Damn the Grandpa, Damn the Grandson

A grand father and his grand son have had the same opinion on a pertinent issue that has been plaguing the nation for a very long time. They have even expressed the very same opinion not anywhere else but once in front of the chief ministers of the different states of India and another time in the parliament of the democratic socialist secular sovereign republic that is India.

The grand father had opposed communal and caste based reservation to the core and same was one by his grand son too.

The grand father said:

"The recent meeting we held here, at which the Chief Ministers were present, to consider national integration, laid down that help should be given on economic considerations and not on caste. It is true that we are tied up with certain rules and conventions about helping the schedules castes and tribes. They deserve help but, even so I dislike any kind of reservation, more particularly in Services. I react strongly against anything which leads to inefficiency and second-rate standards. I want my country to be a first class country in everything. The moment we encourage the second-rate, we are lost.

.. But if we go in for reservations on communal and caste basis, we swamp the bright and able people and remain second-rate and third-rate ? I am grieved to learn how far this business of reservation has gone based on communal considerations. It has amazed me to learn that even promotions are based sometimes on communal or caste considerations. This way lies not only folly, but disaster. Let us help the backward groups by all means, but never at the cost of efficiency. How are we going to build the public sector or indeed any sector with second-rate people? "

The grand son echoed similar feelings some thirty years later in the parliament of India thus:

“Does the government subscribe to the Mandal Commission view that political constituencies should be carved out on a caste basis? Are we going back to the Round Table Conference for having separate electorates? That was designed to break our country”.

“The concept of "Other Backward Castes" has always been a joke. I know for a fact that Reddys are included, Vokkaligas are included, Kammas are included, Lingayats are included, Gounders are included, Chettiyars are included. Are these Backward Castes? Do they need help?”

"Do we want the benefit that the Government is giving to be cornered by the Ministers or the sons of Ministers or the families thereof? Do we want the benefits that are being given by the Government to be cornered by big landlords and people who have a lot of property? Why do we not exclude the people with a certain number of properties from such benefits? Do we want these benefits to go to high senior Government officers who have already got that privilege? The Government is aiming these benefits at a particularly privileged group and not looking at the really poor".

"This government is creating a vested interest in casteism and the country is going to pay a very high price for it".

The grand father spoken about here is none other than Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. He wrote a letter to the Chief Ministers of India on 27th July 1961.

And the grand son is none other than Rajiv Gandhi. He made the said speech in Parliament on 6^th September 1990.

Now we have a different set of Congress men who want to behave like the British. Britain wanted to create serious divisions in the Indian society and hence drafted the “Poona Pact’ of 1932. The said pact was to carve out separate electorates for the Scheduled Castes. Mahatma Gandhi went on a fast unto death to force the British to withdraw the said pact. That was taking the concern of the country seriously.

You can’t blame the current breed of Congress stalwarts too. They are headed by an European and probably because of that they want to entertain similar divisive strategies as were enacted by the earlier British regime.

Earlier we had the Sachchar committee report that wanted special privileges to the minorities. Then came the new messiah called Arjun Singh who supported reservation for minorities in State funded universities. Currently after the Supreme Court has stayed the implementation of the OBC quota order, Arjun Singh said that the government would do everything constitutionally and legally to ensure reservation. The irony is that this reservation project is neither constitutional nor legal.

Now that we have seen that Nehru and Rajiv had opposed reservations, is it not time for the Congress to dis-own the duo and remove them from the Congress pantheon?

( I had written this article in 2006 for another magazine. I have reproduced the same and find that the situation has not changed since .. )

Earlier Link :

http://indiainteracts.in/members/2007/03/30/Paguththarivu-and-Reservations-you-must-be-kidding/

Jayalalithaa's second fall in 100 days

Dear Ms.Jayalalithaa,

Welcome aboard for the third time but pity you for falling for the second time in your first 100
days.

Let me come over to your second fall first - would want to term it the second lunatic act - but stopping short of saying that. Instead would term it an act of cowardice, to put it mildly.

You were right up to the point when you had said that beyond the President's orders, you were powerless and hence did not choose to act on the mercy petition of Rajiv killers. But when the lunatic hoodlums from TN comprising of fringe elements like Nedumaran, Vaiko and Ramadoss who have nothing in common but an element of 'sympathy' towards the LTTE and who have lost out completely in the recent elections and have absolutely no base among the voters in TN ( Citizens of India ), your government did a somersault and of all stunts, passed a resolution in the assembly requesting clemency to the killers of Rajiv.

Let me remind you that you have been chosen not to safeguard killers and mercenaries. You have been elected to retrieve what ever is left of the piece of the country called Tamil Nadu.

