Arjun Singh is the Duryodhana of the 21st century. Like the villain of the Mahabharata, he is feudal, ruthless and completely selfish. Like Duryodhana, he knows he cannot be king; therefore he seeks to play the spoiler. Unfortunately for him, this is the year 2006 and all of India is connected through television, telephone and the internet; nobody is buying his feudal cunning. In raising the issue of quotas for other backward castes, his ultimate target was prime minister Manmohan Singh; the idea was to discredit him within the party and outside. In pursuit of his devious scheme, the human resource development minister sought to mobilise the Congress’ own knee-jerk leftists and the Marxists whose pathological commissars hate the prime minister because he was and remains, the foremost proponent of liberalisation, globalisation and privatisation.

However, the plan seems to have boomeranged, mainly because Congress president Sonia Gandhi didn’t support it. When it became apparent that his ploy has failed, Singh tried hard to cover up his scheming on the OBC quota issue by trying to divert attention to the communal issue. He projected himself as a champion of Muslims and even undertook a trip to Saudi Arabia, trying to position himself as the person who successfully brought back a multimillion dollar endowment for Delhi’s Jamia University. But unfortunately for him nobody accepts him as the great secularist. On the contrary he is an object of hate and derision within the country’s rapidly growing and increasingly confident middle class.

This is not the first time Arjun Singh has played spoiler. In 1989, when my friend Sam Pitroda was attempting to modernise telecommu-nications, he was the minister who tried to sabotage Pitroda’s initiative every which way. Mercifully, because Rajiv Gandhi backed Pitroda, he didn’t succeed. Ever the naysayer, Arjun Singh continued his negative campaign. In 1992, he used the sacking of Babri Masjid by Hindu fanatics to launch a factional revolt against prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao. He roused the knee-jerk leftist rabble in the Congress in a perfidious campaign to portray the scholarly Rao as a closet communalist.

In pushing for OBC quotas, Arjun Singh doesn’t seem to understand that affirmative action policies should be applied at the primary education stage. It is tragic that feudal politicians are using quotas to play vote bank politics with the country’s rapidly decaying higher education system. Singh’s argument is disingenuous: he is only seeking to implement what Parliament had mandated in a constitutional amendment last year, he told protesting students. As with everything else, he is dead wrong. As Dipankar Gupta of Jawaharlal Nehru University points out, the Constitution mandates quotas for “other backward classes,” not castes. This sleight of hand is an act of low cunning perpetrated by morally bankrupt politicians, especially the two Thakurs: Arjun Singh and before him V.P. Singh.

Another negative byproduct of the quota controversy is that the debate has been transformed into a merit versus quota argument. The fact is all affirmative action programmes, including the one first introduced to India by Article 334 of the Constitution, kick in with all other things being equal. Thus, if two candidates have the same qualifications on offer, the person identified as the socially disadvantaged candidate gets preference. The spirit of Article 334 does not say that academic and other institutions are required to lower their standards to accommodate victims of systemic discrimination.

Most of all the quota imbroglio has obscured problems of quality and access confronting 
institutions of higher learning. As the economy grows at unprecedented rates, the demand for skilled manpower has exploded. The higher education system is simply not up to it. There are several stumbling blocks. For one the entire regime of universities and other professional institutions is totally controlled by the Central and state governments. As such, higher education is held in a vice-like grip by semi-literate politicians who have no sense of national priorities.

Moreover apart from being politicised, higher education has also become bureaucratised. Mindless bureaucrats have established a vice-like hold. A classic example is the All India Council of Technical Education which is the biggest obstacle to revamping the higher education system. Not only does it exercise a death grip on existing institutions, it is the major naysayer to the entry of foreign universities. Its negative thinking has put a crimp on plans of major American universities like Stanford, Harvard, Yale and Princeton to export their world-class education programmes to India.

Arjun Singh’s scheming and the negative attitude of mindless bureaucrats of AICTE have highlighted the serious problems besetting the higher education system. They need to be fixed quickly. Or else India’s growing reputation as the world’s brain bank will be seriously compromised. Therefore, it is comforting to know that people are challenging the hold that feudal politics and its attendant, corrupt bureaucracy, has on the body politic. This is good news.

(Rajiv Desai is a well-known Delhi-based columnist and president of Comma)