E-Paper
Teach us a new lesson
Our political system is sick. But we have lived for so long within its confines, and have internalised its cruelty and opportunism to such a degree that we can no longer discern its true nature.
Our political system is sick. But we have lived for so long within its confines, and have internalised its cruelty and opportunism to such a degree that we can no longer discern its true nature.
Last Saturday, the Mumbai police brutally beat up medical students protesting against the imposition of quotas for backward classes in all public and private colleges and specialised institutes.
Disturbed by the reaction to the Mumbai beatings, the Centre has sought to buy time by announcing that the enforcement of quotas will be ‘deferred’. But has anyone in the government had any second thoughts on the move itself? The answer is ‘no’. On the contrary, ‘leaders’ of our country remain prisoners of clichés that became substitutes for thought decades ago. It is in this emptiness of thought, and the rank populism that makes us cling to their substitutes, that the true sickness of the Indian-State lies.
Let me start with one observation: those whom the Mumbai police beat up, and those whom the police in other cities will soon have to beat, are not the usual rent-a-mob lumpens that political parties bring out whenever they wish to make a point. They are young people who have secured at least 90, perhaps 95 per cent in their school leaving examinations, gained first-class degrees at their universities and passed tough entrance examination to enter a medical college.
In any other country, they would have been spotted while still in middle school, showered with scholarships by their governments, and offered a host of jobs in premier institutions even before they finished their degrees. That was how the Soviet Union built a corpus of more than two million first-class scientists and matched the technological progress of the US in defence and metallurgy despite having a twentieth of its per capita income.
But in India, such young people find their futures repeatedly imperilled by opportunistic politicians. And when they take to the streets in desperation, they find out the awful truth — that in this great democracy they count for less than the most thuggish, semi-literate havildar who wears the uniform of the ‘ma-baap sarkar’.
What about social justice? Must the elite castes, who have enjoyed a monopoly of learning wealth and status for millennia, continue to do so? Must we not tilt the scales deliberately against their favour to redress history’s wrongs? These are valid questions, but those who ask them need to answer some still more fundamental questions first.
Is it necessary to be unjust to some in order to be just to others? Is it necessary to take something away from one section to provide more to another? Is statecraft a zero sum game? Has any State ever created the peace and stability that are a precondition to progress by deliberately creating new conflicts that set one part of society against another? Is it less reprehensible to right the inherited wrongs of caste than to right the inherited wrongs of religion? And if not, then on what basis do the secularists of the UPA consider themselves superior to the Hindu communalists of the Sangh parivar?
If the answer to all this is ‘yes’, then by all means impose fresh quotas. But if the answer is ‘no’, then reservations become a part of the problem and not the solution. To illustrate this, let me ask just one more question.
If Arjun Singh were suffering from a possibly terminal cancer, would he go to AIIMS or the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York? We know the answer. even if he chose to stay with AIIMS, would he agree knowingly to put himself under the care of a doctor who had entered a medical college under the SC/SC quota? Arjun Singh might still do so, but we know that 99 out of 100 other Indians would not. The same would hold true of our choice of airlines to fly, of an engineering company to hire, of a school or college for our children. Would readers not shy away from airlines, hospitals, companies and schools and colleges which were heavily staffed by graduates from reserved quotas?
This is the constant humiliation that we, of the upper-castes, unthinkingly inflict upon the less-privileged through our condescending laws. Without an iota of empathy with the Harijans and the backwards, we fail to realise that, as in the Sixties’ US, slavery may have been abolished a 100 years earlier, but discrimination was alive and in very good health. The fault does not lie with the public. In all serious matters, let alone those concerning life and death, we owe it to our institutions, colleagues, families and ourselves, to search out the best people to meet our needs.
What reservation actually does is to tar even the most brilliant and original of minds with the brush of mediocrity and thereby deny it the opportunities and the success that is its due. Reservation did not create a B.R. Ambedkar, a K.N. Raj or a K.R. Narayanan. Sheer intellect, honed by a first-class education, did that. Conversely, 56 years of reservations have created no one to follow in their footsteps.
Education begins at birth. If our governments had cared genuinely for those disadvantaged by birth, they would have created a parallel system of special schools for students from the backward and SCs and the very poor. Here, students would have been promoted solely on merit, backed by scholarships, till they have no need whatsoever for the crutch of reservations. In 56 years, just one apex high school in every district, comparable to the old English grammar schools, would have obliterated the distinction between castes. Instead we have, through our system of reservation, graven the discrimination in stone.
Manmohan Singh’s government is full of good intentions. In 2005-06, it doubled the central Plan outlay on education to Rs 4,800 crore. This year it has increased outlay on the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan programme by another Rs 3,000 crore.
But in the vacuum of ideas that prevails, the money has been earmarked for the same state primary and secondary school structure that has so signally failed to help the disadvantaged poor.
In all these 56 years only one prime minister even came close to tackling the root of the problem. Rajiv Gandhi’s Navodaya schools were intended to provide an alternative rural elite stream of students to the urban stream produced by the ‘Doon School’ stream to which he belonged. A large number of these schools have done very well. But the Navodaya schools did not specifically target those disadvantaged by caste and the absence of a tradition of education in the family.
That is the gap that the Rs 5,500 crore of extra money should have been filling in the education system. It can yet be done. Its results will come only after a decade or more, but the poor and the disadvantaged will wait, because what this parallel elite educational stream will offer them is hope.
That will gain the Congress many more true supporters than any knee-jerk, half-baked ‘gift’ of seats in institutions where the curriculum is impossible to follow, let alone master.
