Will scrapping meritocracy see India grow, PM Singh?

Reservation is no remedy to this country's backwardness and a way to bridge social and economic gap. India's secular leadership during its formative years had made an effort to integrate the divided Indias but they missed out a valid point of universal improvement of primary education, just as the focus was put on the country's higher education. May be the foreign-educated leaders of the day failed to analyse the reality. They had thought philanthropy alone would improve the conditions of the backward lot. But it was an error in thinking.

With each passing generation, this divide has given rise to dangerous partisan politics to raise its ugly hood. The politics of Mandal vs Kamandal was the culmination of a misdirected process of building the nation with a top-down approach. As the monolithic block called the Congress declined owing to its own wrongdoings, narrow regional forces began to play with fire.

Leaders from Uttar Pradesh, a state with a rainbow electoral identity, have primarily indulged in the game of reservation and the BJP, with its politics of communal identity, is also engaging in social engineering to alter the character of India's politics. The tragedy is that the Congress too, which was known for its secular base once, has started to fuel narrow politics.

According to noted scholar activist Dr Anand Teltumbde, the ruling classes today are so much bereft of the ideas that they resort only to some form of reservations. This one is another salvo being fired by the Congress very much like V P Singh in the past. He said although reservations in promotions are needed for he thinks there is no meaning to reservations in recruitment if there is no assurance of reasonable growth of the recruited person, but the entire dynamics work in a complex manner. "The opponent will raise the bogey of merit, which any way can be refuted by even a school boy. But the bigger question is political: how far are they going to fool vast masses of people (even Dalits) with the carrot of reservations to a miniscule minority?"

Singh putting his eggs in the wrong basket

Manmohan Singh, irrespective of his eruditeness, has failed to understand a basic fact. In 1980s and early 1990s, when the nation's economy was buried under the flop doctrine of centrism, the politics of communalism and reservation had particularly become prominent for it had created an alternative reality in the minds of an economically-challenged nation. But once the floodgates were opened in 1991, the effects of these forces were diluted to a great extent, according to an institutionalist theory of communalism.

The Hindutva politics is not as threatening today as it was two decades ago. But if the country's economy, which has again faced a crisis after a gap of twenty years, fail to deliver in the near future and the middle-class struggles to find its economic dream fulfilled, then what is being done today in the name of 'reservation in promotion' will have a serious consequence for the country and its people.

Manmohan Singh intellectually dishonest

It seems Singh is intellectually a dishonest person even if he is honest in terms of money-making. While returning from Iran, he said that the country will continue to grow despite protests by the opposition and that jobs will be created for the younger people. And now, he is backing that statement with a nod to the reservation bill. What growth does he aim at by discarding meritocracy and backing 'reservation in promotion'?

It is no wonder that The Washington Post has called Singh a "dithering, ineffectual bureaucrat presiding over a deeply corrupt government."