Caste and communal divide in India

I'm hereby expressing some thoughts, as I've seen around for the 26 odd years of my life.

Reservations

Since India got its independence, it was Ambedkar who said in a country like ours, there is a necessity of reservations. But, what he didn't knew was that it would become bread and butter of the political parties thereafter. Even today, we have the reservations continuing. I don't understand why there should be special treatment to those who are above poverty line and belong to backward classes, to those who are born and brought up in urban areas and they need reservations.

During CET counseling atleast, we saw so many categories thrown up on the wide-screen in which we were supposed to pick our seats for engineering or medical streams. Just see how wide the list was: 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B, 3A, 3B, SC, ST, GM. Well this is not over yet, we had a breakup for rural and urban for e.g., 1AR (1A category for rural), 1AU(1A for urban. I personally have seen how this provision was mis-used by our fellow people.

One classic example I can give is this, there's a school nearby Harihar which happens to be my hometown, widely famous, it's Aditya Birla School and College, Kumarapatnam and this is like 3-4 kms on the outskirts of my hometown. Most of them who went to this institution were children of employess of Grasim Industries. The worst thing, many people have claimed that the college comes in the purview of Rural area and they were offered seats under Rural quota. Another example, a ST candidate who's father is already a manager at a Bank (I don't want to name his name here) and he chose to take the seat under ST category. I wonder why?? Nobody has the guts to earn a seat or progress with his/her own abilities.

Caste divide

Being a Brahmin myself, my parents never told that I should not mingle with people from SC/ST community or those from lower castes or those from minority communities be it Christians or Muslims. Never! I'm sure the same is the case with all of my friends around. When I did my schooling, we sang "Asathoma Sadgamaya, Tamasoma Jyothirgamaya, Mrutyorma Amrutangamaya" Sansrkit shlokas as our daily prayers before we went into the classes, and all of them sang it including Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs. I'm sure the same is the case with all of my friends who did their schooling at different institutions. If it was a Convent school, they were made to pray the God with some song from Christian culture. If it was a Muslim school, they were made to pray the God in their own culture. Our teachers used to take us in processions of what they called "Komu sauhaardathe" in Kannada meaning "All religions are the same, everyone is equal".

I myself didn't have any feeling about castes, nor did I never felt that belonging to different castes is so important until one day, one bad day! It was when I got into Pre-university second year (we call this as twelfth -XII in other states) and was preparing for CET exams. I had bought a new Bosco CET book (an author who writes Mathematics text books for Pre-University). I was aspiring to earn an engineering seat in BIET, Davanagere. There was a table in it which gave the details of how approximate should your ranking be to earn a seat in various colleges in Karnataka. I went to the row of BIET and checked the figure. I found a lot of columns there, then had to look up the column headers and that is when I noticed I belong to the General Merit (GM) category - The category without reservations. :-) My aspirations came true, that's a different story altogether. Nevertheless, the point that I wanted to mention here was that it was that day when I realized that it is sectorially divided. The people have to select the seats based on their castes.

I sometimes get pissed off just thinking about my past, after having such a wonderful schooling, why the hell did I undergo Pre-university course where I learnt that all I put so much of effort into earning a seat in engineering I desired the most after a good ranking, my friends from other castes got it so easily with their reservations and a bad ranking. I was annoyed, annoyed with the person who created this sectorial "caste divide". I agree it's needed to distinguish students who still managed to earn a rank despite of the rural and poor economic backgrounds they came from, but it's not something which should have been offered to urban students from backward castes. I mean, why is there such a need for those who come from urban and comparatively good economic backgrounds?

Politics

Congress and other parties, leave alone even the biased media seem to call the BJP as a saffron party, party which only takes care of Hindus and leave all the other castes behind. Atal Bihari Vajpayee was in power for around 5 years, were all the Muslims or Christians of the country killed? The answer is NO.

Whenever BJP's leaders comment something, the Congress, the other pseudo-secular parties, even the media led by NDTV whose editor accidently happens to be a close relative of Brinda Karat (Left party leader), the same case is with India Today, Times Now etc, the wise Javed Akhtars, the Shabana Azmis, and the human rights people all attack BJP of being a communal party and talk bullshit saying BJP never takes care of minority and all that.

Now, here's a view point, who is indeed creating a rift or a communal divide in the society? The BJP or the Congress and its bunch of puppets. I personally feel after watching for all these years, the communal divide is created by the latter. Good deeds of the BJP are never shown in the media, the media is biased. The media always looks for an opportunity and they (infact Congress and the junk puppets like Left parties, Laloos and the Mayas and the Paswans) blow the news out of proportion. Whatever has happened never is shown up.

The Congress has been to an extent of calling Rama and Krishna, the Gods we believe in to be fictitious characters and they never existed. Everybody has a faith in himself/herself. A person can be religious believing a religion or may be even an atheist. Now, Congress has hurt the very faith in belief.

India needs politicians who bend their asses and work toward the progress of the nation and not puppets! Everybody can make puppets, even you and I can.

Final word from my end:
This blog was not meant to be personally offensive to specific set of readers, but indeed, if they feel it either ways, I dare to challenge them to raise their children in an independent environment, environment where even if they have the choice of using reservations and caste they should not exercise it. That's when you'll be called forward people. Don't make yourselves backward, work towards becoming forward.