Is this affirmative action or sharp satire?

Satire is not a form of humour much understood in India, or we would have noticed that affirmative action in India that is Bharat has acquired a satirical edge.

Satire is not a form of humour much understood in India, or we would have noticed that affirmative action in India that is Bharat has acquired a satirical edge. First, we made Dalits then called Harijans and untouchables into a special category and told them that because they had been treated like dirt for centuries they deserved to have government jobs and school and college seats reserved for them. Adivasis needed a similar boost because of the primitive conditions in which they lived so we came up with a category called Scheduled Tribes and offered them similar reserved privileges. So far so good. Nobody protested because there was a general sense, when India became independent, that upper-caste attitudes to the lower castes had been shameful and reparations needed to be made.

The trouble began when Vishwanath Pratap Singh as Prime Minister in the early nineties realized that for him to keep his job he needed a vote bank and that an outdated report by a forgotten official by the name of Mandal could provide him with just the support he needed.

Luckily for India his evil plan went awry and he lost his job anyway, but the damage was done. The OBC other backward castes genie was out of the bottle and India has never been able to put it back. So we have a uniquely Indian situation in which affirmative action is provided not for some underprivileged group of citizens but for the average Indian.

The other backward castes constitute a vast, nebulous category of Indians that in some states include the most privileged and oppressive castes in Indian society. Anyone who thinks that Yadavs and Jats are oppressed and underprivileged in rural India needs their head examined, and yet they fall into the OBC category.

Now, under Dr Manmohan Singh8217;s dispensation we are considering affirmative action on behalf of other underprivileged minorities like women and Muslims, and Sikhs are also beginning to make noisy demands, so we could soon have reservations apply to every category of Indian other than upper caste Hindu men. High satire or not?

Yet, on a daily basis the Prime Minister allows his ministers to appear on television to defend his government8217;s satirical approach to affirmative action although they now like to call it by other names. Last week, Minority Affairs Minister, A.R. Antulay told NDTV that he did not like the word 8216;aarakshan8217; and preferred to use 8216;insaaf8217; when it came to reservations for Muslims in the private sector.

The word justice insaaf appeals to me because that is exactly what this debate is not about. It is about the failure of government to provide every category of Indian with their most basic needs. If development policies had worked better we would have a country in which every one of every caste and creed had access to schools, jobs, affordable homes and a 21st century standard of living.

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It is because these have not been made available that we talk about reservations at all. The Prime Minister as an eminent economist understands this better than anyone and yet inexplicably wastes the country8217;s time and money on sops.

Why has there been no attempt to examine the failure of more than 90 per cent of our rural development schemes? The Planning Commission has been aware for some time now that the thousands of crores of rupees we pour into educational and social welfare schemes is mostly money down the drain. Some years ago it pointed out in one of its internal reports that it would be better to send everyone below the poverty line an annual money order for Rs 8,000 than to continue pouring money into grandiose schemes that achieved next to nothing.

I have pointed out before in this column the absurdity of an ICDS Integrated Child Development Services programme in Nandurbar district, which gave parents of starving children Rs 40 a day if they could establish in a hospital that the child was starving.

Once the child recovers and goes home, all aid stops and the child goes back to eating one meal of watery khichdi a day because his family usually has no more than Rs 10 a day to spend on food for everyone. This is only one example of the absurdity of our anti-poverty schemes.

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India remains at the bottom of the list in the UNDP8217;s human development index but we continue to pour money into schemes that cannot work.

When these fail we resort to sops of the affirmative action kind reducing the fight against poverty to a satire that nobody quite gets but everyone knows is not at all funny.