ON January 7th this year, the Supreme Court ruled that reservation of 27 per cent of seats in the all-India quota (AIQ) in medical colleges is not unconstitutional thereby enabling such reservation to be introduced from the 2021-22 academic session. Nearly two weeks later, on January 20, the court spelt out its reasoning in arriving at this ruling. But the very fact that such a ruling was necessitated and that the reasoning behind it is not obvious to all right-thinking people is a testimony to the extent to which entrenched interests in the upper castes will fight to safeguard their privileges and the extent to which governments at the Centre while paying lip service to social justice have acquiesced in this agenda.

First, let’s look at the background to this judgement. The all India quota in graduate and post-graduate medical education was created by a Supreme Court judgement in 1986. The idea behind the AIQ was that there should at least be a section of seats in medical colleges that are not allocated without consideration to the domicile status of applicants. Given the extremely uneven spread of medical colleges, the AIQ would help candidates from states with few colleges access medical education, the court felt. There have been some modifications to the AIQ scheme over the last three and a half decades, but as of now, 15 per cent of MBBS seats and 50 per cent of post-graduate seats in government-owned medical colleges have to be set aside for the AIQ.

Though the AIQ was introduced in 1986, there were no reservations in these seats for the next two decades. It was only from the 2007-08 academic session that reservations for scheduled castes (SC) and scheduled tribes (ST) were introduced. Reservation for OBCs, however, remained unimplemented. With the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Act 2007 coming into effect, 27 per cent reservation was given for OBCs in all the central educational institutions like the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) or Jawaharlal Nehru Institute for Postgraduate Medical Education and Research (JIPMER) from 2009-10. But this reservation was not extended to the AIQ seats. This was despite the medical education division of the health ministry asking for the formulation of a scheme to introduce such reservation.

On June 17, 2020, the National Union of Backward Classes, SCs, STs and minorities (NUBC) filed a petition in the Delhi high court seeking direction to the health ministry to provide for OBC reservation in AIQ seats for UG and PG medical admission. The petition pointed out that thousands of seats were being denied to the OBCs by not implementing the quota. Several petitions were filed in the Madras high court by various political parties in Tamil Nadu seeking implementation of the OBC quota on the seats contributed by Tamil Nadu to the central pool. On July 27, 2020, the Madras high court held that there was no legal impediment to the OBC reservation, but given that the policy varied from state to state, it left it to the centre to decide the modalities for quotas. In March 2021, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhakam (DMK) filed a contempt petition against the centre in the Madras high court for not implementing the court’s July 27, 2020 order on OBC reservation in AIQ. On June 20, 2021, the high court ruled that no medical admissions would be allowed without the OBC quota being implemented.

This is what ultimately led to the introduction of the OBC quota in the AIQ seats. With no reference to the court’s direction, however, on July 19, 2021, the central government said it had taken “a historic and a landmark decision” in response to “a long pending issue” to provide 27 per cent reservation for OBCs and 10 per cent for the economically weaker section (EWS) in AIQ seats. This decision, the government said, would benefit around 1,500 OBC students in MBBS and 2,500 OBC students in post-graduate admissions while 550 from the EWS would gain MBBS seats and 1,000 students would benefit every year in postgraduate medical courses.

The government release also sought to make much of the fact that the total number of undergraduate medical seats in the country had gone up from 54,348 in 2014 to 84,649 in 2020 while the number of post-graduate seats had risen over the same period from 30,191 to 54,275. What the release did not mention was that the bulk of these seats is now in private colleges which are outside the purview of the AIQ. As a result, the AIQ is only about 5,500 MBBS seats and 2,000 post-graduate seats. With successive governments at the centre encouraging the mushrooming of private colleges, the proportion of seats on which reservations are applicable has been steadily declining.

But even a fraction of this declining share of seats going to sections that have historically been deprived and discriminated against on the grounds of caste seems unacceptable to those hell-bent on protecting their privileges. That’s why the government July 2021 notification was challenged in the Supreme Court. The court in its ruling has conclusively nailed the bogey of the merit-versus-quota debate. The relevant parts of the judgement bear repetition. Acknowledging that the Supreme Court in the past had subscribed to the binary of merit and reservation, here is what the court had to say: “An open competitive exam may ensure formal equality where everyone has an equal opportunity to participate. However, widespread inequalities in the availability of and access to educational facilities will result in the deprivation of certain classes of people who would be unable to effectively compete in such a system. Special provisions (like reservation) enable such disadvantaged classes to overcome the barriers they face in effectively competing with forward classes and thus ensuring substantive equality. The privileges that accrue to forward classes are not limited to having access to quality schooling and access to tutorials and coaching centres to prepare for a competitive examination but also includes their social networks and cultural capital (communication skills, accent, books or academic accomplishments) that they inherit from their family. The cultural capital ensures that a child is trained unconsciously by the familial environment to take up higher education or high posts commensurate with their family’s standing. This works to the disadvantage of individuals who are first-generation learners and come from communities whose traditional occupations do not result in the transmission of necessary skills required to perform well in the open examination.”

This reasoning addresses a key question often raised by upper caste people opposed to reservation – admitted that our forefathers discriminated against yours, but why should we be made to pay a price for this today? The reasoning makes it clear that quotas or affirmative action is not about settling accounts for past wrongs. It is about levelling the playing field that has been made grossly unequal because of those historical factors. Quotas are, of course, a limited solution to the problem of inequality, but they help in the interim provided the time is used to address the fundamental factors that perpetuate inequality. Far from doing that, the era of neoliberalism has seen governments in India push aggressively for policies that reduce the capacity of the state to intervene.

The July 2021 notification was also challenged in the Supreme Court on the grounds that the eight lakh rupees per annum threshold fixed by the government for determining the EWS beneficiaries is arbitrary. The court is yet to pronounce on this, but the issue is whether it makes sense to use an income cut-off that is used to define exclusion under the “creamy layer” principle for the OBC quota to determine inclusion in a quota explicitly based on economic criteria alone. In a country with a per capita income of barely a lakh per annum, can a family that earns above the average be called “economically weaker”? The game plan behind such a threshold is quite clear. The 10 per cent quota for the EWS is the Modi government’s attempt to woo the upper castes. Maintaining the same cut-off as is applicable to OBCs (with some differences in the kinds of income included or excluded) effectively signals that he has brought them on par. Thus, while trying to sell the OBC quota in AIQ as a “pro-backward” move (despite the government’s hands actually having been forced by courts), the government is simultaneously seeking to reassure upper castes that their interests are being protected. The duplicity is par for the course for this government