so many days, so many quota protests

yawn. It just doesn't end. The quota issue is still going on and on and only today there seemed to be some sort of headway into the deadlock. We still had the warring medical students in all parts of the country being water-cannoned and we still had the police pushing the protestors back and beating them up, which created for its own little subseries of police brutalities, and shifted some of the focus away from the real issue.

Speaking of real issues, what is really going on here? Arjun Singh has been defiant all along, saying he doesn't care for what the students think, this OBC quota thing is happening. And the students were like, no way. Maybe its just me, but I really haven't heard of many convincing reasons as to why the Government of India is keen on doing this. In fact, i've heard far worse things from these seniles, about how they will bring about a legislation to enforce quotas in the private sector. Seriously, we may call ourselves the world's biggest democracy and all that, but for some reason, the politicians we elect are a joke. Most of them have no idea what fiscal responsibility means, most have no idea how to run departments or ministries and all that technical stuff. What they are good at is manipulating the system, and participating in exemplary vote-bank politics.

I don't know what is on Arjun Singh's mind, and I don't know if what he wants to do will really achieve what he says it will, but I agree with him when he says its not his personal agenda. Of course it ain't his, he's from the Congress for crying out loud! They live by the Gandhi name, and they lick feet by the Gandhi name, they can't think on their own. So I am pretty certain Mrs. Gandhi has a part in the backstage. Anyways, while the Congress prepares to bring their next king as the leader of India, lets get back to the quotas. So anyways, it seems that given the scale of protests, from the students and most of the academics in the country, Arjun Singh was being slowly isolated by his own posse. They didn't want no trouble with the voters man, that ain't cool for survival. But heres the deal, I think Arjun Singh is being made the frontman because he is an old horse, and he can take the fall for the party. Its almost time for his retirement, so he would like to go out with a bang. But this is just my theory.

Like its said again and again, today I think its highly fallacious to assume that the lower castes are the poor ones, and especially in the urban areas. The fact that we still talk about reservations for all sorts of castes is in fact only reinforcing the notions that castes exist, and that one caste is better than the other. Like I said before, imagine an India where private employers will ask you for your caste before they ask you for your name. Caste reservations in every freakin walk of life will only single the victim out. The poor don't need to be put in groups. The poor don't need reservations, they need effective social policies that manage to reach out to them.

Like President Kalam said, its better to increase seats than divide the limited seats available. I mean it doesn't solve the actual problem, but its an option. Our higher education is in shambles. There is a huge disparity among the select few top institutions and the rest of the colleges and that results in many, many students competing for a few spots in the few universities. We have IIT's and we have IIM's, and what other institutions can be say are close to them in terms of research and quality of education. The Government started to rectify this disparity by converting regional engineering colleges to the level of NIT's, or National Institutes of Technology, to upgrade them to the near levels of IITs. So in a way increasing the seats of institutions is a better way of dealing with this mess. Our universities need professionalism and money, and they need to be upgraded so they can handle twice the number of students they take in right now. So heres what you can do Arjun Singh (and Mrs. Gandhi), spend money to upgrade a university, raise the number of seats, and put those seats for whichever caste you are trying to secure the votes of.

Hopefully MMS can use this to bring about some positive changes in this rotting system. For now he only brought his government some breathing space.

Arjun Singh is gently reined in

HRD Minister Arjun Singh, seen as running away with the quota ball, was roped in by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today in an informal committee of three senior ministers to defuse the growing tension and work out the details of what the Government had said will be a “mechanism to satisfy all sections of the society.”

Although no time limit has been set for the committee, sources said that the Government is seeing this as an “opportunity” to usher in some key reforms in the education sector, including upgrade of infrastructure. One of the proposals being discussed is the “gradual” introduction of quotas in step with increase in seats.

Politically, sources said, the panel also will “check” Arjun Singh from forcing the pace of a complex and sensitive issue as he has been doing ever since his sudden pre-election quota announcement.

