In defence of reservation

Usually I avoid topics where everyone has already gotten into it and sparks fly around. No use stirring the same broth. But I notice one issue that's going around in many blogs (I blog-hop to new blogs all the time) and everyone seems to have the same opinion and that too one which I do not share. It is the burning reservation issue that's rocking the country. In my opinion from my perch afar, I think that the violent protests are confined to the North of Vindhyas, while token protests simmer in the south. In the blog world I notice there is a near unanimity in that reservations are harmful. I can't help a cynical thought that the chance of coming to any physical harm being slim has made the bloggers write their true opinions. No offence intended, but in the place where I hail from, Tamilnadu, speaking against reservation publicly is taboo and is inviting danger. In fact I was astonished when some years ago agitations against the Mandal committee recommendations broke out in North India. Anyway what I feel is anyone blindly against the reservation system doesn't understand the reason how it actually has helped the country, and the politicians and the jingoistic nincompoops who show themselves as the protectors of the oppressed don't help a bit in this.

There is a sound economic rationale behind the system of reservation. Here I am not talking about the reservation system in its present form. In its present form it is actually making everyone forget the reason for its being and is harming the real downtrodden. The per-capita income of our country at the time of our independence, as everyone knows was not at the present levels even adjusting to the inflation and occasional devaluations. The peculiar feature about it was that the per capita income varied with communities and skewed in favour of the "forward" communities, the Brahmins. Simply put Brahmins as a class had far higher levels of income while the communities who came into the Scheduled Castes list had abysmal income levels. In order to increase a country's per capita income, it is not enough to merely increase jobs and schools. It would have been a generic band-aid solution and certainly not one which would cure the malaise. It is easy to declare that in this country everyone is equal. Bitter it may be though, it must be realized that centuries of caste-based oppression has stunted the growth and psyche of the humiliated and kept-servile people. It was simply not a level playing field out there at the beginning.

Just opening more and more schools would not increase literacy. The very success of the noon-meals scheme is a reminder to this stark reality. A family where every new addition is another mouth to feed and hence its capability to earn, however fragile the body maybe, simply cannot be spared and provided the luxury of education, is the norm among the historically downtrodden. Just because education is accessible to say, a poor farmer's child and a middle class child it doesn't mean that both would get schooling. Harsh realities of life stand in the way of the less-affluent child. It is common sense that apart from school, the family situation, its environment and even the vocabulary of the parents play a great role in empowering the child. So certain steps designed to uplift the children, the community and thus the nation, have to be accepted and are inevitable. Country's progress is team-work, the pie is limited and the weaker links have to be nourished enough to strengthen the whole team.

Here individual poverty is not an issue. That cuts through communities. But repression of an entire class of people is a sad but very true history. That ails the country's economy and any prescription has to take in consideration the nature of illness to effect a cure. Individual poverty can be (and must be) addressed through merit scholarships.

Unfortunately, the reservation system was viewed as a god-send for unscrupulous political parties. They used the reservation system to create vote-banks. This became a tool to create and support vote-banks enmasse. Every political leader wanted to bring one community or the other into the list. It assured the leader the eternal gratitude and support of the community. At least that's what the leaders believed. With everything, one can go only so far. In their greed and intense competition of vote-bank politics, insanity and unbridled casteism played a role. A sort of reverse-snobbery prevailed with communities rushing in to declare themselves oppressed and backward. In fact many political leaders do not have a genuine interest in educating the downtrodden. The more uneducated the people are, the more rock-solid the vote bank is. This was amply exposed when the issue of creamy layer among the backward communities came about. More on that later.

Even Mahatma Gandhi hoped for a future where reservation won't be needed and every community would be in equal footing. He naively assumed that in 50 years it would be achieved. What he didn't foresee was how this economic upliftment tool would turn into a contraption of political leverage.

So the medicine has actually aggravated the illness and its side-effects have proved to be a detriment to the whole body of the nation. It was mainly because the medicine of reservation was administered recklessly and without proper thought given to it.

My two-cents worth recommendations:
1. The concept of creamy layer should be imposed. The affluent families from the backward communities should be made to compete on par with others.

2. A family who has availed the reservation for three successive generations should be excluded from the reservation process. This measure is because such families actually hinder other families of the same community to prosper

3. Nationwide merit scholarships should be instituted. This should be regardless of the community.

4. A national database should be created containing the families and persons who avail reservations and the communities who lag behind in availing the benefit. In future this would facilitate tailoring the system towards the actual needs and also would help in designing out-reach programmes targeting communities that are not utilizing the opportunities available to them.

I feel even our PM and President skirt around the issue. They advocate creation of more seats everywhere. I seriously doubt whether our country's infrastructure has the wherewithal to support that. It's a mere gimmick, however well-intended it may be, I feel.

For the people out there who would like to know my roots, I am a Brahmin by birth. And I didn't get enough marks in my school finals to get an engineering or medical seat on merit. Of course, no quotas for my community meant I was deprived of those exalted streams of education. That's one way of putting that despite an educated lineage I am a dull-head. Do I deserve reservation? Even I don't think so.


P.S: I am aware that I have not provided statistics supporting any of my arguments. It is merely because that I don't have the time and access to get them. I am lazy as well. All the same, I assure that my hypotheses would stand the test of factual scrutiny.