After almost a score, the last elections brought a government with least alliances. The simple mathematics says the lesser the alliance, the better is the leadership. From the past one year, the time this government came into power, we all are seeing the impact. With almost no fear of losing the majority, the government had acted freely and stood for the policies and bills it wants to implement. Be it nuclear deal, climate change policies, this year's budget or woman's bill it was successful in transforming its vision into reality. Now that we have a strong leadership in place, not sure about all but, at least I am experiencing the real feel good factor.
Woman's bill, which allowed 33% reservation for woman in Parliament, is the government's latest bold move to empower the fairer sex. At least now we can hope to see better sex ratio in parliament.
But sometimes I wonder, do these reservations really empower the weak? Whats the percentage of the weak among those availing these benefits? Here i am not criticizing the Woman's bill but speaking about all the reservations in general. Be it SC/ST reservation, OBC reservation and now Woman's reservation!
Lalu commented over woman's bill, asking, being an MP whether Rabri could go against his will. Though this depicts the cruel male-chauvinistic nature of our society and over it the male-chauvinism of those who are leading us, but isn't it really true? Now the next approach of a shrewd politician would be to put his crown on his obedient wife's head and rule the territory. After it the onus of the empowerment of the common woman would be on the remaining few woman MPs if along with being free they are honest at their will.
Though the woman's bill keeping the above point in mind still gives some hope, do the other reservation policies which are already in place are fulfilling the cause they were laid for? Or these are just there because no party can dare remove them as that would be fatal for their Vote Bank.
When I was doing my engineering, to support the poor people of SC/ST community, they were given a scholar ship that meant whole year's fees and some extra money to help them with day today expenditures. But the irony was, there was not even a single "Poor" SC/ST candidate who took that scholarship. All of them were from a well to do family and this scholarship meant the latest mobile phone to them.
In contrast, there was one of my batch mate who was really in need of this scholarship to lessen the burden on his poor family but he wasn't fit for it because he didn't belong to the 'required' community.
Does this mean that these reservations at least is doing good for the communities for which they were crafted? I don't think so, instead what i understand is only those who form the upper crust of these communities are mostly seeking the benefits of it. Where as the people from these communities who really need to be uplifted are not even able to come to the stage where they can think of availing the benefits of these schemes. For example, most of the 'Maoist' agitation started due to the suppression of so called 'lower castes' by the so called 'upper castes', but now when the maoist themselves has forgotten the cause of their movement, the communities are facing the suppression from prominent castes and the heat of maoists as well. They are still not able to complete their basic education and come to the level where they can with the help of these reservations get a higher education which can promise them a better future with skilled Jobs.
The real empowerment is needed at such a primary level. If the people can be helped primarily, they wont require a reservation to place themselves into institutions of specialized education. And then it will only be merit that will matter whether its a specialization in medicine or in engineering. And at that time our country will have better doctors and better engineers.
But the plight of our country is, these reservations are now imbibed so deeply into the politics that even if a government secretly feels that now its the right time for these reservations to be out, they cant even express it because that will mean lesser votes and might be a new government next time!!
Well the topic of reservations for lower castes and the right use of this is such a subjective matter that discussing it over a small piece of writing is almost impossible. Although you raised the right questions but you missed one interesting point. While implementing the reservations for the lower castes it was assumed that these reservations will be revoked in a step by step process. What we are witnessing is that government kept adding more complications to this system by adding more no of castes/religions to OBCs and bringing reservations to premier institutions.
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