Kiren Rijiju counters Rahul’s OBC barb on secretaries in Govt

New Delhi, Feb 19: Union Minister Kiren Rijiju on Monday strongly countered Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s allegations of ‘discrimination’ against the Other Backward Class (OBC) community in the country’s top bureaucratic set-up.

“Is he naive or a fool?,” Rijiju, lashing out at the Congress leader, took to his X handle and explained in detail the ‘progression process’ of bureaucrats.

Rahul Gandhi, during his Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra in UP’s Amethi on Monday, told newsmen, ”The number of Dalits, Adivasis and other backward people remains very low in courts, same is the case in Bureaucracy.”

Taking strong exception to Rahul’s statement that only 3 out of 90 secretaries in the Government of India belong to the OBC community, Rijiju explained that the current batch of secretaries are from either 1992 or previous batches, when OBC reservation was not even in effect.

“Today Rahul Gandhi again said there are only 3 OBC secretaries to the Govt of India and negligible OBC judges. Is he naive or a fool? A fresh IAS officer can’t just become secretary and a fresh lawyer can’t become a judge of High Court or SC directly,” Rijiju said.

The Minister of Earth Sciences further said that at that time, OBC was not even classified under reserved category, only SC and ST community got quotas in jobs. OBC classification into All India Service (AIS) came only post 1995 following the court verdict.

Speaking light on the functioning of bureaucracy, he said, “Anyone who understands the service and the progression of the service knows how the batch system works in gaining seniority.”

Notably, the Congress party in its recent campaign for ‘equal share of power, corresponding to their population’, has been cornering the Centre over its ‘neglect’ of the community. Rahul, at repeated instances, has said that the OBC community remains hugely ‘under-represented’ despite comprising 50% share of the country’s population.

Rijiju further accused Rahul of ‘fostering division’ in the country on caste and community basis, with support from anti-India forces.

Lambasting the Congress, he asked, “Had Congress party done anything in their time to promote more OBC/SC/ST IAS officers and SC/ST/OBC judges.”