By The Editor: Siddharth Sehgal
The demonetization was a big step on black money, it’s not about if it will be successful or not but more important thing is that someone had the spine to take a stand. Politicians usually are crowd-pleasers which is why they’ll do anything to win your vote even if it means to divide the society, even if it means placing their own interest above everyone else.
This election in UP as in all UP elections will witness again the debauchery of caste politics, dalit, brahmin, forward, backward and almost everyone will be divided in camps. Some so called leaders will wail about oppression his subset of population has suffered and will promise jobs and education with a reserved label. Let me tell you point blank that no political party will dare address this status quo. That’s how they dupe people and then later make money off of their constituents sweat and blood. SP chief minister Akhilesh Yadav has promised to shift 17 OBC communities to SC/ST category, their soft spot for last name Yadav and Muslims is too well known. Mayawati claims to literally own the Dalit vote bank, do you expect magnanimousness from such a politician who hardly feels embarrassed inaugurating her own statues. These are just few examples of a bigger problem that we observe in almost every state. This politics of categories will lead us in a sinkhole. Someone has to show the spine again to challenge this social evil.
No one chooses the parents, caste or circumstance to be born into. Then how we can reward or punish someone for being from a certain background and on top of that this goes against the idea of bridging the rift of caste in our society. We have to change our justice system, our administrative structure to bring development to the left behind communities. Give them education, financial aid, direction, motivation and mentorship to change their lives for better. This change will stay with them for generations. Yes, we have a bitter history of persecution of castism and yes, in some areas those divides are still part of everyday lives but we have a huge number of youths who don’t care about these differences. It’s a seed of social change, a positive change that we have to nurture and grow otherwise we will continue to live with this bitterness. And if we cherry pick groups of people to be given the status of backward, OBC or SC/ST then where is the stopping point. We have already seen Patel & Jat communities agitating for reservation, tomorrow some other subset of population will demand special status.
Just like demonetization we need a shock therapy to this problem. Someone has to show the guts to take the stand and make people think or at least try to start a conversation.