a specific number of seats in public educational institutes for those belonging to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and included this in the Constitution as well.
These reserved seats came with a relaxation in the minimum marks needed to qualify, as many of the students from these communities were first-generation learners. In , the government set up a Backward Classes Commission under the chairmanship of Kaka Kalelkar. It took almost two decades more for the Union government to take up the case of the backward classes. Meanwhile, state governments had been implementing various caste-based reservation schemes in state-run educational institutes and state government offices.
Known as the Mandal Commission, its task was to identify all backward classes and recommend steps for their advancement. It also recommended reserving seats and jobs for them — over and above the existing reservation for Scheduled Castes and Tribes. The Congress-led governments that followed were reluctant to take up the recommendations of the commission fearing public backlash.
Finally, it was the National Front government led by V P Singh, which decided to implement the recommendations in While some decided to take the matter to court, others took more dramatic routes, including self-immolation. What were the Mandal recommendations?
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