Caste in injustice - THE JUSTIFICATION FOR ASSAULT

ARUN SHOURIE :: Indian Express The rhetoric of ‘social justice’ conceals all manner of ills: pandering to sectional interests, appeasing of labour aristocracies, subsidising of dying PSUs and most crucially, robbing of the Indian state of talent by arguing against all forms of merit. By equating caste with class, Left orthodoxies are setting the clock back on modernisation. Excerpts from the Nani Palkhivala Memorial Lecture:

"Today, governments spend about Rs 45,000 crore on subsidies. If you suggest even that governments should ascertain whether these are really reaching the poor, you are against the poor. Standards are dismissed as contrivances to keep the backward down. Mediocrity is the norm. Ignorance is argument. Intimidation is evidence. Assault is proof. And if you question any of this, you are against the ‘backward’.

If you do no more than use the word that Gandhiji used, ‘Harijan’, and not the one that has been coined as a weapon in the politics of grievance-mongering, and to justify norm-less conduct—‘Dalits’—you are a Manuvadi, and, therefore, an oppressor who secretly wants millions to be made untouchables again.

If you point to the truth about reservations: that they are a sleight of hand of the politician—instead of working to ensure better education, better hostel facilities, superior tuition for the disadvantaged, he gets posts ‘reserved’, and proclaims that he has brought boons for them; that these are ‘boons’ in the most stagnant part of our society—namely, government service; that they have led to a perverse race, a jostling to get one’s group declared ‘backward’; that in several states, the ‘reservations’ are being cornered by a few sub-castes; that the proportions of jobs that are now being reserved far exceed even the illustrative proportions that had been stated in the Constituent Assembly by Dr Ambedkar himself—if you request even that these apprehensions be examined, you are part of the oppressor-regime.

In April 1992, while responding to a discussion in the state Assembly, the then chief minister of Assam, Hiteshwar Saikia, admitted that there were 30 lakh illegal Bangladeshi immigrants in the state. Unless he withdraws that statement within 48 hours, thundered the head of the Muslim United Front, his government would be brought down. Saikia immediately declared that he had never made the statement—though he had made it on the floor of the Assembly itself. Last year, Mr A K Antony, one of the most upright of recent chief ministers, warned that minorities were exacting too much in the form of benefits, that their organising themselves into vote banks was bound to create a backlash. That statement cost him the chief ministership.

Trying to justify what he had done V P Singh had told Parliament in August 1990, ‘‘We talk about merit. What is the merit of the system itself? That the section which is 52 per cent of the population gets 12.55 per cent in government employment. What is the merit of the system? That in Class I employees of the government it gets only 4.69 per cent, for 52 per cent of the population in decision-making at the top echelons it is not even one-tenth of the population of the country; in the power structure it is hardly 4.69 per cent. I want to challenge first the merit of the system itself before we come and question on the merit, whether on merit to reject this individual or that. And we want to change the structure basically, consciously, with open eyes. And I know when changing the structures comes, there will be resistance...What I want to convey is that treating unequals as equals is the greatest injustice. And, correction of this injustice is very important and that is what I want to convey...’’ "

The writer is BJP MP and former disinvestment minister

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