The Hypocrisy of the Indian Leftists

The recent action against the Chief Justice of Pakistan by President Pervez Musharraf was rightly condemned by concerned Pakistani citizens. The protests continue and we are yet to see the end of the drama.

Indian newspapers and columnists jumped on the bandwagon and wrote editorials and articles about the sanctity of the judicial system. Little did they know that they would be hoist on their own petard within the space of two weeks.

Last year, Arjun Singh, the Minister for Human Resource Development, started a controversy by declaring that educational institutions such as the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management will have to have 27% of the seats set aside for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in accordance with the Mandal Commission recommendations. It was widely believed at that time that he raised the issue to embarrass the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Soon all Indian politicians, who could recognize a vote-bank with blindfolds on, signed on and the bandwagon started rolling. The Parliament passed by a unanimous vote the law by which the set-aside was mandated. To appease protesting students, it was decided to increase the total number of seats so that the number of seats available for meritorious students would remain the same.

That sop was not enough for Youth for Equality and other protesting groups who took the issue to the Supreme Court of India. And on March 29, 2007, the Supreme Court lowered the boom on the Government of India.

The bench consisting of Justices Arijit Pasayat and Lokeshwar Singh Panta stayed the implementation of the Central Educational Institutions (Reservations in Admission) Act of 2006 with respect to OBCs while allowing the quotas for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SC/STs). The bench did not accept the contention of the Government that reservations per se are not anti-merit. It noted that the Government had made no provisions to exclude the “creamy layer” or the well-to-do section of the OBCs though this concern has been repeatedly raised by the Supreme Court. It further held that the 1931 Census, the last one to enumerate castes, is too outdated to serve as the basis for deciding the 27% figure for the OBC quota. The Court further held that reservations must be time-bound.

But even more caustic were the statements by the Justices such as “It has also to be noted that nowhere else in the world do castes, classes or communities queue up for the sake of gaining backward status. Nowhere else in the world is there competition to assert backwardness and then to claim that we are more backward than you.” Typical of news manipulation, the newspaper The Hindu conveniently left out in its reports the statement by the bench about quotas being used for vote-bank politics which was widely reported on TV as soon as the judgment was made public. As usual, there was the spate of editorials against the Supreme Court judgment as well as letters from the public which were all printed with very little space being given to letters supporting the judgment.

The thugs who are the elected and unelected politicians in India immediately came out against the judgment of the Supreme Court. The first comments were that the judgment was against social equality and should be appealed. A day later, Veerappa Moily, a Congress politician who headed the committee on the implementation of the impugned Act, opined that the Court had not actually issued an order that required the postponement of the implementation of the 27% quota though everybody else in India read the judgment that way. My opinion is that if Veerappa Moily insists on figuratively burying his head in the sand, we should oblige him by really burying him.

The Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, Karunanidhi, called for a State-wide strike on Saturday. He declared it to be a public holiday so that he could shut down the government-owned bus service and ordered all autorickshaws and other public transport off the roads. This was on a day when public examinations were being held for students of the XI and XII Standards. One would assume that the OBCs who are so dear to the heart of Karunanidhi would also have faced difficulties in going to the assigned examination centers but that seemed to have escaped the Rationalist Thinker that Karunanidhi is. He also called on the Central Government to stop all train and air services in Tamil Nadu.

When I asked a lawyer friend of mine if the Central Government would oblige him by stopping trains and flights -- I didn’t think Manmohan Singh would be that stupid or spineless – he said that Karunanidhi was the Super Prime Minister and so his request would be treated as a command by the Central Government. True enough, all interstate trains were stopped at the borders of Tamil Nadu, all in-state trains were cancelled and the police actually erected cordons at all roads leading into the State and prevented buses from entering the State. Air India and Indian Airlines cancelled two flights to Singapore out of Chennai though most other flights operated. However, train and bus passengers who managed to arrive just as the strike started had to cool their heels at the train and bus stations as did the air passengers who had braved the strike. A great victory for the cause of the OBCs was proclaimed by Karunanidhi though the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) estimated the loss due to strike at Rs. 2.5 billion. One would presume that the creamy layer of the OBCs did not work as factory hands and it was the OBCs who really paid the price.

A couple of days later, the Tamil daily Dinamalar printed a human-interest story about a young woman who received her BSc degree at the convocation ceremony. The photo showed a young woman who was physically challenged receiving her diploma from the presiding officer at the function. The story mentioned that the woman was struck with “brain fever” (one would guess encephalitis or cerebral meningitis) as a child. After suffering brain damage from the illness, she went through physical therapy to gain limited use of her limbs. She had also lost some mental faculties but struggled hard to get through school and college and had found employment in the software industry. There was no mention of any special privileges for her in school, college or at work. The story merely proved that even brain damage is better than being born a OBC/MBC/SC/ST.