Your election plank was not to save Rajiv killers and additionally the killers of the 17 other policemen ( they were Tamil too ). You were elected to work for the people of Tamil Nadu.

Rajiv was killed, as has often been declared by the LTTE in the courts as well, for teaching him a lesson for sending the peace keeping force to SL. But wait a minute. The former PM just implemented a resolution of the Parliament of India.

As a result of the killing, you had won a grand victory in 1991, no doubt, in the elections. But the nation as a whole had to suffer later on as there was always this instability. We had to suffer a Gujral and a Deve Gowda as PMs and the nation was set back by another 10 years during their tenure until Vajpayee come over to salvage the situation.

You might want to believe that you had scored a point over the DMK on the Rajiv killer front. There is no need to do this as the DMK is already history and the country knows of the plight of the party.

Just when you came back to power and started making some rational decisions, I was under the impression that TN was on its way towards progress like Gujarat's no-nonsense approach to development.

What a precedent you had set ! What if the Nagaland assembly passed a resolution demanding independence now that there is no dearth of lunatics in India with Omar Abdullah and his father from J&K being the head of the Lunacy Department ?

I would, as an Indian, term your act as an act in complete cowardice and the second of the somersault to score some political brownie points against a non-existent opposition, much to the detriment of national integrity.

And you had your first fall when you wanted to appeal against the HC ruling on the Uniform system of education. I know that the USE is, pardon me, fit for lunatics. But that was the lunacy brought upon the people by a lunatic government lead by a lunatic who spent his time in the company of movie stars. And you need not have appealed in the SC. Quietly you could have allowed the USE-less education to propagate for one year, reveal itself in full and then introduce the new method from next year on-wards.

And, in any case, the state board syllabus is useless and serves only the cause of paper re-cyclers.

Hence, please watch-out before you falter again as during the current times, the people don't forgive politicians that are irresponsible.

Thanks

A concerned citizen of India.

Why not a "Bharat Ratna" for Kasab ?

So, why the hue and cry for the killers of Rajiv and that too by Karunanidhi and a bunch of hoodlums comprising of mis-guided students, electorally defeated caste chieftains such as Ramdoss and Thirumavalavan ?

The ostensible reason : it has taken 20 years to arrive at the death sentence for the killers. And the killers are Tamils. Hence the death sentence should be commuted to life imprisonment.

A mute question here : The 17 other policemen who were killed along with Rajiv Gandhi, were they not Tamil enough ?

So who rejected the mercy petition in the first place ? Smt.Pratibha Patil ( if the name is not familiar, she is the President of the Republic of India ).

Why did she reject ? Because the Union Cabinet rejected the mercy petition and hence advised her thus to do so.

Why did the Cabinet reject the mercy petition ? Because the Governor of Tamil Nadu recommended so.

Why did the Governor recommend thus ? Because the State govt of Tamil Nadu advised thus.

So, who was the head of the TN govt then who did this recommendation ? Shri. Karunanidhi, the then Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu in the year 2000.

So why does Karunanidhi back the mercy petition now in 2011 ? Probably this is 'Paguththarivu' or rationalism.

But some 'rational' questions remain.

Why does Karunanidhi not talk to Pratibha directly on this ? Is is he who backed her Presidential candidature first and in fact took pride in bringing forth a woman for that position.

Also, who are participating in the protests ? Law breaking 'law'less students who aspire to become 'lawyers'. How do they protest ? By climbing on trains and staging 'rasta-roko'. Here we see pictures of 'lawyers' climbing the gates of the high court in Madurai Tamil Nadu. Probably this is how lawyers 'stand-up' for justice to prevail .(Note that these people had not come out to protest for Anna Hazare.)

And immediately some innocent students / young people commit suicide by self-immolation. And people who self-immolate are invariably from the lower income group who have nothing but idealism in their minds and who are fired by speeches that they keep hearing. Sengodi, a teen-age student immolated herself for the cause of the 3 prisoners.

Now, how does a suicide help in this cause ? In case the three prisoners' life sentences are commuted, what happens to the parents of the girl who self immolated ? Interestingly, no relative of the pro-LTTE leaders commit such acts.

How does a suicide bomber like Kasab justify to be kept alive at state expense ? In any case he had come on a mission to kill and be killed.

Hence it follows that once the date of hanging of Kasab approaches, there could be people from section of the population who would argue for commuting his sentence.

We have heard of 'Arjuna' awardees languishing in poverty in India. But Kasab and Afzal Guru are being fed and taken care of at our cost.

Therefore, instead of waiting for long, let us confer 'Bharat Ratna' on Kasab and officially take care of him for the rest of his life. That would be a great tribute to the Indians who were killed in the events of 26/Nov/2008.