THERE is no doubt that the 93rd Amendment to the Constitution is poised to effect an expansion of reservations that may, at long last, begin to change the social composition of elite sectors of Indian higher education. However, most people involved with elite higher education – a sector overwhelmingly dominated by the upper castes – remain either actively or certainly passively opposed to the expansion of reservations. Indeed, student opposition by vocal segments appears to be unimpressed by the extraordinary efforts made to appease the ‘general category’ by ensuring that the absolute number of seats available to it remains unchanged. While vested interests may make it impossible to ever convince opponents, even proponents – not to speak of potential beneficiaries – need to renew and reinforce their resolve. Much of the anxiety on both sides is centred on modalities, particularly the question of quotas.

As with many things in life, there is much that is right with quotas and much that is wrong with them. But quotas remain much misunderstood because we forget that what is right with them makes them indispensable, whereas what is wrong with them only makes them inadequate. This means that initiatives for social justice – even in a field like higher education – cannot succeed without quotas, nor can they be sustained with quotas alone. To understand why this is so, we need to revisit the fundamentals of the argument for social justice.

 

Quotas are essential because they are often the political-practical expression of a social contract. But in India, dominant (upper caste) common sense has amputated the very language in which we think of reservations by erasing its fundamentally political character from collective memory.¹

The origin-story of reservations is by now well known. By announcing his first ever ‘fast unto death’, Gandhi prevailed upon Ambedkar to withdraw his demand for separate electorates for the ‘Depressed Classes’ in return for the promise of special constitutional guarantees for them. This agreement – known as the Poona Pact – inaugurated the idea of formal reservations for the Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes.

However, if we only think of the Poona Pact as the moment when the reservations policy was conceived we are guilty of taking a one-sided – Gandhian – view of history. For the pact – as Ambedkar and his followers have long argued – is also the moment which transformed Dalits from co-owners of the nation into supplicants dependent on the nation’s generosity. By allowing reservations to be represented as a special concession being made to favour a group – rather than the mark of full co-ownership in the nation – the Poona Pact allowed the upper castes to represent themselves as the sole owners of the nation.

It is only from such a standpoint of exclusive ownership that reservations can be transformed from an inalienable group right into a contingent, criteria-driven favour or benefit. Considered as such a group right, reservations are a crucial component of the social contract on which our republic is founded. From this viewpoint, every major social group has a right to its legitimate share of the nation and its resources. While some definitional debate may be involved in specifying ‘social groups’, ‘legitimate share’ and other such abstract labels, it is most important to note the nature of this right. This is a sovereign right – it is not alienable, divisible or negotiable in any form. At the group level, it is not – it cannot be – subjected to any conditions and criteria other than the most basic ones of citizenship.

 

Broadly speaking, social justice interventions are justified with reference to one of the three ‘Ds’ – discrimination, deprivation and diversity. Thus, social justice programmes often claim to redress the effects of the first or the second, or sometimes they claim to promote the third. In the Indian context, diversity has generally been invoked in the context of ‘minority-majority relations’ rather than social justice. For this reason, I will not rehearse the many good reasons why we need to take diversity more seriously, and focus on discrimination and deprivation. The main problem here, specially in the post-independence period, is that the two are often conflated. More accurately, deprivation has tended to dominate discrimination to the point of turning into its gatekeeper.

This gatekeeper effect is clearly visible, for example, in the common (upper caste) belief that no non-poor person could possibly deserve a reserved seat in any context; or conversely, that economic deprivation is the only legitimate criterion for determining entitlement to reservation. Implied here is the necessary, and often sufficient status of deprivation as a rightful source of entitlement, whereas discrimination, being neither necessary nor sufficient, is reduced to irrelevance. The obvious error in such a privileging of deprivation is the failure to recognize that, though they are often closely related, (social) prejudice is quite distinct from (economic) disadvantage. The most famous historical example of the relative autonomy of social prejudice from material status is that of the Jews, where wealth, learning or other measures of well-being did little to alleviate severe anti-Semitic prejudice.

