I was consciously staying away from the reservation debate at least on this blog. In case you haven’t noticed yet, this blog is strictly a personal one dealing with my experiences in life and how I learn from them. The reservations mess that the Indian Government has brought onto itself and my take on it probably doesn’t quite fit in the scheme of things here.
But today I seem to have found a way to fit this thing in this blog. Some specific news items- one is of the Muslim groups demanding their fair share representation in the number of seats, the second one is of Meira Kumar giving details of proposed increased quotas for SC to reflect the increase of their population percentage. I also came to know the people of Buddhist religion are officially recognised as SC. It is also widely known that one can easily obtain false caste certificates if you oil the right hands. Mr. Ram Vilas Paswan is now proposing earmarking as much as 22.5% of the annual budget for Scheduled Castes. Wow! The sheer intelligence of our leaders amazes me. Anyways I do not wish to rant here about the twisted logic of this proposal.
The point I wish to make here is that given my own feelings for all things religious, I can easily convert to a more comfortable religion. So how is the govt going to stop me from getting reservation? Also for people who probably are more particular about being Hindu, they could easily obtain false (oops the certificates are actually genuine in the sense that they are duly signed by the actual issuing authority, so the govt cannot possibly call them as false) caste certificates. So if we leave aside the so called noble intentions of the govt and purely look the impact or try to know about the actual population benefiting by the move, we’ll see that they constitute those who actually are traditionally from so called backward castes, those who convert to Muslim or Buddhism and those who conveniently obtain false caste certificates from touts attached to various corrupt offices. The govt is conveniently forgetting about the huge number of poor people from all castes who are struggling for food and probably don’t even think about education. After all what possible vote bank could they represent?
Given that this reservation policy has almost unanimous support among the politicians, (who would want to dare challenge the united voting might of the backward castes?) there is no way this bill can be stopped. So it is now time for me to take a stand. What am I going to do once this bill is passed? Am I going to get fed up of all this, quit and emigrate to another country that is not governed by the age old divide and rule policy? Am I going to stay back and face the rigours of increasingly reducing portion of seats and jobs that will be left for me and my children to compete for? Am I going to stand up for my principles and not get a false caste certificate? Am I going to stand up for whatever feeble religious beliefs I have and not convert? Only time will tell. But time too is running out. Sooner or later the loophole of changing religion and the one of false caste certificates ought to be discovered. Some fix will definitely follow. Maybe I need to act fast. Hmm lets see…..
