Affirmative Action

Affirmative action rests on the idea that establishing formal legal equality is not, by itself, sufficient wherever inequality is deeply rooted in a society. To genuinely eliminate entrenched forms of social inequality, it is often necessary to take more positive measures — measures specifically designed to correct the cumulative effect of past injustice, rather than simply promising equal treatment from today onward.

Affirmative action can take many different forms — from preferential spending on facilities for disadvantaged communities, to scholarships and hostels, to giving special consideration to particular groups in admissions to educational institutions and jobs. In India, the chosen policy instrument has mainly been a system of quotas, or reserved seats, in education and public employment for groups identified as socially and educationally deprived. This policy has been the subject of considerable debate and disagreement. It is defended on the ground that certain groups have historically been victims of social prejudice and discrimination, facing systematic exclusion and segregation — communities that have suffered in this way and been denied equal opportunities in the past cannot reasonably be expected to compete immediately with others on equal terms. In the interest of building a genuinely egalitarian and just society, such communities need to be given special protection and help. This kind of special assistance is meant to be a temporary or time-bound measure — the underlying assumption is that it will eventually allow disadvantaged communities to overcome existing disadvantages and compete with everyone else on equal terms.

Critics of positive discrimination — particularly of reservation policies — invoke this very same principle of equality to argue against it. Any provision of reservations or quotas for deprived sections, they argue, unfairly and arbitrarily denies other sections of society their own right to equal treatment. They describe reservations as a form of "reverse discrimination," continuing exactly the same caste-conscious practice that the principle of equality is supposed to reject and eliminate. On this view, when the state makes distinctions between individuals on the basis of caste or colour, it risks reinforcing precisely the caste and racial prejudices it is meant to overcome; instead, the important goal should be to do away with social distinctions altogether, treating every individual alike.

This debate is clarified by an important distinction: between equality as a guiding principle of state policy, and the equal rights of individuals. Every individual does have an equal right to be considered for admission to educational institutions and for public-sector employment. But competition for a genuinely limited number of seats or jobs is not always fair in practice — the circumstances of a first-generation learner, whose parents and even grandparents may have been illiterate, are very different from those of someone born into an already-educated family. Members of excluded groups — whether Dalits, women or any other historically disadvantaged category — deserve and need some real, additional help if they are to have a genuinely fair chance to compete with others. Providing this kind of help through deliberate social policy is exactly what the state is expected to do.

There is also a deeper, structural problem that this debate does not fully resolve on its own: in the spheres of education and healthcare, India has, as a matter of fact, done far less for its deprived population than what is genuinely owed to them. Inequalities in school education remain glaring — many poor children in rural areas or urban slums have very little real chance of attending a decent school, and where they do get the chance, the school often has little to offer in comparison with the facilities available at elite institutions. The disadvantages with which children enter school tend to persist and compound, hampering their ability to improve their qualifications or secure good jobs later on. Students from such backgrounds also face real hurdles in gaining admission to competitive professional courses, since they typically lack the means to pay for expensive coaching, and the fees for professional courses themselves can be prohibitively high. As a result, they simply cannot compete on equal terms with more privileged sections of society — no matter how formally equal the rules of competition may look on paper. Most theorists today recognise this reality; what remains genuinely contested is not the goal of equal opportunity itself, but exactly which policies the state should pursue to achieve it — whether seats should be reserved for deprived communities or whether other kinds of facilities should instead be provided to develop talent and skill from an early age; whether deprivation should be identified through an economic criterion, or through the social inequalities that arise specifically from the caste system. Ultimately, any policy chosen in this area has to be judged by whether it actually succeeds in making society more egalitarian and fair for everyone — not simply by how fair its own design looks in the abstract.

This entire debate connects to a further, more general distinction worth keeping in mind while reflecting on equality: the difference between treating everyone in an identical manner and treating everyone as equals. The latter may, on occasion, genuinely require differential treatment — but in every such case, the primary consideration must remain the promotion of equality itself, and differential treatment always calls for careful justification and reflection. This caution is not accidental: differential treatment for different communities was also, historically, part and parcel of deeply unjust systems, such as the caste system and apartheid. This is exactly why liberals, in particular, tend to remain wary of any departure from identical treatment, even when it is proposed for good reasons. …