Examples from our own context include Dalits and Muslims, not to speak of women, Adivasis, and other ‘lower’ or ‘upstart’ castes. We know in our hearts that members of such groups suffer from different degrees and varieties of prejudice regardless of their economic status, just as we know that evidence of discrimination is much harder to provide than evidence of deprivation.

 

The point can be sharpened: By according unqualified primacy to deprivation, we effectively make one or more of the following arguments: (i) legitimate claimants to reservations must not be economically better off than any member of the ‘general’ category; (ii) ‘lower’ and ‘upper’ caste candidates of the same economic status are indistinguishable from a social policy perspective; or (iii) though ‘upper’ caste candidates of high economic status are implicitly allowed to take advantage of their superior class status in ‘open competition’, the same advantage shall be explicitly denied to reserved category candidates.

A few moments of unbiased reflection should be sufficient to establish that the first two of the above propositions are indefensible. The third proposition depends entirely on the notion of ‘merit’ and what we take to be its meanings and entailments, issues that are discussed separately below.

To sum up, quotas are indispensable because they capture the sense of equitable sharing that is at the heart of the notion of social justice. The syllogism is simple and compelling: the idea of social justice only makes sense if distinct, identifiable groups exist in society; if such groups exist, then the central question is that of equitable (not necessarily equal) sharing of societal privileges and disprivileges among them; this question can only be answered with the help of some notion of proportionate shares (according to context-determined criteria) – or quotas.

 

The logic of nation-sharing implies that distinct social groups should be given their legitimate share of all national resources, such as higher education. At this general level, the group share is unconditional and unqualified – it is not required to meet any further criterion or provide any further justification beyond that of membership in the nation. While terms like ‘social group’ and ‘legitimate share’ require definition, rough correspondence with population proportion is a useful common starting point. This means, for example, that a 7.5% share in higher education for Scheduled Tribes or a 15% share for the Scheduled Castes is, or should be, a taken for granted matter. The same should be true of more complex groups like the Other Backward Classes (OBCs), provided that they are in fact under-represented in higher education.

From this point of view, ‘creamy layer’ and similar issues only have relevance within categories, not across them. When Scheduled Tribes (for example) ask for their share in higher education, they are entitled to (say) 7.5% at the outset. As far as other social groups are concerned, the specific individuals who avail of this share need only meet one criterion – belonging to the relevant group, in this case the Scheduled Tribes. The economic status or other characteristics of individual incumbents can be criteria for further selection only within the group, not across it. In other words, the ‘creamy layer’ of one group cannot be compared with a subset of another group. Only then will we recognize the specificity of social discrimination as different from economic deprivation.

 

But this is as far as the logic of quotas-as-shares will take us. To go beyond this general level – a level, by the way, which we are yet to self-consciously accept – we need to think of contextual details and specifics. What happens, for example, when we begin to disaggregate general terms like ‘higher education’ or ‘Scheduled Castes’? Or when we wish to address issues of gender or regional disparities within caste groupings? Such questions obviously need specific answers tailored to the particulars of each context or case, but a set of commonly recurring issues and arguments is summarized below.

1. Higher education as exception: This is the argument which says that a specialized field like higher education need not ‘represent’ the social composition of society; only excellence ought to matter here. However, barring exceptional cases where gains on one front necessarily involve losses on another front, the ‘pursuit of excellence’ and ‘social mobility’ or ‘self-advancement’ are always inseparably mixed up. This is all the more so in a poor country, where credential inflation ensures that higher education bears a substantial ‘social mobility’ burden – a large proportion of those who enter this field do so to better their prospects in a competitive employment market. To the extent that higher education is fulfilling this function, it cannot claim exemption from the representative function. It is hypocritical to pretend that everyone going to IIT, IIM or AIIMS (for example) is solely interested in advancing the frontiers of knowledge.

