Confronting Social Exclusion: a Critical Review of the CREST Experience D

Caste Quotas and Formal Inclusion x 251 9 d Confronting Social Exclusion: A Critical Review of the CREST Experience D. D. Nampoothiri* While the gates of higher education in Kerala were significantly opened for candidates hailing from scheduled communities from 1950s onwards, the affirmative processes have yielded, at best, only partial results till date. This was, by and large, due to the relative lack of social, economic, cultural, and symbolic capital that these historically excluded communities had always to contend with, even while progressive social reform and class movements had begun to address their overall conditions of civic disabilities during the 1930s onwards. In other words, positive discrimination such as reservation only scratched the surface and benefited merely a tiny section in obtaining access to high-end jobs in public/private sectors. While admission to institutions of higher education in Kerala was somewhat assured through reservation, successful completion, for instance, of the professional courses within the stipulated time was, it appears, a rare occurrence. The ensuing study attempts to delineate the various issues and processes that have, over the post- independence decades, tried to reproduce the deep social exclusion of these communities especially in the spheres of professional education in the state. The paper describes Kerala’s social and educational development with special reference to Dalit and Adivasi communities, provides a critical overview of the professional higher education scenario in the state, and finally, describes the Centre for Research and Education for Social Transformation (CREST), experience in bridging the gap. The first section deals with the unique historical and social development of Kerala which led to 252 x D. D. Nampoothiri progressive citizenship as well as empowerment of the under classes cutting across caste and religion. At the same time, the arrival of a radical/vibrant public sphere with the ushering in of universal literacy/access to schooling/spread of print media/healthcare for all in the state seems to have unleashed several inclusive policies and trends. The second section provides a detailed analysis of how casteist educational gaps have indeed been deepened by the contradictions of development particularly during the last decade. Vasavi, in her wide-ranging and incisive study, has outlined what it means to be a Dalit in contemporary India. She shows how, in crucial ways, caste indignities or its violence and inequities mark individuals and groups of scheduled communities, leaving them with subjected personhoods. If groups, communities and societies play a significant role in defining the personhoods of individuals, then furthering this, by subjected personhoods I refer to personalities and orientations in which there is an erosion of agency, and the sense of self-worth of individuals or groups is not individually defined or directed but is marked by the violence of persistent and pervasive humiliation, deprivation and indignities (Vasavi 2004). While the section attempts to position today’s Dalit student/ aspirant for Kerala’s professional courses, the study carried out by CREST tends to reveal the subjected personhoods of these students who are confronted with caste indignities, albeit of a covert and subtle kind, that inform the academic and extra-curricular processes in the engineering colleges of the state today. This may, however, be contrasted with the brutally frontal humiliation and shaming that the Dalit students of Hyderabad Central University experienced which was poignantly summed up in the following words: the sense of self-worth is the first casualty of university life. Dalit students are embittered by the way they are perpetually on probation at a university that at best suffers their presence. They are ignored in the classroom, invisible in the curriculum. Try as they might, their grades never improve. They are regarded as ‘unteachable’. They are watched while they eat, mocked at by teachers and students, suspected for their corruption, hounded for their misuse of hostel rooms for guests from the village, chastised for their inability to pay bills on time, condemned for their violence (Anveshi Report 2002: 101). Confronting Social Exclusion x 253 The final section deals with a brief albeit critical appraisal of CREST’s interventions, on behalf of students hailing from scheduled communities, particularly through its five months’ flagship programme titled Post Graduate Certificate Course for Professional Development (PGCCPD) as well as the short-duration orientation programmes for BTech entry students, that have attempted to obviate, compensate and supplement the deficits in their social, cultural and learning skills. No engineering/technology institution in India, to the best of my knowledge, presently offers any knowledge/ skill-enhancing programme to its disadvantaged students before she actually starts attending the BTech/MTech courses, except the initial probational year’s course conducted at Indian Institution of Technology (IITs). All the same, most IITs still do not provide any orientation/skill enhancement programme to its Scheduled Caste/ Scheduled Tribe (SC/ST) BTech entry students in the campus. However, many developed countries have been conducting such programmes to benefit the socially disadvantaged candidates in their universities so that their entry-level knowledge, motivation and skill-sets are enhanced to a reasonable extent to match with those of their peers. While CREST’s work has to be viewed in this wider context, it is also evident that these programmes fine-tuned at CREST need further refining at pedagogical and substantive levels. In other words, CREST programmes should not be envisaged as a panacea for addressing the entrenched caste indignities that have survived even in Kerala despite the state’s singular achievements in evolving a mass democratic consciousness. Section I Scheduled Communities and Kerala’s Educational Departures: A Review It is a truism to state that Kerala’s distinctive educational departures are offshoots of its tryst with democratisation. The coming of age of the mass democratisation was a protracted journey in the face of tenacious negotiations/resistance/ consensus from among both dominant and subaltern social forces, with a constellation of movement initiatives that emerged from within and outside the region, culminating in the creation of modern state of Kerala (Raman 2010: 2). 254 x D. D. Nampoothiri While the Brahmanical castes dominated the democratisation in most other states in India, Kerala’s renaissance was launched by the subaltern castes. The populous backward caste of Ezhavas, along with Christian and Muslim communities, who together formed almost two-thirds of the population asserted their rights for access to education, citizenship, jobs and, socio-economic mobility through a host of varied mobilisations covering the whole range from community-based collective actions to nationalist/communist movements. While Dalit community also participated in these mobilisations, theirs was a lesser presence due to the fact that they had been historically the most impoverished, ostracised and oppressed community in the region. More significantly, they were mostly concentrated in the paddy-cultivation areas where they were directly under the sway of traditional upper caste domination. An Overview of Transformations in Caste/Class Relations in Post-Independence Kerala The success achieved in Kerala’s early efforts towards equity and access to quality education is embedded in the wider transformations in social, political, economic, and cultural processes that became accentuated with the arrival of the first-ever Left govern- ment soon after the formation of the unified Kerala state in 1956. Working class and peasant movements especially since 1947 had a tremendous impact on inter-caste relations and caste awareness in the state. Secular, egalitarian and radical worldviews, thus, came to dominate the consciousness of the under-classes, thereby weak- ening the hold of communal and caste consciousness among them. K. C. Alexander brings out these transformations by comparing the rural Kerala scene with that of rural Karnataka, where radical/ communist mobilisation was conspicuous by its absence. He port- rays the altered worldviews of the subaltern groups in Kerala, while in rural Karnataka the feudal-casteist domination had remained firm with hardly any change. The exposure of the peasantry to radical ideas through the in- tensive activities of the communist parties and its (Sic) Frontline organizations — the labor unions and tenants organizations — created the conditions for a change in consciousness. To understand this, in 1973 some aspects of the ideological and normative orientations of the peasantry(including cultivators and agricultural laborers), were studied . In Mandya taluk in Karnataka, communist activities were Confronting Social Exclusion x 255 absent; . and in Kuttanad Taluk in Alleppey district, Communist activities have been both prolonged and extensive (Frankel and Rao 1989: 392–93). The following table has been culled from Alexander’s essay ‘Caste mobilization and Class Consciousness (ibid.) that show the changing ideological positions of peasants and agricultural workers in Kerala, which stood in sharp contrast to the responses from Karnataka. Table 9.1: Selected Statements and Responses by Peasants and Agricultural Workers of Kerala and Karnataka Indicating their Ideological

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