Placebo politics

Placebo politics

Quotas have run their course, time to expand jobs and improve education.

With the Lok Sabha passing the Constitution amendment bill providing for a new 10% quota for the ‘economically backward’ among those outside other quotas, a Pandora’s Box of new quota demands is set to be opened. This is because the government move will see the 50% limit set for quotas by the Supreme Court being breached. And once that happens it will literally be a free-for-all in the great quota race.

Already there are demands to raise the existing quota for OBCs from 27% to 54% to reflect this section’s putative proportion in the population. If the trend is encouraged further, then Article 15 guaranteeing the fundamental right to equality might as well be expunged from the Constitution and Indians told to take shelter within their respective caste/ religious/ tribal ghettos.

The 50% cap put by the apex court is already too high. Raising this any more will grievously injure meritocracy as well. For those very reasons BR Ambedkar, chief architect of the Constitution, was against expansive quotas. In his Constituent Assembly speech on November 30, 1948, he had explicitly stated that reservations should be for a minority of seats and only for those backward classes who did not have representation in the state. Instead of this self-limiting concept quotas have continued to expand over the decades, driven by the force of vote bank politics.

As a result, there is a race to the bottom today with most communities demanding provisions originally meant for the most deprived sections of society, that too only temporarily. The relaxed criteria of the EWS quota – such as annual income up to Rs 8 lakh – make over 95% of Indians eligible for it, which means that positions under the quota will broadly be recycled within the same groups. This looks like a version of the great Indian rope trick, a feel-good placebo of the sort our political class habitually doles out. Except that this placebo causes actual harm, sacrificing the principles of equality as well as merit in higher education and governance. Failures on the jobs and education front are sought to be masked by expanding the reservations empire. If a nation is to succeed, however, there is no short cut around the hard tasks – providing quality education and jobs to its people. India’s political class must turn its mind to this, and the apex court must nudge them down this road by reiterating the 50% upper limit it had set.