Book of Integration Council New - Ministry of Home Affairs

esponsibility of providing security to the minorities. And the Central government
must live up to its consititutional responsibility of ensuring that the concerned
state governments actually do so.
Of course the communal elements find a fertile soil for their nefarious
activities in the fact that the process of economic development of the country
has been deeply inequalizing; while it has brought unprecedented wealth to a
small segment at the top, it has brought acute misery to vast masses of the
people whose desperate struggle for survival is bringing them into acute conflicts
with one another. This is not a question of some being "excluded" from the
benefits of growth as a happenstance, and, hence merely needing more "inclusive"
measures within the same neo-liberal growth strategy for their uplift, as the
Eleventh Plan suggests. This so-called "exclusion" is intrinsic to the strategy
itself. The type of growth strategy we are currently pursuing necessarily produces
such "exclusion", since the withdrawal of the State support, without which vast
masses of peasants, petty producers and workers cannot survive the onslaught
of domestic corporates, multinational corporations and globalized finance,
dooms them to absolute deprivation.
World capitalism is obviously moving into a prolonged and serious crisis
which will inevitably cast its shadow on our economy as well, and add further to
the woes of the common people. They have to be protected against this crisis,
through a reactivation of the protective and interventionist role of the State. We
may have had differences in the past about the effects of neo-liberalism, but
these differences should disappear now, since the outcome of the functioning of
unbridled capitalism is obvious for all to see. Indeed, now is the opportune
moment to formulate a new development strategy that escapes the thraldom of
neo-liberalism.
But even as we put through a paradigm shift in economic policy, we
cannot afford to ignore short-term, specific measures. One such is the extension
of the policy of reservations based on social deprivation to the private sector.
There can be no excuse whatsoever for leaving the private sector out of its
ambit; indeed even in the U.S. legislation on affirmative action is not confined
to the government sector alone but includes the private sector as well.
While doing so, we also have to ensure that the dalits, the scheduled
tribes and the minorities, get appropriate educational opportunities. The Sachar
Committee has made us acutely aware of the lacunae in this sphere with regard
to the miniorities, but the problem afflicts other deprived segments as well.
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