Will our worthies heed it?

The Supreme Court has said the practice of notifying religious groups as “minority communities” should be discouraged as it promotes divisive tendencies that weaken the nation.

Never. On the contrary, they’ll do everything to perpetuate it. Remember what happened to the famous diktat of Dr.Ambedkar: have reservations for only 10 years and then scrap it?

We have created a class of beggar-warriors out of the mass of the really disadvantaged, the poor, and the suffering. Look around and read reports of backward caste rallies: their emphasis is on “reservations in the private sector.” A real social affirmative action programme (as the Americans call it) should instill self-respect and an awareness that the accident of your birth is no barrier to achievement. Instead every self-professed leader of the backward castes/minorities (the difference lies only in the labels) incites the often-illiterate, uneducated and unaware crowd to “demand” prosperity instead of working towards, and deserving it.

Post-independence reservations have resulted in promoting and glorifying inefficiency. The glaring examples: government schools (more appropriately, teachers), universities, the PWD, the railways, and government hospitals. Instead of levelling out the field using hard work and merit as criteria, our social engineers have used only one yardstick to achieve justice: historical injustice–that I don’t deserve it is immaterial, only the fact that I was born into a caste/community that had been oppressed for hundreds of years matters.

And so the Messiah of the Downtrodden Lalu, enjoys no less than regal splendour while his genuinely disadvantaged caste bretherens’ condition remains the same. Or worse. The same applies in varying degrees to Paswan, Mulayam, and our own Siddaramaiah.

Our worthies will really do well to heed this insight the Supreme Court has provided:

…in a caste-ridden society, no section or distinct groups of people can claim to be in majority. All are minorities among Hindus. Many of them claim such status because of their number and expect protection from the State on the ground that they are backward.