Quota politics – and the death of a dream

Kill pill

24 May 2006: The irony would be missed by nobody except the government. On a day that the UPA government approved the quota death pill, school leavers in Delhi, Chennai and other CBSE centres set record high exam scores. The girls did better than the boys, how nice, ninety percenters were more than ever, and eight hundred and twelve students, let us be precise about this, scored one hundred per cent in math. Terrific.

But sad too, many of these brilliant students will struggle to get quality admission in Delhi or Chennai, in Tamil Nadu, it is abysmal, with reservations exceeding sixty per cent. And it is going to get worse, with extra twenty-seven per cent OBC reservations coming from the next academic year.

What’s the point of brilliance?

Why work hard?

Why compete?

The tragedy, the utter, benumbing horror of it, is not a whimper of protest from the political establishment against the OBC quota, not even in the face of a heroic doctors’ strike in Delhi and other places. It would appear the only man to be concerned, and which occasioned all the dilly-dallying on going ahead with quotas, was the prime minister, Manmohan Singh. A PM who sets up a knowledge commission should understand what he is about, more to the point, knows the knowledge gaps in society, and hopes for a radical solution to them. But he was pre-empted and bushwhacked by the PM-aspirant, Arjun Singh, and all the plans and vision washed out.

You may ask, what use a PM who cannot take a stand? Well, true. Indefensible as he is on that, and right cowardly in not coming to the defence of the knowledge commission under attack from Arjun Singh, Sharad Yadav and Sitaram Yechury, there is something else. Probably the PM was the last holdout against quota, or blanket quota hikes as envisaged, the PM and Sonia Gandhi, perhaps, but there was a strong pro-quota sentiment in the Congress, and of course, the allies bamboozled them on it. In the end, it was vision against narrow politics, and politics won out.

The Congress’s internal quota impulses come from a fear that the party is losing its political bearings with Manmohan as PM. The quota became a vehicle to attack the PM, but since Sonia, for whatever reason, was covering him, the attack did not get personal. By now, otherwise, Manmohan Singh would have been booed within the party.

But what swung in favour of the pro-quota-ists, including the likes of Jairam Ramesh, was the strong UPA allies’ pitch for it, and here is another story. After the Congress’s defeat in the assembly elections, the Left and the DMK were expected to turn the heat on the Centre. The quota became the issue, and they got a reluctant Manmohan Singh to push it forward. But here, another story attaches, the most significant of the political narratives so far.

OBC politics has arrived with a bang. So far, OBC politics ate into the political base of a national party like the Congress in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh of and on, and more permanently in North India. OBCs kept away from the Congress, as we illustrated in an earlier commentary piece ( “No gain,” 17 May 2006), preferring their own leaders, Mulayam, Laloo, Nitish Kumar & Co, or stayed with the BJP, Uma Bharati (before), the Scindias (though not for OBC reasons), Kalyan Singh, Shivraj Singh Chauhan, and so on.

But now, the OBCs have stormed the Centre, this is more than a Mulayam as defence minister or Laloo in railways, the OBCs are meaning to control Central – or national – politics, and they have just succeeded with the quota kill pill. See it this way, with its national, political instincts, the Congress leadership, in the main the PM and Sonia Gandhi, resisted, but the OBC allies of the Congress, from Laloo to the DMK, PMK, rammed down the resistance.

The Left assisted in this. The Left’s central leaders are doing different politics from regional leaderships, here, they are as lowdown as it takes to power. By not putting any opposition to quotas – how can it with such a powerful OBC section within? – the BJP has also given in to the OBC wave at the Centre. There is, in addition, the pressure of its ally in Bihar, Nitish and Sharad Yadav. Don’t be surprised if there is an OBC push in the BJP for central leadership control.

But the Congress gets a message too from the quota disaster, the tail has begun wagging the dog, and the Congress has the UPA allies’ plant within, Arjun Singh. It is Arjun Singh’s victory and the Congress’s defeat, maybe the PM’s defeat, because Sonia can always make adjustments and survive. But the survival of the Congress is at risk.

At this late stage, the party cannot assimilate the OBC vote stream, nobody will give up their share, and second, this the Congress should take note, it has lost its leadership role in the government. The PM is nominally the PM, even more nominal than before, which makes him nothing, and more and more, the allies will set the agenda and drive the government. The Congress has given up leadership in return for stability and to continue in power.

At this rate, it is the end of the Congress, you cannot become like everyone and survive. The party is afraid of its own identity as a national party, a far-seeing party with vision. It is living day-to-day, making compromises on an hourly basis, to retain the conceit of having its PM, who has little to no power left.

If the Congress and the PM had stood their grounds against quota, going for a comprehensive solution, including reopening the whole issue of affirmative action, the allies could have threatened but done little else. They couldn’t have pulled down the government risking a return of the BJP with or without elections. By standing firm, they would have captured the space to build a dynamic new equitable knowledge society. It could have been a great plank for re-election.

Instead, we stand looking at the ruin of an Indian dream.