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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Quota in Lokpal will not solve unemployment in disadvantaged sections

Quota in Lokpal will not solve unemployment in disadvantaged sections

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published Published on Jan 6, 2012   modified Modified on Jan 6, 2012

-The Economic Times

 

The enacting of the Lokpal Bill has been deferred in the Rajya Sabha but that need not end the discussion on how focused the proposals are when it comes to tackling corruption. For instance, what exactly are the quotas in the Lokpal meant to do? If out of an eight-or-nine-member Lokpal, four or five should be from SCs, STs, OBCs, minorities and women, what is the message going out? Are we saying corruption among SCofficials should only be looked at by the SC Lokpal member?

Or that corruption among officials from minority communities should only be looked at by the minority community Lokpal member? Are there no honest people in this country of 1.21 billion who can, as Lokpal members, tackle corruption irrespective of their caste or the community to which the officials indulging in malpractices belong? Hasn't the Supreme Court demonstrated in its response to the PILs on the 2G and other scams that what it takes to deal with gargantuan corruption is a bench composed of judges of professional integrity and competence?

A quota system in the Lokpal will not, by any stretch of imagination, solve the problem of unemployment among the disadvantaged sections. The priority should be to tackle corruption and not indulge in tokenism. What is required is rapid economic growth so as to generate hundreds of thousands of jobs for the coming generations in a system that is perceived to befair and transparent.

The Lokpal should focus on trying to ensure that the process of economic growth is fair and transparent and not derailed by scams. Mere tokenism will not suffice, given the overwhelming challenge of dealing with scams that have, whether we admit it or not, been facilitated by what the Prime Minister termed 'the compulsions of coalition politics'. Which still does not explain how the same constraints of coalition politics did not seem to constrain Tamil Nadu's previous rulingregional outfit that needed the support of the PM's party to stay on in power in TN even while its MP-cum-telecom minister was allegedly perpetrating one of the country's biggest scams!

A few years ago, during a visit to another Asian nation, Infosys chairman-emeritus N R Narayana Murthy noted that people in other developing countries took pride in being considered progressive and forward-looking. India, he regretted, was one of the few countries in the world where sections of the populace insisted on their being called backward so as to access quotas in government jobs and educational institutions. The last few years have seen the railway network in northern India periodically paralysed by members of one community or the other squatting on the tracks to demand that their community be classified as backward.

Democracy allows the option of peaceful protest but without infringing on the fundamental rights of others, including those who travel by train. Democracy itself, as Churchill quipped while addressing the House of Commons in 1947, "is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried". The lesser evil of democracy can be made into a greater virtue only if the people are aware of not just their rights but of their duties to the country and to each other.

It has been proposed that the chairman of the Lokpal should either be a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India, a former judge, a sitting judge or a person of repute. Which means that, once he demits office, the incumbent Chief Justice of India could also be eligible. While presiding over the Supreme Court that tackled some of the country's worst-ever scams, Justice Kapadia restored the faith of the common man in the system at a time when integrity and competence seemed to be sadly lacking in other spheres of public life.

If Justice Kapadia is co-opted on to the Lokpal after he steps down from the Supreme Court, it would be ironical if it was on the basis of his belonging to the minority Parsi community at a time when the people of India see him as an outstanding judge and not just a member of one community or the other. This country fondly remembers outstanding Supreme Court judges of a previous era like Justice Hidayatullah.

So why can't India's political leaders emulate outstanding judges like Justice Hidayatullah and Justice Kapadia who were not constrained by caste or creed while discharging their responsibilities? Alternately, if everything including the composition of the Lokpal has to be on the quota-basis of caste or creed, can we expect the high command of every Indian political outfit to likewise insist that the top leadership of each national or regional party not be confined to a family or a class but be periodically rotated among members of all disadvantaged socioeconomic groups of castes and communities? And will the Indian Railways ultimately adopt a reservation system where seats and berths are allotted on the basis of caste quotas and not the date of booking!

The Economic Times, 6 January, 2012, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/guest-writer/quota-in-lokpal-will-not-solve-unemployment-in-disadvantaged-sections/articleshow/11382940.cms


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