At the fag end of an undistinguished career in Indian politics, Union human resource development minister Arjun Singh, aka the Raja of Reservations, didn’t get the reservations he wanted most — Congress party tickets for his son Ajeya and daughter Veena to contest from safe constituencies in his Madhya Pradesh bailiwick. This unfair denial of his perceived right prompted the octogenarian minister, who has done the first family of the Congress, if not the State, some service, to burst into tears when Veena was denied the party ticket of the safe Sidhi constituency.
Readers may recall that in 2006, at a time when there were rumours that the ailing HRD minister was about to be axed, Singh suo motu aired the proposal to reserve 27 percent of capacity in Central government institutions of higher education for OBCs, who reportedly constitute 52 percent of the country’s population. Given this electoral arithmetic, the surprised Congress high command, indeed all major political parties, were obliged to toe Singh’s line and support the proposal which quickly translated into the Central Educational Institutions (Reservations in Admissions) Act, 2006 arousing strong passions within the country and Indian academia.
If there’s a serves-him-right tone in the above narrative, it’s also because for the past five years Singh ex officio has been receiving complimentary copies of this publication accompanied by missives requesting access and interview. Alas, as in the case of the ruder than male ladies cited above, not a single reply — a graver dereliction of duty given that EW is the country’s sole education news features magazine. There’s a lesson in this latter-day morality tale: those who slight this publication born out of the purest motives — to plead the case of the country’s vulnerable and hapless children — come to a bad end. Vide Arjun Singh’s unlamented exit from the national stage into the dustbin of history.