My first article of 2019 should have been on a positive note, like about Team India’s fabulous victory down under in Australia. But when my dad suddenly mentioned about government sops for the upper-class people, it sailed right over my head. Then I came across tweets and news articles about the baffling 10% reservation announcement from the government for the upper-class people.
In the last five years, Modi government has been throwing googlies one after the other at the people, so I had to spend quite a bit of time on social media and TV to figure out what the latest one is all about. First of all, I have a huge problem with the concept of reservation. Though I admit that there had to be a way for the upliftment of the deprived lower classes of people after independence, it amounted to the prevailing caste system being incorporated into the country’s Constitution. Neither the leaders of our independence movement nor the makers of the Constitution seemed to have realised that colonials were not our true enemies. Colonials were able to establish their rule in the country because of the fractured and fragmented nature of our society primarily because of the caste system. Integrating it into the Constitution in the name of reservations has held back the country’s progress in a multitude of ways.
I would understand reservations and upliftment for one or two generations of people or more importantly for the most needed ones. I know of a case where a husband and wife of the scheduled caste were well employed with a public sector enterprise and one of their sons got admission to one of the premier engineering colleges in the country based on caste reservation. How many generations of lower caste people need to be uplifted? I am wondering how many such cases might exist in the country now where reservations helped people to leap ahead of the more eligible ones and how the system has failed to reach the deserving ones.
Why does the country need these separations based on class and caste? It’s not the country’s need, rather it is what sustains and nourishes vote bank politics, the most dangerous disease the country is afflicted with which has its roots in the caste based reservation system. The real progress of a country is not in any money and wealth based measurements. It is in social equality which is the cornerstone for the evolution and maturing of a society. If, after 70 years of being an independent democratic country, we are still voting in return for basic amenities such as drinking water, electricity and education on the basis of religion and caste, then the time has actually passed for us to understand that our country hasn’t progressed at all. A government is just a body of elected representatives of people who have been given the privilege to authorise policies which would utilise the various taxes collected by the civil administration bodies for development schemes intended to develop and improve the lives of people. But the fact that they behave like our rulers is our collective failure for not holding them accountable to our votes and making them the pied pipers and following them blindly like rats in the vicious system of vote bank politics.
If the upper class has become deprived now it is only because of governance failures and lack of employment opportunities. By initiating reservation for the upper-class Modi government is implicitly admitting to a total breakdown of its governance and miserable failures of demonetization and GST implementations. If we look closely at the eligibility cap, we can understand that the objective is to woo all classes of voters irrespective of religion and caste. The truth is out now that every class of people is suffering and the government is being forced to resort to reservation politics for 2019 Elections. But where are the government jobs to provide reservation based benefits? More importantly, where is the money to provide any benefits?
The government is already pulling out a huge chunk of RBI’s reserve money to fund banks in distress which would only result in writing off of massive corporate NPAs. The money would neither be recoverable for the RBI nor would do any good for the common people. A similar problem in Iceland was tackled by the government by shutting down or merging banks under insolvency and putting willful defaulters behind bars which had resulted in faster recovery of the country’s economy. Even the eligibility cap of employed people earning less than 8 lakhs per annum is laughable. Questions are being asked about whether such people should first be exempted from income taxes.
The more important question is why now when the 2019 elections are just a stone’s throw away? Is it an election sop? Definitely is. But there are other reasons as well. BJP seems to be finally realising that playing politics with cow and spreading hate through religion is not the governance model the country needs. The PM has spent his last 4 years travelling with his corporate friends and getting them business ventures in all the major countries. He seemed to be oblivious to the growing economic hardships spreading to the roots of the country. The wake-up call finally came in the form of the electoral defeats in MP, Rajasthan and Chattisgarh.
BJP has lost vast swathes of its voter base in the last 4 years. Complete indifference to the agriculture sector has destroyed its voter base among the rural class and demonetization and GST has alienated its most trusted voters, the traders and business class especially the MSME sector. Uncontrolled price rise especially of fuel and rising unemployment has distanced the middle class from the Modi charm. All that remains is the upper-class votes. Their ploy to polarise votes by creating communal violence in Kerala by stirring up and complicating the Sabarimala issue, in the same vein as how they won the assembly elections in UP in 2017 has been neutralised effectively by the Kerala government.
The Ram Mandir issue is stuck in the Supreme Court. RSS, whose ulterior objective is to revive the hegemony of Brahmanism, is obviously furious that the government hasn’t done anything of note to win the confidence of the upper castes. Then they have been hounded by the dubious Rafale deal both in the Parliament and in the SC. The rumoured seat-sharing deal between SP and BSP in UP would be BJP’s death knell because it is common knowledge that the party that wins the maximum Lok Sabha seats in UP invariably goes on to form the government. The only option left was to use one of the last curve balls left in their bag.
Getting the reservation bill passed on the floor of both the Houses of Parliament seems to be a dicey affair though BJP knows no other party will oppose it at the cost of alienating upper-class voters. But there is another catch here. Reservations cannot cross the 50% mark as per the mandate of the Constitution so adding 10% would be untenable. Even if the bill passes through both the Houses it is surely going to get challenged in the judiciary for violating the Constitution. All of these are time-consuming and any outcomes would be long past the elections. So what’s the point of this whole exercise? I am all for waiting and watching because like Shane Warne and Ravichandran Ashwin, the government may have a flipper to follow up on the googly.
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