Vir Sanghvi writes serious stuff when he finds time from amusing people with his views on building egalitarian societies. This time around, he examines the Reservations issue, which has raised its ugly head. He wants to call a debate to see whether Reservations are still needed; he wants to go back to the basics.

One of the unfortunate consequences of this intellectual extremism is that we rarely go back to basics, to the foundations of the case for Reservation.

And builds a logical case for his op-ed. What he says is nothing new; the bottomline is that he is undecided, and confused: he doesn’t want Reservation in the private sector and he isn’t subtle in showing his sympathies for the “underprivileged” Muslims to whom Reservations should be granted. Of course, he doesn’t say it in so many words, but the intent is clear.

…if you use the ?disadvantaged minority? argument that politicians favour, then what do you do about the Muslim community? By any yardstick, Muslims are an incredibly disadvantaged minority. They are poor, educational levels are low and they face appalling discrimination. What moral sense does it make to offer Reservation to some prosperous Cow Belt backward or some well-off Naga businessman while simultaneously denying it to a poor Muslim?

If Vir Sanghvi takes off his incredibly narrow field glasses and look at just a few samples of the reality, he’ll know better than to speak in this manner. Here is the typical scenario which illustrates where the problem lies:

The chief reason why Muslims in countries where they are minorities are backward economically is because of Islam’s exclusivist claims. Islam forbids them from mingling freely with people of other faiths: the entire non-Muslim world is Dar-ul-Harb. And this message is drilled into them every Friday by the revered Mullah. This prohibition extends not just to faith but to every aspect, education being a prominent aspect. Thus, the only education a Muslim child has is of the Madrassa kind. In fact, Hyderabad alone over a thousand Madrassa. And don’t we all know the kind of subjects that are taught out there? With such an education, how can a Muslim when he grows up, compete on par with people who receive our kind of education? Effectively, thousands of such Muslims render themselves incapable of any sort of gainful employment in the real world. The outcome and the effect this has on the psychology is anybody’s guess. Is it any small wonder that increasingly, most criminals who’re caught/involved in serious cases are Muslims?

There’s another angle to this problem of Muslim backwardness in India. If we observe closely, we see a huge disparity in wealth among the Muslims: on the one hand we have political leaders, and wealthy businessmen and on the other (this forms the majority condition) lie atrociously poor Muslims. It’s curious because Islam is hailed as a religion of universal brotherhood, not by Islamists, but by their secular brethren in the media.

Now, instead of at least attempting to look into the reasons for their backwardness, Sanghvi assumes it to be their default condition. He also talks of them being discriminated against, which is patently false. Any Indian reader of this blog can testify to this statement using his/her own real-life experience. I’m not implying that discrimination doesn’t exist, but to generalize this so blatantly isn’t acceptable. And if discrimination does exist, it’s not just against the Muslims, it extends to other communities/religions/castes as Sanghvi himself states. He also employs twisted logic when he states (I quote again),

What moral sense does it make to offer Reservation to some prosperous Cow Belt backward or some well-off Naga businessman while simultaneously denying it to a poor Muslim?

I can say the same thing as, what moral sense does it make to offer Reservation to some prosperous Muslim while simultaneously denying it to a poor Brahmin?

However, I agree with the author when he speaks of phasing out Reservations all together.

This is not to say that you suddenly get up and announce that all Reservation is now at an end, but that you phase it out. You say, for example, that you will reduce the dalit quota by 5 per cent over the next decade; by another 5 per cent over the next five years and so on.
[...]
Nobody can, logically, object to such a gradual reduction. The greatest argument for phasing out quotas is that if, after 50 years, you reckon that you still need exactly the same level of Reservation, well, then, it clearly hasn?t worked very well, has it? If society is just as unequal as it was half a century ago, then Reservation has failed and we should look for other ways of bringing about greater social equality.

Seriously speaking, the idea of Reservations hasn’t worked at all in India because we didn’t care to put a clause in our statutes that after X years, it ends. Instead, government after government kept extending the period for… well I don’t have to say the rest, do I?
That’s the reason I say, there’s no point in debating about Reservations unless our politicians (and their media friends) miraculously have a change of heart and think about the nation’s interest first.