RIGHT ANGLE – Modi Unable to Douse Rahul’s Fire

Prime Minister Narendra Modi says India is on the firm course of becoming a developed country. Really? As a goal, his ideas are laudable. But, are they realisable, given his increasingly obvious political reluctance?

The answer to this question, I am afraid, is this – “Highly unlikely”. Let me explain, “why”.

Never before in independent India’s history has the politics of entitlement assumed such perverse proportions as it is today. Opposition political parties, now much stronger after years, led by Congress supremo Rahul Gandhi, see castes in everybody. And he wants all the resources of the country, including jobs, to be divided among castes, based on their respective numerical numbers. In effect, he is encouraging people to only have more and more children and then demand their shares. That his blind allies in the developed southern and western parts of the country echoing Gandhi without realising that their states will suffer the most as they are more developed, more educated and less populated is something we will discuss later.

Politics of entitlement means that whether you are competent or not is not the issue; you have every right to get a share. It is completely different from politics of empowerment which is positive in the sense that it adds to your competence (through education and training) to be productive and self-dependent; unlike that of a parasite, an empowered person’s survival does not depend on the mercies of the government that has to distribute the nation’s resources. An empowered person contributes to the nation’s resources; an entitled person only eats away the resources without any contribution, whatsoever.

The second feature of the politics of entitlement is that it drives away talents. For instance, in a school or research institution or factory, there are 100 highly talented people. Rahul Gandhi’s casteism-theory will ensure that at least 90 of them will be thrown away unless they belong to the certain castes for which these posts will be reserved.

But then the fact remains that in today’s knowledge- and technology-driven world, a country’s prosperity and security depends on strengthening its educational and research capacity and mobilising emerging technologies to serve the national interest.

It is not realised that caste-based reservations are bound to encourage inefficiency which already is high in our system. Imagine that students scoring 98 percent in exams will not be able to get admissions or jobs in 85 percent cases, but under quota, OBC candidates with 50 percent will grab them. Any reservation based on social or historical criteria beyond a reasonable limit will undoubtedly affect efficiency adversely.

However, Rahul Gandhi’s singular obsession with caste-based reservation on the basis of the caste’s number will imply that we only have doctors, engineers, scientists, sportspersons, bureaucrats, professors, soldiers and even judges on the basis of entitlement, not competence or empowerment. His exact slogan is, “Jitni Abadi, utna Haq”.

Our constitution makers, including B R Amebedkar, dreamt of a casteless India, but the likes of Rahul Gandhi want castes to be a permanent feature, at least for 10, 000 years (because of the narrative that upper castes have exploited to lower ones for at least the same number of years). And unfortunately, and this is the tragedy, even many in Modi’s BJP, not to speak of his allies like Nitish Kumars and Paswans, are buying the theory of caste-based entitlements.

The BJP is worried that Rahul Gandhi and his INDIA alliance have found a magic formula to defeat Modi and “eradicate” BJP. That formula is caste-based reservation. For this, they demand first a country-wide caste- census and subsequently an increase in the upper ceiling of the reservation in education and jobs, which the Supreme Court had fixed at 50 percent initially but agreed to extend it to 60 percent when the Modi government brought out an amendment for reserving 10 percent for economically poor among the so-called upper castes. In fact, now there will be demands that OBC candidates who have nearly 25 percent reservations in education and jobs at the moment should have the provision in political representation like their SC and ST counterparts. That means reservation of seats for OBC in legislatures, including Parliament.

But that is not all. If the demands of the pro-reservationists in the past are any indication, then this so-called socially empowering facility must be extended to the private sector. They now want that whether it is Tatas or Ambanis or Adanis or any IT czar like Narayan Murthy, the manpower in their enterprises must not be drawn from the meritorious but be inclusive of representatives of SC, ST and OBC.

Of course, the unstated but obvious fact behind these demands is that the pro-OBC slogan would be the best political strategy to unseat Modi from power. Because, all told, Modi’s or for that matter BJP’s strongest political base happens to be Hindi-speaking states in general and Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in particular. And these happen to be states where the OBC matter politically the most. After all, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar send as many as 120 members to the Lok Sabha. Add another 150 plus from other states like Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Rajasthan and Haryana where the OBC presence is quite substantial.

