Analysis

Deadly Enemies of Merit and Excellence - II

When the Constitution of India was drawn up after independence, it provided for Fundamental RIGHTS. It also provided for hereditary Funda-Mendel Rights to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes based on the well-known Mendel's Law of Inheritance in the field of biology. The constitution makers thought that the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes deserved a special treatment and consideration taking note of the established facts of brutal discrimination and untouchability practiced against them by all the Caste Hindus and the forward castes. This situation was altered by V P Singh in 1989 when he accepted the Mandal Commission's Report on Backward Classes.

I call the rights conferred on the Backward Classes following the official acceptance of this report, as Funda-Mandal Rights.

In the light of this three-fold classification, it should be clear that the Indian Constitution originally provided only for the two pillars of Fundamentalism (General Rule for All ) and Funda-Mendelism (Special Rule for the Scheduled castes and Scheduled Tribes ) in the field of public employment and education in government institutions. Then came the nefariously propped up grand and massive pillar of Funda-Mandalism ( The fraudulent Structure of Caste based Quota Raj proposed by Mandal with reference to 1931 Census Report Caste Data !! ). The Supreme Court of India in its historic verdict delivered day before yesterday has duly endorsed the two original pillars of Fundamental RIGHTS and Funda-Mendel Rights. It has rightly struck down the artificially raised caste based political structure of vote bank politics created by Funda-Mandalism ? I mean Funda-Mandal Rights.  

Hundreds of students who were part of the anti-reservation agitation at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences ( AIIMS ) heartily welcomed the new Supreme Court Order. There were tumultuous celebrations at AIIMS after news about the Supreme Court order came in. I congratulate the students of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and the Indian Institute of Technology ( IIT ), New Delhi for having shown the necessary physical, moral and political courage to come into the open public platform and declared in one voice : 'We welcome the Supreme Court order staying the 27 per cent reservation for Other Backward Classes ( OBCs) in elite educational institutions including the Indian Institutes of Management'. All India Resident Doctors Association Vice President Arnab Pal said : 'We are celebrating Holi and Diwali together and are happy with the Supreme Court order. The proposal was wrong to begin with and was aimed at creating a Vote Bank'. The President of the IIT Alumni Association, Delhi Chapter, Ashok Singh declared amidst cheers : 'The only way to improve education is to remove corruption from the Government-funded and managed schools and institutes. Let the elite show the way by sending their children to Corporation Schools to show their trust in their own educational system. The need of the day is to strengthen the basic primary education for the backward Classes. Many other senior politicians run hundreds of collages. Why have they excluded them from reservation ?'

Youth for Equality, a non-political student movement has announced : 'We welcome the move and are happy that the Apex Court's decision which is both student and nation friendly. The Government has to admit that its proposal was politically motivated and did not take into account the fact that meritorious students did not stand to benefit from the revised reservation proposal'.

We cannot expect our third-grade politicians to study Aristotle. Aristotle may have had Indian political scoundrels in view when he said: 'Democratic education ought to mean, not the education (or more precisely non-education!) which democrats like, but the education which will preserve democracy'. Until we have realised that these two things do not necessarily go together we cannot think clearly about education.

Rajaji spoke against the 'Licence-Permit-Control-Quota Raj' in the 1950s and 1960s. If he had been in our midst today, he would have spoken against the 'Licence-Permit-Control-Quota Raj' created by our politicians in the field of professional, higher and university education. This Casteist and Communal ARAJ has been created in the name of casteless society raised on a fraudulent superstructure of caste-based structure of quotas. Thus the stark and hideous spectre of Funda-Mandalism is endevouring to uproot and overthrow the original Constitutional pillars of Fundamentalism and Funda-Mendelism erected with noble, lofty and good national intentions by our founding fathers.

