4.5% Quota for Minorities
It is too little, too late, and is most surely an exercise in buying a community’s votes on the promise of a mirage.
Coming as it does on the eve of the Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, it is not difficult to read the element of expediency in the Union Government’s move to accord 4.5 percentage points sub-quota within the overall 27 per cent OBC reservation quota. But then such political sins could have been pardoned. After all in a democracy, parties bargain for power against bloc votes. What is difficult to be implemented in normal course of governance, gets done in the heat of elections. If the UPA Government could manage to scoop out the poll dates from the Election Commission and timed the introduction of the Bill a day before the announcement of polls, it certainly needs a pat on the back for its artfulness.
But the move is patently dishonest. What the United Popular Alliance (UPA) had promised to Muslims in its manifesto, is being laid thin on a table far too vast to be pecked by the candidates of the community alone. It is like serving the proverbial porridge to the pelican on a platter rather than in an ewer. Plainly, the reservation for minorities in such homeopathic doses in a country as vast and varied as India with stiff competition for government jobs and seats in educational institutions, is least likely to benefit Muslims, the ‘neo-Dalits’, if interpretations of the celebrated Sachar Committee Report are to believed.
First, the 4.5 per cent reservation is far too little for religious minorities who represent 18 per cent of the population. The Ranganath Mishra Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities had recommended 10 per cent reservation for Muslims. It was not for general category of minorities. The 4.5 per cent is all likely to be lapped up by more socially and educationally advanced sections among minorities such as Christians from Kerala and Tamil Nadu (and generally from South Indian states where reside 65% of India’s Christians) and Sikhs and Jains from all over. Second, it is being camouflaged as a favour for Muslims to woo the community’s 18 per cent votes in Uttar Pradesh. There is clearly a mismatch. The State’s Muslims are being taken for a ride. Promise of lollipops from the Centre on the eve of Assembly elections can impress only the gullible.
Third, the Union Government is clearly on a weak wicket. It fights shy of naming the Muslims as beneficiaries of even the minuscule 4.5 per cent quota. It was the Muslims who deserved the affirmative action, not the minorities as a whole. Christians, Sikhs and Jains have traditionally fared better in terms of socio-economic and educational development. There was no demand from them to be placed among the underprivileged. In fact some of these communities are represented more than their proportion in the central jobs. The Sachar Committee had highlighted the disparity in terms of development between Muslims and other communities. It is certainly a sad commentary if the Union Government dithers on delivering the pinpointed remedy.
There is of course, no mention of reservation on the basis of religion in the Constitution. But then reservations were done on the basis of gender, habitation (rural), language etc, which too are extra-Constitutional categories. All the four southern States have Muslims in some or the other reserved category. Barring the BJP, all political parties have veered round to the view that Muslims need affirmative action. It seems the removal of this Constitutional hitch would not have posed much of a problem, given the growing realization of stewarding the nation on the path of inclusive growth among all political parties. One wonders, if the Union government would take into consideration all these factors.
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January 2012 |