State, Caste and the Cul-de-Sac of Justice: A Response to Anand Teltumbde

Refusing comforting illusions, Anand Teltumbde forces us to look into the mirror of the Indian Republic. What stares back is not the casteless citizen of Ambedkar’s dreams, but a grotesque caricature: the citizen as a bureaucratised unit of caste.

His recent column, arguing that the constitutional framework "transplanted" caste from feudalism to modernity and rendered its annihilation impossible, is a devastating critique. When one looks at the "casteography" of the Bihar elections – where tickets were distributed with the precision of an actuarial table (35% to Upper Castes by the NDA, 37% to OBCs by the MGB) – it is hard to dispute his central premise: we have not annihilated caste; we have democratised it.

However, while I share Anand’s despair at the ossification of identity, I must dissent regarding the mechanism of this tragedy. To argue that the inclusion of "backward classes" (OBCs) and reservation mechanisms are the primary culprits in preserving caste is to mistake the thermometer for the fever. It risks a dangerous slippage into a logic that, even if unintended, aligns with those wishing to dismantle the only, albeit flawed, shield the oppressed possess.

The trap of the 'hack'

Anand quotes Ambedkar’s lament of being a "hack" to show his disillusionment. However, one must ask: why did Ambedkar feel compelled to become that hack? It was not to preserve caste, but out of a grim recognition of Indian reality. 

He understood that in a society governed by the violent hierarchy of Brahminism, a "casteless" constitution, one ignoring these categories, would have been a death sentence for the marginalised.

The liberal notion of an abstract, casteless individual works only where power is not hereditary. In India, to be "casteless" in law while remaining a Dalit in the village is to be invisible to justice. The constitution’s recognition of caste was a strategic essentialism, a necessary poison administered to counteract a fatal disease.

The political economy of the ‘backward’

Anand’s analysis requires more dialectical layering regarding the OBCs. He suggests their inclusion was merely a political expediency or vote-bank calculation. It was, certainly, but it also reflected a material shift in the agrarian economy.

The "Backward Classes" – the Kammas, Reddys, Yadavs, Kurmis and others – were not just recipients of a government label. Over the last seven decades, through the Green Revolution and the decline of old Brahmin-landlordism, they emerged as the provincial propertied class. They control the land, the contracts and the local capital. Their assertion of "backwardness" is indeed ironic, as they are often the perpetrators of violence against Dalits (as seen in Karamchedu, Tsunduru, Kilvenmani and other atrocities).

But the constitution did not create this power; it registered it. If the state had not created the "OBC" category, would the Yadavs of Bihar or the Reddys of Telangana have ceased organising as a caste? Unlikely. They would have organised nonetheless, perhaps more violently, to secure their dominance. 

The reservation system became the safety valve, integrating a volatile agrarian elite into the parliamentary system.

The double-edged sword of ‘social justice’

Anand is correct that ‘social justice’ has been reduced to a bureaucratic quota. The radical transformative agenda – land reform, the annihilation of priestly ideology, the democratisation of labour – has been abandoned.

However, we must be wary of arguing that legal recognition causes social persistence. The recent move to grant Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) reservation to the Upper Castes, which Anand rightly highlights, proves that the Upper Castes never lost their consciousness. 

They merely hid it behind the veil of "merit" until that veil could no longer guarantee their monopoly. Now that their hegemony is challenged, they too demand to be counted.

This proves that caste does not survive because the constitution names it; it survives because it remains the most efficient vehicle for accumulating power and resources in a scarce economy like India.

The way out of the cul-de-sac

The tragedy is not that we used caste to fight caste. The tragedy is that we stopped there.

We assumed representation would lead to transformation. We assumed putting a Dalit or an OBC in the magistrate’s chair would democratise the magistracy. Instead, as the Bihar data shows, the magistracy and the legislature simply absorbed the logic of caste. The "ticket distribution" charts are not democracy; they are a brokering of feudal power-sharing agreements in a modern currency.

To accept Anand’s conclusion that "annihilation is made impossible" is to accept a determinism we cannot afford. The solution is not to strip the constitution of its protective discrimination clauses, leaving the Dalit and Adivasi at the mercy of a "meritocratic" market that is nothing but caste privilege in disguise.

The solution is to recognise that the constitution has done all it can. It has reached its limit. The annihilation of caste will not come from a gazette notification or a Supreme Court judgment. It will come only when we move the battle from the question of reservation (who gets the job) to the question of production (who owns the land, who controls the capital, and why is labour dignified only when divorced from the hands that toil).

Anand Teltumbde sounded the alarm that the medicine has become addictive. He is right. But let us not stop taking the medicine only to die of the infection. Let us, instead, find the courage to perform the surgery we abandoned in 1950.

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