
Thank heavens, the Supreme Court has ordered a stay on the 27% reservation for the OBCs, such a whole lot of reservations cannot possibly be decided without doing a careful study on the real numbers of various communities in this country, and also exactly who genuinely qualifies to be certified an OBC. And I don’t say this because I don’t care for people from the backward castes, I say this for two reasons: One, this is too big a decision to jump into on some neta’s whim, it affects lakhs of students and their families. And even more significantly, we just cannot allow our netas to continue to ride their divide and rule agendas, I can guarantee you Arjun Singh’s heart (read that as boss Sonia Gandhi’s) doesn’t bleed for backward communities, it only bleeds for the mass of votes they can bring in.
But more importantly, I just can’t believe that in the year 2007, when our industrialists are buying out global giants, when our IT guys are leading the world, when our filmmakers are making international waves, our netas are going on unchecked with their divide and rule methods, something that actually the Brits started. So the Congress wants to cut us based on caste, the BJP wants to cut us based on religion, and in Mumbai, the Shiv Sena wants to cut us based on the language we speak. Thackeray’s latest command that 80% jobs in the city’s BPOs and MNC companies be reserved for the Marathi Manus is nothing but another divide and rule agenda. They have realised the non-Marathis anyways shan’t vote for them, so why not indulge in the sons-of-the-soil type of jingoism.
The problem is we are freely allowing our political parties to carve us out like a gooey chocolate cake, and no amount of globalisation is able to stop this regressive trend. Sure, there will come a day when the gullible Indian masses will be literate and matured enough to understand the situation, but that could take decades, even a hundred years. And by that time, permanent damage may have been affected on our social fabric, we may have reached a point of no return.
I think time has come for our apex court to kick arse of politicians who continue to indulge in the divide and rule methods. Time has come to make amendments in our Constitution, so that politicians who seek votes based on divisions are made to do time in the slammer, no less.