Reservation becomes a national issue only when it upsets upper castes.
This sentence appears in Yogendra Yadav's ToI op-ed on the need for sub-dividing the SC quota, so that the benefits are not 'cornered' only by the better off (and better-prepared?) communities among the Dalits.
4 Comments:
Sharp eyes. I missed it and had to look for it.
Next comment is my two cents for the day. Most humans are supposed to desire status and strive for it. It seems to be automatically bestowed in the case of castes and subcastes. Is this what gives caste its strength apart from economic considerations?
Agreed.
I have been saying for a long time that the current focus of our reservation policy is on the non-beneficiaries.
We need to shift the focus from the non-beneficiaries to the beneficiaries. We need to look inside the omnibus OBC category to check the pulse of individual components within it.
Prof Yadav is bang on target. It would probably be better if he talked about OBCs instead of SCs. The inter-group variation is much more dramatic within the OBC group than the SC group.
The article is a quagmire within a quagmire.
"It would be wrong to blame them for the disadvantage of other communities. Yet it would be grossly unjust not to recognise this difference and incorporate it in the policy of social justice."
There is no indication within the article that the leatherworkers have an inherent advantage over others, which is also shown by the fact that they lag behind in the Mahar community.The end game in this line of thought is to reserve seats dynamically(in geography and time) based on demographic percentages. That is the concrete realization of the term 'social justice' as used by Yadav.
Very true.
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