The current decision is insidious. HRD minister, Arjun Singh, describes himself as a Nehruvian. But nothing has crucified Nehru more than the runaway, politically cynical, socially ineffective, and pedagogically fraudulent discourse on reservation that the current decision exemplifies. Nehru once wrote, “So these external props, as I might call them, the reservation of seats, and the rest — may possibly be helpful occasionally, but they produce a false sense of political relation, a false sense of strength, and, ultimately therefore, they are not so nearly important as real educational, cultural and economic advance which gives them inner strength to face any difficulty or opponent.”

At the time of independence there was a consensus that the condition of SCs/STs was so appalling that they deserved special consideration. It is a profound tragedy that arguments that were made in the context of SCs/STs have been extended to cover OBCs and all kinds of other groups. Whatever one’s views on reservation, the claims of OBCs are not the same as those of SCs/STs. Our founding fathers were wise to recognise that. OBCs have been capitalising on a narrative of injustice which is not theirs, and in the process compounding greater injustice. It is a widely known fact that many OBCs are now akin to what used to be dominant castes. Giving them special access to state offices is, in some cases, working against the interests of SCs/STs. While many of the atrocities against Dalits are perpetuated by high castes, OBC atrocities on Dalits are no less significant. It is a travesty of justice to contrive special measures to reinforce OBC dominance. In this context letting SCs/STs reservations stand for the time being, without extending the ambit to OBCs, would have been prudent.

But the current announcement also exemplifies the cynicism with which sections of government deal with education. In order to blunt the backlash against reservation, the government is announcing that the number of seats will be increased so as not to reduce the number of seats available in the general category. This is, what might be called, a pure statistical approach to education: increase the number of seats by government fiat, pride yourself on achieving numerical targets without any concern for quality, and make education a totem to be thrown around in mass politics.

IITs, IIMs and some of our central universities are a few recognisable brand names left. But instead of ameliorating their problems, these measures will only impede their ability to carry out their mission. For instance, there is an acute shortage of faculty in the IITs and these institutions are already struggling to raise their research profile; our flagship institutions like the Delhi School of Economics are pale shadows of what they once were. In this context, to blithely raise the number of seats is to utterly disregard the conditions that make excellent institutions possible.

The decision should also be seen in the larger context of the debate over the autonomy and regulation of institutions of higher education. The very day the government made this announcement, the high court in Chennai has passed a controversial judgment considerably enlarging the powers of the AICTE over institutions that are deemed universities. This decision makes a travesty of the concept of a university, which among other things gave an institution degree-granting powers. This erosion in the degree-granting powers of universities is part of the same trend that the decision to increase the number of seats exemplifies: let all decisions about whom to admit the criteria of admission and what should be taught, be taken away from educationists, teachers and students, and be put in the hands of political and bureaucratic masters, who will move according to their own political and administrative logic.

Nehru was right. Reservations have become a substitute for “real cultural, educational and economic advance”, a cheap way of displaying your commitment to justice while you connive in every way possible to make sure that the conditions that produce grievous injustice are not really overcome. The real issue is how can we expand the supply of good quality institutions, and how can we ensure that social circumstance or financial deprivation does not prevent students from getting the best education they can.

The mandalisation of IITs, IIMs and central universities does not address these challenges. We have for too long sacrificed excellence to populism, independence to conformity, pedagogy to politics, substantive achievement to symbolic targets, and the real interests of students to the mathematical calculus of the political class. Designing effective access policies is not an easy task, but it would have done this government great credit if, instead of a headlong rush to destroy educational institutions, it had used the opportunity provided by Inamdar to think through the issues at stake more carefully. Instead it has initiated a political race to the bottom.

We will now witness the horrible spectacle of states falling over each other to play the reservation card. It is perhaps too much to expect that we will ever get political leaders who have the courage to shape public

discourse. But the least this government could have done was to not willfully exacerbate the rot. One sometimes wonder whether ministers and bureaucrats even have a sense of what ails our education system. All the good work the UPA is trying to do will come to naught if the HRD ministry bequeaths a legacy of destroyed institutions unable to fulfill India’s needs and potential. Pardon this gracelessness, but the cynical use of reservations is putting too much of our future at risk.

The writer is president, Center for Policy Research. Views expressed are strictly his own