: Opinion: Way to end caste quotas #IndiaNEWS #News By Arun Sinha Moving in upper caste circles, you cannot escape that nauseous grimace with a crackling ‘Tch! Tch!’ whenever the subject of SC-ST-OBC

Opinion: Way to end caste quotas #IndiaNEWS #News
By Arun Sinha

Moving in upper caste circles, you cannot escape that nauseous grimace with a crackling ‘Tch! Tch!’ whenever the subject of SC-ST-OBC reservations comes up. If a highly placed bureaucrat happens to be around, he will most likely have a wallet of hilarious gems about the idiocy of a junior colleague from quota to amuse the crowd.
Maybe a principal will share his own funny-cum-frustrating stories about a new teacher (the oldest son of a cobbler) who is so ignorant of his subject he asks his best student to stand holding the book by his chair and teach the class, his own contribution being frequent catnaps and dog-like yawns when awake.
Exaggerations forgiven, there will be more such stories, and at the end, somebody will say, “This country is doomed,�? and the others will lament in chorus, “It is, it is. �?
Common Arguments
The system sinking under the burden of ‘undeserving’ quota appointees is just one of the four strands of argument against reservations you commonly hear in the upper caste circles.
There are three more: one, it is the wealthy among lower castes who take the entire quota cake; two, the upper castes are victims of ‘reverse casteism’ and not getting jobs and college admissions; and three, reservations have gone on for seven decades, bringing benefits in terms of jobs, college admissions, scholarships, grants, loans and subsidies to large numbers of lower castes, and hence they must go.
Did we not hear the echoes of it in the observations of the judges who formed the majority side in the Supreme Court judgement favouring the EWS quota? They too saw the lower castes as ‘privileged’. They refused to include them among the economically weaker sections, saying they were enjoying quotas that were not based on the law of equality and hence had no right to demand application of the equality law in the EWS quota.
And the majority judges also wanted reservations to go. Their call for an end of reservations was of course in total contradiction with their endorsement of EWS reservation — it was like a longevity injection given by them to a monster they wanted to kill — but we will let it pass. We will concentrate on the question they have raised: should we not fix a timeline for the abrogation of reservations?
No Revolution
Before we cast something away, we have to remind ourselves of why we had it in the first place and whether it has served its purpose. What were the reservations meant for? Certainly not for societal transformation. Reservation was not a revolution. Nobody — neither Gandhi, nor Ambedkar, or the Congress or the other political parties — saw it as the only way to transform India into a casteless society.

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