The X profile of the Parashuram Dal in Haryana called for another protest in Palwal, Haryana, on September 7.
On his X handle, Anand Swaroop posted, “Surprisingly, the upper-caste society has awakened—who it will uproot, we can’t say, but reforms in reservations, the abolition of SC/ST quotas, and the rollback of UGC are definitely going to happen.”
A month after student protests wound down in Jantar Mantar, another protest following the same patterns of online mobilisation was staged in Delhi. This time, asking for the dismantling of the reservation system for historically marginalised castes in the country.
While the protest followed the same internet-to-ground organising model as the Cockroach Janta Party, the “Reservation Hatao Andolan” (RHA) had some differences in terms of the demographics of the protesters and political backing. A large section of protesters belonged to the general category. Organisations like the Karni Sena, Ranvir Sena and Rajput caste organisations gave political and mobilisation support.
The Instagram page of the RHA was started in July with Harsh Dubey, a NEET aspirant, as its key face. Right-wing commentators such as YouTuber Ajeet Bharti and Swami Anand Swaroop, founder of the Kali Sena and president of the Shankaracharya Parishad, backed the movement.
The call for protest that started online materialised on August 21. Protestors who gathered at Jantar Mantar raised slogans like ‘Jai Bhavani’ and ‘Jai Shree Ram’. They said they felt betrayed by the Modi government and the BJP, which they had supported so far. The protestors claimed that students who have received very few marks or even negative marks get placed due to reservation, whereas meritorious students are left out. They said that this has led to a decrease in the quality of scholarship produced in the country and that it has affected standards in employment.
“Jab jab Modi darta hai, police ko aage karta hai” (Whenever Modi is scared, he brings out the police) was a slogan they raised, which was common with CJP protests, after the police detained several protesters.
However, following the one-day demonstration, a leadership crisis emerged in the movement.
Harsh Dubey had addressed a press conference with Uttar Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister Brajesh Pathak on August 23 and written a letter seeking an increase in educational opportunities for all students. Others leading the protest said this was not the cause they had been espousing. They said Dubey had betrayed the movement.
Meanwhile, Ajeet Bharti was charged under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. He had reportedly made “caste-based, abusive, humiliating, sexually degrading and potentially inflammatory statements” against Bhim Army chief and Nagina MP Chandrashekhar Azad and the Dalit community. Across social media too, the use of caste-based abuse by protestors went viral. “We have not even let them sit close to us,” one protestor said, in a video posted by the Instagram handle Bahujan Lives Matter. “These are the people who polish our shoes,” another said.
Following the protest and the case against Bharti, the RHA raised demands for a review of the SC/ST Act as well. The RHA also included a demand for a National General Caste Commission following these developments.
Following the meeting with Pathak, Dubey met the Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare, J.P. Nadda, on August 27. After the meeting, both Dubey and Mr. Nadda tweeted about the meeting with Dubey, saying, “An important step had been taken towards fostering conversation around the issue.”
Anuradha Tiwari, who currently handles the RHA social media pages, clapped back to Mr. Nadda’s tweet. “If you think that by catching a kid to mouth your points, you can stop this movement, then you are mistaken,” she said. Many of the organisers of the protest, as well as supporters, turned critical of the BJP following Dubey’s first press conference.
After the meeting with Mr. Nadda, Dubey has said that he was promised a decision on the matter by September 7. He was also told that there will be more meetings on the matter.
Meanwhile, within the ruling National Democratic Alliance, the movement has created conflict. Chirag Paswan, Lok Janshakti Party leader and Union Minister, made statements supporting reservation. Meanwhile, another NDA MP, Jitan Ram Manjhi, called for a creamy layer system within the SC/ST reservation. In response, Mr. Paswan called for the resignation of Mr. Manjhi and his son, Bihar Minister Santosh Kumar Suman.
Demands of the Reservation Hatao Andolan
The RHA protest started with five demands, including a cap on reservations to one generation in a family, reservations in educational institutions and employment to be based on income alone, and a sunset clause for the reservation policy. The page later changed its slogan to reservation reform instead of removal. The revised demands included a bar on discussions of reservation in the private sector, a national commission for the General category and a review of the SC/ST (PoA) act.“Most of the doctors and professionals in developed countries are Indian expats. People migrate because their merit does not get an opportunity here. They are using the knowledge from the Vedas and Shastras there while we are promoting people who score less than them,” Abhishek Agnihotri, co-creator of the movement, told The Hindu. He claims that casteism is a government construct to divide people.
A crisis of education and employment
“While anti-reservation protests have happened before, in the country, we cannot draw a direct parallel between the current one and prior protests. Jobs in the public sector are being increasingly contractualised. The public sector itself is shrinking. At the same time the private sector has always been protected from accountability to the people, so there are larger crises of unemployment and education,” says historian and former professor at the School of Social Sciences at the Mahatma Gandhi University in Kerala, P. Sanal Mohan. “Anti-reservation is a convenient argument that is resurrected at various points of history when popular uprisings challenge power and forms of domination,” he adds.Speaking on the protest, Akhil Bharatiya Vidhyarthi Parishad (ABVP), National President Shravan B. Raj said, “We have seen such discourse on social media, but ABVP does not support these protests. Reservation has been a great tool envisaged in the Constitution for upward mobility of socio-economically marginalised groups. Such demands are heard from people who have only observed limited metropolitan parts of the country,” he said. “When subsidies on cooking gas were limited by the government, many people came up to voluntarily give up their benefits. Such action is always welcome,” he clarified. ABVP is a student organisation affiliated to the RSS.
“Even if the current agitations take anti-BJP forms, it is very superfluous. The BJP has been driving at the removal of reservations in the country. An example of this agenda is the 10% reservation for Economically Weaker Sections that the BJP government implemented,” says scholar Anand Teltumbde.
The logic of reservation is that it is a counterbalance written into the State against social attitudes towards the Scheduled Castes. These communities were isolated so much so that no matter what merit they held, they could not get into the mainstream, he said. “In India, with such levels of homogeneity, there will always exist differentiations. But it is superficial to argue that there must be sub-categorisation.” He explains that any category that is made will give rise to the same complaints of some people getting a greater advantage.
He continues. As for the economic criteria, the Bihar Caste Census showed that the unreserved castes were around 15 percent of the population. “The EWS quota, which is exclusive for the general castes, already gives a 10 percent quota to this 15 per cent population group, so the argument for further economic reservation is just this same group asking for 30 and 50 and even greater percentages,” Mr. Teltumbde says.
Students from SC/ST communities have taken strong objection to the protest and have put forward their own experiences of casteism inside higher education institutions. “I was in 10th standard when discussing the future, when I told my friends I want to write the medical entrance test. My friends said I didn’t have to do any hard work since I would get by on reservations. I’ve had this same conversation far too many times in college as well,” Tanu, a Dalit student from Bhandara district in Maharashtra, said. Although she was a NEET aspirant, the 23-year-old did her master’s in medical chemistry. “People have very wrong ideas about reservation. We have to face all the same exams within the colleges and meet all the same criteria as everyone else,” she said.
