Reservation: Meaningless Debate

by Raj Yashwant

May 30, 2006

While everyone talks about castes and the like, it may be interesting to trace the very root of the word. It was first used by the British to wedge a divide. While I cannot say with certainty, there was probably a fair amount of fabrication about the discrimination that the 'so called' lower castes suffered from. People very conveniently forget that a similar social structure exists everywhere in the world, including the much touted USA and the erstwhile USSR. These are taken as natural phenomena, but nowhere do you see reservation. In India a certain political class is taking advantage of the legacy that the British left behind.

Reservation deals a crippling blow to society by diminishing the enthusiasm of the more capable and reducing the motivation of the less capable. In both senses the country suffers.

Reservation cannot be a substitute for equitable distribution of opportunities. If there are people who do not have opportunities to acquire skills, provide these to them. But the qualification level should not be compromised. What reservation proposes to do is cut the qualification level of the 'less privileged'. That is what we should fight against. Nobody is complaining about helping the under-privileged, what everybody is railing against is the way in which it is being done.

Before the pro-reservationists speak of reservations in the US, it would be nice to know the number of students admitted to 'elite' universities in the US. An MIT alone admits 4000 students, that is more than all of our IITs combined. And our population is about 4 times that of the US.

Without considering all these in totality, the reservation debate is meaningless. It smacks of opportunism of the worst kind.

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