India must be the only country in the world where people struggle and kill to be declared backward and revel in social regression in reversal of the whole story of civilisation and where it is official policy and serious politics to tout and cultivate such nonsense. This monstrous aberration that stigmatises and deforms our society is a product of warped thinking and ad hoc action that legitimises and rewards such crude behaviour.
The Gurjar-Meena “caste war” is a fallout of the vote-bank politics and policies practised over the years by all parties across the board to score petty points, stoke fires and win cheap kudos at the cost of the national interest. Yes, Gurjars, like any other community anywhere in the country, deserve to get their due share of jobs and opportunities through fair competition untrammelled by nepotism or discrimination. If they do not compete it could be that they have other preferences unless it be that they are not competitive, in which case the remedy lies elsewhere, in education and training, rather than in seeking to carve out more and more quotas for ever larger numbers at an increasingly high social cost. It is nobody’s case that the Gurjars in Rajasthan, an OBC, face wilful discrimination in writing exams and entering the civil or other superior services. The Meenas have made advances through reservation, having long back been declared a tribal community. The Jats in Rajasthan, by no means a particularly disadvantaged people, were some time back listed as an OBC, enabling them to appropriate a slice of the reserved quota.
So when the Gurjars of Rajasthan argue that it is now their turn to get the golden key, with what logic can they be denied? After all, Gurjars in J&K, Himachal and Uttaranchal have been scheduled as tribes and derive certain entitlements from that status. And the criteria of backwardness, remoteness, isolation, etc by which such a determination is made, provide little justification for such selection. In J&K all those living in Leh tehsil were declared tribes on a territorial rather than any sociological basis. So, by adding nonsense to nonsense over the years, logic and reason have fled and pure political expediency has come to dictate far-reaching decisions that have a bearing on the national interest. The story has been repeated in the eastern region where Rajbongshis are SCs, STs or OBCs depending where they are domiciled. A process of de-Sanskritisation and re-tribalisation has been unleashed, the price for which varies from burning 10 buses and killing half a dozen people or the other way about, depending on the prevalent “ideology” in vogue. The Gurjars of Rajasthan are understandably inflamed because several of their people died in police firing. But who should mourn the initial manhandling and killing of some policemen whether in Rajasthan or Kalinganagar in Orissa or elsewhere?
There is reasonable ground for reservation for SCs and STs and maybe other disadvantaged groups (who may not necessarily be traditional OBCs) accompanied by a well defined exit policy subject to periodic review so that the benefits seep down to the least privileged and the entire quota is steadily depleted and not perpetuated and enlarged as at present. Yet the very idea of a “creamy layer” is derided by those who have battened on the cream to the detriment of others more deserving.
A further and major flaw lies in not adequately expanding education and vocational and professional training at all levels and in all regions to build competence, merit and equal opportunity, backed by scholarships. Distance learning, open universities, correspondence courses, workers’ education and extra-mural studies are all well known methodologies. Certainly something has been done in this direction but this has been too little and rather late. The Human Resources Ministry at the centre has been too busy playing petty politics to devote much time to this vital task. Private education has been needlessly thwarted or sought to be over-regulated, a current example being the threat by the Karnataka government to de-license Kannada medium schools for switching to English, which, presumably, is what parents and the job-market want. It is nobody’s case that Kannada or the mother tongue should not be well taught; but why prepare the ground for creating a prospective demand for declaring alumni of such Kannada-first schools OBCs or STs 10-15 years from now!
The object of all right thinking people should be to enlarge the cake, so that there is more for more, and not to reduce the size of the pie and then dole out starvation rations to burgeoning numbers of job seekers looking for better opportunities and a richer life. The Rajasthan crisis calls for a national solution that is long term and holistic. Hopefully the judge appointed to inquire into the merits of the Gujjar demand will lay down what will be adopted as rational national criteria. There is sometimes nothing like a crisis to crystallise the mind. Hopefully the Meena-Gurjar “caste war” will give pause to the political class and caste demagogues to reflect on their follies and enable them to fashion a better response to the huge challenge of inclusive development and social change.