Opinion | What Next? Quotas in Cricket Team?

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has become obsessed with caste, so much so that he seems to be outdoing the Mandal-Lohia brand of leaders whose casteist approach in politics has done immense harm to the country. He wants to shroud beauty contests in the miasma of social justice.

“I have checked the list of Miss India, which did not have any Dalit, Adivasi [tribal] or OBC [other backward class] women. Some will talk about cricket or Bollywood. No one will show the cobbler or plumber. Even top anchors in the media are not from the 90 per cent,” Gandhi recently told the media. Evidently, the 90 per cent means Dalits, tribals, OBC people, and minorities.

This is not the first time he has divided the country 90:10. A few months ago, he had said the same thing at Panchkula in Haryana. He also talked about “two different sets of rules” in the system that “are aligned against lower castes”.

Union Minister Kiren Rijiju rightly slammed the Leader of the Opposition for refusing to “see first tribal President, OBC PM, record numbers of SC/ST Cabinet Ministers.”

But then social justice warriors never let facts come in the way of their theorising; Gandhi is no exception. He is just peddling caste war doctrine, which is a putrid version of the Marxian class struggle theory.

At the heart of such theories is a falsehood: life is a zero-sum game in which some groups can gain only at the expense of others. The natural corollary is that politics and the economy too follow the zero-sum logic. In practice, such theories result in pitting groups, classes, castes, communities, etc, against each other.

This explains the curious paradox of the rise of casteism in politics (especially after Mandal) and the decline of caste differences in society. Inter-caste marriages are no longer frowned upon the way they were, say, at the time of Independence, especially in cities. People from all castes and communities are making their presence felt in various professions, including the professions which were regarded as preserves of ‘upper castes’.

But it is a well-known fact that change in society is much slower than that in politics and even the economy. For instance, on January 26, 1950, India became a republic; all citizens were bestowed rights hitherto unknown in the history of the country. Similarly, information technology has remarkably changed our lives in a few decades. Changes in social norms and cultural mores, however, take much more time.

Politicians like Gandhi deliberately overlook these facts. This is because the ideology they subscribe to, social justice, is fundamentally flawed. A big flaw arises from its focus, which is on equity, not equality.

On the face of it, both equality and equity appear to be the same, but the difference between the two is deep-seated. Equality is a noble concept that emanated from the intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. It is about treating all human beings—irrespective of their social and economic position, ethnicity, faith, gender, et al—equally. Hence the famous sentence from the United States Declaration of Independence penned by Thomas Jefferson during the beginning of the Revolutionary War in 1776: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” In those politically incorrect times, ‘men’ meant both men and women.

And hence, the motto of the French Revolution—Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

Equality is about removing any obstacles pertaining to birth-related attributes like race and sex that may impede the progress of an individual.

Equity, on the other hand, is the product and function of counter-Enlightenment ideologies, especially the postmodern doctrines, which focus on outcomes. As a consequence, the votaries of equity want equal representation of all groups in every vocation and station.

Equal outcomes are impossible because of a myriad of factors, including discrimination; equity bigots, however, talk only about discrimination. But other factors are often more important. For instance, while blacks in the West do very well in football and basketball, they are not so good in tennis and golf. Women all over the world—even in the much richer and fairer West—don’t do as well in science and mathematics as men do. There are historical, cultural, religious, economic, and perhaps even genetic factors determining a person’s excellence. Ignoring all these, and emphasizing only one, discrimination, is intellectually dishonest and morally reprehensible.

But this is what the intellectual and political elites do all the time; the grand old party under Rahul Gandhi is surely doing that. This is reflected in the GOP’s embrace of the slogan ‘Jitni abadi, utna haq’ (Rights in accordance with the proportion of population).

Since Gandhi seems unrelenting in his pursuit of this formula, we may not be surprised if he starts talking about the caste and communal composition of the Indian cricket team. The next demand may be reservation in the team. Absurdity has no limits in politics.

The author is a freelance journalist. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.