There goes the SC again

It is most unfortunate that the Indian Supreme Court has stayed the implementation of the new law providing for reservations in higher educational institutions for students belonging to backward castes.

The Indian constitution itself (in its Article 15) empowers the government to carry out affirmative action programs for "the advancement of educationally and socially backward classes". Thus the court could hardly question the constitutionality of the principle of reservation. Rather, it has based its judgment on the fact that the government could not provide any data on the backwardness of specific castes more recent than the 1931 census.

The court's argument is flawed because different provinces have regularly kept updating the list of backward castes which are eligible for reservation. Instead the court has turned this fact on its head by observing:

Nowhere else in the world is there competition to assert backwardness and then to claim we are more backward than you.

Of course there will always be attempts by the powerful to hijack and subvert any redistributive program. But this does not take away the fact that Indian society is highly unequal and that a lot of this inequality is caste-based.

Hopefully the Supreme Court judgment will cause the government to produce a well-researched survey of social backwardness in our country (just as the Sachar Committee did for the Muslims) that will put to rest once and for all the anti-reservationist argument that reservation for OBCs is nothing but pork-barrel politics.

And on one thing I think that the government is completely wrong: the issue of creamy layer. Deprivation in Indian society is not just caste-based but also economic and there is enough economically privileged people from the OBCs that it makes sense to have provisions for the exclusion of the creamy layer.