Sujit De
This is in response to Kajal Chatterjee’s article, “Rise above petty barriers” (Herald, Other Voices, November 6). If we are asked to rise above petty barriers and keep the main entrance to our home open in the small hours, we will never do so; so long as there are thieves! Similarly, the policy of reservation which is nothing but protective barriers for the Dalits, cannot be done away with so long as there is widespread hatred on the basis of caste. It is as simple as that.
That caste hatred is still prevalent in our country is an open secret. Lower caste students are forced to sit separately from upper caste for their mid-day meal in a government school in Junagadh, Gujarat and such ugly practices prevail elsewhere also. The Director of District Primary Education Project (DEPP), Mahesh Singh has told the Press at the end of the “Chintan Shibir” for teachers, principals and education department officials that if the children of all castes are made to sit together, many upper caste parents would withdraw their wards from the school.
These incidents confirm the survey on untouchability in India in 2016. Researchers from Jawaharlal Nehru University and University of Maryland have covered 42,152 households across our country. A whopping 27 per cent of the members of those households shamelessly declare that they practice untouchability. There must be some more people who cling to such inhuman prejudices without categorically declaring it to a study team for the fear of legal actions against them. This shows that a large section of our people are still carrying almost same horrifying apathy against Dalits as our ancestors.
Also, the attack on the Bastar-based academic and researcher Bela Bhatia shows that we not only fail Dalits but their champions as well. This is the reason why India still needs job reservation for the Dalits not for giving them jobs but for the sake of social justice and to make our administration free from caste bias. It goes without saying that any administrative bias against Dalits cannot act as a deterrent to stop rising incidents like Una, Bastar and Junagadh.
Caste reservation is confined only to government sector which is a tiny part of total job market. If the idea behind the caste reservation is to provide just employment to Dalits then such reservation would have been extended to private sector also. Indeed, reservation for the Dalits, only for the government sector is just to give them protective barriers and to ensure their proportional representation in every police station, government office and legislative body as they are still being agonisingly ill-treated.