The HRD Minister has cleverly positioned himself as the sole spokesman for the Government on the issue and given the compulsions of electoral politics, nobody can openly counter his rhetoric. Now that two other ministers have been taken on board, there is a feeling in the party that a more “holistic” view will be taken—and seen to be taken.

Evidence of this came in the evening when the Congress decided to call off a meeting of the Forum of OBC MPs. This provoked non-Cong members to allege that the Congress had “sabotaged” the meeting to avoid discussion on the controversial quotas. Today’s OBC meeting, if it had happened, would have caused an embarrassment for the government and the Congress, given the fact that its leaders are party MPs.
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Which brings me to a new section, which is to call Arjun Singh's character in question. Lets get the basics right first, how is Arjun Singh where he is today? Simple, for being the butler at the Gandhi household. The same can be said for Mr. Shivraj Patil as well, that weakling of a home minister. according to this writer, Ajrun Singh has been a bastard since the 80's. His tirade against the Knowledge Commission, a meeting of some of the best minds, is pretty insulting considering the fact that they were brought together at the behest of the Prime Minister who aimed to revolutionize our ancient education system.

I totally agree with a lot of what the writer, Mr. Rajiv Desai is saying, including the fact that the insistence of netas in putting reservations as a top social reform is only because they don't have the mind or the will to actually try to solve the inequality that exists today. Read the article, some new thoughts on a reformists vs. the Luddites in the government.

Arjun Singh’s quota bluff

In the 1980s, when Sam Pitroda was pushing to take India’s telecom digital from its analog antiquity, Arjun Singh was the telecom minister in the Rajiv Gandhi government. As a person who was intimately involved with Rajiv’s thrust to modernisation, I know that Singh tried to put a spoke in Pitroda’s plans.

Well, Weepy [V P Singh], who eventually slimed his way to the prime minister’s office, was then chief minister of Uttar Pradesh while Arjun Singh was chief minister of Madhya Pradesh. Like Weepy, who set the nation aflame by championing the recommendations of the Mandal Commission, Arjun Singh has touched off civil violence by championing quotas for other backward castes. I did not know either of them until Rajiv [Gandhi] told me who they were. He also made observations about the two Thakurs that are best left unquoted; suffice it to say Rajiv did not think that either of them took after Mahatma Gandhi.

Weepy is pretty much irrelevant today but his fellow feudal Arjun Singh is playing the slime game in the hope that Sonia Gandhi will dismiss Manmohan Singh and name him prime minister. Singh’s grandiose fantasy has as much chance of coming to fruition as a snowball has of surviving in Hell. But the feudal lord bashes on regardless.
There is violence spreading across major cities and towns in the country, and health services are paralysed. But Arjun Singh remains unfazed. He has done precious little to make his human resource development ministry useful; done nothing to stem the corruption and sloth within it. But on the OBC issue, he has come alive.

His intemperate attacks on Pitroda and the knowledge commission; his wily attempt to provoke a backward caste backlash against the protesters and his Machiavellian reference to the 104th amendment…all smack of low cunning masquerading as political savvy.

Consider the 104th Amendment. It was passed in December last year with huge majorities in the Rajya Sabha and the Lok Sabha. That to Arjun Singh’s feudal mind is representative of the people’s will; but we all know that the 104th amendment like the 23rd, 45th, 62nd and 79th Amendments before it, represent a failure of political will. Our founding fathers included quotas in educational institutions under Article 334 with a view to “righting a historical wrong”. The provision was to remain in force for 20 years after which such quotas were to be abolished. However, politicians resorted to rank populism and extended the quota regime to hide their ineptitude and perpetuate their feudal hold over narrow constituencies.

In persisting with the quota regime, the political class admitted to its failure to address the issues of poverty and prejudice. , when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his team have pushed economic growth to a level that the world holds in awe, feudal lords like Arjun Singh and Natwar Singh have banded together with Leftists and Luddites in a futile bid to depose the prime minister.

But poverty and prejudice are not new in India; what is new is the economic resurgence. Feudal politics is on notice. When Article 334 comes up for review in 2010, the feudal overlords will not have the clout to extend the quota regime.