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It’s payback time for Raje

Sometimes, politics is the art of procrastination. When Vasundhara Raje’s government set up the Justice Jas Raj Chopra Committee six months ago to study the Gujjar demand for inclusion in the Scheduled Tribes (ST) list, it was buying sorely needed time. The Gujjar agitation, which had turned violent and spread to some areas outside Rajasthan, began to assume the disquieting shape of a caste war. The government managed to extricate itself from a sticky situation by pe rsuading the Gujjar leadership to call off the protests in return for the Chopra committee examining its demands. With the report submitted, the time Ms Raje had bought is over. The Chief Minister is now faced with the prospect of another intense agitation, which Kirori Singh Bainsala, who spearheaded the one in May-June 2007, has threatened to launch in one week. As expected, the committee stopped short of recommending ST status for Gujjars. It held that the community did not fulfil the existing criteria for such classification. Instead, it suggested a special economic package in underdeveloped areas of the State where Gujjars live. The thrust of the committee’s report is founded on the plausible premise that backwardness is a function not of caste alone but also of region. “The really deprived groups inhabiting … remote and rural settings …stand no chances to immediately gain from such a classification. What they need is an improvement in living conditions.”

The report’s contents are only part of the reason for Gujjar annoyance. In the eyes of Mr. Bainsala and others, the real “deceit” of the Raje government lies in forwarding the report to the Central government without comment. Only New Delhi can take a decision on granting Gujjars ST status — under the Constitution (Scheduled Tribes) Order 1950, any such reclassification can be granted only after due process and determination of such things as cultural distinctiveness and geographical location. During the 2003 Assembly election campaign, Ms Raje and the Bharatiya Janata Party repeatedly promised to concede the ST tag to Gujjars. This recklessly cynical promise, made with an eye on the Gujjar vote, has returned to haunt her in office. With the numerically stronger Meenas, a Scheduled Tribe, violently opposed to granting Gujjars similar status, Ms Raje faces a seemingly intractable problem. It may be recalled that the Gujjar agitation intensified only after the Vajpayee government reclassified Jats en masse as an Other Backward Class. The lesson in all this is that it is dangerous to play the politics of competitive casteism and it is also self-defeating for political parties to make demagogic promises on sensitive issues that they do not intend to keep.

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