D.Parthasarathy
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

The debate on reservations as one of the affirmative action policy measures in India has largely revolved around issues of merit and efficiency. While it is fairly easy to debunk the often ignorant and ill-informed ways in which these concepts have been used by those opposed to such policies, they are rarely questioned on the basis of a sociological imagination that is critical both for a better understanding of the problems involved as well to locate the whole debate in the larger context of the Indian social structure as it has evolved to its present stage.

This paper seeks to understand the whole debate within a larger theoretical and conceptual framework by interrogating the many in-built systemic biases that maintain and extend power and status inequalities in India today. One needs to understand the larger philosophical and epistemological issues that underpin the valorization of specific policy measures such as reservations and of issues such as “merit” and ‘efficiency”, so that a more objective view may be taken of the whole issue. Partly because of the influence of Ambedkar’s writing, activists and scholars sympathetic to reservation policies have to a certain extent launched epistemological critiques of concepts such as “merit”; on the contrary the thinking of opponents of such policies are clearly influenced by caste biases of an especially crass kind.

In critically examining the need and possible impacts of affirmative action policies like reservations, the first thing to be aware of is that de facto and de jure reservation is accepted and practiced by all societies in many different ways, most of which are not opposed at all, since they especially benefit the rich and middle classes. One example is inheritance rights. Going by the logic of anti-reservationists that merit alone and not accident of birth should be the criteria for seats or positions, one can ask why a son (or, rarely a daughter) should get the property of a parent when the parent dies. Should not the merit of candidates be assessed before passing on the property? Take agricultural land in India. In many cases, the skilled agricultural labourer doesn’t get the property but an unskilled, absentee landlord living in a city gets access to agricultural land from his (mostly) or her parent when he (mostly) or she dies. Some of the great thinkers of the last couple of centuries (including Gandhi in India) have opposed inheritance rights on the ground that it rewards those who are not necessarily the most deserving. How many of those opposing reservations speak out against inheritance rights? Even if one accepts right to inheritance, why should property be reserved only for sons and not daughters as happens in reality in most families in India. Would it be correct to say that sons have no merit and cannot fend for themselves and therefore need the property, but daughters don’t since they have more merit?