Final assault on feudal politics

Arjun Singh is the Duryodhana of the 21st century. Like the villain of the Mahabharata, he is feudal, ruthless and completely selfish. Like Duryodhana, he knows he cannot be king; therefore he seeks to play the spoiler. Unfortunately for him, this is the year 2006 and all of India is connected through television, telephone and the internet; nobody is buying his feudal cunning. In raising the issue of quotas for other backward castes, his ultimate target was prime minister Manmohan Singh; the idea was to discredit him within the party and outside. In pursuit of his devious scheme, the human resource development minister sought to mobilise the Congress’ own knee-jerk leftists and the Marxists whose pathological commissars hate the prime minister because he was and remains, the foremost proponent of liberalisation, globalisation and privatisation. However, the plan seems to have boomeranged, mainly because Congress president Sonia Gandhi didn’t support it. When it became apparent that his ploy has failed, Singh tried hard to cover up his scheming on the OBC quota issue by trying to divert attention to the communal issue. He projected himself as a champion of Muslims and even undertook a trip to Saudi Arabia, trying to position himself as the person who successfully brought back a multimillion dollar endowment for Delhi’s Jamia University. But unfortunately for him nobody accepts him as the great secularist. On the contrary he is an object of hate and derision within the country’s rapidly growing and increasingly confident middle class. This is not the first time Arjun Singh has played spoiler. In 1989, when my friend Sam Pitroda was attempting to modernise telecommu-nications, he was the minister who tried to sabotage Pitroda’s initiative every which way. Mercifully, because Rajiv Gandhi backed Pitroda, he didn’t succeed. Ever the naysayer, Arjun Singh continued his negative campaign. In 1992, he used the sacking of Babri Masjid by Hindu fanatics to launch a factional revolt against prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao. He roused the knee-jerk leftist rabble in the Congress in a perfidious campaign to portray the scholarly Rao as a closet communalist. In pushing for OBC quotas, Arjun Singh doesn’t seem to understand that affirmative action policies should be applied at the primary education stage. It is tragic that feudal politicians are using quotas to play vote bank politics with the country’s rapidly decaying higher education system. Singh’s argument is disingenuous: he is only seeking to implement what Parliament had mandated in a constitutional amendment last year, he told protesting students. As with everything else, he is dead wrong. As Dipankar Gupta of Jawaharlal Nehru University points out, the Constitution mandates quotas for “other backward classes,” not castes. This sleight of hand is an act of low cunning perpetrated by morally bankrupt politicians, especially the two Thakurs: Arjun Singh and before him V.P. Singh. Another negative byproduct of the quota controversy is that the debate has been transformed into a merit versus quota argument. The fact is all affirmative action programmes, including the one first introduced to India by…