Siddaramaiah’s Lingayat ploy opens Pandora’s Box - The Sunday Guardian Live b.mdnalapat.com/tsg25092018
More and more groups within the majority community are likely to demand minority status, not out of distaste for the ancient religion they belong to, but solely to be enabled to compete on an equal footing with competitors from the minority communities.
The most important is the fact that Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru continued with the British-era policy of giving preferential treatment to non-Hindus, a strand of policy which was implemented with added vigour during the ten years of UPA rule.
The consequence of this (RTE) law has been to substantially handicap the majority community from setting up and administering schools, thereby ceding the advantage to institutions started by members of the minority communities.
Despite the NDA entering upon its fifth year in office, this far no effort has been made to either scrap the RTE to ensure that every citizen of India be treated equally in the matter of setting up of private schools.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi apparently wants to wait till a second or a third term before doing away with British-era measures that target the Hindu community, such as the continuation of state control over temples in India.
But some Hindus are not prepared to wait that long &doubt that such British-era discriminatory steps will ever get rolled back.They would, therefore,like to join the ranks of the minority communities,thereby winning for themselves the privileges such a tag brings with it in India
