Pratap B Mehta On Quotas

… on the Quota Bill, which has passed through the Cabinet and will enter into parliament - possibly at the last possible moment so that there’s not too much discussion or debate on it!

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of the Center For Policy Research, who resigned from the Knowledge Commission has presented his opinion eloquently.

From the article (on Outlook Magazine online):
If politically complacent young men and women have been moved to political action, let them also make this a transformative moment in the process of social reform and justice. The campaign should not be about the number of seats, it should be about saying emphatically:

“We all want to build an inclusive society, where no one will be denied opportunities because of social and financial circumstances. But we will no longer accept chimerical solutions to this aspiration, we will cut through the cant and diversion that the politics of quotas represent, and we will put pressure on government to take all those instruments that build an inclusive society seriously: making the right to education effective, creating new institutional architectures, setting the priorities of the state right, creating new ways of making it more accountable and thinking of more sensible forms of affirmative action.”

If the opposition to quotas does not occupy the ground of justice in an enlarged sense, it will simply be reproducing the narrow mindedness it is objecting to. The dark clouds will dissipate only when this crisis becomes an occasion for genuine soul searching, for focusing attention on the meaning of citizenship and justice.

The transformation of caste politics will not be possible without the transformation of India.

Read the complete article on Outlookindia.com