It would take an extreme cynic to fault the right-wing Hindu organisation, the RSS, for stating in no unequivocal terms its support for reservation at this point in time.
Some may connect the timing of the declaration to the wooing of dalit votes in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, but that is an extremely narrow and partisan view.
As we witnessed in the recent general election, promises of increasing reservation quotas did not garner votes.
If RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s statement is intended to rise above vote-bank politics and genuinely supports reservation, he may have done signal service to a society that has believed in affirmative action for decades in the matter of striving for equality.
Bhagwat dramatised it in saying, “If those who are privileged do not bow or bend, those below the line cannot come up.”
We only have to study our history of discrimination to know instinctively that the ancient caste system was fundamentally flawed.
It took a Mahatma Gandhi and an Ambedkar to sensitise this nation towards accepting a more equal society in which everyone should compete for the finest things in life regardless of how high or humble his birth.
And reservation, within reasonable limits, is the best possible equaliser until such time the historical inequalities are rubbed out.
In an ideal world, there would be no politics in this but we have also witnessed two waves of protests — the anti-Mandal protests in the 1990s and in 2006 against reservation for OBCs in institutes of higher education. As the RSS has shown, common sense is no one’s monopoly.
