Thakur will stay his caste course

NEW DELHI: Union Human Resources Development Minister Arjun Singh, like his idols US President George Bush, minister colleague Pyaar Dasmunshi and partybee Lindsay Lohan, is determined to stay the course. And he doesn’t need a poodle to back him in his war on error-ism. He will not rest until the errors of the past are corrected. A lot of people had enjoyed the fruits of wealth and health at the cost of those people who belonged to the lower castes in the Indian caste system. Mr Singh has always believed it was time those caste errors were corrected. Correcting religious errors will still be the responsibility of the BJP and its allies and various Muslim leagues.
He has repeatedly said that his ministry would find ways to circumvent the Supreme Court stay on reservations in IITs, IIMs other institutions of higher learning. While the country has moved forward quite a lot since 1931, he has decided to not budge from his position. In 1931, most of India was backward and he was royalty.
The Thakur was just a year old when the last caste census was done, which determined 52 per cent of Indians were backward castes but not as backward as dalits. They were called the other backward castes. The Supreme Court wants a new census. But Mr Singh believes it is 1931.
"He needs to be remembered for his contribution to the Indian society. Everything else is temporary. You can build an institution in this country, but in some years, the institution goes down the drain. On the other hand, reservation is permanent. It never fades away," said political analyst Ganganath Ganguly, pointing out that reservation for Scheduled Castes and Tribes was also meant to be reviewed every 10 years. "This way he seeks to eternalise his legacy, just like the caste system. Centuries of progress but the system stays."
Many in the Youth for Equality campaign, who opposed his war on error-ism when it began a couple of years ago have grown increasingly impatient with its progress, fearing that our country is stuck between a rock and a soft place.
"What’s there to choose between reservation and superior caste status," asked one survey correspondent. "We ought to admit that going without these jobs is actually making the world less competitive. We should be cutting our competition, not our caste lines."
But does his popularity among the Youth for Equality bother him? According to the latest CDAC/D-FORE/CDSS poll, Youth for Equality’s support for Singh’s war on error-ism is at an all-time high, five per cent.
"Thakur Arjun Singh is his own person," said his cook, Anmolbabu Chandrahaas. "Arjun Singh ji is not going to abandon his principles just because they might be popular at the moment."
Chandrahaas may not be so far from the truth. Arjun Singh is his own person, since he declared independence. It was on the day he joined the Cabinet of his junior political colleague, Manmohan Singh. His mind and then the body followed him by declaring their independence. According to experts, his body doesn’t follow him, so he works out of home. His mind likes the out-of-body experience. When asked about the war on error-ism, his mind says: To err is human, to forgive divine but it takes Arjun Singh or Bajrang Dal to attempt correcting errors made by humans, thousands or hundreds of years ago as the case may be.
— Postcards from the Pug Pus, with due apologies to Postcards from the Pug Bus