Ridiculous Idealism

Equal Opportunities, equal rights

Inquilab Zindabad, a fellow blogger proclaims. Youth for Equality the banners scream. Kick this monster out!

Protest. Rallies. Candle-lit processions. Self immolation.

All for one thing. Anti-reservation.

I would like to say I don't get the fuss, that so what if 28% seats go to OBS and SCs and STs. However, I know that this does affect me, not merely because I'm from an upper class and the seat reservation policy is going to directly affect me later on but also because I am a citizen of this country and reservation is by itself a policy I am against.

Yes I am anti-reservation. But I am also anti anti-reservation activists.

Because the thing is, the dalits in this nation have absolutely no priveleges at all! In recent years, crimes committed against dalits have reached terrifying proportions, all in the rural areas of course. In Gujrat, upper class folks burned down a Dalit village. Somewhere else, dalits were forced to eat human excreta!

The problem here is firstly of course the upper class Hindus. Educated, non-educated what it may, nobody has the right to do that to another human being. This is blatant violation of human rights and I am shocked and disgusted by the fact that nobody has been punished for this. Secondly, in relation to reservation, the fact remains that OBCs do NOT have the same advantages as the upper, richer classes do. We prepare intensively for competitive exams, tution, coaching, having the best of facilities, the best infrastructure at our disposal. The OBCs do not and the question of judging merit then becomes difficult. So it is not surprising then that the OBCs who do take advantage of reservation are those who are actually able to afford half-way decent facilities for education. They of course would be able to get through through merit but when they can under category, well then, why not? So we have people like a friend of mine, who got a 3000th rank under General Merit in IIT but a 9th rank under category. Guess what she chose?

This is where reservation fails. Just by allocating seats but not filling them in the way they should be is not bringing any thing to the community. The poor people who do need reservation do not get the opportunities they need to reach that level. And on top of everything else, they're further trampled down upon, depriving them of basic human rights. Where does education even come into the picture?

The thing that needs to be done is to improve primary and secondary level education. When education at school level is improved to the standard of private schools then OBCs who attend these schools will have a better opportunity to fare better in competitive exams. Students should be encouraged to attend school, teachers need to be paid more to give them more incentive to actually teach. There's no point in providing higher level reservation when the fault lies at the grass roots. When these schools have reached the standard of private schools then where does the question of reservation even arise?

Something else which has been questioned recently is the caste-bias, especially in the media, with regards to the reservation protests. In the past few weeks, focus has been mostly on the anti-reservation rallyists, where TV channels and newspapers have been looking at the activists with indulgence, perhaps even encouragement. Meanwhile the pro-reservation activists merit less than a couple of minutes of air or news space...

Is this because most journalists are upper class members, who themselves look down upon the the pro-reservationists, considering most of them are bound to be dalits or OBCs? And if so, how does this reflect on the so-called secularist nature of our country?

In today's Hindu there was an extremely interesting article written by one Siddharth Vardrajan. He relates the story of a number of dalits who had been accepted into a medical college. Not only were they given seperate quarters from the rest of the student body, but even in the student mess, they were forced to sit at seperate tables. When one boy sat by mistake among the other 'upper-class' boys, he was insulted and told to shove off.

They kept quiet about this, accepted it but when one of their fellow students was beaten to pulp because he was a dalit, they staged a silent dharna. The journo covered the story, (he tried getting others to do so but no one volunteered) but the article appeared a month after the dharna and was completely mutilated.

We call ourselves educated, we call ourselves upper-class. Maybe we should learn to behave like 'upper-class' citizens once in a while. Instead of staging poorly thought out dharnas maybe we should look carefully at what really needs to be changed and then solve the problem once in for all.

(Personal note: I am anti-reservation, like I have said. I believe that when I, as a Hindu, cannot get equal rights in my country, then I really have nowhere to go. I disapprove in principal of minority run educational institutions where they give preference to their own religion, hence defeating the whole purpose of democracy and secularism. But when coming to OBCs and Dalits then I sympathise for they are Hindus and they have absolutely none of the advantages that minority religions like Muslims and Christians have. Infact I believe that Islam and Christianity should not have minority status at all, but then that's just my opinion.)

posted by Books inc @ 12:33 AM