The Gujjar Demand

It is more than 2 weeks since the Gujjaras have been agitating demanding ST status for them. About 45 activists have been killed till date. It is reported that the Railways is loosing about 3 crore INR every day the rail traffic is disrupted. The CM and other top bureaucrats have been wasting a lot of time on this. The loss the daily commuters and the companies that employ them may incur in not reporting to jobs in time and the resulting productivity loss would be hard to calculate. The mental trauma of people who had to commute or travel urgently trough the trouble torn areas would be more difficult to quantify.

In spite of all these, the Raje Govt. is taking a tough stand by not yielding to their demands. With a sizable 15% of the population in the state belonging to Gujjars, it would be a very easy political decision to grant their demand. Just imagine what would happen if this causes a 5-6% vote swing against the ruling front. This would mean a disaster for any party, leave alone a party which has an opposition which is at least as popular. A more worrying factor would be that the state is going for assembly polls shortly.

In spite of all these, I think the Rajastan Govt. is sensible in not yielding to their demands. If a community gets the status of SC / ST just because they have agitate so much, it would send a wrong message to the other communities, particularly those which have sufficient strength in their side. Each of them would start agitating and it would be a total chaos in the country.

In fact, the attitude of the political parties to appease a community or a section of the society has boomeranged back at them. I believe that at least now, the top leadership in most of the political parties would start thinking about the bane of community / caste based reservations. Perhaps this is the start of end of caste / community based reservation. The saying goes that there is an opportunity in every adversary and here too, there is an opportunity to get rid of caste / community based reservation. Hope the policy makers wake up sufficiently early.