Data bank vital

For long so many, including the IFP have been advocating the need for the government to evolve a comprehensive database, and based on these periodic whitepapers, on the employment structure as well as community wise constituent percentage in the government hierarchy. We are prompted again to push the issue in order that some of the rather harmful perceptions held by different communities of social inequities continuing to be structured in the Manipur society and this being encouraged by uncritical government policies. The question that often comes up, especially at the time of government job recruitments and admission to various educational institutes, in particular admission to institutes of medical studies, is that there still remains biases in these processes. These are contentious issues, and the sooner they are resolved, the better for everybody and the answer would not have been difficult at all had there been a database on these matters. But beyond proving or disproving charges and counter charges, it is anybody’s guess where else such a database could come handy. For instance, we can think of what the government could have done with such data to arrive at a decision on the agitation by the state’s Muslim community for the introduction of a reservation policy for the community in government job allotments. Is the cry for a special statutory asymmetric measure to ensure more “inclusion” of what is believed to be an “excluded community” in the different hierarchies of government justified? Are the Meitei Pangal actually marginalized? These are questions that could have been much better answered without ambiguities had the government given some serious to these suggestions. Reservation is a sensitive matter. It can level out playing fields where they have not been uneven, but it can also tilt the same playing fields in the reverse direction if flawed criterions are used to determine it. Hence, we would still say it is absolutely essential for the government to know where it treads on the matter.

We too do not have the relevant data in hand, but still by and large, the Muslim community is much worse off than many other communities. While some among the community are exceptionally rich, the majority are burdened by grinding poverty. As for instance, the community forms a large percentage of the menial labour force in the state. This poverty has also driven many in the community to petty crimes, as police reports of these cases in daily newspaper are evidence. This itself, together with other factors may be vital indicators that some sort of positive discrimination must go the community’s way, and we are happy that the community has a separate reservation section within the income-based reservation for “Other Backward Classes”. We do however believe that all such affirmative action must have to be time bound, lest they come to be treated as birth-rights, as in the case of the reservation policy for Schedule Tribes and Schedule Castes. Positive discriminatory measures must remain only so long as the income and opportunity disparities remain above what is normally expected of normal society. Unqualified extension of these measures can reverse the injustice to those who are made to compete with a hand tied behind their back in the name of levelling out the playing fields. It needs no reminder that has been and still is the fuel for agitations against reservation in various institutions of higher learnings currently throughout the country. Reservation is necessary considering the inbuilt and deep-rooted inequities in our social structure, but it must have qualitative as well as quantitative limits.

To re-emphasise the point, in evolving any of these policies, what is most needed are hard data. In the wake of Mandal-II, as the case for reservation of seats for backward classes in institutions of higher learnings was popularly referred to once, the most clinching evidences were the data that various organizations with necessary resources and indeed the government were able to cite. A number of magazines, including India Today, Outlook, and Frontline, and prestigious autonomous think tanks were also able to come up with revealing data to point out the pros and cons of the issue debated. If the Manipur government had been prudent enough to listen to sane advice, it too would be having some vital data in hand to refer to in making the right policy decisions in sensitive matters such as the reservation issue, but also blunt provocative allegations wherever they are baseless. Better late than never. The government can still do a periodic whitepaper exercise.