Abstract
With the passing away of P.S. Krishnan in November last year at the age of 87, the country has lost its most pre-eminent crusader for the rights of the wretched, the oppressed, the exploited and the despised millions of India. Seventy years of his relentless fight against caste, considered the longest lasting system of human debasement, suddenly came to an end.
The quest for social justice was the golden thread that linked Krishnan’s life from end to end, starting as a 10-year-old boy till he breathed his last at the age of 87. The obsession that took possession of Krishnan when he was a youngster kept driving him all his life. It was a personal commitment to take on the malevolent core of Indian society, caste, which Krishnan called, ‘India’s civilisational fault-line.’ The cause and the crusader became indistinguishable, the triumphs and also the setbacks of the cause marking milestones in the crusader’s life.
Throughout his life, from his student days in his native Kerala, later as a member of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) in the Andhra Pradesh cadre, and then in various positions, including as secretary to the Government of India, and later during his post-retirement phase he was passionately and with single-minded devotion working for the advancement and empowerment of the Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST) and Socially and Educationally Backward Classes (SEdBC), including religious minorities.
The bureaucrat in him sought to mould governance and public administration into a proactive instrument of reaching out to deprived communities. Challenging India’s Himalayan inequities and inhumanities was not new. What was rare was this challenge emerging and functioning from within the system, from the inner core of the steel frame. Functioning from the top of the bureaucracy’s pyramid, Krishnan’s life and work encompassed ‘the rarest of the rare’ among Indian bureaucrats.
P. S. Krishnan’s crusading work was carried out in the land of many oppressions that India was in his younger days and still, largely and essentially, is. His vision derived, Krishnan used to say, from a unique ideology, rather a synthesis of ideologies of Ambedkar, Gandhi, Marx, Narayana Guru, Vivekananda and Periyar. Fired by such a synthesis and equipped with an encyclopaedic knowledge of India’s thousands of castes and their regional variations, he evolved strategies based on unassailable constitutional and legal premises, crafting them with intricate details. He used to say that he entered the civil service already armed with an uncompromising commitment to fight the deeply entrenched caste system and its attendant malaise of untouchability. He believed that, ‘there must be an alignment between personal ethic and professional ethic with social ethic, constitutional ethic and humanistic ethic. This will impart harmony to one’s personality.’ As a word of advice to members of the senior bureaucracy to which he belonged, he said,
I believe that those in the IAS and other higher services must consider the value of this approach to life and work. This will not only make for individual peace and harmony within oneself but also enhance the prestige of the IAS and other higher services by becoming socially and ethically relevant in the public perception and esteem.
As a young officer in Andhra Pradesh, he started, as early as 1957 the practice of officially camping in SC bastis, tribal villages and hamlets of the labouring Backward Classes (BC), thereby not only infusing confidence and self-esteem in them but also infuriating the incredulous upper caste classes. The stories of Krishnan’s early days in the government make for fascinating reading. He confronted head-on the monster of caste oppression and abysmal poverty in villages. The entry of this sub-collector and later collector, the visible representative of the mighty state, had an electrifying effect on those benighted villages. He conducted Jamabandhi (a record of rights) there, and stayed and ate food with the people living in the bastis. Those were the days when the term dalit was not even known; the consciousness and resistance that the word meant would emerge much later. We can only imagine the shockwaves these actions would have sent through the upper caste communities, who now were forced to step into the despised, obnoxious streets of the lowly to meet the collector to transact their business. Naturally, he often faced antagonism, hostility and persecution from powerful sections of village society.
However, it was not only the upper castes alone who were seething with fury; the imperious officialdom, the mighty steel frame, did not know how to deal with this young upstart who was striking at the very root of its power. He had to face, inevitably, opposition and retribution from his superiors. He was pulled up by the higher authorities for his totally unconventional ways of governance and for upsetting the apple cart. However to their dismay, he turned the punishment posts he was given into launching pads from where to continue his work. An eloquent comment bears testimony to how his superiors viewed him as a scourge and a blot on the system. A worthy superior’s remarks in Krishnan’s Confidential Report (CR) early in his career read as follows: ‘Undue partiality to depressed classes, strident advocacy of inter-caste marriages, uses his knowledge of Sanskrit to debunk religion, trusts the words of the villagers rather than village officers, acts in a manner that helps subversive elements.’
Each word of this CR was actually a celebration of Krishnan’s indomitable spirit and his unflinching dedication to his war for justice. Not bothering to reply to the adverse remarks, he went on, for instance, to advocate not ‘inter-caste’ marriages, but ‘anti-caste’ marriages. He also expressed the view that there should be some legislation prohibiting marriages within the same caste. ‘I expounded the concept of “social incest”, in addition to the concept of biological incest,’ he said.
The list of his achievements is long, but a few will suffice to illustrate his monumental contributions. During his early years in Andhra Pradesh, he pioneered massive drives for the distribution of agricultural lands and house sites to the landless and homeless, which are milestones in the governance of Andhra Pradesh. While holding various positions, mainly as secretary, Government of India, he conceived and brought to fruition many landmark laws for empowering the SCs, STs, OBCs and minorities. His was the heart, brain and hands behind a number of progressive constitutional and legislative enactments like the Constitution (65th) Amendment Act, 1990, that vested constitutional status in the National Commission for SCs and STs; he was also instrumental in passing legislation that provided SC status to dalit Buddhists, the SC and ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 and later the SC and ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Amendment Act, 2015 and the Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, 1993, and its amended version, the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013. It was his tireless efforts that pulled out the B.P Mandal Commission Report from cold storage. It was Krishnan as secretary, Ministry of Welfare who persuaded Prime Minister V.P. Singh to accord the long-denied recognition to the SEdBCs (Socially and Educationally Backward Classes) at the national level by providing 27 per cent reservation for them.
