Goodbye, General Category. EWS quota ends savarna’s long-enjoyed casteless identity

Section has brought a major shift in the caste discourse in India. The widely popular term ‘General Category’ is now in the past. With the Supreme Court upholding the validity of the 103rd Constitutional Amendment granting 10 percent reservation to upper castes, every social group in India now falls under the ambit of the quota policy and the politics related to it. Nobody can now say they don’t have a caste. The much-cherished, but hollowed, claim of castelessness enjoyed by the savarnas doesn’t exist anymore.

For long, caste and identity politics was disparagingly used only for the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and the Other Backward Classes. The savarnas enjoyed the invisibility in caste discourse because of the ‘General Category’ tag. Not only would they look down upon the quota beneficiaries, but they also held a moral high ground by propagating a false notion of ‘merit’. According to them, reservation is the opposite of merit. Clearly, they won’t make such claims now.