Our future is in the Court

India is a unique experiment in nation creation. We must recognise it as such in order to resolve why we mustn’t let mere politicians destroy it. For, left to their machinations, the likes of Arjun Singh, and VP Singh before him, will spread their divisive malignancy to a point from which we may not be able to arrest a fatal degeneration of the idea of India.

There is no other successful attempt at building a nation that is anywhere like what we have created and sustained over 56 years. The European Union comes closest as an experiment similar to ours but it hasn’t lifted off the ground yet. Our bold venture began in 1950, when we became a republic governed by principles laid out in a carefully crafted Constitution. It was a democratic republic in which the range of ethnic, religious, linguistic, racial and caste differences were of such magnitude and diversity as to be unprecedented in the history of nation building. We have so far done marvellously to hold it together. Because, thanks to our Constitution we resolved not to hold anyone’s caste or ethnic, linguistic, religious identity to stand in the way of equality under the law.

However, soon after the Constitution came into operation, the principle of equality (Article 14) and of prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth (Article 15) were compromised by the First Amendment carried out in 1951. A clause was added to Article 15 saying that the state could make special provision “for the advancement of socially and educationally backward classes of citizens or for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes”. We took that in our stride though, correctly recognising the centuries of social humiliation and psychological debility caused by the abhorrent practice of untouchability and the extreme backwardness of India’s tribes.

Unfortunately, that compromise has come to haunt us. To secure their own political backyards, a series of opportunistic politicians — Charan Singh and VP Singh, to cite two — drove the truck of quotas for a nebulous and malleable concept called “other backward classes” through that crack in the Constitution. Today, wily Arjun Singh has thrown a Molotov at the government and the Congress party with a similar intention. A paralysed Manmohan Singh and a wow-what-just-hit-me Sonia Gandhi are floundering to manage the crisis at a time when they should be attending full time to accelerate the growth of New India. Mercifully, the Supreme Court has stepped in.

Warning, rightly, the striking doctors to go back to work or risk contempt of court, the court has observed that any renewed emphasis on quotas would “divide the country on caste basis”. Indeed. Why, at this point, must any government disrupt the cohesion of a stabilising society? The court has asked the government to explain the basics of its reasoning justifying quotas for OBCs, adding that “these issues would have serious political and social ramifications”.

Good. We can only hope the Court will knock common sense back into the polity and help resolve this issue once for all. The future of our nationhood hangs in the balance.