Why has the Supreme Court struck down the proposal of Arjun Singh? Arjun Singh adopted the Mandal Commission Report as his Bible. How did the Mandal Commission identify the 'Other Backward Classes' ( OBCs ) whose cause it championed ? What was the irrefutable , rational and logical basis on which suddenly in 1991 - 92, instead of 22.5 per cent seats being assigned on the basis of birth, 50 per cent came to be assigned by Government of India in that way ?.
Bindheshwari Prasad Mandal who headed the Mandal Commission had the temerity to criticize the finding of the First Backward Classes Commission set up in 1953 by Jawaharlal Nehru under the Chairmanship of Kakasaheb Kalekar in these words : ' The Kalekar Commission specified certain criteria for adjudging Backwardness and then proceeded to list 2399 Castes as Backward. But it is not clear from the report as to how the lists of Backward Classes were derived from the application of that criteria and in the absence of any explanation of the rationale for fixing different percentages for different groups of posts etc, the approach appears somewhat arbitrary'.

Having made this seemingly objective but essentially hypocritical observation agaist the Kalekar Commission , the Mandal Commission proceeded on blatantly stupid, politically vicious and legally untenable basis to determine first what percentage of our people are 'Other Backward Classes (OBCs)' . The cardinal fact is that there has been no Castewise enumeration of our population since the Census of 1931. This handicap did not in any way deter or halt the planned and ruthless political march of Mandalism. The Mandal Commission just assumed that the relative rates of growth of the population of different castes of Hindus have been identical ever since 1931. And thus it concluded that Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs) and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) today are the same percentage of the total Hindu population as they were in 1931 !. The Mandal Commission did not stop with this abominable caste advance or avalanche !. In the next step the Mandal Commission was politically determine to identify Other Backward Classes (OBCs) among other religions too ' Muslim and Christian religions which have been priding themselves on the ground, and whose propagandists have been running Hinduism down on the ground that, unlike Hinduism, the have no castes among them.

The point to be noted is that there was no castewise enumeration of non-Hindus even in the census of 1931. Even this did not pose any problem for the disgraceful Mandal Commission. It has determined to make one more abominable assumption ! To quote the Mandal Commision in this context : 'Assuming that roughly the proportion of OBCs among non-Hindus was of the same order as among the Hindus, population of non-Hindu OBCs was also taken as 52 per cent of the actual proportion of their population of 16.6 per cent, or 8.4 per cent.'

Based on the above two atrocious and untenable assumptions, the Mandal Commission came out with this judicial verdict (!) when it declared : 'Thus total population of Hindu and non-Hindu OBCs naturally added up to nearly 52 per cent (43.7 per cent Hindus plus 8.4 per cent of non-Hindus) of the country's population'. This is neither imaginary fiction nor acceptable fact. I call it the Menacing Mantra of Mandalism founded on a superstructure of fraudulent foundations and this mantra has been overturned by the Supreme Court.
In Tamilnadu, the quota system has been specially designed to academically, culturally, socially and economically eliminate and destroy the people belonging to the Forward Communities (FCs). According to a report in The Hindu (23 August, 2004), admissions to the 12 government medical colleges in Tamilnadu were: Total 1224; Scheduled Castes (SCs) - 231; Most Backward Classes (MBCs) - 952 and Forward Communities (FCs) - 28. In the open competition, only 31 in the FCs category qualified but the numbers for the others were BCs - 315, MBCs - 45 and SCs- 5. The lowest marks under various categories were: FCs - 295.74; BCs- 294.26; MBCs - 292.13; and SCs - 287.50. Evidently, backward communities are not backward at all. May I invite the kind attention of our wicked and barbarous politicians to the lethal words of Harold Laski in this context : 'Any constitution or formula or system which cannot constitutionally be amended is only an open invitation to an armed and bloody revolution'.

All political parties in India today are pitted against any system founded on merit or excellence or intellectual superiority. The demand for equality arises from two sources. One of them is among the noblest, the other is the basest, of human emotions. The noble source is the desire for fair play. But the other source is the hatred of merit and superiority. The kind of democratic education which is being advocated by all political parties in India today is bad because it endeavours to propitiate evil passions, to appease envy. A truly democratic education, one which will preserve democracy, must be in its own field, ruthlessly aristocratic and shamelessly 'highbrow'. Our infant democracy demands that little men should not take big ones seriously ; it will die when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves.  

 Continued

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09-Apr-2007

More by :  V. Sundaram

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