Indra’s Drishtikona (Viewpoint)

OBC Reservation: A Unique War of Letters

Posted : May 25, 2006 at 7:33 pm [IST]

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, one of the members of Sam Pitroda led National Knowledge Commission, who recently resigned protesting the government’s approach through the OBC reservation and Yogendra Yadav, the popular figure on news channels for election analysis had written some letters on the issue. I feel somehow the letters provide a unique insight into the minds of the wise men of the country.

Here is some portion of Pratap Bhanu’s letter that he wrote to Manmohan Singh:

The government’s recent decision (announced by Honorable Minister of Human Resource Development on the floor of Parliament) to extend quotas for OBCs in Central institutions, the palliative measures the government is contemplating to defuse the resulting agitation, and the process employed to arrive at these measures are steps in the wrong direction.

It violates four cardinal principles that institutions in a knowledge based society will have to follow:

Not based on assessment of effectiveness
Incompatible with the freedom and diversity of institutions
More thoroughly politicizes the education process
Injects an insidious poison that will harm the nation’s long-term interest

The measures will not achieve social justice. The historical claims of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and the nature of the deprivations SCs/STs face are qualitatively of a different order than those faced by Other Backward Castes, at least in North India.

As a society we focus on reservations largely because it is a way of avoiding doing the things that really create access. Increasing the supply of good quality institutions at all levels (not to be confused with numerical increases), more robust scholarship and support programs, will go much further than numerically mandated quotas.

We are not doing enough to genuinely empower marginalized groups, but are offering condescending palliatives like quotas as substitute. All the measures currently under discussion are to defuse the agitation, not to lay the foundations for a vibrant education system. If I may borrow a phrase of Tom Paine’s, we pity the plumage, but forget the dying bird.

Could it not be that some state institutions follow numerically mandated quotas, while others are left free to devise their own programs? Why should all institutions have to be reduced to the same level?
While institutions have responsibilities and are accountable to society, how will they ever achieve excellence and autonomy if basic decisions like who should they teach, what should they teach, how much should they charge, are uniformly mandated by government diktat?

Nations are not built by specific programs, they are built by healthy institutions, and the process by which your government is arriving at its decisions suggests contempt for the autonomy and integrity of academic life.

Instead of finding imaginative solutions to allow us to transcend our own despicable history of inequity, your government is ensuring that we remain entrapped in the caste paradigm.

Jawaharlal Nehru wrote, “So these external props, as I may call them, the reservations of seats and the rest - may possibly be helpful occasionally, but they produce a false sense of political relation, a false sense of strength, and, ultimately therefore, they are not so nearly important as real educational, cultural and economic advance which gives them inner strength to face any difficulty or opponent.”

However, today even Congress party and the family remembers Nehru only to remind the people that they belong to the same pedigree.

Yogendra Yadav wrote a letter to Pratap Bhanu that appeared in Indian Express:

He mentions about a scheme of calculating disadvantage points that takes into account caste and other inequalities that exist in our society, and opines that the NKC could have given a more carefully worked out solution.

You say that the government’s proposed measure goes against the freedom of academic institutions and the principle of diversity, that each institution should be ‘left free to devise their own programmes’ for affirmative action. Pratap, how many elite medical, engineering or management institutions in this country can you think of that have used their freedom to introduce any serious measure of affirmative action?

Far from tempering the debate and facilitating a solution, the NKC’s intervention added fuel to the fire, appeared as a partisan intervention and accentuated the artificial urgency that reduced the space for thinking afresh. To outsiders like me it appeared that instead of becoming a vital link in a possible solution, the NKC became part of the problem.

Pratap Bhanu did also reply to this letter.

PS
I went out today for some work and saw the poster war of the pro-reservation and anti-reservation groups too all over in Noida. The whole atmosphere has gone poisonous because of politicians. I don’t know what they aim at. After such sorts of protests and counter protests, the people belonging to the both groups work amicably together in the interest of the nation.Why are the politicians dividing them?

Some More Readings
Turning on the nation - Rajdeep Sardesai
Privatise affirmative action- Jaithirth Rao

Some Interesting News
Trip to NASA for Orissa’s wonderkids

- Indra

Category: Religious/Social issues |