Reserved verdict

The Andhra Pradesh High Court, by striking down the AP government’s 4 per cent education and job quotas for 15 deemed backward Muslims groups, has brought the issue of reservations back into the public eye.

Oddly, the court’s decision has come at the same time as a West Bengal government announcement of 10 per cent job quotas for Muslim OBCs.

The Left Front government is clearly playing electoral politics and trying to regain some lost ground in Bengal. Growing dissatisfaction with the government plus increasing pressure from Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress has the Left scrambling for answers. Bengal’s Muslims could well ask the Left exactly what it did so little for 30 years.

When the AP government had introduced quotas for these Muslim groups, there had been much opposition. The question of reservations and quotas in India is fraught with argument.

Even the quotas for Scheduled Castes and Tribes guaranteed in the Constitution were supposed to have a limited time frame, not to be continued in perpetuity. Since then, we have added quotas for Other Backward Castes and the clamour for quotas is now matched by the demand that they be scrapped.

It is also true that if the quota system has had any merits whatsoever, those benefits have been denied to Scheduled caste Hindus and Scheduled Tribes who converted to Islam or Christianity.

But in spite of the “equality” promised by those religions, India’s caste-based society continued with earlier discriminatory practices. So while Muslim clergy opposed reservations for low caste Muslims, many Muslims themselves demanded it.

The AP government in part responded to that problem and also to the findings in the Rajinder Sachar committee report on the social, economic and educational problems which Muslims in India suffer.

In bald terms, an ambitious India looking to move ahead in the world cannot move fast if large tracts of its population wallow in poverty and discrimination. Muslims in India need help: that is not a matter of debate any more.

The question is whether quotas alone provide the answer. The evidence suggests that successive governments have failed to come up with effective policies for poverty amelioration and educational and employment opportunities for millions of Indians, including Muslims.

And when faced with the enormity of the task, they have taken refuge behind the veil of reservations. Results have therefore been sacrificed to politics.