In a significant development for the national capital, protestors from the Jat community on Sunday called off their agitation for 15 days which was scheduled to begin today. At a meeting, Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Khattar assured the All India Jat Aarakshan Sangharsh Samiti that the Centre would initiate the process of providing reservations in government jobs and institutes of higher education for the community after the appointment of chairman and members of National Commission for Backward Classes. This development follows a clash earlier in the day between the Delhi-bound protesters and the police in Fatehabad district in Haryana, which left four cops injured. Last year, the state-wide agitation for quotas descended to full-scale riots, where more than 30 people lost their lives and property worth approximately Rs 20,000 crore were destroyed. The Jats had even managed to block the Munak canal, which supplies water to Delhi. It took a significant intervention from the Indian Army to clear them out. Given the scale of violence, the Centre and Delhi government are taking no chances. A whole host of steps was taken to prevent the protestors from making good on their threat to gherao Parliament. The Delhi Metro, for example, will only function within city limits and not extend to the suburbs in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. Across metro stations in central Delhi, surrounding Parliament, entry and exit will be barred. In a bid to prevent the protesters from driving up to Parliament, major roads within central Delhi have been either shut off or heavily barricaded. The Delhi Police has also imposed Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure across the national capital, which outlaws a gathering of five or more people. Finally, there were plans of deploying more than 30,000 personnel of the Delhi Police and 110 companies of paramilitary forces within Delhi and its borders. Making up 30% of Haryana's population, allied with the fact that 7 out of 10 of its Chief Ministers have come from their community, the Jats possess a visible political and economic clout. Allied with their close physical proximity to New Delhi, the strategy is to besiege the capital and force the Centre to accede to their demands. One must remember the events of 1988 when a prominent Jat leader from western Uttar Pradesh Mahendra Singh Tikait led thousands of farmers to the heart of the national capital. At the end of this standoff, the then Rajiv Gandhi government was compelled to accede to his demands that included raising the minimum support price for sugarcane. The Modi government clearly is in no mood for a repeat. Will the Centre suspend all these arrangements in light of Sunday's developments? At the time publications, the Delhi Metro had loosened some of its restrictions.
On the subject of reservations, however, is where the BJP find itself in a real quandary. Young Jats, who are seeking a slice of the quota in government jobs, are left in a confrontation with other communities in the OBC list. How will the Haryana government placate the Jat community, since the Supreme Court of India had rejected the idea of reservations for Jats? The court said that they are not socially and economically backwards, referring to National Commission for Backward Classes' (NCBC) opinion. In the Indra Sawhney versus Union of India– popularly known as the Mandal case –the court also ruled in 1992 that reservations cannot exceed 50%. If the Centre indeed passes legislation to include reservations for Jats under the Ninth Schedule, it could alienate other non-Jat caste communities, and dent their carefully crafted rainbow alliance in Haryana. Big picture, the reservation system, especially the one based on the Other Backward Classes model, has failed to expand the criteria for social justice beyond caste. Despite the anarchy wreaked upon the state of Haryana, the Khattar administration has chosen to treat this issue with kid gloves. After the riots last February, the BJP government did pass legislation providing for Jat reservations, but the courts put a stay on it. Protesters want Jat reservations to put into Schedule IX of the Constitution so that the courts can't strike them down. On Sunday, full-page advertisements came up across newspapers, which lists the steps the Haryana government took to enhance the welfare of this influential community. Some of the steps listed included its unsuccessful attempt at passing the Jat Reservation bill by the Haryana Assembly in March 2016, and government jobs for the families of those Jats who were shot dead by security personnel.
The Jats drew their political power from the land, as cultivators in a region that had borne the fruits of the Green Revolution. Today, however, sections of these socially dominant communities are economically backwards. Many among the erstwhile traditional landowner community have seen their landholdings shrink through generations, allied with pressure from the real estate sector. Agriculture has become a less attractive proposition for the current generation of Jats. Those who move away from the farm, often finds that the education they receive is often not good enough for the job market. To some extent, Jats have been unable to leverage their once-held agricultural prosperity to branch out into white-collar jobs. Going by the KC Gupta Commission report in 2011, Jats are woefully underrepresented in institutes of higher education, forming merely 10% of the student. Concerning government jobs, Jats held 18% of class 1 and class 2 government jobs.