Person of Indian Origin

Two unconnected things happened in the recent past :

1.  One had the opportunity to fill the immigration form.

2. A thought read somewhere as to why BJP should bother about Muslim votes.

Each one of us who has travelled out of this Country has to fill in an immigration paper. One of the questions is about your origins. Invariably if you hold an Indian Passport, you tick the column PIO (Person of Indian Origin) unless you are a NRI (Non Resident Indian).

In both cases, you affirm your being an Indian. This way the immigration form gives a small window of thought for those who want a uniform India. The form doesn't ask about your religion, your caste, the region you come from etc...  The fault lines that political class keeps talking of and has been exploiting over the decades in the name of secularism.

This word secularism if removed from all its overt cosmetics just means how many Muslim candidates / vote share does one party have. The moment like the immigration form does, if one removes this column of religion the secularism myth vanishes.

The BJP has been the most highlighted party as a non-secular one & BJP in turn talks of those who espouse secularism as pseudo secularism.

Probably the reason why the Immigration form doesn’t have these columns is because the guy is once capable of going abroad he is beyond the need of categorization!! This is simply because the person has income enough to take a trip abroad for whatever reasons & these sub groupings are redundant.

Talking of the reservations given on the basis of caste / religion etc… is a sham is self evident when you end up giving reservations to the Jain community which is one of the most economically prosperous communities in the country!

Look at these reservations holistically. Anyone who comes under this category gets the benefits once he/she completes 10^th standard. Till then which school that person goes if at all he / she are able to go depends solely on the parent’s income and not based on their religion /cast.

Hence these reservations are of no meaning unless kids have parents who can sustain their education till the 10^th standard. The only avenue for economically weak parents, hell bent on giving their children education irrespective of their poor living standards are the Municipal / Government schools, conditions of whose would be a matter for another blog.

Hence providing basic education for kids to make them cross 10^th standard is entirely dependent on the income standards and has nothing to do with the parent’s religion caste etc…

The madrasas which the Muslim communities run for their kids are at best are for so called religious education & not for getting the kids into main stream education.  

It is at this stage comes the involvement of the Muslims & all those caught in the reservation sham have started thinking beyond these voting patterns.

The development pattern that Narendra Modi has been propagating is the best chance to break this stranglehold of Religion & Caste based reservation. When you have a sustained income levels coming from increased opportunities of earning, the reservation becomes irrelevant.  

It is for this reason that  one sees Modi talking all these years in Gujarat of 5 / 6 crore Guajarati’s which obviously includes people from all religions / castes / communities. He is now extrapolating this on the National scene by talking of 150 crore Indians. He is aware that one can’t leave out the underprivileged out of the growth story, if one wants a society where the gap between the haves & have-nots becomes dangerously unbridgeable.

That it was this economical development of Europe, North America & Japan which increasingly made religion irrelevant to a great extent. Living aside the fringe loonies, who would exist any ways.

That the BJP needs to engage this 10% of the population and bring them into mainstream is essential or else this would always remain a drag in the growth.  This also becomes important in case of the backward regions where extremism is playing havoc.

Can We Cast This Caste Out and every Indian have one identity P