Reservation by Religion vs Reservation by Constitution

When we talk about reservation, most of the anger comes towards reservation by constitution. This is the 21% reservation for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes in educational institutions and government jobs. The other reservation which is the reservation by religion is never called out. The reservation I am referring to is reservation by caste, not post-constitution but pre-constitution, the one that we lived with since inception of the universe according to mythology. If we date it according to what we know when Vedas were written, it will be some 3000 years ago. Hinduism is a religion based on inequality and 100% reservation based on caste. Son of priest can become a priest and son of a ruler can become a ruler. This is pure 100% reservation of education and profession by caste. 

Thanks to British who opened up schools and universities that other castes who could afford education could finally get it. Assuming people end up having kids by the time they are 25, the 100% reservation by caste sanctioned by religion lasted some 120 generations. This makes the religiously reserved castes the biggest beneficiaries of reservation in the whole of known human history.  The constitutional scheduled castes by comparison are just 3 generations old and that too taking just the 21%.  Am I missing something here? 

The good part is that some of people from the religious reserved castes after 120 generations of 100% reservation are against 21% reservation for those people who were denied the education and opportunity to grow for 120 generations because now they believe in equality of opportunity for everyone. This is wonderful news! Finally we are past the inequality advocated by Hinduism and questioning the inequality created by constitution inspite of promising us equality. This is a conversation worth having. 

Let’s try to deconstruct the equality of opportunity. India abolished inheritance tax in 1985. Before that India had 85% inheritance tax through constitution. Perhaps the idea was to bring about social equality through equality in opportunity by levelling the economic playground. If the unit of nation is an individual, his tax is individual, his vote is individual, his crimes are individual,  then it seems appropriate to assume that his accumulated wealth is individual too. Why should children get the benefits of work done by their parents? In short, inheritance tax makes sense. Alternatively, the unit of nation is actually a family and not an individual. In which case it makes sense for the family to appropriate all the wealth i.e no inheritance tax. (As a side note, this will be an excellent way to discourage corruption if family inherited property as well as crimes and their punishments). If the unit of nation is a family, then the unit of reservation should be family as well.  This fits nicely with the idea of constitutional reservation. Reservation is bad when looked at from the equality of opportunity of an individual, but it is fair given the economic reality of family as unit of nation and opportunity. The idea of having equality of opportunity at individual level but conservation of property at family level is not equality, it is simply an abuse of notion of equality. We are comparing apples with grapes here. If we believe in meritocracy, we have to argue not only for abolition of reservation but also bring around high inheritance tax. If we believe in right to inheritance, we need to accept the economic consequences of it and support reservation. Without this balance, we are simply asking formula one cars and cyclists to compete on the same track in the name of equality. This is pretty far from equality of opportunity, on the contrary,  it is a mockery of meritocracy. What we are comparing in this example is not merit, what we are comparing is access to resources. 

Apologies for being a “castehole”: explaining world through caste, but I feel caste is better understood through economics and not religion. It is just the economics of caste that make it appear as a construct having some predictive value, but the actual economics is never discussed or debated. Simply abolishing reservation will not bring equality, it will just widen the economic gap and the explanation will be caste. Not abolishing the reservation creates the feeling of undue privilege, hatred and still nurtures the thinking on caste lines. There is no version of this in which caste doesn't win.  We either have religion reserved castes or constitutional reserved castes, but reserved never the less. For some time now, we also have some overlap where religion reserved castes are also constitutional reserved castes. Looks like the idea that unites us is also the same idea that divides us: reservation. 

Slavery world over has always been explained through laziness of slaves and their lower moral character. Colonialism was explained as white mans burden to librate the natives. Explanations explain and hide. Words reveal and conceal. Language unites and divides.  If there was no caste or at least no reservation by caste pre-constitution we would never have had the need for reservation by caste post-constitution. We are all biological neural networks, we do as we are trained, except we have the power to intercept our learned responses with reasoned responses. We can learn from each other, converse and correct our biases. It takes time and as Montesquieu said “Success in majority of circumstances depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed”. Sometimes generations. Caste is both social and economic phenomena and we need to fix at least one side to fix the other side.