Author: Editorial
Publication: India Today
Date: June 9, 2003
Introduction: Reservation has become
a huge political enterprise. The victim is India.
India has come a long way since
Independence. If there is a dispute, it is all about the pace, not about
the progress. One of the fastest growing economies in the world, the country,
in its own peculiar ways-ah, blame it on the vibrancy of the great Indian
democracy-has an identifiable, and reasonably decisive, place in the global
free market. And geopolitically too the voice of India is audible and is
listened to. India is taken note of for its merit. There is another India,
steeped in shibboleths. One of them is the policy of reservations. It is
one country where the quota system in education and employment has become
so sacrosanct that no political party-for that matter even the government-has
the courage to protest. Rather, the system that works only against the
qualified and the meritorious has become a source of competitive social
justice in the political market. It is in this context that the BJP's proposal
of reservation for the economically backward among the upper castes becomes
an extension of an idea that has already passed its time. For, reservation,
no matter whether it is for the backward or other castes, is an anachronism.
It is particularly unfortunate that
the BJP too is falling to the temptation. The existing quotas in states
and the Centre are more than enough to deny the eligible the opportunities
they rightly deserve. Well, certain forms of affirmative action must have
been inevitable in the beginning when a big underclass needed the state's
help to join the mainstream. But reservation cannot be an eternal policy.
In India, every other day one caste or another is struggling to be labelled
Other Backward Classes. And the list of the privileged is lengthening.
Look at the irony of this social bargaining: ideally, as time passes the
list should be getting shorter. In India it is as if affirmative action
creates only new under classes, as if the divisive Mandal effect won't
go away. The quota system, in reality, has become a huge political enterprise-
increasingly literally so, for the new bargain is for reservations in political
power, as the BJP proposal shows. Every political party is responsible
for this crime on quality and merit. Reservation has become a political
mindset. The victim is India: a nation is only as good as the people who
manage it. Reservation ensures that India won't be managed by the best
alone.
