It was autumn 1928. A tornado of protests against a commission led by British advocate John Simon was sweeping the still-British colony of India. Defying the groundswell led by the Indian National Congress, a 37-year-old barrister reached Pune to give his statement in front of the seven-member panel. Dr BR Ambedkar’s statement pushed back against the demand that the all-British panel should have had an Indian member — the principal contention of the Congress — because he felt caste elites could not have appreciated his demand for dignity.
He spoke eloquently of the need for special assistance for the depressed classes, making for the first time a cohesive case for affirmative action and dismantling a string of objections to special quotas on questions of efficiency and merit. Taking the case of public service examinations, he said, “The system of competitive examination relied upon may result in fairness to all castes and creeds. But those circumstances presuppose that the educational system of the State is sufficiently democratic… This basic condition is conspicuous by its absence in India, so to invite backward classes to rely upon the results of competitive examination is to practise a delusion upon them.”
Hidden in this were the first echoes of his arguments later in the Constituent Assembly. In the 90-odd years since, reservation systems evolved, expanded and were reshaped. Yet in this churn, the policy for Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) largely remained intact, courtesy their affirmation in the Constitution (unlike that for Other Backward Classes) and the constant pressure from the streets that forced one government after another to shield quotas from judicial censure. This held true whether in the Champakam Dorairajan decision in 1951 forcing the first amendment or the 2018 law virtually rolling back a top court verdict that diluted provisions of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.
Until possibly now. The apex court’s recent decision greenlighting the sub-classification of SC/ST quotas and a secondary call emanating from four judges to enforce creamy layer exclusions hold the potential to upend a settled but imperfect compact on affirmative action in India.
Since 1947, electoral politics has always been ahead of the courts on reservations. In the early years, the judiciary used arguments of merit to nix quotas, then acknowledged quotas as necessary but still antithetical to efficiency, and finally came around to recognising that diversity and correcting oppression was in itself a social good. In each of these phases, also detailed in CJI DY Chandrachud’s judgment, politics was ahead of judicial reasoning — not only because of electoral expediency but also because Dalits could exercise more power through the one-person-one-vote system (another of Ambedkar’s Simon Commission recommendations) than through access-barriered institutions such as civil society, media and the judiciary. Over the last decade, similarly, the politics of sub-castes burst to the fore in the electoral arena, busting the myth of a homogenous Dalit vote as the BJP successfully cleaved smaller groups using cultural nationalism, only for the Opposition to beat it at the game in 2024.
What happens now? For decades, smaller SC groups such as Madigas in erstwhile Andhra Pradesh or Arundhatiyars in Tamil Nadu found themselves on the backfoot not just in comparison to upper castes but also some of their SC brethren. The demand for local internal quotas emanates from there, but also creates reciprocal anxieties among larger SC groups that political parties will use quotas to exploit fractures in the Dalit communities for first-past-the-post wins. At a time when Dalit people, irrespective of their economic standing or social status, face stiff caste barriers and are often at the receiving end of violence for their surnames, fears about a loss of unity have real world implications. Think of the pandering by parties to dominant groups demanding quotas — either appeasing influential groups like in Maharashtra or Haryana, or holding back survey data to mollify rivalling but powerful groups as in Karnataka — and it is clear why this is a fraught moment.
Verdicts calling for a gradual end to reservations or instituting income exclusions fan this anxiety. If reservations have performed sub-optimally, a large chunk of the blame must lie with the diffident implementation that metes out dollops of humiliation to young people trying to get certificates, segregates them in classrooms, playgrounds and workplaces, and allows tens of thousands of vacancies in positions ranging from universities to government jobs. As Gopal Guru suggests, therefore, the problem of smaller SC groups isn’t bigger groups cornering benefits but something deeper in the caste-based political economy. Without granular data that the regular census doesn’t have, and only a caste census can, it will be difficult to make those calls.
Against this backdrop of pernicious caste discrimination, income exclusions suggest that economic mobility ends caste bias, while empirical evidence shows that caste only morphs its shape without losing its bite. Not only is intergenerational mobility precarious for these communities, but recent research also shows social or economic assertion can invite sharp new forms of violence. Think of aspirational Dalit men being attacked for uploading photographs on social media or riding a horse or a motorbike, and the logic of creamy layer exclusions can begin to unravel.
At the core of this churn are two contrasting worldviews. One looks at reservations as a bitter palliative that the State is swallowing for a limited period of time. Here, quotas have little function beyond economic, and, therefore, there is no reason to nurture them and every motivation to whittle them down for the sake of efficiency and merit. As a result, there is no difference seen between OBC and SC/ST quotas. Many judges and politicians, including some former PMs, appear to adhere to this view.
The alternative view, championed by Dr Ambedkar, sees reservations not as an economic lever but a social one, used to level the playing field after centuries of oppression. These constitutional guarantees of equality act as the glue to hold disparate strands of this Republic together despite a society where the accident of birth continues to define the destiny of life. Here, SC/ST quotas are different from OBCs because the former emanate from and militate against the inhumanity of untouchability. Reservations are not antithetical to merit, therefore, but a fulcrum to achieve something even higher — dignity.
Since that day in 1928, the history of reservations has been shaped by the clash of these two worldviews. The road ahead will be determined by how sub-quotas play out — whether they help downtrodden SC groups , or undermine Dalit unity without any meaningful improvement in their conditions, as some fear. It’s too early to call the verdict a landmark
The views expressed are personal