2. Merit as the only criterion for entry into higher education: While it is true that higher education presupposes adequate prior qualifications, it is important to avoid confusing competence with excellence. What is indeed imperative is the maintenance of strict standards of competence. However, whether through oversight or as a matter of deliberate strategy, opponents of reservation insist on going by standards of excellence as measured by rank in competitive examination. This is a complex issue that requires careful consideration – we urgently need transparent and fair methods of assessing competence, and the political will to stick by the standards set in this manner.

 

What we need even more is the moral courage to overcome motivated arguments that insist on conflating competence with ill-founded claims of excellence. More accurately, the merit argument is most often deployed to nullify the competence of members of one social group by referring to the ‘superior competence’ or excellence of members of another social group. But, as already outlined, when sharing the resources of higher education across social groups, the imperative is to ensure minimum levels of competence; considerations like ‘excellence’ cannot be used here to trump the claims of social groups.

More generally, the concept of merit is characteristically under-defined, as Amartya Sen has argued.² Both the content of merit (what precisely it consists of) and its force (what consequences ought to follow once its presence or extent is established) are rarely spelt out. Indeed, this is very difficult to do because the concept of merit is itself dependent on our vision of the good society. If, for example, our vision of a good society includes an aversion to severe inter-group inequality, then definitions of merit will have to be sensitive to inequality.

3. Multiple criteria beyond caste: Once we get beyond the basic logic of group shares, there is no alternative but to get involved with multiple criteria for determining entitlements. Moreover, it is undeniable that multiple axes of exclusion, prejudice or deprivation are at work in our society, and that the synergistic effects of these must be addressed. The obvious route would be to develop a spectrum of context specific designs for affirmative action initiatives that can meet the particular needs of special fields or groups. The one-size-fits-all philosophy has long outlived its usefulness, and we should not persist with the effort to evolve a single set of priorities or criteria that can meet all eventualities.

4. Issues of autonomy and accountability: As we go up the educational pyramid, institutions begin to be smaller, more complex and also more fragile. Well-intentioned efforts to force a social justice agenda on such institutions may indeed affect them adversely, as is often asserted. However, the other side of this coin is that of accountability. There is a long and shameful history of evasive tactics followed by elite institutions of all kinds to subvert the social justice agenda. In fact, the present crisis would be nowhere as severe as it is today if institutions had diligently followed the spirit of the law rather than exploit or invent more and more loopholes to circumvent it.

 

To look upon the bright side, we may well have reached the stage of political and economic development today when it is possible to provide institutions with a reasonable set of concrete objectives backed by adequate resources and time, and leave them to devise the specific modalities by which they will achieve them. Much will depend, of course, on carefully calibrated levels of political pressure being maintained on elite institutions to deliver the goods.

5. The need for rich descriptions: One of the more surprising discoveries in the recent debate on reservations is the acute scarcity of good empirical evidence on the subject. Apart from macro perspectives, we badly need situated descriptions from the wide variety of contexts in which reservations exist. What is happening to these abstractions as they are reshaped in concrete circumstances? What meanings do different terms acquire? How do the different actors negotiate with the structural as well as interpersonal dimensions of these issues? Accumulating more detailed accounts that can answer such questions will help immensely in taking the debate forward.

In conclusion, it is useful to remind ourselves that, contrary to popular impressions, the fundamentals of the social justice argument – as much as its details – need careful reconsideration and a renewal of commitment. Quotas are not a misguided option, nor are they misplaced in the field of higher education. On the other hand, we have passed the stage where quotas alone can be depended on to further the social justice agenda.

 

Footnotes:

1. While this general point has been made before, Susie Tharu, Madhav Prasad, Rekha Pappu and K.Satyanarayana have recently elaborated an insightful and passionate argument in its defence. I am deeply indebted to this superb essay despite some differences regarding emphasis and direction. ‘Reservations and the Return to Politics’, Economic and Political Weekly, 8 December 2007, pp.39-45.

2. Amartya Sen, ‘Merit and Justice’, in Kenneth Arrow, Samuel Bowles and Steven Durlauf (eds.), Meritocracy and Economic Inequality, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2000, pp.5-16.