The Politics of the Karnataka Reservation Bill

Critique of the Bill must be grounded in India's exploding jobs crisis and regional socio-economic disparities

Published in The Hindu

The Karnataka Reservation bill has been almost universally panned and generated so much controversy that the Government was forced to retreat and issue assurances. The Bill mandates 100 per cent reservation for "local candidates" in the private sector for Group C and D posts and 50 per cent and 70 percent in management categories and non-management categories respectively. The Bill, as currently drafted, may be too heavy-handed and some provisions may need a rethink. However, a deeper conversation about the underlying issues - India's exploding jobs crisis and regional socio-economic disparities - is required before knee-jerk dismissal.

India has the distinction of being the fastest growing large economy in the world and also has the largest youth population. This would be a happy circumstance if our growth model created large numbers of jobs to productively employ our youth. Instead, our high-end services-led growth model has delinked growth and employment. This situation has been long in the making: globalisation, financialisation, and technological advances have allowed capital and a small set of highly skilled individuals to reap extraordinary benefits while the working class globally has seen an erosion in their ability to earn.

The political repercussions of this trend are reverberating around the world. In developed countries, it manifests, inter alia, as a backlash against immigration - in India, it's showing up in part as regionalism and reaction against inter-state migration. While an argument for immigration has been made in the developed world by liberal parties, it has largely been in utilitarian terms for the host country - addressing labour shortage for unpleasant jobs, offsetting aging populations etc.

While these global trends are significant, the situation in India is both different and more complicated. The Constitution guarantees freedom of movement and the right to work anywhere in India and domicile requirements of this nature seem to evoke parochialism and militate against national unity. At the same time, the impetus for local reservations is an attempt by the state political leadership to be responsive to its own electorate. This tension between local aspirations and national unity is increasingly a recurring theme in Indian politics, visible in questions of devolution of funds, delimitation, and state domicile requirements.

At the crux of this debate is the question of federalism and political accountability. The politics of such initiatives come not from reservation for high-skill positions - but instead mass unskilled jobs. It's notable that all local reservation initiatives adopt a graded scale with near universal reservation for unskilled jobs and lower levels at higher skill tiers. This raises two critical questions: what impels large-scale migration for unskilled jobs that could easily be done locally; and why isn’t the industry opposition to local reservation limited to high-skill jobs indicating thus a preference for migrant workers for unskilled jobs even when locals are willing and able.

The answer to the first question is evident: large-scale unskilled migration is not migration by choice but distress migration, resulting from some state governments' inability to adequately develop their regions. We can and should apply a national unity and Constitutional lens to citizen migration but it would be intellectually dishonest if it is done to sidestep the question of political accountability for chronic lack of development.

The response to the second question is equally revealing. Industries often prefer migrant workers for unskilled jobs because they are less likely to unionize and thus can be more easily exploited. This dynamic not only takes away jobs from local workers but also depresses local wages.

There's no question that all states benefit economically and culturally from being part of the larger Indian union and thus have responsibility to the entirety of the country and its people. However, the issue at hand is too serious for simplistic rhetoric, political expediency or mere outrage. Instead, the way forward requires a more expansive exercise: first, there must be a real national debate - involving our political class, corporate sector, civil society - on urgently addressing India's job crisis. The long-term response cannot be data chicanery, unemployment allowances, or knee-jerk regionalism. Nationally, it is evident that the current skilling and PLI interventions are inadequate to the challenge at hand. Similarly, at the state level, the fact that political responsiveness shows up in domicile quotas is indicative of anxiety about adequately growing the employment pie. Second, we must foreground political accountability for large-scale distress migration and endemic lack of development in some states. This political accountability must extend to both state and national leadership. Third, questions of federalism and national unity need both an institutional response and greater political maturity. At a minimum, the atrophied National Development Council (NDC) needs to be resurrected. Finally, the corporate sector must be held to account for working standards for unskilled labour instead of allowing it to arbitrage worker precarity for its own profit.

The Karnataka Reservation Bill is a symptom of a much larger problem. While the Bill can be kept in abeyance or rewritten, the underlying issues need to be at the forefront of our discourse and politics. Our response to this challenge will shape the future of India's economic growth, social cohesion, and political stability.