Arjun Singh brewing another embarrassment for govt?

After lying low for some time now, veteran congress leader Arjun Singh, who created a nationwide furore after asking for reservation for backward class students in higher education, is once again out to create trouble for the party leadership. 

This time Singh has asked for early implementation of the Ranganath Mishra Commission report, which recommends reservation for Muslims and Dalit Christians, as the leadership "cannot sleep over it".

The Ranganath Mishra report, made by the National Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities, has recommended a 15 percent reservation in jobs in government services and seats in educational institutions for minorities, an 8.4 percent reservation in the existing OBC quota of 27 percent for minorities, and also inclusion of Dalit Muslims and Christians in the scheduled castes list.

Highly placed sources said the government has no intention of moving ahead with implementing the recommendations as it would once again open a Pandora's Box of problems for the government.

"Well, I think the party always has a special concern for those sections of the people. Since the party has already expressed a special concern, we cannot just sleep over it (report)," the 79-year-old Singh said.

The former Union human resource development minister said the views of allies like the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the Trinamool Congress on the issue were already known.

While Singh has come out in the open to support the report, some sections of the party are not courageous enough to express their personal views.

A senior All India Congress Committee functionary, who did not want to be named, said that since the Supreme Court had laid a cap of 50 percent on reservations, the government would have to reserve for the socially and economically backward Muslims from within the 50 percent limit.

This means, the existing reservations for backward classes would have to be reduced to accommodate the Muslims, which will not be agreeable to Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav, Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Yadav and other Yadav leaders.

But some Congress leaders justified saying that the Congress has never won the backward class vote, so it does not really matter how it deals with the issue.

Supporters of the report have justified the reservation saying that if the Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist Dalits could get quota, then why not the Dalit Muslims and Dalit Christians?

Also, it does not require a constitutional amendment and can be implemented through an executive order, which was passed in 1950 but revoked in 1951.

The Congress has so far remained ambivalent on the issue of Mishra report.

It is learnt that the government has been studying the recommendations carefully and has decided that it is too much of a hot potato and should be put in the cold storage for now.