Sons of the Soil

The concept of Sons of the Soil (SoS) is deeply embedded in the human psyche. Sons of the soil is an elemental concept tying people to their place of birth and confers some benefits, rights, roles and responsibilities on them, which may not apply to others. It is a difficult concept to grasp, even though this has been explicitly seen in many countries. The problem with this concept of SoS (no pun intended, oh! ok, ok, so I did mean it as a pun!) is that it is beset between two forces, the concept of equality versus the concept of fairness. Quite a lot of insurgencies, terrorist campaigns, riots, internal disturbances, tensions and wars have been driven by this issue. Let's see why this is so.

The SoS concept basically boils down to, we SoS’s were here first, you newcomers are doing better / crowding out opportunities / taking more resources / etc. etc. etc, and therefore we will positively discriminate against you newcomer chaps. It is like going to live in a small village, and you are not a stranger within two days, but still a newcomer after thirty years. But jokes apart, this is where the inconsistency becomes apparent. It is an article of faith that everybody (well, adult humans at least) should be treated equally; as broadly as possible. This is the equality concept. Entire forests have been felled, rivers of blood have been spilled and Gondwanaland has sunk below the age long fight for equality. Nobody in their right mind will turn to me, a British Citizen of Indian extraction and say, “Well, mate, you are a newcomer to this country so your vote is worth, umm, let's see, 1/10th of that of people who have been here since William the Conqueror, 1/5th of that of people who came over with the Huguenots, 1/2 of those of the Italian POW’s who decided to stay on after World War II and ummm, how about 1/1.3 times of the British Asians who came from Uganda”. This is so ludicrous a statement that you will indeed laugh and move on and you are right. That is because once I am a British citizen (whether by birth, adoption, naturalisation or divine dispensation), the concept of equality kicks in and I gain an equal right to every right available and equal effort to every duty due to any British Citizen. By and large, this applies almost all over the world. So far - so good.

Now we explore the other concept, which is that of fairness. Everybody and everything in this world should be treated fairly. That has been drummed into our minds since we were born. I used to moan about fairness to my mum, and now my son moans to me about fairness, it’s a vast intergenerational game. If we leave things just like that, without any government intervention, we will have massive inequality and unfairness; call it the rule of the jungle. Might may be right and God may be on the side of the big battalions, but given human civilisation, fairness is a concept which we apply and adopt.

So in the name of fairness, we have a progressive taxation system, where we take money from the rich saps and give it to the poor ones; we take money from rich regions and give it to the poor regions; we put in affirmative action and positive discrimination programs so that previously discriminated minorities are pushed up the ladder; we have multi-culturalism, so that every culture is treated equally; we reserve special seats in parliament, educational institutions, buses and trains for disabled, women, elderly, particular minorities and people of a fluorescent green colour; we have special education programmes, so on and so forth. By and large, people understand and accept this, even though one may not like it.

Then comes the concept of SoS. We see these phenomena in a variety of different guises, but before we do this, let me be clear that I am not talking about the differential treatment that is meted out to non-citizens which has a whole load of different arguments around it. This is within one country itself. A particular group of citizens, whether identified by religion, race, language or what have you, are considered to be the natives of that country / state / region. This is what is meant by Sons of the Soil. So you have the Malay people (usually ethnically Malay, Muslim, as opposed to Chinese or Indian extraction minorities) in Malaysia, the Maharashtrians (usually people who speak Marathi and were born/brought up in the Indian state of Maharashtra as opposed to everybody else), the Assamese (usually people who speak Assamese and were born / brought up in the Indian state of Assam as opposed to Bengalis and Marwari’s), the Sunni in Saudi Arabia (as opposed to the Shia), native white skinned Frenchmen as opposed to the dark skinned Banaleu (the French term used for Frenchmen who are from north Africa and live in the suburbs tower blocks Banalieues), the Singhalese (as in Buddhist Sri Lankans as opposed to the Tamils) in Sri Lanka, white skinned Russians as opposed to anybody from the far off republics in the old USSR and even now in Russia, Punjabis (as opposed to Sindhis and others) in Pakistan, and so on and so forth.

The responses by the government range from positive discrimination to negative discrimination. Negative discrimination again is in whole panoplies of emotions and behavioural responses, ranging from outright racism to jokes about how southern Italians are lazy while northern Italians are hard working, how the English people subsidise the Scots, so on and so forth. This negative discrimination has been discussed far and wide and you, my dear gentle reader, can do without me twittering on about it. Hence, let us focus on the positive discrimination part.

