08-23-2006, 02:30 AM
I guess why 87% of the population is enjoying reservation is probably not so interesting as the North-South divide!!!
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> Quota issue: Divisive responses in north & south India
K Venkataramanan | Chennai
Sometimes, divisive issues invite divided responses. At other times, responses like strikes and protests tend to make issues seem divisive, even when they are not. The reservation conundrum in India is an issue seen as divisive by the elite in north India, while protests against quotas appear unjust to most people in the south.
The principal fear among those opposing the idea of OBC reservation appears to be the loss of a sizeable chunk of their educational opportunities. This is in contrast to the manner in which OBC quotas in jobs had become slowly acceptable after the Supreme Court upheld the 27 per cent reservation in 1992 and employment came under the ambit of 'social justice'.
<b>There is neither surprise nor unease in the South about the goings-on on the reservation front. Is it not the most natural thing for parties with a base among the backward classes - who in Tamil Nadu constitute nearly 87 per cent of the population - to press the Government for quotas?</b>
To some, such opposition is understandable from sections of society that have not yet changed their conceptual mindset about accommodating backward class aspirations. And to others, it may even come as a surprise that something so commonplace, understandable and justified as reservations should become a huge emotive issue.
The DMK, a key constituent of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), has been busy on the quota front, its leader writing to the Prime Minister, and its legislators meeting Manmohan Singh, while partner Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) holds a rally in New Delhi - something very unusual for a regional party which is not even one of the two top parties in its home State.
Politically motivated initiatives are so common that it is easy to suspect that the two parties are championing the cause of the backward classes with an eye on expanding their support base and projecting themselves in a better light before the electorate in TN, <b>a State where 87.5 per cent of the population is covered by reservation benefits.</b>
However, there is a deeper ideological story underneath the political surface. Both parties are rooted in a philosophy of 'social justice', though their detractors dismiss it as an anti-Brahmin predilection rather than an ideological position.
'Dravidian' parties in Tamil Nadu owe their existence to the thought and movement of EV Ramasamy, the 20th century social reformer referred to by them reverentially as 'Periyar' (The Great One). And even before Periyar became the mainstream voice of 'Dravidian' thought by founding the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK), an earlier party, the South Indian Liberal Federation, informally known as the Justice Party, had initiated a series of 'social justice' measures in the 1920s.
While the credit for introducing the 'depressed classes' to education and employment opportunities must go to a few British administrators and educationists of the 19th century, it was the Government of the Madras Presidency headed by the Justice Party that passed the first official order by an elected regime providing for reservations. This was in the first 'communal GO' of September 1921, and was followed by improvements and changes in 1922 and 1924.
<b>It also brought in laws to regulate Hindu temple administration and to deny state grants to schools that barred admission to 'Adidravidars', as Tamil scheduled castes are known. Thanks to the mass appeal and reach of Dravidian ideology, a majority of the people in Tamil Nadu appreciate the need for reservation better than their counterparts in the rest of India.</b>
And the politically aware Tamil Nadu citizen dismisses as fallacious many of the arguments that form the basis for the opposition to caste-based quotas. First, historically engendered social disability can be corrected only on the same parameter that caused the disability in the first place, viz, on the basis of caste. Secondly, reservation is seen as a right and not a concession. Thirdly, the demand clamour for 'economic criteria' as an alternative to having caste as the basis is rejected as against the social and constitutional philosophy behind reservation.
Quotas are not meant to be a correction of economic disparities, but for those pushed to the nether regions of the social structure in the past, rendering them 'socially and educationally backward'.
Finally, the contention that reservations compromise merit is held in contempt in Tamil Nadu, which is known for its efficiency in administration, health services, and other technical branches of the Government. There is no exception to the reservation rule in the State's non-IAS bureaucracy, teachers, doctors, engineers and other professionals recruited by the State, and the entire subordinate judiciary.
Also, in comparison with the affluent buying their admissions into private medical and engineering institutions by paying high capitation fees, reservation represents a far less pernicious compromise with merit.<b> And those admitted under reserved category require fairly high qualifying marks (in TN, the cut-off marks for BC admission to an engineering seat is sometimes as high as 290 out of 300), while those buying their seats just require a minimum pass mark.</b>
However, in the country's long history of the pursuit of social justice, the suspicion that proponents of quotas are driven by electoral calculations has always persisted, and invariably proven false. After all, the struggle for OBC reservations has survived a span of many decades, different regimes and pushed past upper caste protests, administrative roadblocks and varying judicial moods.
