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Assignment on Affirmation Action

Roll No P122051 Vidit S. Jain

1. The Central Government and State Government should not

require affirmation action programme for private Organization2. Affirmation action programmes have been very helpful to

minorities and women. Private enterprise organization should haveaffirmation action programme.The debate on affirmative action in India is long and not always geared to

the desired aim: creation of equality of opportunity. Just like Indian

secularism, reservation system in India has always a different political

aim to make the system more unequal than what it is. Indian secularism,rather than making the state independent of religion, is intended to

provide special privileges to certain religious groups.Similarly Indian affirmative system is politically designed to provide

restricted rights not equal rights to some chosen people. The affirmative action in India has started perhaps by Vice-Roy Curzon

in 1905 by banning the employment of Hindu Bengalis in the government

services; the official argument was that they were too advanced and

taking away job opportunity from others particularly the Muslims. Later

it was extended in the military services by giving preferential treatments

for Muslims and Sikhs branding them as martial races. Reservations in

government jobs were introduced in 1918 in Mysore in favour of a

number of castes and communities that had little share in the

administration. In 1909 and in 1919 similar reservation system wasintroduced for the Muslims in British India. In 1935, for pure political

reason the British government has provided job reservation for the

backward castes.

The real idea was to divide the population of India into several warring

groups along religious, ethnic and caste lines by giving special rights so

that future India would be divided and weak. A number of prominentpoliticians had acted as the agents of the British Raj to implement that

line of action; the most prominent of them was Dr BR Ambedkar.

Although today he is considered to be one of the founding father of theIndian nation, writer of the constitution of India and the cult figure of the

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backward castes with four universities named after him, during the pre-

independence years he took no part in the freedom movement. Insteadjust like E.V.R Perier of the Tamils, C.P. Ramaswamy Aiyar of Kerala,

Jinnah and Mohammed Iqbal, he was one of the staunch Empire

Loyalists hand in glove with the British to divide up India along caste,religion and tribal line. The followers of the same person today include

even the Indian communists, who, forgetting the essential of Marx-Lenin,

are supporting job reservation along both castes and religious lines.

Equality of opportunity is the basis of a true democracy and as such

affirmative actions are needed to equalize the opportunities among the

people who are endowed differently. Even in the US, affirmative actions

were promoted first by President Johnson since 1974 to promote

American blacks, who were deprived of most opportunities. However, it

was not a success. The countries where it was most successful are Japan,

the Soviet Union and other former socialist countries of East Europe

along with Cuba and Vietnam. India should take a lesson from them to

implement a proper affirmative action to equalize opportunity in our

society.

Affirmative action in India:In Indian situation, because of the reservation system based on caste, the

state could not lift up those who are backward or poor, as they may not

belong to the castes or tribes qualified to receive such aid from the state.

That is the main reason for the demands for reservation for Muslims andChristians. Also, the reservation system has turned castes against each

other, as they have to compete for the small social and economic benefit

in a very poor country. The failure of the existing system of reservation

based on caste and tribe is very obvious. The characteristics of this failed

system are many.

Reservations for Scheduled Castes (SC) in schools and government posts

remain largely unfilled, whereas reservations for Other Backward Classes

(OBCs) are generally filled to capacity. A 1997 study indicates thatnationally preferential policies only benefit 6 percent of Dalit families.

Moreover, the same study reported that "none of India's elite universities

and engineering institutes had filled its quota for members of scheduled

castes."

People from the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes continue to beabsent from white collar positions. For the country as a whole, members

of the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes -- combined -- did not

receive as much as 3 percent of the degrees in engineering or medicine,

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though together they add up to nearly one-fourth of the population of

India, according to a study by Sowell(2004).The government provides scholarship to SC students to attend school, but

that is not enough: "Even when the government provides primary

schooling free of charge, the costs of books and supplies may not beaffordable by very poor people. For secondary education, rural students

especially may not always find a school nearby, so that those whose

parents cannot afford the costs of commuting or relocating -- and paying

for housing and boarding -- have little realistic prospect of attending,

regardless of preferential admissions policies."

Some Scheduled Castes do better than others with the system, raising the

demand in some quarters for "quotas within the quota". A particular case

in point are the Chamars, historically a leather-working (and therefore

untouchable) caste. In the state of Maharashtra, the Chamars are among

the most prosperous of the scheduled castes. A study found that they were

17 percent of the state"s population and 35 percent of its medical

students. In the state of Haryana, the Chamars received 65 percent of the

scholarships for the scheduled castes at the graduate level and 80 percent

at the undergraduate level. Meanwhile 18 of the 37 untouchable groups inHaryana failed to get any of the preferential scholarships. In the state of

Madhya Pradesh, Chamars were 53 percent of all the scheduled caste

students in the schools of that state. In Bihar, just two of the 12 scheduled

castes in that state--one being the Chamars-- supplied 61 percent of thescheduled class students in school and 74 percent of those in college.

Conclusion:It is essential for the government to accept that the affirmative action

policy based on unscientific criteria like caste or tribe, as introduced by

Ambedkar and enhanced by V.P.Singh for pure political reason, has

failed in India. However, the government and the political parties, even

the communists, want not only to preserve this failed system but to

intensify it by including religion in the equation.To solve the problem of unequal opportunity India should have

reservations based on poverty and physical disability irrespective of

religion, tribe or caste. Like in Europe, education must be free at all

levels in both universities and specialized institutes of higher learning; all

students should get automatic grants to cover their maintenance costs, as

it is in Europe. Villages should be either consolidated or mobile schoolsshould be set up for remote villages. Villages should have public libraries

and reading room, as it was in the Soviet Union, so that poor students can

have space to study. To remove linguistic discriminations and to haveproper representations of all provinces an informal system of fair

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representation or quota can be maintained regarding jobs in both public

and private sector. That system exist in the United Nations offices andalso in the United States. However, caste system must be abolished by

law by making it illegal for anyone even to mention his or her caste.