The idea is that if the OBC can be wooed by the INDIA alliance in the aforesaid states, Modi can be easily defeated, even though facts remain that Modi himself is India’s first OBC Prime Minister and majority of the BJP MPs and MLAs happen to be from the OBC ( it is perhaps not realized enough that the BJP has got the most OBC, SC and ST MPs), that the Modi government is the one that has given the OBC Commission the constitutional status, a long standing demand, and that majority of the Hindi-speaking states have had OBC chief Ministers. This is particularly true of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh where the likes of Laloo, Nitish, Mulayam and Akhilesh have ruled for years but without contributing much towards the OBC welfare and empowerment.

Rahul Gandhi and his advisors (some of whom are foreign-based) think that this strategy will work this time as it worked for former Prime Minister VP Singh who implemented the Mandal Commission report to give the OBC reservation for the first time in 1990.

In fact, they think that Hindus in India, who have awakened under the Modi regime to assert their legitimate political and other rights as equal citizens of the country and not remain dormant as second-class citizens under the long Congress rule, will get divided in terms of castes. And once these caste-divisions take place, then the Hindu- rise will be halted and Modi will be defeated, so runs their strategy.

Interestingly, the Congress party thinks that whatever is India today is because of the deeds and sacrifices of the Gandhi family – Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, all late Prime Ministers. But has Rahul realized what his father, grandmother and great grandfather had said about caste-based reservations?

Nehru had written a letter to Chief Ministers on June 27, 1961, in which the then Prime Minister had opposed quotas on caste and communal lines. “If we go in for reservations on a communal and caste basis, we swamp the bright and able people and remain second-rate or third-rate. I am grieved to learn how far this business of reservation has gone based on communal consideration,” Nehru wrote.

“It has amazed me to learn that even promotions are based sometimes on communal and caste considerations. This way lies not only folly, but disaster. Let’s help the backward groups by all means, but never at the cost of efficiency. How are we going to build our public sector or indeed any sector with second-rate people?”, he had added.

Nehru had also opposed a caste census in 1951. Similarly, though the Janata Party government that came to power in 1977 had set up the Mandal Commission to consider the issue of OBC reservation, Ms. Indira Gandhi, after her comeback to power in 1980 put its report on the backburner when it was submitted to her in 1980. In fact, the same year, she coined a slogan to counter caste-based parties: “Na jaat par na paat par, mohar lagegi haath par (Vote for Congress and not on caste and community lines)”. Rajiv Gandhi also ignored the Mandal report. He had termed it as an attempt to divide the country on caste lines.

One understands that these communities were treated badly in the past and reservations are like a cost our society must pay for a few years, perhaps a few decades if it has any pretence of undoing the effects of social and economic exploitation of the masses by a handful minority for over thousands of years, it cannot be a long term phenomenon unless one believes in a genetic theory of inefficiency and corruption.

As I have mentioned above, nothing can be more perverse than demanding quotas based on a castle’s numerical number. It is a sign of development when one’s family is small and the population of the country or the state is under control. Imagine our states in South India and West India. They are developed because of their smaller population that is better educated and gainfully employed to generate wealth for the country. Now reservations based on population means that North India will have a bigger share of the national cake and governance.

In fact, the likes of Rahul are encouraging the people in North India to produce more and more children to demand bigger shares. In other words, if in the name of social empowerment, there will be redistribution of wealth, jobs and political representations, then this wealth that is produced more by southern and western India will make its creators have a relook at India’s political map.

Economically too, there will be a pause in the creation of wealth that requires talent and hard work. Inefficiency associated with reservations will halt investments into India and the country’s business houses and industries may decide to shift their locations abroad.

In sum, caste-based reservations would be against national unity. It would escalate caste-based divisiveness and encourage sub-nationalisms by allowing them to be articulated in electoral politics.

Rahul Gandhi is playing with fire, indeed! But Modi does not seem to do anything to douse this fire. After all, he too is a politician who needs votes.