India Political Blog

Quite a few people would have seen this photograph in their morning paper (TOI) from a few days back, and been shocked by it. In a conservative city such as Rajkot, such a form of protest would be all the more shocking.
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The Congress government in Andhra Pradesh is at it again. After being rebuffed by the courts earlier in an attempt to implement a separate reservation quota for Muslims, they are trying again. The constitution is clear, reservations were only considered due to the centuries of discrimination against the Scheduled Castes and Tribes resulting in their being very repressed, and reservation could be one of the measures to bring them up. Because no one wants to be seen as removing reservation, it is likely to be with us for a very long time.
However, what causes a problem is when the reservations are seen as a pure political tool, and this is what the Congress is guilty of. The reservations for OBC’s were also first implemented by V P Singh as a move to checkmate his ambitious deputy Devi Lal, and have been sought to be extended in the education area by Arjun Singh as a measure by the wily thakur to get a support base for himself. However, the Congress, being a broad based party has always suffered from not being able to fully tom-tom its reservation agenda due to fear of alienating other castes (as seen freshly in the Gujjar-Meena issue). In this case as well, the Congress will end up with egg on its face.
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