27 pc quota upheld: Are OBCs India's new rulers?

NEW ORDER? Experts suggest improving the quality of primary education so everyone gets an equal chance.

          

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Keywords: OBC Quota, Supreme Court

So as a vanguard of revolting against reservations, did Anirudh Lochan feel betrayed by the Apex Court?

Anirudh Lochan who had always conveyed his pessimism from the very beginning regarding “the Court’s ability to deliver a strong judgement” said, “The very premise in which the stir was started was that we were opposed to the government’s equation that social justice and equality can be brought about by reservation and that has not been addressed.

Un-dividing the society

Lochan was given a chance to put a question across to Rao in the show.

He asked, “All of them keep talking about the fact that OBCs need to be given reservation and they have to develop, but 24 per cent of the seats in government organisations are already filled up by the OBCs. There a 200 OBC MPs in the Parliament already and if they themselves cannot do anything for the upliftment of their communities then how will the additional three per cent seats going to help the community with?”

Secondly he asked, “The biggest issue that the Mandal Commission raised was land reforms so why is the government silent on the issue?”

Rao in response said that Lochan was talking about merit that was not anybody’s individual property.

Giving an example of a boy named Muthiala Naidu who belonged to a fisherman community and came from a remote village in Andhra Pradesh but was a topper in IAS, Rao said, “Merit is not an individual property but everybody’s right.”

In times of social cleavage where there were haves and have nots and globalisation was creating a lot of culture so people were feeling resentful and left out, wasn’t it important to create stakeholders and people who equally own education?

Das agreed that such a set up was a requirement but that couldn’t be achieved by dividing society but by uniting society.

“The real issue in India is the issue of the supply of the high quality education. The answer to affirmative action is to adopt a scholarship scheme for all the different sections of children in the society,” said Das.

Was there plain politics involved in quota? Instead of playing with the futures of young people why wasn’t the government pressurised to actually rescue the crisis of elementary education?

Raja said that nobody was dividing the society but the society was already divided.