India Comes Last!

It is said that one must think before one acts. If you are America, you can act first and think later. Or, you need not think at all. After all, you are the big brother! You can act and justify your action with afterthoughts, if you deem fit. In the name of establishing world order, you can topple democratically elected governments, indulge into espionage, and keep next door neighbours at loggerheads to maintain your supremacy.

If you are America, you have the right to preach that while Christians can follow varied political beliefs, Muslims all over the world toe a single political line, and therefore your President can deliver a speech to the ‘Muslim world’! Being the ‘Mr Know All’, you can supply loads and loads of deadly weapons and give billions of dollars of monetary help to Pakistan for fighting terrorism, ignoring the warning from your own sleuths that these are used by the Pakistani army against India and not against terrorists. You can do an encore of the mid sixties, when you supported Pakistan in a similar manner and supplied rotten food grain to India. You can even walk a step further, and suggest De-Militarised Zones on both sides of the Indo-Pak border, knowing fully well that it would increase infiltration of terrorists into India.

And while you take steps that spell doom for India’s security and prosperity, you need not worry about any retaliation from India (not that you ever cared about it!). With so many assembly elections lined up, the ruling UPA is in no mood to waste its time on such issues. The right leaning NDA is too busy in mudslinging over the loss of power that it had so cosily got accustomed to. And, the trigger happy left front, who is quick to call a bandh and damage public property at the drop of a hat, is busy trying to figure out how to contain Mamata Banerjee who threatens to upset its bastion in West Bengal.

Concerns for India come last.

Towards A Strong India

All sorts of reservation policies are tried in our nation. There is reservation for employment, reservation for admission to institutes of higher education, reservation for membership of a parliament seat, reservation for eligibility on accommodation in the train, etc., etc.

Scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, backward classes, women, residents of a particular state, poor, all are supposed to get the benefit of reservation. Discrimination based on gender, caste, economic status, domicile, religion, etc., is expected to vanish with adaptation of the reservation policy.

The fact is, in spite of living half a century with reservation, discrimination stares at us from all angles. It is exploited by different people for different selfish reasons. We still have untouchables who cannot draw water from a well. We have violence against Indians because they moved out of their state. We still have poor dying of hunger.

We are in this state because we are still not aware. We are still not educated. Specially the women, the architects of society. I wonder why India cannot have a much more liberal reservation policy for education? Why cannot we have hundred per cent reservation for education? Let every Indian, be she or he of any caste, religion, economic group, and state, have a seat reserved in a school, in a college, in an institute of higher learning. If we do not have enough resources to fund education for all, let us obtain it through a penalty on all bundhs and activities of damage to public property and peace.

Unless we take a revolutionary step in educating ourselves, we will not be able to build a strong India.