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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> Quota issue: Divisive responses in north & south India
K Venkataramanan | Chennai
Sometimes, divisive issues invite divided responses. At other times, responses like strikes and protests tend to make issues seem divisive, even when they are not. The reservation conundrum in India is an issue seen as divisive by the elite in north India, while protests against quotas appear unjust to most people in the south.
The principal fear among those opposing the idea of OBC reservation appears to be the loss of a sizeable chunk of their educational opportunities. This is in contrast to the manner in which OBC quotas in jobs had become slowly acceptable after the Supreme Court upheld the 27 per cent reservation in 1992 and employment came under the ambit of 'social justice'.
<b>There is neither surprise nor unease in the South about the goings-on on the reservation front. Is it not the most natural thing for parties with a base among the backward classes - who in Tamil Nadu constitute nearly 87 per cent of the population - to press the Government for quotas?</b>
To some, such opposition is understandable from sections of society that have not yet changed their conceptual mindset about accommodating backward class aspirations. And to others, it may even come as a surprise that something so commonplace, understandable and justified as reservations should become a huge emotive issue.
The DMK, a key constituent of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), has been busy on the quota front, its leader writing to the Prime Minister, and its legislators meeting Manmohan Singh, while partner Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) holds a rally in New Delhi - something very unusual for a regional party which is not even one of the two top parties in its home State.
Politically motivated initiatives are so common that it is easy to suspect that the two parties are championing the cause of the backward classes with an eye on expanding their support base and projecting themselves in a better light before the electorate in TN, <b>a State where 87.5 per cent of the population is covered by reservation benefits.</b>
However, there is a deeper ideological story underneath the political surface. Both parties are rooted in a philosophy of 'social justice', though their detractors dismiss it as an anti-Brahmin predilection rather than an ideological position.
'Dravidian' parties in Tamil Nadu owe their existence to the thought and movement of EV Ramasamy, the 20th century social reformer referred to by them reverentially as 'Periyar' (The Great One). And even before Periyar became the mainstream voice of 'Dravidian' thought by founding the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK), an earlier party, the South Indian Liberal Federation, informally known as the Justice Party, had initiated a series of 'social justice' measures in the 1920s.
While the credit for introducing the 'depressed classes' to education and employment opportunities must go to a few British administrators and educationists of the 19th century, it was the Government of the Madras Presidency headed by the Justice Party that passed the first official order by an elected regime providing for reservations. This was in the first 'communal GO' of September 1921, and was followed by improvements and changes in 1922 and 1924.
<b>It also brought in laws to regulate Hindu temple administration and to deny state grants to schools that barred admission to 'Adidravidars', as Tamil scheduled castes are known. Thanks to the mass appeal and reach of Dravidian ideology, a majority of the people in Tamil Nadu appreciate the need for reservation better than their counterparts in the rest of India.</b>
And the politically aware Tamil Nadu citizen dismisses as fallacious many of the arguments that form the basis for the opposition to caste-based quotas. First, historically engendered social disability can be corrected only on the same parameter that caused the disability in the first place, viz, on the basis of caste. Secondly, reservation is seen as a right and not a concession. Thirdly, the demand clamour for 'economic criteria' as an alternative to having caste as the basis is rejected as against the social and constitutional philosophy behind reservation.
Quotas are not meant to be a correction of economic disparities, but for those pushed to the nether regions of the social structure in the past, rendering them 'socially and educationally backward'.
Finally, the contention that reservations compromise merit is held in contempt in Tamil Nadu, which is known for its efficiency in administration, health services, and other technical branches of the Government. There is no exception to the reservation rule in the State's non-IAS bureaucracy, teachers, doctors, engineers and other professionals recruited by the State, and the entire subordinate judiciary.
Also, in comparison with the affluent buying their admissions into private medical and engineering institutions by paying high capitation fees, reservation represents a far less pernicious compromise with merit.<b> And those admitted under reserved category require fairly high qualifying marks (in TN, the cut-off marks for BC admission to an engineering seat is sometimes as high as 290 out of 300), while those buying their seats just require a minimum pass mark.</b>
However, in the country's long history of the pursuit of social justice, the suspicion that proponents of quotas are driven by electoral calculations has always persisted, and invariably proven false. After all, the struggle for OBC reservations has survived a span of many decades, different regimes and pushed past upper caste protests, administrative roadblocks and varying judicial moods.
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