Caste Census: A Ticket to Dark Ages

Now that our country looks set to get a caste based census, all the hopes of revoking the caste based reservations, atleast for next 10-15 years have died, as I feel the sole purpose of it is to press for more reservations.

These reservations might have died a slow death by next generation but now it seems casteism is going to hit our country very badly which I fear may even lead to disintegration.

As of now, the present generation hardly cares about castes. That's how we have been brought up. My parents never told me about the castes or which caste we belonged to until I had to fill it in some applications while applying for some engineering colleges. Nor was I told to condescend on someone who belongs to other caste. Even in schools, we were taught that discrimination based on castes is something evil and it hampers development of society. Even as I grew up and went to college, I did not find anyone talking about castes nor did I find any groupism based on castes. There was no one who felt that he had divine rights because he was born in a higher caste nor was anyone humiliated because he was born in a lower caste. Actually no one cared about who belongs to which caste. The very notion of caste has died among many of us in the present generation. I may have met very few people in my life but I can say that 99% of my friends and batchmates from school or college hardly care about castes and they don't make friends after ascertaining the caste of someone.

But now with caste census and subsequent reservations, there will be a tendency to cling to one's caste so as to enjoy the benefits a caste might get. People will start identifying themselves more with their castes than with their country. This may soon take an ugly shape as we have already witness some of it in Meena-Gujjar violence in Rajasthan. Trouble mongers will have one more excuse to create trouble in name of castes, this time on a wider scale, in addition to the troubles our country is facing in form of separatist agitations, maoist violence and occasional outbreak of communal violence.

If our politicians are really concerned for the poor and downtrodden, they can implement reservations based on financial conditions or on regional basis as some regions are quite underdeveloped and people don't even have basic amenities. But reservations based on caste are divisive and it amounts to racism too. It is unconstitutional too as our constitution professes social equality.