Caste in class

It happens that on the morning that I sat down to write against the 104th constitution amendment Bill—which will reserve nearly half the seats in private colleges and schools for the low of caste—a parcel of books arrived for me from Amazon. The postman who brought them said I had to pay Rs 1,375 before I could get the books. I asked why since I had already been charged for postage by Amazon. He said it was customs duty. I said I had never paid customs duty for books before and he said he knew nothing about these things, he was ‘‘only following orders’’. If I needed more information I should speak to his superior.

From a grubby notebook he gave me a telephone number and said I should speak to Kadam. When I asked who this Kadam was he said he did not know anything more than that he took orders from him at the Nariman Point post-office in Mumbai.

It took me, as is usual with government offices, more than half an hour to get through to Kadam, who could tell me only that he was following orders from Customs. Surely, I should then have a receipt, I said, getting increasingly irritated, and his response was: ‘‘Why are you getting so excited? As a journalist you should know that there is nothing to get excited about. I cannot give you a receipt but if you don’t want the parcel you can send it back.’’ I paid and got my books but I have no idea what I paid for. In the past I have paid duty to release a student’s laptop because when he left India on holiday he forgot to write it into his passport.

We talk about being in the vanguard of the knowledge revolution but we charge duty on the tools of knowledge. Bizarre? Not at all. In the Kafkaesque world of Indian officialdom, controls, arbitrariness and discretionary powers are the very fabric of the Indian state. Logic, reason, basic common sense are absent, which is why the 104th amendment is so dangerous.

It is also a violation of fundamental rights, but who will go to court when the case could take 30 years to be decided. The 104th amendment makes it compulsory for private educational institutions to reserve seats for Dalits, scheduled tribes and other backward castes. And, because this is a move to consolidate the Congress party’s lost vote bank there is a cynical exemption for ‘minority’ schools and colleges. In our ‘Mandalised’ land no political party dares oppose reservations so the BJP contribution to the debate was only to try and include minority institutions. The move failed. The Bill was passed unanimously with 379 of 381 members present in the Lok Sabha voting for it.

What will it achieve? It will put private schools and colleges at the mercy of petty officials and it will give political leaders and senior bureaucrats more chance to exercise their already outrageous powers of patronage. The truly underprivileged will remain uneducated but a cottage industry will develop for the manufacture of fake caste certificates.

The Indian state has failed shamefully to provide halfway decent mass education. The average state school would not be considered a school in a more civilised country but here we see no action from our Minister for Human Resources Development. Higher education is a mess because in the interests of the underprivileged tuition fees have not gone up in 50 years. Once fine colleges are now in decay but again we see no action from Shri Arjun Singh. What does he care? Like the children and grandchildren of other political leaders and bureaucrats his probably go abroad for their studies anyway.

Write to tavleensinghexpressindia.com