The Bharatiya Janata Party has raised strong objection to the Government move to set up a Commission to look into the issue of reservation in education and employment for the socially and educationally backward sections among the linguistic and religious minorities. The Government was trying to do what people such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Govind Vallabh Pant had unambiguously rejected, it claimed.
"Such a move will hurt the process of national integration and unity in the country," the party vice-president and spokesperson, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, said today. "The Congress has done this purely for political gains. It has adopted the politics of vote-banks and appeasement [of minorities]," he added.
`Dangerous policy'
It is for the very first time that the Government is moving towards religion-based reservation and it would prove disastrous, Mr. Naqvi said. "Such a policy would be foolish and destructive and create tensions in the country," he said adding that the BJP would oppose it strongly. He said the "backward" sections of the minority communities were already covered by the reservation for the backward classes. An advisory committee of the Nehru Government had "unanimously" rejected the idea of religion-based reservation, he said.
The BJP favoured steps to bring all the economically deprived sections, whether they belonged to the minority or the majority communities, into the national mainstream through the reservation policy, but was opposed to "religion-based" reservations.
Textbook issue
On the issue of a chapter in praise of Hitler in some textbooks in Gujarat, Mr. Naqvi blamed the Congress saying that the textbook had been reprinted since 1986. However, he had spoken to the Gujarat Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, who had indicated that the chapter would be dropped. On the matter of a map in some textbooks showing Kashmir as part of Pakistan, Mr. Naqvi said that it was a Government-approved map of the physical features of the sub-continent and was "not a political map."
EC approached
The BJP has approached the Election Commission protesting against the Cabinet decision. Its party leaders who met the Commission today submitted a memorandum saying that the announcement was a "blatant violation of the code of conduct" for the Assembly elections in Maharashtra and Arunachal Pradesh. They said the "timing of the Cabinet decision" and the announcement by the Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Jaipal Reddy, was a "calculated move by the United Progressive Alliance Government to woo the minorities" during the elections.
The party also brought to the notice of the Commission that the National Advisory Committee headed by Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, had announced measures that could violate the model code of conduct.