Mayawati, clearly delighted at her newfound success, is now calling for reservations to be extended to poor 'upper castes' as well as non-Hindu minorities. Well, this is an interesting psychological breakthrough for her, in recognizing that 'upper castes' can be economically backward as well. She's obviously able to get away with this stance because of her background, in contrast to a BJP that would never dare to call for such things. It's too bad that she's not willing to address the issue of extra-territorialism amongst minorities, when she's willing to extend quotas to them.
But this does pose a problem for meritocracy. If you give everybody quota entitlements, then who the hell has to work hard?
But it's still politically significant that you have a 'lower-caste' leader willing to go on record that 'upper castes' are human beings suffering economic deprivation too. It shows the greater ability of 'upper castes' to influence BSP from within, rather than from outside. This soft-power influence and its possibilities should not be sneezed at.
4 comments:
sadly - on the same date as this new reservation was announced here is another piece to show you how difficult her job is in terms of governance http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=86399
In the end Mayawati will win-lose on the strength of her governance for 5 years and stitching caste coalitions on the polling day five years from now. Luckily for her she only has to show she is better than Mulayam, which should not take too much doing :-)
I do rejoice at this utterance as it is one step - one very very small step at building a Hindu super-vote bank!
i have deleted this post by saktivel although he made some good points. the reason is that he went into a serious and insulting rant against 'northies', which i dont think is appropriate.
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