Fifteen years of reform have changed all that. In fact, our children today would find these stories of man-made, self-inflicted scarcities and atrocities entirely unbelievable.

As incredible as, hopefully, their children would find stories of today’s even more cruel, self-inflicted atrocities. A total of 4,000 seats in all our IITs, just around 1,500 in all our IIMs, a mere 50 MBBS seats per year in AIIMS, a ridiculous total of 235 for graduate diploma and post-graduates put together at the National Institute for Design, only 480 students at National Law School, and so on. That is why today’s spectacle of a mere three to four per cent of all eligible applicants making it to these institutions, of 90-percenters failing to find decent courses in Delhi University colleges, is today’s equivalent of the pre-1991 fifteen-year wait for scooters, gas connections, telephones. The anger you see on the streets of your cities, the bitterness that motivates normally pampered and softie medical students to endure hunger strikes to rival Medha Patkar’s, comes out of this frustration. And here is my central point. If the economic crisis, the near default of 1991, which arose from two years of totally disastrous economic management under V.P. Singh and Chandra Shekhar gave Finance Minister Manmohan Singh the opportunity to turn that 15-year wait for basic necessities of transport, household fuel and communication into a situation of unlimited plenty, his own colleagues’ crude push for OBC reservations brings an opportunity to similarly rejuvenate higher education.

Why do people like Arjun Singh (and the Mandalite chieftains who still reap the harvest of votes at the expense of the Congress) think OBC quota is such a potent weapon to slay whichever demons that are out to get them? Why should a step that will, at best, get two to three thousand (only that many, you can count again) OBCs into these institutions bring them so much political gain, whether in terms of votes or sheer revenge on a rival, or fate? Because this handful of seats in these institutions is today’s equivalent of Krishan Kant’s LPG coupons. Here is something the politician denied you in the first place. And here is something he can give you: his generous largesse if you give him your external gratitude and, of course, vote.

... contd.