Reservations: The Brahamastra for Ghar Wapsi

The Upper Caste rants against reservations just hit the crescendo with the recent Jat riots in Haryana, which caused massive destruction of public property. These rants are well justified and grounded in the libertarian thoughts which many of the Right Wingers have directly copied from the west. Sadly like all other borrowed ideology, the imitation is perfect and the libertarian cheerleaders have forgotten to tweak and adapt them according to local conditions. There is a huge momentum built around reservations based on economic inequality and do away with caste based reservations. Given how it is adopted blindly by many of the right wing Hindu intellectuals, it is utmost important to describe the one constitutional provision, which has helped in consolidating Hindus more than anything else. While most constitutional provisions like temple control, RTE etc are stacked against Hindus, only reservations is one tool which is favourable against the onslaught of Abrahamic religions. By the end of this article, we should be able to convince you why all Hindus should bury the hatchet against caste based reservations for the next few decades and use it as an active policy tool to counter missionary through Ghar Wapsi.

Let’s go back to February 2015 to understand the importance of caste based reservations, which Hindu organizations have ignored till now. The bench of Justices Dipak Misra and V Gopala Gowda held that a person shall not be deprived of reservation benefits if he decides to “reconvert” to Hinduism and adopts the caste of his forefathers. The case was brought into the court by an individual whose grandparents had converted to Christianity while he reconverted back to Hinduism and availed reservation benefits. This is what the Supreme Court had to say about this issue:

This decision has now removed the inter-generational gap between conversion and reconversion within the fold of Hinduism to avail reservation benefits, thus opening the way for Hindus to win the demographic battle stacked against them. With this single decision, the Supreme Court has given the Brahmastra(i.e. heavenly weapon) to fight both the menace of aggressive Evangelization efforts in India as well as high muslim fertility. Extending the right of reservation to those who converted generations ago will give the massive carrot which can be dangled in front of Muslims as well as Christians and get them back into the Hindu fold. This single ruling gives immense advantage to Hindu organizations to counter deep pockets of both Wahabi Mullahs as well as Christian missionaries.

As expected, this decision caused massive heartburn among the sickulars of the country, which can be gauged from this article by Shoiab Daniyal in Scroll.in, the very next day after SC decision. Here is the quote from this article:

In principle, that is correct. Mohan Bhagwat has as much as a right to preach Hinduism as Mother Teresa had to preach Christianity or Zakir Naik to preach Islam. The issue here is that there is no level-playing field: the state dangles carrots for conversions to Hinduism and brandishes a stick for conversions out of Hinduism. Given this environment, gharwapsi is not an exercise celebrating freedom of religion; it simply becomes a project in brute majoritarianism ‒ a majoritarianism that seems to have received a formal seal with the latest Supreme Court judgement.

Sad thing is most of the people on the Hindu Right have overlooked the benefits of this one policy in countering the Abrahamic religions. The cry for substituting the current reservation policy from caste to economic status is getting louder each day. Also, there has been active policy push by Christian Organizations to extend quota benefits to dalit Christians and Muslims. While Hindus have more or less ignored this issue, this constitutional disparity has been an important topic for the atrocity literature published in the west. For eg:

The loss of constitutional privileges upon conversion, however, serves as a serious impediment to their freedom to choose their religion.  Additionally, most Dalits are ultimately unable to escape their treatment as “untouchables” regardless of the religion they profess.²⁸⁴ The introduction of anti-conversion legislation in several states has further made religious conversion extremely difficult if not impossible. Finally, Dalits may become targets of forced “reconversions” to Hinduism by sangh parivar groups.

Since, the Church feeds on poverty and deprivation, reservation policy has been one policy tool which has blunted their advances in many parts of the country. Just to connect the dots, one can look at the history of activism by Arvind Kejriwal, who started his career by protesting against reservations under the banner of Youth for Equality. The massive funding he gets from foreign organizations is enough to explain the reasons behind his earlier stand and whether he was executing the agenda on behalf of foreign masters. There is no reason to disregard this connection as a mere figment of imagination.

While people protesting against reservations cannot be faulted completely, but they are actually helping the agenda of the missionaries. The recent Jat and Patel agitation had the undercurrent of either extending reservations to their communities or completely removing it. Seen under the light of missionary propaganda, it is not a mystery why these pro-reservations protests are main-streaming the idea of removal of caste based reservation.

What is the way forward?

1. For the benefit of India and to maintain Hindu demographic superiority, it is essential that Hindus do not fall for the current attempts to remove the caste based reservations in favour of reservations based on income. Keeping the Hindu dominance under reservation is only possible under caste based reservation as changing it to income will completely change the rules of the game.

2. No matter how much the Muslims or Christians cry over discrimination, they cannot avail caste based religion on a massive scale due to theological equality provided under Islam and Christianity. Since the Constitution already acknowledges it, it has made the task simple for Hindus.

3. Hindu Organizations should use it as an active policy tool to get jobs for reconverted Hindus and blunt the monetary advantage of Abrahamics.

4. The quota level can be increased from the current ad-hoc 50% level set by the SC to higher levels so that there is healthy competition within the quota and increase the pool of better candidates. What most people forget that increasing the quota is also another way to dilute quota benefits. Tamil Nadu model can be extended to rest of India to actively squeeze the benefits available to people from other religions, while improving the quality of quota based candidates.

5. This policy should be maintained till India achieves a middle income country status when it would completely blunt the conversion business of evangelists. No surprise, the Church has made so many attempts to keep Indians poor and marginalized. If used well for the next 2-3 decades, this single policy can completely recover the losses made by Dharmic religions in India.

6. Rather than asking for implementing no-conversion as a state policy Hindus need to actively use reservations as the carrot to dangle in front of Muslims or Christians and increase their numbers before it is too late. No conversion will effectively block any reconversion back to Hinduism. Given the massive state benefit through reservations for reconversion, Hindus should not advocate for no-conversion policy.