Welcome to The India Fix by Shoaib Daniyal. A newsletter on Indian politics.As always, if you’ve been sent this newsletter and like it, to get it in your inbox every week, sign up here (click on “follow”).Caste-based reservations are a major component of what ​​political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot calls “India’s silent revolution”: the fact that Indian democracy has made space for lower castes after millennia of oppression.Given the scale of change they promise, it is hardly surprising that quotas for members of the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes have always been bitterly contested. The latest iteration of this dispute is a group called the Reservation Hatao Andolan or Movement to Remove Reservations. In August, its followers held protests in Delhi’s Jantar Mantar protest site.Some critics claim that the group was a tactical way to undercut the youth solidarity that had led to the removal of a Union minister only weeks before. Indeed, while the earlier so-called cockroach protests identified the government as being responsible for the lack of employment, the Reservation Hatao Andolan tried to shift the focus to quotas. The protesters claimed that upper castes were not getting jobs since the pie for them had shrunk.Cat got the creamAs an upper-caste interest group, the Reservation Hatao Andolan’s demands were designed to increase employment opportunities for the general category, as India’s unreserved seats are called. They want quotas kept away from private-sector jobs as well as reservations to be based on economic rather than caste criteria.The pressure group also called for the exclusion of the “creamy layer” when it came to Dalit and Adivasi quotas. The creamy layer – an incredible Indianism – refers to the elite within a caste bloc. The Reservation Hatao Andolan also wants to debar families from being able to apply for reserved positions if a member has availed of quotas previously.This emphasis on the the creamy layer is odd since the policy has no effect on upper caste quotas at all. It does not expand the general category: the number of seats available to them remains exactly the same. The Reservation Hatao Andolan is an unabashed upper-caste pressure group, so why does it care how caste quotas are organised internally?The logic of reservationsTo understand why the Reservation Hatao Andolan is so worked up about the creamy layer, we would first have to understand why India has caste-based reservations in the first place.Contrary to perception, India’s caste-based quotas are not a poverty alleviation programme. India has many of those, given that they are critical to a poor country. Caste-based quotas, however, only apply to a small pool of government jobs in India. Most Indians never interact with caste-based quotas – an absurd design were it to be some sort of welfare scheme.Most people batting for creamy-layer exclusion will point to the fact that many people are excluded from availing of quotas – and claim that this policy would widen the net. But of course, barring the creamy layer does not really solve that, since the number of jobs under quotas are so small, they will always exclude the vast majority of Indians.If not poverty-eradication then what is the point of reservations? The aim is simple: to broaden the representation of Indians from marginal groups in critical areas such as higher education and the bureaucracy. Given that upper castes have maintained a near-total domination of these spaces, quotas allow representatives from other castes to gain a toehold.The logic is that these representatives will frame policy and shape society in a way that benefits far more Indians than the earlier upper-caste-dominated system.In effect, the very aim of reservations is to build new elites – just that these elites would now come from hitherto marginalised groups.Who gets upward mobility?It is this logic that that creamy layer exclusion seeks to undercut. Building a socially and economically elite class takes generations. Talk to rich upper castes around you and you will find signs of privilege going back generations. Someone’s great-great grandfather was a collector under the Raj. A great grandmother who was a graduate at a time when it was rare for an Indian woman to go to school at all. Tales of zamindars and boxwallahs abound among upper castes who occupy elite positions in Indian society today.This is borne out by research. In 2022, economists Sam Asher, Paul Novosad and Charlie Rafkin published a paper that used the 2012 India Human Development Survey and the 2012 Socioeconomic and Caste Census to show that upward mobility in India is poor by global standards. Their research makes it clear that kvetching about upper castes being left behind has little empirical data behind it.“Higher caste groups have experienced constant and high upward mobility over time, a result that contradicts a popular notion that it is increasingly difficult for higher-caste Hindus to get ahead,” the paper states quite bluntly.Creamy layer exclusion would stop this process of elite formation for backward castes, Dalits and Adivasis. The upper castes had the freedom to build on generations of eliteness to create the present social and economic capital they enjoy. But the creamy layer exclusion would pull the ladder up for other castes trying to do the same.Undercutting the projectAnd remember, quotas are all about building representation. Without elites to represent diverse caste interests in key positions in the state, this project would have failed.It was the Supreme Court that introduced in the concept of the “creamy layer” in a judgement in 1992 that related to Other Backward Class quotas. This served to significantly dilute the impact of OBC reservations. Currently, the court is also hearing a plea to apply the filter to Dalit and Adivasi quotas.The fact that the Reservation Hatao Andolan is adopting this as a demand, even though it does not affect general category numbers, is thus not a paradox at all. It understands well how powerful a weapon creamy layer exclusion could be to weaken the small but vocal non-upper caste elites that reservations have created thus far.