Pratap Bhanu Mehta, one of the members of the Knowledge Commission has resigned. His resignation letter is a case study in clear, and coherent expression of thought, a highly-recommended piece for aspiring essayists… what am I saying? Read the letter yourself and tell me if you won’t come away feeling as defeated as I am.

I write to resign as Member-Convener of the National Knowledge Commission. I believe the Commission’s mandate is extremely important, and I am deeply grateful that you gave me the opportunity to serve on it. But many of the recent announcements made by your government with respect to higher education lead me to the conclusion that my continuation on the commission will serve no useful purpose.

It is perhaps only a matter of time before others on the commission will resign and the good doctor will be simply left alone, to pen its epitaph.

The sense of intellectual excitement that the commission generated stemmed from the fact that it represented an opportunity to think boldly, honestly and with an eye to posterity. But 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. They violate four cardinal principles that institutions in a knowledge based society will have to follow: they are not based on assessment of effectiveness, they are incompatible with the freedom and diversity of institutions, they more thoroughly politicise the education process, and they inject an insidious poison that will harm the nation’s long-term interest.

These measures will not achieve social justice. I am as committed as anyone to two propositions. Every student must be enabled to realise his/her full potential regardless of financial or social circumstances. Achieving this aim requires radical forms of affirmative action. But the numerically mandated quotas your government is proposing are deeply disappointing, for the following reasons. First, these measures foreclose any possibility of more intelligent targeting that any sensible programme should require. For one thing, the historical claims of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and the nature of the deprivations they face are qualitatively of a different order than those faced by Other Backward Castes, at least in North India. It is plainly disingenuous to lump them together in the same narrative of social injustice and assume that the same instruments should apply to both. It is for this reason that I advocated status quo for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes until such time as better and more effective measures can be found to achieve affirmative action for them.

In all fairness, whatever the intent behind forming the Knowledge Commission, it was a welcome move in the right direction. Yet, recent electoral victories have forced us to think otherwise: that it was just a cheap political gimmick to stall, to gain time to see which way the (electoral) tide turned. If the intent was genuine, why is it being held hostage to Arjun Singh’s antics? In Mehta’s words,

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 programmes will go much further than numerically mandated quotas.

Manmohan Singh has again proved that he is simply a puppet minister incapable of reining in his irresponsible colleagues/juniors. In my Arundhati Roy post earlier today, she remarked that several Indian states are on the brink of civil war. And she’s partly right although in a different context: institutions we held above divisive differences are today being slowly shredded, thanks to Arjun Singh.

Close on the heels of division in the AIIMS’ faculty on issue of quota, cracks appeared in the Indian Medical Association, which has been supporting the agitationists, with the doctors belonging to backward classes setting up a new body to favour government’s reservation proposal.

What a sorry state we have come to: a land that was much-sought after for above all, its learning, possibly can’t descend lower than this. Or, can we? Only, give us hundred more Arjun Singhs.