Editor,
Had the authorities of a private university indulged in a ‘conspiracy’ to prevent the admission of Dalit, tribal, or OBC students in its fold despite good results of such candidates in qualifying entrance examinations, or acted cruelly with them through meaningful humiliating gestures comments and action, not only the agitating students, rather all rational Indians should have protested against such discriminatory practice and demanded exemplary punishment for the mandarins concerned.
But just because only 7 percent of the university’s students hail from Dalit, tribal, or OBC background, the private university will have to implement caste-based reservation after indulging in a census. What a ridiculous, hilarious demand indeed.
However, it is hardly surprising, given that ‘rights and benefits in proportion to share of population’ have turned into the latest buzzword and issue of political and social turmoil in the country.
On the one hand, it would be demanded that all leaves under the Indian sky should nod only through the prism of mere caste by making a mockery of all things – eligibility, quality, and national identity – on the other, the rhetoric of ‘We are at first Indians’ will be zealously uttered along with lip service towards efficiency. What a gem of hypocrisy.
What a criminal wastage of time, energy and resources to determine which caste or tribe group will receive what quantum of share in job openings, higher education and other rights and benefits in this diverse heterogeneous country – that too by the yardstick of numerical strength only.
When demands should have been raised to treat all downtrodden and economically weak Indians equally in terms of opening the door of opportunities to prosper and flourish by providing food, shelter, education, and medical services for free or through nominal service cost and thereafter allow the best to enter the field of higher education, service, and all sectors of the country by according eligibility and merit the sole yardstick, Indians are being continuously fragmented through all sorts of demographic equation even after 76 years of attainment of independence, that too by relegating all norms of quality and efficiency to oblivion. Nothing can be more tragic than this mindset.
Already the caste-/tribe-based reservation policy has posed a severe threat to the future of the country as absolutely ineligible candidates are often attaining pride of place in government offices and educational institutions with innumerable candidates of merit quality getting scandalously deprived from their rightful seats and jobs despite scoring high marks. Now the situation has come to such a chauvinistic pass that even private universities/institutions are being coaxed to go such fatal way by making a mockery of all norms of quality and equality by playing to the gallery of numerical muscle-flexing in terms of caste and demography.
This is simply not done.
Kajal Chatterjee,
D-2/403,
Peerless Nagar, Kolkata