As the Centre hunted for a compromise formula to resolve the quota controversy, HRD Minister Arjun Singh told Parliament on Tuesday that quotas for OBCs in higher education is “irrevocable”.
NEW DELHI: As the Centre hunted for a compromise formula to resolve the quota controversy, HRD Minister Arjun Singh told Parliament on Tuesday that quotas for OBCs in higher education is “irrevocable”.
With this blunt reply to a question in the Lok Sabha, Singh threw down the gauntlet to his opponents within the government.
It is clear from Monday night’s inconclusive meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs (CCPA) that Singh’s gambit has put the government under pressure. The Congress is divided on the issue: OBC and SC/ST leaders are pushing for quotas; upper-caste ones are opposing them, privately.
The Forum of OBC MPs is slated to meet on Wednesday evening to discuss the matter. The forum is headed by Congress MP Hanumantha Rao, who circulated a paper in Parliament House on Tuesday, which picked holes in the merit argument of the anti-reservationists.
Given the division in the Congress, neither party chief Sonia Gandhi nor the Prime Minister wants to take sides.
Gandhi avoided the topic altogether in her speech to the Congress Party in Parliament on Monday.
Party leaders said privately that Gandhi and Singh have indicated the need for a middle path: implementation of OBC quotas in all educational institutions - private and government - but in a ratio that will maintain the current number of unreserved seats. The modalities of working this out have been left to an informal group of ministers set up by the CCPA on Monday.
The group includes Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee, Finance Minister P Chidambaram, Law Minister HR Bhardwaj, and, of course, Arjun Singh. They are likely to be assisted by a committee of secretaries, which will be notified once the current session of Parliament ends.
In other words, the government is buying time to resolve a situation that threatens to blow up like the 1990 Mandal crisis and which it appears clueless about tackling. Its biggest headache is to find an interlocutor to talk to the agitators. Arjun Singh has become a red rag to the students who are now demanding a meeting with the Prime Minister. But the Centre is reluctant to involve the PM in such a tricky issue.
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