|
|
| April 10, 2000 | ||
|
|
| Affirmative
Inaction Little merit in a runaway quota system
There is no disputing the historical iniquities suffered by SCs and STs -- but is the present mechanism of reservations doing anything to benefit the poorest of the poor? Without a strictly economic parameter the quota system can never be foolproof. What it has done is to create a sub-elite among the traditionally indigent classes. There is no provision, for instance, to prevent the same family from using the reservation facility for, say, more than three generations. It is ridiculous to treat the daughter of an sc secretary to the Government of India at par with the son of a Dalit labourer in, well, Jehanabad. Injecting a dose of rationality into affirmative action will only hasten the journey to social equity. Rather than take piecemeal decisions on reservations, shouldn't the Government study the Indian experience with the quota system in its entirety? Perhaps the Constitutional Review Committee could finally be gainfully employed. Grow up India Less
than a week after Bill Clinton left India, the very circles that acclaimed
his visit are decrying "American racism". Even a term as
mothballed as "apartheid" is back in currency -- all because NRI
filmmaker Manoj Night Shyamalan didn't win an It is nobody's case Shyamalan has not produced a remarkably different, and commercially successful, psychological thriller. In sidestepping The Sixth Sense the Motion Picture Academy may well have erred. Indeed, even Orson Welles' Citizen Kane -- arguably the greatest film ever made -- was a failure at the Oscar ceremony in 1941. If nothing else, Shyamalan is in good company. What isn't quite as agreeable is the tetchy reaction back in his homeland. Just days after putting up a grand show about being a self-confident nation, does India have to go berserk only because one Shyamalan doesn't win an Oscar? Talk of Sense and hyper-sensitivity. |
|
||||
| Top |
 © Living Media India Ltd |
On
Wednesday, March 29, the Union cabinet approved the delinking of the
backlog of SC/ST vacancies in government jobs from the overall 50 per cent
ceiling on reservations. This supersedes the Supreme Court's ruling that
not more than half of all government recruitments be covered by
affirmative action. If the entire SC/ST quota has
not been filled in year one, it will be carried over to year two and so
on. The Cabinet's announcement came only days after the Parliamentary
Committee for Welfare of SCs and STs recommended a constitutional
amendment for reservations in the judiciary. If this is allowed, there is
no earthly reason why the Union Cabinet itself should not be subject to
caste-based reservations. At a time when the Indian mind is a prized
commodity in the global marketplace, the Indian state is closing its doors
to homegrown talent. The 50 per cent limit was an eminently sensible one
that reconciled social justice with meritocracy. Now the balance is gone;
forever.
Oscar
for The Sixth Sense. A people given to instant analyses, Indians have
immediately concluded Hollywood doesn't like coloured, at any rate brown,
faces, that the Academy Awards go only to American predictability rather
than a more audacious creativity. A mindset that sees the world as a
conspiracy designed to victimise talented Indians -- and treats every
umpiring decision against Sachin Tendulkar as part of a grand
CIA-sponsored mission -- has announced its rebirth. With the death of
political ideologies, the new faultlines are cultural. So the Booker Prize
committee is appreciative of multiculturalism when it applauds Arundhati
Roy but suffers from an imperial hangover when it rejects Vikram Seth.
Shekhar Kapur has to be saluted simply because he's made a film on an
English queen, never mind if critics call it unintelligent. This is the
white man's burden gone mad.