Everyone on the Wrong Side

So the government has finally announced its committment to implement OBC reservation in all the institutes. And there are demonstrations from medicos and also my almameter IITB and my present institute IIMC.

The logic given for reservation is that the condition of backward classes in village is very bad. I dont have knowledge on that. But taking it to be true, why don't the government target the reservations specifically towards them. I am personally opposed to reservations of all kind. But most of the protestors are just demanding that those who themselves or their parents have availed of reservations should be removed from this net. What is wrong in arguing on that.

In my experience most of the high caste people who enter IIT/IIM/AIIMS are from middle class. A very rich student who belongs to high caste would never study so much to get into IIT/IIM etc. He won't strive for 99 percentile in CAT and high cutoffs for general candidates in IITJEE.

While the situation is reversed for the low castes. The low caste poor are often the landless labour in villages and slum dweller in cities. They don't have means to get even decent primary and secondary education and so cann't think of going to Engg/Med colleges.

And the beneficiaries of reservation. The low castes students who are the sons of IAS officers/IIT/IIM grads/politicians. The cutoffs for them in JEE is very low. They can also get 60 percentile easily in CAT and get through without much hardwork.

Now if we are demanding that the low castes/OBC sons of these elite class should be removed from the reservation bracket what is wrong in this argument? The political parties are asking the high castes to make sacrifices. Why don't they ask the elite low castes to let go there priveleges? Because of the obvious reason. The Ballot box.
Why we don't have any case of a Reserved category father saying that he won't let his son take the benefits of reservation? Simple. Because nobody refuses Free Lunch.

So the fight is not between high castes and low castes. Rather it is between middle class high castes and high class low castes. More informally it is between elite beneficiaries of reservations and poor victms of the same.

And lets see how reservations should actually be antithetical to every political party's ideology.

First the Left. They have sided with the high class ppl in this fight. ie. they are in support of the elite beneficiaries of reservation. Like all through the birth of communism, this time also they are fighting on the wrong side by supporting the rich against the poor.

Now the grand old party of India: The Indian National Congress. It swears by integration of all communities in the mainstream. But history proves otherwise. Before independence its policy of appeasing the Muslims, its agreeing to the separate electorates for Muslims at Lucknow Pact and its belief in Jinnah was responsible for the partition of the country. Now with again dividing the society, with again appeasing one community against other Indian National Congress is laying for another division of the country, this time along caste lines.

The BJP. Advani's long cherished dream of Hindu Rajya. Well Hinduism is in tatters today. It was able to withstand various onslaughts throughout history but it is shattering now, because of the discrimination by the state between different Hindus. Different castes are coming at loggerheads. The best religion in world is in a danger of extinction because of its own internal rivalries. And this is supported by BJP and its idealogue the RSS.

I cann't comment on other parties like Lalu's and Mulayam's because I don't know much about them. But their agendas are very much similar to that of Left and hence that argument also applies to them.

Tag: Reservations||CPM ||Congress||BJP