In 2003 I penned down an article or two on the terribly grave injustice the reserved categories inflict on the rights of poor and meritorious. The one titled ‘The murder of talent’, though created a few ripples in the politico-administrative stagnant waters but itself got murdered for lack of adequate response that the piece was written to wake up the Kashmiri speaking community, the main victim of splashing sword arm of faceless exploiters. Since then a number of articles and letters on the subject got published in GK. But nothing changed. But deep in their viscera the thought that their rights are being usurped and snatched so treacherously and tyrannically is growing ever deeper. We are a people who love to hold naivety close to our bosom and scream only when we are bitten.
We love to shut our eyes to the sinister designs that besiegeus all around. We wake up to douse the engulfing flames when there is no water in sight. Beating our chests on the debris of our collective follies has given us name and individuality. We tend to lick the feet that trample us down, pound us aflat. In allowing our reigns of destiny in others’ hand we make a class of our own. Apathetic and insensitive, at the initial stage, to questions that matter for us and for future, turn to swell to point of frustration. Inundated we struggle to retrieve the lost belongings. Wiser after events, after all, is seed we are inheriting from our ancestors and love to bequeath to next of our generation.
Encircled from all sides we are being squeezed to a point where, within a decade or two from now on, there will be nothing left for us to compete, even for 4th class post. Every sling-shot is directed at us. To make us blind and subservient. The walls of apartheid might have crumbled down in South Africa and the majority black might have heaved a sigh of relief, the Bantusta’n type segregation is stalking us to our last post. The Reservation elephant has gone on rampage. The bull is menacingly marching on to the streets and towns, terrorizing and goring anyone which comes across its way. There are no effective tranquilizers, it seems, to halt his menacing march.
The way the reservation menace has choked the future of our meritorious boys and girls has in it the ethnic cleansing strands of Kashmiri speaking Kashmiris. With a difference, indeed. This is soft-ware cleansing drive of Kashmiris from professional courses, government jobs and positions of power. They need no military might to achieve their aim. That is a dangerous therapy which won’t serve as Kashmiri speaking people are in majority. They are sagacious enough to rely their age old policy of deciet: invade in grooves as ants do and sap the life out from the budding saplings bubbling with merit. The death of talent is inevitable. There will be no blood stains on the smiling predator. No accusations against him, no charge-sheets filed on him. There will be no one to make them accountable. If it is the ‘instinct of temptation that flattens all highs and lows’, the categorized “wizards” do have this temptation monster to knock others down and raise their flags on the vanquished. In their weakness of temptation to bore their way in the turf of others lies their strength. The mediocracy has the right, and the law in support too, to put on the robes of the meritocracy and run away. That the latter is crest-fallen and stripped naked, left screaming, so what! It is social-engineering in reverse process.
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