The Sachar Committee report tabled in Parliament last week, Dalit violence in Maharashtra and the vandalism we saw from Mamata Bannerji’s legislators in the W. Bengal Assembly all fit into my category of primitive politics.

We like to blame the British Raj for our divisions but those of us who disregard political correctness know that blame must rest on the broad shoulders of the Congress Party. It was this party that came up with the idea of uniting voters under it by playing up divisions. Dalits in one ballot box, Muslims in another, upper caste Hindus lured into the fold by giving Brahmins high positions in government, and thereby keeping the caste system intact. All under the billowing umbrella of Congress.

Mandal and Mandir ended this happy arrangement with the Yadav chieftains from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh running off with the other backward castes, the BJP taking the upper castes, Mayawati the Dalits, and Muslims falling away because a Congress prime minister allowed the demolition of the Babri Masjid.

Sadly, little has changed since because no political party has come up with a new idea in more than 50 years. From the centrist ‘secular’ parties to the supposedly rightist Hindutva BJP, we are offered a combination of doddering old leaders and their baba log.

The Marxist parties have so far not offered us dynastic democracy, but they do worse by offering us Stalin and now Saddam Hussain as their heroes.

Since the Sachar report has been widely welcomed by more politically correct analysts as a giant liberal, secular leap forward I am going to begin by explaining why I see it as a dangerous and divisive document.

Its main message is that Muslims have fallen off the development and education map of India and it blames this on discrimination and a lack of access to good schools. One of the solutions it suggests is high-quality government schools in Muslim areas since nearly 70 per cent of Muslim children rely on the public education system.

Why not high quality government schools for everyone? As someone who has travelled the country in such of good government schools, may I say that I have not seen one that would be considered a good school by modern, 21st century standards. To recommend that good schools be built only in Muslim areas is as retrograde and divisive a suggestion as possible.

If Muslims have not participated fully in the economic prosperity of the past fifteen years it is largely due to the 7th century mentality in which an unfortunately large number of Muslims wish to bring up their children. Why does the Sachar Committee not describe the effect on the community of elite seminaries like Deoband?

If you are a woman you enter its precincts at your risk unless you are veiled. Why does it not explain why most Muslim families continue to deprive girls of basic education? No government can do for Muslims what they refuse to do for themselves, and the Sachar Committee report is little more than an exercise in delusion.

Now, let us talk of the violence we saw in Maharashtra and the W. Bengal Assembly last week. Whatever the Dalit grievance, they have no right to express it by burning public property that has been paid for by the hard earned money of taxpayers.

It is primitive (and stupid) to burn trains and buses because they belong to us, and if you were in Mumbai last week, you would have seen that whatever sympathy the Dalits had after the horrible massacre in Khairlanji, they lost with last week’s vandalism.

Yet, what do you expect of ordinary people if MLAs of a national political party like the Trinamul Congress, think nothing of breaking tables and chairs in the legislative assembly in the full glare of nationwide television.

They did this because their leader, Mamata Bannerji, was allegedly denied permission to protest in the streets. If this is not primitive politics what is? Mobs are faceless, so the Dalit vandals who burned buses and the Deccan Queen will probably get away with what they did, but Ms Bannerji must be made to pay for the damage her MLAs did, and they should be locked up and the key thrown away till the next election.

We need a new kind of politics if we are to truly benefit from the enormous changes that economic liberalisation has brought. Personally, I am ready to vote for a party that offers to take us from 9.2 to 10 per cent growth next year.