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Bengaluru’s power couple, Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy and his wife, Rajya Sabha MP Sudha Murty, have declined to participate in the Karnataka government’s ongoing Social and Educational (caste) Survey. Their refusal to participate is not against the law since the Karnataka High Court made it clear that it was voluntary. However, their refusal shows a disregard for social justice.
The couple submitted a self-declaration form dated October 10, saying that they do not belong to any backward class. “Hence, participating in this survey will not be of any help to the government. Therefore, we decline to participate,” the declaration read.
Measuring the relative backwardness of various communities would be impossible without comprehensive social, educational and economic data about all communities.
Like Narayana and Sudha Murty, if all people who belong to forward communities decline to participate in the survey, the entire exercise—which is a constitutional mandate on states—risks being undermined.
The legal position
The statewide Social and Educational Survey, being carried out by the Karnataka State Backward Classes Commission since September 22, aims to measure social backwardness.
Section 9(2) of the Karnataka State Backward Classes Commission Act mandates the Commission to conduct a survey on the social and educational status of all citizens of the state to identify groups that are backward and make necessary recommendations to the state government. Under Section 11, the commission must conduct a survey every 10 years to revise the lists of backward communities.
The Karnataka State Backward Classes Commission Act itself was a product of the Indra Sawhney judgement of the Supreme Court, which directed that permanent backward classes commissions be set up to look into reservations. Previous commissions that provided for backward classes reservations in Karnataka, and even the Mandal Commission set up by the Union government, were ad hoc commissions set up under the Commissions of Inquiry Act.
Although the SC placed a legal obligation on backward classes commissions to survey all citizens of a state, the methodology of the survey was left to the discretion of the commission, and there is no provision in law making participation mandatory, as it is for the decadal census conducted by the Union government.
Dominant caste groups have consistently opposed the survey, and petitioners representing these interests challenged the survey on various grounds in the Karnataka High Court, which issued an interim order.
Although a stay on the survey was sought, the High Court declined but said that participation was voluntary and that surveyors must make this clear to people. The court also directed that the data collected by the Commission must not be shared with the government.
Following the High Court’s interim order, different sections of people—BJP leaders such as Pralhad Joshi and Tejasvi Surya being the most prominent among them—began to call for people to refuse participation in the survey. Naryana Murthy, Sudha Murty, Pralhad and Tejasvi are all Brahmins.
Former Karnataka State Backward Classes Commission member and author of four books on affirmative action, KN Lingappa, told TNM that the government was at fault for not challenging the HC’s interim order.
“Why did the government not challenge the HC order by filing a review petition in the Supreme Court? They could have cited the Indra Sawhney judgement, which said a survey of all citizens of the state was to be done. The government simply let it go. They were satisfied with the interim relief that the HC allowed the survey to continue and did not grant a stay as sought by the petitioners.”
Betrayal of constitutional morality
Bengaluru-based activist Shivasundar wrote an open letter to the couple, saying that an understanding of “both the condition of the backward classes and the privileges of the forward classes” was necessary to understand the persistence of social inequality.
He said that in the Indra Sawhney judgement, the Supreme Court unequivocally affirmed that the identification of backward classes must emerge from an inclusive, population-wide survey.
“Consequently, the realisation of social justice – a foundational constitutional goal – requires that every citizen participate in such a survey. Participation, in this sense, is not merely administrative but represents a form of civic responsibility and constitutional morality.”
Shivasundar said that urban, affluent, English-educated, technologically empowered elites, such as the billionaire couple, despite their access to information and awareness of constitutional obligations, were deliberately avoiding participation, offering rationalisations and specious arguments.
“In doing so, they may not violate the law, but they demonstrate a moral failure: the absence of constitutional morality and a disregard for the collective pursuit of social justice,” Shivasundar said.
Lingappa told TNM that Narayana Murthy and Sudha Murty’s stance reflected blatant disregard for the backward classes.
“(Such people) are Vedics (those who accept the Vedas). They don’t accept the survey because it will not benefit Brahmins in any way, and they will not get any benefits from the Commission based on the social and educational data collected by the survey. But there is also a mindset that they will continue to benefit disproportionately—three or four times more than their numerical strength… ”
Disproportionate benefits
Leaked portions of the 2015 survey and the O Chinnappa Reddy Commission in 1990 show how communities that score very low on overall backwardness benefit disproportionately.
TNM had reported how Brahmins, who comprise 2.62% of the population according to the 2015 survey, had the lowest score on overall backwardness, below the commission’s cutoff score of 20. Communities that scored below 20 were considered general.
The caste-wise secondary compiled by the Chinnappa Reddy Commission was even more stark.
It found that Lingayats, Vokkaligas, and Brahmins – in that order – had the highest access to government jobs across categories relative to their population. But of these, Brahmins had the most disproportionately high access to group A and B jobs.
Although Brahmins were 3.5% (in 1990) of the population, 21.5% of people from the community had access to higher education. No other community had access that was this disproportionately higher than their population, according to the Reddy Commission data.