New Delhi (Ashish): Senior Congress Leader Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday said that they will go further than reducing reservation to 50 percent. He was speaking about the Indian reservation system during his speech in the Washington, US . He intended to demonstrate how reservation works as a tool of affirmative action to offer quotas in education and employment to underprivileged sections. Nevertheless, some media and observers who followed his speeches misinterpreted them, saying he has become against the reservation system or he compared it to unfavourable systems in other countries.
Here, Rahul Gandhi is correcting a misconception that has been made about his stand on reservation or affirmative action. However, in recent weeks, comments about the Indian reservation system were misunderstood, and some thought it was against it. Gandhi asserts that he fully endorses reservation policies, and intends to expand them further past the current 50 % , one of the factors that define India’s affirmative action mechanisms.
This clarification is intended to correct and clarify any misunderstanding or distortion of views he holds and restate his avowed aim of improving the reservation system to benefit other disadvantaged people.
However, some media outlets and observers and other political parties failed to understand his statements initially and twisted them in a wrong manner. Some reports indicated that Gandhi was against the reservation system or was comparing it unfavorably with similar systems in other countries. This further caused a great deal of misunderstanding and created a controversy over his stand on the problem.
To the escalating conflict of the issue, Gandhi released a statement wherein he said that his statements have been misunderstood. He clarified that he does not have anything against reservation. Instead, he argues for raising the cap of reservation beyond the present 50% in order to continue correcting injustices of the past. The intended meaning of Gandhi was to explain and support the concept of reservation as a measure that is necessary and serves to uphold social justice.
