Cheering On!

BY Darius Nakhoonwala| IN Opinion | 13/04/2008

 You don¿t say!

Darius Nakhoonwala

Reading the edits on the Supreme Court ruling on the OBC reservations case, I was reminded of the period 1969-75. Where, if readers will recall, when Indira Gandhi was putting in place a bad idea – socialism, Indian style – to loud cheers from the press which thought heaven was at hand.

The cheering for the reservation of 27 per cent of the seats for the OBCs at the university level is very similar. Almost every editor has taken the line that this is fine, that it needed to be done and, thank God, that whatever has been done has been done sensibly.

Bollocks, is all I can say.

A bad idea takes time to reveal its badness and I wish the editorial writers had focused on at least one or two such ideas that turned out to be lemons in the long run, and impossible to correct.

I think only the Telegraph got it right. It asked what about quality and pointed out that "lowering admission criteria for one half of the class would tend to lower standards anyway."  It was also the only one to point out another obvious mistake, namely, that "the idea of affirmative action has been skewed at its fundamentals by making caste the basis of quotas… If India is to build on and improve its human resources, there should be strict parameters of qualification for the benefits of affirmative action, and caste should not be one of them, certainly not the only one."

The Hindu, as often in the last four years, was all praise. "The…judgment… should clear the air..." But it didn¿t say why, merely reported the judgment in the edit!

The Times of India said the Court had done a balancing act but it did ask the key question, "…it is time to ask if caste should continue to be the sole criterion to judge social and educational backwardness." It said what we need is a "broad-based deprivation index to replace caste as the sole criterion for measuring backwardness…

Supply-side solutions — more IITs, IIMs and central universities as well as jobs — could ensure that there are no losers. The shrillness of the debate has prevented sensible stocktaking of our affirmative action programmes. It¿s time to move forward." How  absolutely right.

The Pioneer toed the party line and praised the ruling but to give a semblance of intellectual honesty, it focused on the exclusion of the ¿creamy layer¿. Well, yes, but what about caste as the determinant of entitlement? Silence.

The Indian Express also refused to discuss caste as the determinant of entitlement and used a strange argument. "Today, a political and social consensus holds on the need to deepen equal-opportunity measures. This is not to deny that there is anxiety amongst large sections of the population that a door may be closing on their aspirations for quality higher education. There is. But that anxiety would have been present even if quotas for SEBCs had not been announced."

Is it not amazing that an issue of such great importance was dealt with so casually, with pop wisdom and throwaway lines?