Congress becomes a prisoner of quota raj
By Amulya Ganguli
It is a safe bet that if the Supreme Court lifts the present 50 per cent ceiling on reservations in jobs and education in government establishments, then the cynical, self-serving political class will carve out quotas for the various communities up to 100 per cent. Having failed to boost the economy either through the Hindu rate of growth earlier or the “Sikh rate of growth” now, to quote the irrepressible Congressman, Mani Shankar Aiyer, the only sop which the politicians can provide for wooing a vote bank is the quota system.
Muslims are the latest target of the Congress in this respect. Ever since it lost the support of the country’s largest minority because of Rajiv Gandhi’s blunders – opening the Babri masjid gates to pamper the Hindus who were angry over the nullification of the Supreme Court’s forward-looking verdict in the Shah Bano case – the party has been trying to recover the loyalty of what used to be one of its most substantial group of supporters. But to little avail because of two reasons. One is the Congress’s declining influence which means that the Congress is no longer as attractive a proposition as before. The other is that the Muslims have turned to parties like the Samajwadi Party, RJD, Trinamool Congress and others in view of the Congress’s absence as a political force of some consequence in the Hindi belt, West Bengal and elsewhere.
Arguably, if the economy had picked up with a sustained eight to nine per cent growth, the scope for more jobs in the private sector and greater business opportunities would have been availed of by the Muslims along with other communities, thereby obviating the need for the government’s crutches. But, since the economy is slowing down and champions of the reforms are unsure whether, if at all, the tide will turn, the only allurement which the Congress can offer to woo the Muslims is a promise of quotas.
If there weren’t any elections, especially in U.P. where so much is at stake for Rahul Gandhi, especially after he drew a blank in Bihar in 2010, the Congress might not have offered to include a 4.5 per cent quota for the backward caste Muslims within the overall 27 per cent for OBCs. But, the need to play saviour was too great for the Congress to desist from making the offer even at the risk of it being shot down by the Election Commission. Now, the party wants to raise the percentage to nine – as law and minority affairs minister Salman Khurshid had suggested along with a veiled threat to the commission about the government’s overall control of autonomous bodies – but to what extent the Muslims will be impressed will only be clear when the results are declared.
In the meantime, it may be worthwhile considering how the concept of reservations has been distorted by the short-sighted politicians. From the time when the decision was taken to extend the quotas for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes beyond the original 10-year limit, to the time when an entirely new group – the OBCs – was accorded this special privilege, the political class has been guided solely by considerations of placating vote banks without a thought to whether the targeted communities are actually benefitting or whether they are becoming far too dependent to stand on their own feet.
If the logic of the politicians is to be believed, then even the so-called creamy layer among the beneficiaries are still in need of wheel-chairs since the criterion of income, land holdings, etc for identifying this group is routinely extended so that none in the “layer” is excluded. Nothing exposes the political cynicism more than the fact that the creamy layer continues to enjoy the benefits of reservations although the Supreme Court wanted them to be excluded when it approved of the OBC quota.
However, an even more stark reminder of the negativity of the quota system is the demand of the Gujjars for relegation to the scheduled tribe category because the community feels it is being squeezed within the OBCs because of the inclusion of the Jats. It is not without significance that the Gujjars do not want to be included among the scheduled castes or Dalits because of the latter’s still continuing lowly status in Hindu society, including the taint of untouchability, despite their rising political profile. However, the Gujjar demand for the status of scheduled tribes or Adivasis is odd since these “original inhabitants”, as the name implies, enjoy a highly distinctive position largely because they are outside the Hindu varna or caste system, having lived in India from before the arrival of the Aryans in 1500 B.C.
So, whether it is the social tension created by agitations, such as those by the Gujjars recently, or the exacerbation of communal sentiments by the Congress’s wooing of the Muslims, which has now emboldened them to call for a ban on Salman Rushdie’s entry into India, or the accident of birth being preference over merit in the matter of employment and education, the baneful effects of the quota system are obvious.