‘Abolish reservations after 10 years’: The illusion of merit and what BR Ambedkar never said

When a false statement gets repeated time and again, it acquires its own life. People stop questioning its veracity and start accepting that as the ultimate truth.

It was 1994. I was a Class 12 student at a Gujarati-medium state school in a village in Gujarat. My sociology teacher, whose last name was Patel, suddenly started talking about reservations. Until then, although my caste label was that of a Dalit, I did not know what reservations were.

He said that reservations were an unjust system meant to confer unfair advantages to scheduled castes and tribes. It was all a political gimmick aimed at harming the meritorious and more deserving castes in university admissions and government jobs. He also said that these reservations were introduced by BR Ambedkar, the architect of India’s Constitution, only for 10 years and they have never been abolished as intended. It was high time to do that, he said.

I was not the only Dalit student in the class. He was aware of our caste labels, but did not care how we might feel about his rant against reservations.

He thought Dalits lacked merit although I, a Dalit boy, was the best performing student at the school and he took pride in being my...

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