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.

... contd.