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Quotas: RSS has got it right - for once
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By Amulya GanguliThe Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief, Mohan Bhagwat, deserves a
mild round of applause for calling for a relook at the reservations
policy.
Following his suggestion, at least three Congress leaders
have gathered enough courage to say that a review should consider
making economic status rather than caste the basis of quotas.
Before last year's general election, a senior Congress leader, Janardhan Dwivedi, had made a similar statement.
It
is unlikely, however, that their bosses in the party, the
mother-and-son duo of Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, will back them considering
that the Congress president had forced a reluctant Manmohan Singh to
renew the inclusion of caste data in the census operations of 2011 after
a gap of eight decades.
Her objective was no different from that
of the Hindi belt leaders who use the bait of providing education and
employment in government institutions to specific caste groups to build
up their support bases.
It is this unabashed partisan purpose
which has seemingly persuaded the RSS chief to seek an assessment of the
quota system for those sections which "require reservation and for how
long".
However, the timing of Bhagwat's suggestion was
disadvantageous for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), for it enabled its
opponents in the forthcoming Bihar elections to accuse the BJP of an
upper caste bias which seeks to block the upward mobility of the lower
castes by ending the quota system.
The BJP-led Rajasthan
government's decision to allot quotas to the economically weaker
sections of the "forward" castes has also provided grist to the party's
opponents. A similar initiative has also been taken in BJP-ruled
Gujarat.
Notwithstanding these steps, the BJP is trying to
distance itself from its mentor's counsel and the RSS, too, is now
hemming and hawing about the issue because it has belatedly realised
that it had wandered into an area where angels fear to tread.
It
will be a mistake, however, to believe that Bhagwat's observations have
anything to do with the visions of Jawaharlal Nehru and other stalwarts
of the freedom movement who wanted the caste system to wither away in an
independent India with the growth of a meritocracy because of the
spread of quality education and the cultivation of a scientific temper.
Instead,
the RSS chief's concerns cannot be unrelated to the angst of the Patel
community in Gujarat, which has been disheartened by the lack of
education and employment opportunities because of the inroads made into
these fields by groups which flaunt their reservation rights even if
they may be less qualified than those who are outside the ambit of the
quota system.
Hence, the demand of the gun-toting and
sword-wielding young leader of the generally well-off Patels or
Patidars, as they are also known, Hardik Patel, that his community be
included in the Other Backward Classes (OBC) category.
Considering
that he has called for either an inclusion in the quota system, or for
dispensing with the reservations altogether, there is little doubt that
he has touched a chord in the hearts of not only the upper castes, who
have always been against the reservations, but also those who believe
that this form of affirmative action has fostered vested interests who
deliberately ignore the original idea of the quotas being offered for a
limited period and that, too, for only the two most deprived groups -
the Dalits and Adivasis.
Instead, the quotas have been extended
to communities like the politically influential Yadavs even if they
still experience some of the social stigma because of their
"backwardness".
What is more, the Supreme Court's directive about
denying what is called the "creamy layers", or those who have
benefitted from the reservations, any further access to quotas has been
studiously circumvented by successive governments of various hues.
However,
as is evident from the suggestions that the quota system be reoriented
towards the poorer sections of all castes, the present virtual travesty
of the original intent of the reservations is becoming increasingly
obvious.
Yet, the political class is too focussed on making
immediate gains by playing the caste card to see how the unavoidable
fallout of the denial of opportunity to the meritorious can breed social
tension, as the agitation of the Patels show.
At present, only
Narendra Modi has made an attempt to turn the spotlight on development
even if his party, and especially its allies, are not averse to playing
the caste game in Bihar.
Otherwise, all the other parties,
including the supposedly progressive Left, have made no attempt to
mobilise public opinion against quotas while the Aam Admi Party is too
busy making space for itself in politics to spend much time on a
contentious subject.
The murmurs in the Congress about a new
approach show that the ingrained sycophancy of its members towards the
Nehru-Gandhis hasn't yet made the party totally brain dead. But,
unfortunately, neither Sonia nor Rahul has the intellectual prowess to
consider the matter with all its implications and chart a new course.
The
Bihar elections are important in this context because there will be a
direct contest between a pro-development and a pro-casteist outlook.
Last year, the development model had received a thumbs-up signal from
the voters. The results on November 8 will show their present mindset.
(Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at [email protected])