In addition to such landmark legislations, he also formulated many schemes for the betterment of the marginalised like the Special Component Plan (SCP) for SCs in 1978, the Special Central Assistance to the States’ SCPs and Central Assistance to States for their SC Development Corporations, and many other similar schemes.
Each of the measures he helped to bring about were inevitably challenged in the courts. But with his remarkable acumen, he drafted elaborate arguments to face the judicial process which led to laws being placed on unassailable legal foundations. Indeed, in 2006, the Government of India took his help, appointing him advisor to guide the defence of its legislation in the Supreme Court—legislation that provided the reservation for SCs, STs and SEdBCs in admission to educational institutions, which resulted in the upholding of its Constitutional validity in 2008. The Government of Andhra Pradesh also took his help as advisor in 2007 to identify the SEdBCs of Muslims. On the basis of his encyclopaedic analysis, the government enacted legislation that provided them 4 per cent reservation; he again guided the defence of this legislation successfully in the High Court and later in the Supreme Court.
After retiring from the government in 1990, he was appointed Member of the National Commission for SCs and STs in 1991–1992, Member of the Expert Committee on Backward Classes in 1993 and Member-Secretary of the National Commission for Backward Classes, 1993–2000. In that capacity, he operationalised reservation for SEdBCs and prepared Central (Common) Lists of SEdBCs, ensuring that the genuinely backward communities that had been left out were brought into the central list and the communities that were not socially backward were scrupulously kept out.
He was closely associated with a number of NGOs working for the rights of SCs, STs and SEdBCs, including Muslims and other minority BCs. He was the chairperson, and a member of many working groups, Planning Commission Steering Committees and government committees that focussed on these communities.
What was the ideological approach and its strategic implications that would ultimately bring about the liberation of the oppressed in India? Krishnan’s firm faith was that the growth and progress of the totality of India was only possible with the liberation and equality attained by the oppressed sections of society. The huge gap between socially advanced castes, on the one hand and the SCs, STs and SEdBCs, on the other in every parameter of development, such as education, health, asset ownership and share in all levels of employment, including in the highest judiciary, needed to be fully and comprehensively bridged. Only then could India claim to be a civilised country.
It was only through the oppressed sections forging solidarity among themselves that the historic task could be achieved. But then who were the oppressed sections in India? Was this categorisation based on class or caste as a basic unit of Indian society? Krishnan advocated a unified caste–class approach. This short piece has no space for the manifold processes of multi-dimensional design that Krishnan laid out.
The basic contradiction in rural India today is between the dominant landed BCs and landless dalits, who constitute the main labour force. However, a large section of OBCs, particularly the innumerable service and artisanal castes, are also landless, and so there is no contradiction between these castes and dalits. The two sections, the non-dominant, landless backward castes and the dalits, coming together, transcending caste barriers, would forge the unity of the oppressed and lead to the liberation of the entire society. Their united struggle and distribution of land to all the landless is the key to the much needed transcendence and historic transformation of Indian society. The disempowerment of SCs is comprehensive and multi-sectoral. Conversely, measures for their empowerment also have to be comprehensive and multi-sectoral. Most important are measures of economic liberation and educational equalisation at all levels of education.
This tireless crusader was also the author of many books and documents; he wrote papers on the subject of social justice, some published and others in the pipeline. Till he breathed his last, he was feverishly working with many state governments, pushing for comprehensive legislative and programmatic/schematic measures required for the holistic advancement of SCs, STs and SEdBCs, especially the most and extremely backward castes of the SEdBCs, to enable them to reach the level of equality with socially advanced castes.
Krishnan had drawn up elaborate road maps for each of the social categories in order to achieve the constitutionally mandated goal of social equality. These covered a wide range of unfinished tasks, starting with constitutional amendments, amendments to existing legislations, new legislations, schemes and programmes, including massive programmes for skill development and housing. Among these, measures for specially vulnerable groups needed to be prioritised like the rehabilitation and resettlement of manual scavengers, nomadic, semi-nomadic and vimukta jatis. These were not to be taken as concessions, but as an atonement for the Himalayan sins of a caste-based society. As was his wont, Krishnan had drawn up all these measures in an elaborate, detailed blueprint ready to be implemented.
So what is the task that Krishnan, the legendary crusader, the indefatigable social activist leaves behind for us? To put it in his own words,
I secured certain results important to dalits and other deprived classes, issues in respect of which my efforts could not secure final results and which, therefore, remain to be pursued, the trials and tribulations and persecutions that I have encountered in this journey and how I faced them, will be of help and guidance to younger generations in Government as well as in other professions.
For all those who believe in justice, in human rights, in the ideals of the Indian Constitution, and in the social and economic progress of all Indians, Krishnan’s passing is an irreparable loss. His legacy should inspire us to work towards the annihilation of caste and to build an equitable world, with justice and human rights for all.