The existing quotas … deny the eligible the opportunities they rightly deserve…. The quota system, in reality, has become a huge political enterprise….
Not a single politician dares to stop this thing…. It’s a big, big joke.
So, what else is new? We’ve all heard this before, ad infinitum. But this isn’t new; it’s old: The above quotes are from an article about affirmative action in India, the world’s largest laboratory of affirmative action.
Nothing reveals the logic of affirmative action better than the practice of affirmative action, and it has been practiced longer, on a bigger scale, and with more diligence in India than anywhere else. Recently, that practice has taken an interesting turn.
For more than half a century, India has maintained quotas for socially disadvantaged classes in government jobs, political bodies and educational institutions. Brahmins and other supposedly privileged groups were left to fend for themselves. Here in the state of Rajasthan, however, the government recently proposed an idea that some say turns the logic of affirmative action on its head: It wants quotas for high-caste Indians, albeit on the basis of economic need.
Supporters say they are merely trying to make the system fairer. But to many people, the initiative is yet another example of how interest-group politics is subverting the goals of a vast experiment in social engineering that already bestows preferential treatment on roughly half of India’s billion-plus people.
In 1990 Parliament reserved an additional 27 percent of government jobs for members of 3,743 lower castes, or “Other Backward Classes.” That was endorsed by the Supreme Court of India, with the reassuring caveat “that 50 percent of government jobs should be filled solely on the basis of merit.” The Court, pioneering a trail that may yet have to be followed here, also created a “National Commission on Backward Classes,” which to date has added 676 “socially and educationally” disadvantaged castes to the original list.
Well, predictably a veritable stampede of groups clamoring to be numbered among the “backward classes” was unleashed.
In the mid-1990s, for example, Rajasthan’s Jats applied for inclusion on the backward-classes list. They cited, among other things, 1931 census data showing that child marriage in their community was more prevalent than among other officially backward castes, according to Dharam Vir, a Jat leader.
In 1997, the commission recommended to Parliament that the Rajasthan Jats be added to the list. But it wasn’t until two years later, in the midst of a heated electoral campaign, that Vajpayee promised to follow through on the pledge, after mass rallies by the large and well-organized Jat community.
Although Jats once were tenant farmers, many of them now own land as a result of post-independence agricultural reforms, and are therefore better off than many people from higher castes who do not own land, government officials say.
“The Jats got the reservation because of their agitation and political power,” said C.P. Joshi, a cabinet minister in the state’s Congress Party government, which recently proposed a 14 percent quota for upper-caste poor in government jobs. “All parties are fighting for their political survival and they are using the reservation as a tool.”
As one perceptive critic warned, such policies pose the threat of
a real Balkanization, in which group after group struggles for the benefits of special treatment…. The demand for special treatment will lead to animus against other groups that already have it, by those who think they should have it and don’t.
That perceptive critic was Nathan Glazer, writing in his 1975 book, AFFIRMATIVE DISCRIMINATION. “The rising emphasis on group difference which government is called upon to correct might mean the destruction of any hope for the larger fraternity of all Americans,” he concluded then. Over the past few years Glazer, abandoning his earlier views, has concluded that blacks cannot succeed without the benefit of preferences.
A majority of the Supreme Court agrees. Without preferences, the Court concluded, there would not be enough blacks at elite institutions to serve the compelling interest of whites being exposed to them.
