One Man's Folly...

Did Arjun Singh spring the reservation of another 27 per cent for the backward classes in all central institutions of higher learning on the prime minister or was this a considered decision of the Congress to which he was also a party? Since neither Congress president Sonia Gandhi nor the PM have distanced themselves from the decision, much less announced a 'reconsideration', we must assume that they were all party to this catastrophic decision.

If that is indeed so, then the Congress seems to have suffered from an unforgivable lapse of memory. It has forgotten the needless hell V.P. Singh's decision to reserve a similar percentage of jobs in the central government for the OBCs, over and above the 22.5 per cent already reserved for the SC/STs, had unleashed upon the nation in 1990. V.P. Singh too had taken the decision within a matter of days in mid-July, against the advice of his principal secretary, B.G. Deshmukh; his cabinet secretary, Vinod Pandey; and his coalition partners, the Telugu Desam and the Left. He did so because about a fortnight earlier, the Intelligence Bureau had warned him that the BJP had decided to resile on its October 1989 commitment to him to stay out of the Ramjanmabhoomi dispute, and support the agitation for pulling down the Babri Masjid, scheduled for October 30 in Ayodhya. The reservations were his attempt to build an alternate base for his party in the election that had become inevitable as a result of the BJP's decision.

His counter-strategy proved futile. The Janata Dal was comprehensively routed in the May 1991 polls, and the BJP emerged as the official Opposition in Parliament. But, before that happened, 114 young men and women had committed suicide by burning or poisoning themselves.

V.P. Singh could have prevented this from happening. All he had to do was to simultaneously increase the annual recruitment to the already woefully short-staffed All India services by an equivalent proportion, so that in absolute terms the chance of selection for those in the 'merit' category wasn't reduced. But this didn't occur to him, his cabinet or his principal bureaucrats.

Today the Manmohan Singh government has repeated the same mistake. Let's assume there is some moral justification to the reservations just announced. To prevent the backlash that has begun to build in the country today all that the government had to do was to increase admission to the central universities,IITs, regional engineering and medical colleges and institutes of management by an equal proportion, or to set up newIITs, IIMS, engineering and medical colleges.

Admittedly, if this was not to lower the standard of education that has made many of these institutions the envy of the world, the government would have had to invest in campuses, buildings, computerised libraries, an increased faculty and, above all, much higher salaries to attract top-class post-graduates and doctorate holders into the teaching profession. But such investment is in any case long overdue. Since the advent of globalisation and the computer, the needs of Indian industry and society have been changing just as rapidly as that of other industrialised countries. The need for more elite educational institutions was recognised by theNDA government in its last months. Instead of meeting it, the UPA government has decided to gouge out a chunk of the existing pie to give to the disadvantaged. If the decision is not reversed, it will begin a process that will end by destroying world-class educational institutions. In the coming years, these institutions will have to choose, as they've been doing in the case of SC/ST reservations, between failing the vast majority of entrants on the reserved quota and diluting their qualifying standards. We all know what they'll be forced to do.

The protestations of concern for social equity that underlie this move are not only shallow but cruel. Five decades of reservation for the SC/STs has shown just how hard it's been for them to cope with the demands of these elite institutions, and how few of them get the choice jobs and places in foreign universities their 'upper caste' peers get for the asking. This is because the kind of education that would have made it possible for them to do so has to be given from the first years of schooling. Truly world-class education starts at birth. That's why children from families with a tradition of learning, such as university professors, consistently outperform their peers.

Had any government in the last 60 years been serious about removing the disadvantages of the SC/STs and the OBCs, it would have set up special elite schools devoted to educating the most gifted children from disadvantaged families. It would have had nationwide entry exams to select students. It would have sent the best of students at each level on to the next—and to the top. Had we done so five decades ago, there would have been no battle left to fight. Instead, we have a dropout rate of more than 95 per cent among SC/STs between Class I and the university level.

Contrast what we are doing with the policies of China. At this moment, it is inveigling Chinese professors from universities all over the world back to China on salaries that match and even exceed what they were earning in the West. And their single-line directive to the directors of their universities and specialised institutions: make them the best in the world.

The difference between us and China: China is a nation, we're just a bunch of people who happen to belong to one country.