Author: Editorial
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: December 10, 2005
The proposed amendment to the Constitution,
to ensure reservation for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes students in
private unaided professional institutions, does enjoy support cross-party
support in Parliament.
The reason for that has little to do with
genuine concern for the welfare of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and
more to do with quota politics and votes. But while MPs will be exulting at
this opportunity to project themselves as champions of Scheduled Castes and
Scheduled Tribes welfare, a point of detail runs the risk of getting lost
in their vacuous speeches when the amendment is debated upon in Parliament.
The proposed law has been prompted by a recent
Supreme Court judgement that allowed the administration of private unaided
professional institutions to frame their own admission policy. The order was
seen as having the potential of encouraging such colleges to deny admission
to students from underprivileged families, especially those belonging to Scheduled
Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
There is merit in trying to negate that possibility,
not least because positive discrimination continues to be the only means of
ensuring a level playing field for students from less privileged families.
However, while ensuring that Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes students
are not denied the opportunity to excel in studies, the proposed amendment
to Article 15 of the Constitution, which deals with "Prohibition of discrimination
on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth", violates
the fundamental right to equality before law guaranteed by Article 14. For,
the quota will not be applicable to minority private unaided professional
institutions.
The official reason for the exclusion of such
institutions from the purview of the new law is that they are already serving
the great cause of empowering minority communities. That is balderdash - only
the most ill-informed will claim that minority professional institutions are
being run for charitable purposes or to empower minority communities. Surely
the UPA Government is not ignorant of this reality. The unstated reason is
that the UPA regime, like every other before it, feels compelled to demonstrate
its "secular" credentials by exempting minority institutions from
the law of the land.
If the proposed amendment to the Constitution
gets parliamentary approval - there is no reason to suggest it will not because
every party wants to be on the right side of quota politics - then discrimination
between non-minority private unaided professional institutions and minority
unaided professional institutions will be accorded legal sanctity. In brief,
while preventing discrimination against Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes,
the Constitution, after being amended, will discriminate against institutions
run by Hindus.
This will not be the first time that we will
witness such gross perversion of secularism; in the Republic of India where
equality, including before law, is supposed to reign supreme, time and again
Hindus have been forced to accept unequal status. The resultant social discord
has been of no concern for the peddlers of "secularism", nor are
our political parties particularly concerned that insidious laws that they
vote for surreptitiously undermine the very foundation on which the Constitution
rests.
By exempting minority unaided professional
institutions from the new quota, the Government has once again underscored
the most loathsome aspect of "secularism" as practiced in India
- that equality before law is inversely proportionate to a community's numerical
strength. Since both executive and legislature are party to this perversion,
the pernicious law, after it is enacted, will hopefully be struck down by
the judiciary.