I am, in principle, in favour of removing reservation from the Indian Constitution. I want to say that plainly, because everything that follows depends on you believing I mean it.
Here are my conditions.
One: the removal applies only prospectively. Any child born after the bill is passed competes in the unreserved category. No retrospective punishment for those who built their lives around the old rules. This one, I suspect, you'll accept without argument. It costs you nothing.
Two: before this bill, we pass another — criminalising the use of caste identity and caste-indicating surnames in the Hindu community. If caste is to stop mattering in exam halls, it should stop mattering everywhere else first. No surname, no caste marker, no caste question on any form, anywhere.
Three: Brahmin priests train a Dalit or Adivasi successor — not OBC, not general category, specifically Dalit or Adivasi — within three years of condition two passing.
Four. Here's the part that never gets said in the reservation debate: a Brahmin priest is the original beneficiary of caste reservation. Not metaphorically — structurally. He didn't sit an exam for the pulpit. He didn't compete against anyone. He was assigned the seat at birth, by gotra — the same accident of birth reservation is endlessly accused of rewarding. And what does he bring to the seat? A few verses, whose content is often incidental to why he holds it, that mean nothing to a kid grinding through JEE cut-offs, that answer none of the modern world's questions and were never asked to. That non-achievement is enough. It buys him deference from every community — Hindus who've never opened the text he recites bow to him anyway — and it buys him a share of the offerings moving through every mela and mutt in the country, unaudited, unquestioned. If merit is the objection to reservation, start here. This is the one seat in Indian society reserved by caste alone, with no merit bar whatsoever — and it's the one nobody dares call a reservation.
There is an obvious contradiction between points two, three, and four. That contradiction is not a flaw in my argument. It is the argument.
You cannot have it both ways — a state that is caste-blind exactly where caste-blindness benefits you, and caste-aware exactly where caste-awareness has always benefited you. Reservation is the one place upper-caste India has ever been asked to notice caste and share space with Dalits and underprivileged communities. Meanwhile the sanctum has never once needed a law to know who may stand in it. The "internal addressing mechanism" — memory, marriage networks, gotra, local knowledge — did that work for a thousand years, and will keep doing it for a thousand more, with or without a surname on a form. Criminalise caste tomorrow, and the first Dalit man to stand at that altar will still be known, by everyone in that village, exactly as what he is — a Dalit. Caste doesn't vanish, and nor does the discrimination that comes with it, when you stop naming it. It just stops being written down or talked out loud.
That is the whole point. Reservation as policy is no older than the Constitution — it exists because the Constitution created it. Priesthood's reservation has existed for centuries longer, inherited economy and inherited authority handed down by birth, no exam, no cut-off, no waiting list. "Merit" only became the fervent word it is today after reservation took a seat in the Constitution. Before that, merit was a social construct upper castes made and settled among themselves.
So keep your caste-blind constitution, if you want it. But take the sanctum with you. Take the offerings, and the seat assigned at birth, and the surnames you'll defend as "just identity" the moment they're not asked to disappear alongside someone else's quota. Caste-blindness has to cost the people demanding it something, or it isn't blindness. It's just a better vantage point.
I'll pass the bill removing reservation the same day you pass the one closing the temple door to no one. Not before.