Pulling up the dead bodies – The reservation politics of Maharashtra

Wine’s value will increase when it becomes older. However, the same is not true for tactics and strategies. One need to upgrade and refine the strategies every now and then to keep pace with external competition, otherwise it will become obsolete. Congress forgot this principle.

The Grand Old Party often relied on minority appeasement and meaningless offers, when nothing else works. New India need something more meaningful than hollow promises. It’s not without a reason that the party lost recent general elections.

Instead of learning lessons from the debacle, Congress again fell back to old strategies in Maharashtra in the wake of coming assembly elections. Otherwise what was need to give reservation, that too such a high percentage - 16% - to Marathas and another 5% to Muslims? Taking the total percentage of reservation to 73!!!

Government knew very well that Supreme Court capped the reservations at 50%. It means court will reject this new order, in case someone challenged it there. If SC quashed this order then Marathas and Muslims will become unhappy. If it went through, then OBCs will become unhappy. OBCs are already claiming that only 32% of Maharashtra population is Maratha’s and they are going to get 16%; while OBCs even after having 50% (by the way this is stat only, it’s not necessary that all of them are actually backward other than the community name in various certificates) of population are getting only 19% reservation!!!

In a country which boast that her citizens are getting equal opportunity seldom live upto reputation, considering the fact that many states already crossed or on the verge of crossing 50% cap (for e.g. in Tamilnadu total reservation is 69%). Time already passed for the political parties and administration to take a serious look in to this issue. Probably even B.R Ambedkar never imagined that from the entire constitution this one piece can live this much long and all political parties will religiously agree on that.

Better be late than never. Congress, even if you don’t have any problem in seeing your party’s growing irrelevance, we Indians would like to see you play a meaningful role in opposition rather than pumping out waste.

Sajeev