Karnataka government has taken a historic decision by abolishing reservation on the basis of religion.

In a major move ahead of the assembly elections, the Karnataka government has scrapped four per cent reservation for religious minorities and merged it with the existing reservation for two major communities in the state. Four per cent reservation for minorities in Karnataka will now be distributed equally and added to the existing reservation for Vokkaligas and Lingayat communities in the state. In fact, the Karnataka government had created two new reservation categories 2C and 2D for the Vokkaligas and Lingayat communities during the Belagavi assembly session last year. The Karnataka cabinet has now decided to bring religious minorities under the category of economically weaker sections. With this decision of the state government, the four per cent reservation for Vokkaligas and others will increase to six per cent while Veerashaiva Panchamasali and others (Lingayats), who were getting five per cent reservation, will now get seven per cent.

Those who are raising their voice against this decision should understand that first of all it is absolutely wrong to give reservation on the basis of religion. Article 14 of the Indian Constitution states that all Indians are equal and have equal protection of the law. Article 15 says that no one will be discriminated on the basis of caste, creed, language, region, place of birth and Article 16 says that whether Hindu or Muslim, everyone will get equal opportunities in jobs. Not only this, during the debate on reservation in the Constituent Assembly on 26 May 1949, there was general opinion on the question of giving reservation to Scheduled Castes, but there was extreme opposition to giving reservation on religious grounds. Pandit Nehru had also said that reservation based on creed, faith and religion is wrong, but till then the meaning of minority had become Muslim. At that time Tajmul Hussain, a member of the Constituent Assembly, insisted that “we are not a minority, the word minority is an invention of the British. The British left here, so remove this word from the dictionary. He said that now there is no minority in India.” Not a minority, we are all Indians”. There was a lot of applause in the Constituent Assembly on the speech of Tajamul Hussain.

Those who ask for reservation for Muslims on the basis of religion, the question is whether that community can be called a minority which decides the future of councilor-pradhan in more than 200 districts of India, the future of MP in about 200 Lok Sabha constituencies. Decides and determines victory and defeat in about 1000 assembly constituencies. All citizens have got equal rights in the constitution, so now the time has come to stop the division of society on the basis of minority-majority, otherwise the second solution is to set guidelines for the definition of minority and district-wise identification of minorities. Go and ensure that only those communities get the protection of Articles 29-30 of the Constitution which are actually socially, economically and politically ineffective and are negligible in number.

-Neeraj Kumar Dubey