Hope On Reserve

“Nowhere else in the world is there competition to assert backwardness and then to claim we are more backward than you. This truth was recognised as an unhappy and disturbing situation and such situation was noted by this court as a stark reality in Indra Sawhney’s case [Mandal case].”
Supreme Court Bench featured in The Hindu Online

I’ve posted my views on reservations earlier - here, here & here. I’m glad the Supreme Court has ruled as it has - and Murli Manohar Joshi should take lessons from Arjun Singh on wiliness instead of criticizing him!

We have all travelled our own complicated paths to arrive at our own varied conclusions on what place quotas should have in a progressive, egalitarian society. My journey began in the 1990s. I was a wide-eyed college student who marched down the streets of Delhi to protest against the implementation of the Mandal Commission report. The murder of merit was a romantic war cry for an 18-year-old. And when we were first sprayed with water canons and herded into a police station, I really felt like a revolutionary. Subsequently, adult life brought me face to face with the horrific complexities of caste. And I lurched to the other extreme — I was embarrassed at being an ‘elitist’ Delhi girl who had known no better, and I quickly became a supporter of the quota regime. It’s only now, many years later that I have been able to escape the blinding rhetoric of either side to find my own equilibrium.
Barkha Dutt, writing in The Hindustan Times

Why is the government so willing to act on data extrapolated from 1931? Why is there no effort to study the co-relation of reservations with what it is meant to achieve - economic upliftment through education? Does Dr Manmohan Singh truly believe in the reservations that his government is proposing? What about Sonia Gandhi - if her concern was enough to derail the deregulation of the retail sector, why is something that is equally important if not even more important met with the kind of silence that this issue seems to be shrouded by?

Instead of assisting people to strive and reach their fullest potential, through making school education attractive and compelling across the length and breadth of the country, why are our politicians hell-bent on lowering the bar citing history? Why divide?

Why are you perpetuating the caste system Arjun Singh?