In a tremendous display of mean-mindedness, Madhya Pradesh’s Cooperatives Minister Gopal Bhargava announced that Brahmins didn’t want reservations, and that “the beggars who seek it” were welcome to it. He stuck by his statement even after a furious Congress demanded his withdrawal, maintaining that such demands by castes and sub-castes would never end, and were not in the nation’s interest. Bhargava voiced the worst instincts of the bitter reservations battle that has haunted India for years, as caste hostilities faced off over India’s “compensatory discrimination” policy. But voices like his increasingly sound like atavistic battle-cries at a time when the reservations discourse is more a matter of sorting out policy details rather than questioning any bedrock principles.

And on the flip side, Gurjjar leaders who are agitating for the ST stamp are also playing the same curdled politics. As they try to coerce unlawful concessions out of the government, they are doing a great disfavour to the Indian model of affirmative action, evolved over decades of fine-tuning. Successive governments and the Supreme Court have attempted to keep the official categories changeable, and responsive to new kinds of social mobility. The court’s directive to exclude the “creamy layer” aims to skim off the most affluent among backward castes, ensuring that this small subset does not hijack the benefits of reservation. The current reservation policy tries to use a double lens for evaluating disadvantage, both economic and social. Now that public sector jobs are no longer the holy grail, the rancour around reservations is less widespread, and institutes of higher education have also adopted a nuanced method of ramping up reservations as they expand overall capacity.

The enormous achievements of our reservations policy are undeniable, as it opened up possibilities for people who would never have otherwise broken into the social brackets they now have, or have access to the job and schooling now available to them. The flaws inherent in such a complex policy cannot be minimised either. But Gopal Bhargava’s deeply offensive remarks invoke the caste wars of a time decisively past.

editor@expressindia.com