The Latest: Top stories of the day
1. A United Nations court has ruled that India should send back Salvatore Girone, one of the marines arrested in the high profile case from 2012.
2. Businessman Vijay Mallya resigns from the Rajya Sabha, shortly after the ethics committee had recommended that he be expelled.
3. After five die in Tamil Nadu election rallies, the National Human Rights Commission sends notices to the state chief secretary and director general of police.
4. The Central Bureau of Investigation grills former Air Force chief SP Tyagi on the AugustaWestland chopper scam.
The Big Story: Gujarat quota
Months after Gujarat's Patidars took to the streets, demanding reservations in jobs and educational institutions, the state government promulgated an ordinance that enables a 10% quota for the economically backward among the upper castes. Families with an income below Rs 6 lakh per annum will be eligible for the quota. It appears to be a hasty sop devised by a government beleaguered by protests from a politically powerful group, which has rejected the quota anyway. Economically Backward Class quotas like the one just announced tend to dilute the logic of reservations in the Indian context.
As sociologist Sonalde Desai explains, the Rs 6 lakh cut off is high enough to include a very large section of the population. In other words, quotas in Gujarat have inched forward until they leave out almost nobody. Second, economic criteria for reservations that ignore caste tend to play to the old hierarchies. In an intensely competitive job market, the poor from the upper or dominant castes are likely to continue enjoying the advantages of their social position, leaving behind the poor from scheduled castes, scheduled tribes or other backward classes.
EBC quotas elide the specific and entrenched inequalities that caste-based reservation was meant to correct. The latter was introduced as affirmative action targeting groups that have been oppressed and marginalised for centuries, in a society where caste was fate. Purely economic inequalities are also a pressing reality, and need to be tackled in their own way, by creating more jobs, for one. But Indian society has not yet evolved beyond the horrors of caste.
The Big Scroll: Scroll.in on the day's big story
Aarefa Johari reports that Gujarat's Patidars reject the economically backward class quota offered by the Gujarat government.
Mrinalika Joseph explains why the haters of caste-based reservations are wrong.
Underlying tensions between OBCs and Patidars in Gujarat gave rise to the violent agitation, says social scientist Ghanshyam Shah in an interview.
Politicking and policying
1. Ilyas Azmi, a founder member of the Aam Aadmi Party, quits the party, calling Arvind Kejriwal "autocratic".
2. At least two persons were killed after the police opened fire on crowds protesting against the arrest of a Buddhist monk in Tawang, Arunachal Pradesh.
3. Experts say Uttarakhand forest fires could melt glaciers faster.
4. A 625-acre plot has been identified in Jammu for Jammu and Kashmir's first IIT.
Punditry
1. In the Hindu, Sonalde Desai explains why we need a procedure for notification for groups moving out of the reserved category.
2. In the Telegraph, Shubhashis Gangopadhyay on the problems of Indian research in the social sciences.
3. In the Indian Express, Suhas Palshikar on how Maharashtra's social contract is fraying and the ruling party cannot handle it.
Don't Miss...
Peter Smetacek on how Uttarakhand forest fires have increased in frequency after a 1981 government ban on felling trees 1,000 metres above sea level:
Earlier, forest fires were accidental (there is no record of a natural forest fire from the Himalayas). Today, they are intentional. Traditionally, villagers would set fire to grassy hillsides so that with the first rains, a new flush of nutritious grass would appear.
Today, forests are being set on fire to kill trees so that timber contractors can stay in business, commercial builders can clear land of trees to negate the difficulty of obtaining felling permission, villagers can stock up dead fuelwood for cooking and warming themselves, and various other reasons. The main trigger for this phenomenon was a 1981 governmental ban on the felling of green trees over 1,000 metres above sea-level.
