On April 14, India will celebrate the 135th birthday of 'Babasaheb' Ambedkar, a stalwart economist, jurist, social reformer, and chairman of the Drafting Committee of her Constitution.
The day is particularly significant to Dalits, for whose rights he fought a lifelong battle.
One of his significant wins was the inclusion of reservation policies for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in the Constitution.
While Babasaheb's constitutionalising of affirmative action was a landmark moment for the new nation, the idea of caste-based reservations had been in play for nearly 70 years, with the Princely State of Mysore figuring prominently in the story.
As far back as 1882, Pune's social activist and educationist Jyotiba Phule, who founded the Satyashodhak Samaj, a society that advocated for equal rights for the lower castes, made an impassioned deposition to the Hunter Commission, set up by the then-Viceroy, Lord Ripon, to review the state of education in India.
Exhorting the Commission to prioritise free and compulsory primary education for the lower castes and women in the vernacular languages, Phule proposed the recruitment of teachers from lower-caste communities, rather than Brahmins, who he believed would be unwilling to do the job.
To the Commission's credit, almost every one of Phule's recommendations was included in the final report, largely because they resonated with the personal beliefs of its secretary, Bangalore's Benjamin Lewis Rice, then serving as Mysore's Director of Public Instruction.
In 1902, the progressive ruler of Kolhapur, Shahu Maharaj, inspired by the Satyashodhak Samaj, issued a historic proclamation when he realised that all his efforts to provide education to the lower classes had not led to students opting for higher education.
Accurately concluding that the lack of employment opportunities was to blame, he decreed that no less than 50% of government appointments would be reserved for the backward classes thenceforth.
Parallelly, in the south, rumblings of discontent began among non-Brahmins in the British-ruled Madras Presidency when they realised that a disproportionate number of government positions were occupied by the Brahmin minority.
Given that top positions in neighbouring Mysore, including that of Dewan, were held by British appointees who were invariably from Madras, the discontent inevitably spilled across the border, where it morphed into the 'Mysore for Mysoreans' movement.
In 1912, Maharaja Nalvadi Krishnaraja Wadiyar bowed to the pressure, appointing Mysore's pride, Sir M Visvesvaraya, a Brahmin, as his Dewan.
In 1916, non-Brahmin leaders in Madras established the South Indian Liberal Federation (which became the famous Justice Party) and released the Non-Brahmin Manifesto, which called for communal representation in public services.
Few could have guessed that it marked the beginning of Tamil Nadu's powerful Dravidian Movement.
Inspired, non-Brahmin leaders in Mysore – Sahukar Chennaiah, M Basavaiah, Mahammed Abbas Khan, AV Nanjundashetty – formed the Praja Mitra Mandali to advocate for the rights of the backward classes—primarily Vokkaligas, Lingayats and Muslims.
The Mandali's sustained advocacy bore fruit when, in 1918, Nalvadi constituted a committee headed by the Chief Judge of the Mysore High Court, Sir Leslie Miller, to investigate the matter.
The report, based on the 1911 census, recommended that over the next seven years, the proportion of members representing the backward community, so long as they possessed the prescribed qualifications, should be increased to 50% across all state departments.
Nalvadi was all set to implement the Miller Report's recommendations when he encountered stiff resistance from a most unexpected source – his own Dewan!
Sir MV had nothing against non-Brahmins, but he believed deeply that a government that wasn't a meritocracy could never serve the best interests of its people.
The detente resulted in Sir MV resigning from his post in 1919.
By 1921, Mysore's revolutionary reservation policy had radically changed the administrative composition of its government, and laid the foundation for a more equitable state.
