Is Arjun waiting for a Rajeev Goswami?

New Delhi: Bruised faces and swollen limbs—medical students protesting against the new reservation proposal are getting a first-hand treatment of police brutality and Government insensitivity.

Just when the anti-reservation agitation needed to be handled with patience and subtlety, police thrashed medical students in Mumbai. Before that, medical students in Delhi were attacked with water cannons and dragged away during protest marches. And all this was on camera.

Baton-wielding policemen chasing and beating up young, apron-clad boys, an innocent-looking Kolkata girl braving police water cannons and students being dragged out of a blockade to be beaten up black and blue in Mumbai — these have been some of the abiding images of the agitation, which is now fast taking the shape of Mandal II.

With Union HRD Minister Arjun Singh still playing hide and seek and the Manmohan Singh government observing an ominous silence on the reservation issue, it's both surprising and intriguing to see the police going all-out to stall a popular and growing protest.

Do we really need such strong-arm police tactics to stall a protest?

Where do we go from here? Is the Manmohan Singh government waiting for the protest to get more widespread and turn a far bigger issue so that it can derive the maximum political benefit out of it?

In 1990, it took Rajeev Goswami's self-immolation to shock the VP Singh government out of its acquiescence.

From the look of things — the way Arjun Singh is still trying to slug it out with his own Cabinet colleagues and the Knowledge Commission — it still appears that the issue is still at the discussion stage.

There is also a fair chance that more than anything else, the whole quota debate might just turn out to be just another gambit in the Congress' inside struggle for one upmanship.

Why then is the government letting things go this far? Couldn't this much have been avoided?

Why is Arjun Singh fiddling while the flames of protest have engulfed almost all of India?

Perhaps he is waiting for another Rajeev Goswami to make him understand the gravity of the situation.