For example, we have the situation in Malaysia where ethnic Malays were and are explicitly given a hand up by the government in all sorts of human activities, whether government funding by state financial institutions, explicit (and for a long period of time, only) usage of Malay as the language of instruction thereby putting the Chinese and Indian populations at a disadvantage, explicit favouring of Malays in government job opportunities, more emphasis on development in the rural areas where more Malays live, etc. So much, that they decided to chuck Singapore away from Malaysia because Singapore was skewing the population too much towards the ethnically Chinese minority. Very rare, this behaviour of actually getting rid of territory and frankly is a bit bewildering (mind you, the running joke while I was growing up was about the state of Bihar in India, where people complained about Kashmir and Punjab wanting independence and we asking them to stay on, but Bihar never asking for it, and if they did, we will grant it to them post-haste) But there you have it, when issues like this come up, one can only be grateful that the separation happened without bloodshed unlike other countries which have been torn apart with genocide level violence such as in Bangladesh and Rwanda. Fair? Yes! Equal? No!

A big campaign was fought by the Shiv Sena, a particularly nationalistic Hindu and mainly Maharashtrian focussed group in the western part of India. They were chiefly upset because of three other groups of Indians; the first group were the wealthy Gujarati’s, the professional South Indian groups (Kannada, Tamil, Kerelaites, etc.) and finally the labourer class of Biharis. In various shapes and sizes, the arguments came fast and furious about wanting linguistic discrimination, preference to the natives, give them better educational opportunities, funding opportunities, job opportunities and the like. While the hoo-hah has reduced considerably these days, we still see remnants of this Marathi nationalism. Besides educational and governmental service, this really has not helped the natives to any great extent. Also given Shiv Sena’s national aspirations, it quietly dropped its insistence on its linguistic, state based preferential system. Fair? Yes! Equal? No!

The same thing happened in Sri Lanka., because the Tamils were better educated and better qualified than the majority Singhalese. Resentment was brewing there within the Singhalese ranks. There are ironies galore within this situation. Despite positive action as well as positive discrimination, the Singhalese were not able to rise up economically as compared to the Tamils. Even extremely bizarre steps were taken, the examination results were adjusted to give more weight to Singhalese students. In other words, if you were a Tamil, you were judged against your fellow Tamils, not the entire class. Besides many other things, because of this preference towards the sons of the soil, the country has descended into brutal civil war. Fair? Yes! Equal? No!

A different angle can be seen in old British India. When the British came in, the country was generally ruled by Muslims. Following the reform of the British Indian education system, Hindu’s took full opportunity to get educated and that gave rise to a very rapid increase in their relative socio-economic status, and a corresponding (real or imagined, you decide) decrease in the Indian Muslim status. Again, besides many other factors, the Muslim intelligentsia decided to take their toys and move off to a separate country. Fair? Yes! Equal? Not really.

Not that this ended the matter after the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Recently, a case was publicised where a Muslim student was awarded additional marks for her knowledge of the Qur'an and managed to get into an educational institution. Needless to say, another non-Muslim student objected, since she had equal marks (before the addition of the additional marks) and has launched a legal case. This promises to be an interesting episode in the perennial search for identity within the Pakistani state. If Muslims are not given special status in Pakistan (after all, that was the raison-d'-être for the formation of Pakistan), and every citizen is treated equally, then what is the country’s identity (especially when you consider the background of Partition and compare this to secular India). We already talked about Shia and Sunni in Saudi Arabia (http://piquancy.blogspot.com/2005/09/damned-if-they-do-damned-if-they-dont.html) and how the Sunni’s are treated better. Another example (but not as clear) is in Israel, where Israeli Jews have more advantages than Israeli Arabs with well known repercussions.

The inconsistency is clear, everybody agrees on the equality principle, everybody agrees on the fairness principle, but how does one reconcile these two? If you want to be fair, you will impose inequality. In many cases, it works out, in some cases, it doesn’t and sometimes it creates more problems than it solves. A couple of additional lessons can be learnt. The first is, whenever people are talking about imposing discrimination on the basis of fairness, I am always reminded of the quote, “the government/politician who robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul”. In all the examples, nobody ever looks at the quality, expertise, skills, experience, intelligence, or what have you of the sons of the soil. They always blame the others for their own laziness, sloth, lesser education, lower economic ability, etc. etc. After all, it is much easier to blame somebody else than to look at oneself (something which I do with great gusto and utmost innocence (feigned of course!) to my sister – it is a miracle she still talks to me).

The second aspect is that, when one looks deeper behind each of these positive discrimination examples, one will almost always find the stench of an ambitious and ruthless politician. Whether you look at Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Assam/Maharashtra in India, Pakistan, Burundi/Rwanda, you will immediately notice that the situation was driven, crystallised, pushed forward, brought into the limelight, and taken further than it should have, by a politician. It is also strange that many times, these politicians do realise the severe damage they have done, but that unfortunately is only much later, I am afraid.

All I can say in the end is, beware of a politician who is demanding special privileges for his constituency! Beware that for somebody to gain, somebody else will lose (and the loser may well come gunning for you). Beware! Treat people equally, more than you treat them fairly. Here, chew on this lovely quote from Friedrich Nietzsche - "The craving for equality can express itself either as a desire to pull everyone down to our own level (by belittling them, excluding them, tripping them up) or as a desire to raise ourselves up along with everyone else (by acknowledging them, helping them, and rejoicing in their success)".

All this to be taken with a grain of salt!