Is caste a barrier to professional success?

Asks IBN-Live, and wants you to sms your answers. This announcement was preceded by the mandatory round-up of 'anti-reservations' protests across the country (the newsperson never fails to emphasize that) and a story on an OBC kid from Bihar who made it to IIT Kharagpur without the'crutches' (the newsperson can't stop herself from saying what she thinks of ..*&@ reservations) of reservations.The routine is repeated, more or less, across the channels with subtle and not-so-subtle insertion of hints that the Mandal recommendations are still up for questioning, meaning its very basis, recommendations and methods should be questioned (as if they haven't been questioned earlier) and directions (do it-that's the media's appeal to the anti-reservationists)...interspersed with wise heads like Dipankar Gupta and others almost saying that caste is an irrelevant issue and Mandal was flawed etc.,.. And a commenter on one of my posts, couched in much abuse and...asks me why do I consider 'anti-reservations protests' a nautanki ?
Recalcitrant OBCs and Dalits are routinely subjected to much more than lathis and water cannons in this country. Students from the lower castes have to routinely stage rallies, after having begged and pleaded with their school/college authorities and babus in social welfare departments in most states, to appeal to their state governments to release their 'merit-cum-means scholarships'. They are never allowed anywhere near the mantralaya/secretariat.. forget the minister's house or the Mukhya Mantri Nivas or the Governor's Bungalow..(they wouldn't even dare to think of going anywhere near those places). If you ever happen to witness any of these rallies, feast your curiosity on the sight of hundreds of scrawny, shabbily dressed kids scrambling for cover from the lathis, racing and diving and occasionally darting back to pick up their ..chappals. Watch them scale walls and skirt and avoid the lathis with such ease. You'd think it was a game for them. Except that, running through the minds of many of them is this choice : drought and starvation back home and free food in the hostel and education.. . Their names are routinely struck off the rolls of their colleges for not having paid their fees, thrown out of their hostels.. I think of all those clever people calculating how many OBC kids could get school education if the subsidy that would go to supporting an OBC student's education at an IIT/IIM were diverted to the schoolkids' cause. No, you wouldn't get any figures on how many upper caste kids' subsidised education at the IIT/IIMs or dozens of other fancy institutions, since the day they were started, could have supported how many OBC?Dalit kids' education. And those sensible people who suggest, so helpfully (why doesn't anyone ever think of these simple answers!), 'give them good schooling ..first' , they wouldn't know ,of course, just how whimsically state governments can scale down budgets for 'welfare' students. Scholarships for two lakh students last year.. scholarships for one lakh seventy five thousand this year..You are not supposed to ask: there hasn't been a fall in admissions, in fact there has been an increase.. then why this scaling down? None of the sensible people actually ask this question , routinely or otherwise. It's only when the Mandal issue, every fifteen years or so, crops up do they actually bother.
So when the elite says it's protesting, are we to understand that its appointees in the government aren't actually working overtime finding out ways and means to get over this..infernal mandal thing? That Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi and Advani and Yechuri and .. aren't as exercised over the issue as that loudmouth Sibal?