Some reservations

How can you support the extension of reservations to the OBCs while mopping up the resentment among the upper castes? The two national political parties are being incredibly disingenuous in playing the quota issue for maximum electoral gain. There is a striking casualness in the way something is being offered for everyone, without even the pretence of informed groundwork. This is why the government appears embarrassingly exposed each time its emissary offers a settlement to striking medical students. Where is the precise plan of action for increasing the total number of seats in higher education by the promised 54 per cent, they ask. It is a legitimate query. The UPA government has committed itself to that increase by the next academic year. When a small group of healthcare workers striking duty in blatant abdication of their primary responsibility to patients can so easily appear to hold the government in breach of due diligence, someone has to be held accountable.

But if this is the state of government strategy, the Opposition too is being rather carefree in identifying beneficiaries that should be targeted. The BJP, on the first day of its National Executive meet in Delhi, welcomed the extension of quotas to OBCs in higher education with a string of caveats. Remove the creamy layer among the OBCs from entitlement to affirmative action. Add the economically weak among the upper castes. It is so evidently an appeal to various sections of the social coalition it had successfully wooed in the nineties in Uttar Pradesh 8212; which goes to polls next year. One could argue that this was a game begun by the Congress for the same stakes, but the BJP too jettisons its responsibility as the primary party in opposition by failing to keep focus on the more pertinent questions of infrastructure and delivery mechanisms.

Excellence and equity are twin objectives India compromises on to its own peril in this phase of globalisation. But can excellence be maintained by expansion of seats a key need without adequate investment in educational infrastructure? And is equity really best achieved through reservations on the basis of an old caste census? It is difficult to escape the suspicion that the Congress and the BJP are walking out of these questions with an eye on UP. Experience yields a sobering lesson. Mandal is actually an instrument that has banished Congress from the political matrix of UP. And for the BJP, gains in the Hindi heartland have come on the more inclusive bijli, sadak, pani plank. So, what accounts for this political amnesia?