Indian industry begins a caste census to figure out exactly how diverse its workforce is. Of all the boneheaded issues Arjun Singh and the Congress could set on the nation’s agenda, this has to be one of the worst. This is on par with LK Advani’s Rath Yatra and VP Singh’s implementation of the Mandal Commission report as a ploy against the BJP. (And this one, like the Rath Yatra and the Mandal mess, will end badly for its perpetrators.)

If India’s leaders were serious about abolishing caste, they’d follow a socio-economic approach to identifying persons from disadvantaged backgrounds irrespective of caste and offer them primary through post-graduate scholarships and on-the-job training (if corporate India plays this right, this might happen yet — they could offer this as a quid-pro-quo for not having caste quotas forced on them).

Proponents of caste-based reservations point to affirmative action rules in place throughout the world. However India is unique in that it is probably the only country where affirmative action is practiced on a non-ethnic (a.k.a caste) basis. There are many problems with affirmative action on the basis of caste. It assumes all members of a particular caste are at the same level of development, which is not true. It does not provide any assistance aid to disadvantaged people belonging to other religions (caste being a peculiarly Hindu concept). And most fundamentally, it flies in the face of centuries of reform in Hinduism that sought to abolish caste.

Of course, abolishing caste would be very problematic for our more venal politicians (that’s almost all of them) for who people voting along caste (and religion) lines are a huge convenience: creating a culture of entitlement gives them proven ‘vote-banks’ without having to worry about things actual developmental issues. Hence we end up with the curious result of a caste census in the 21st century in the hallways of private industry in the second-hottest economy in the world. God save India.