#backwardness

Reservation is not a poverty alleviation mechanism. Reservation was always implemented to address representation or the lack thereof in educational institutions and public employment. The Supreme Court has failed to recognise that the 103rd Constitutional Amendment has relied on economic criteria to extend reservations, something that has been expressly barred in law. In Indra Sawhney vs Union (1992), it has been categorically held that in the determination of backwardness, economic condition can never be the sole criterion. The reason for this is that income is a variable factor and not a structural or systematic tool for discrimination. On the other hand, caste is structural and systematic discrimination and poverty is a consequence of such discrimination.

One of the results of the superior, elitist approach is that the question of reservation is invariably viewed as the conflict between the meritarian principle and the compensatory principle. No, it is not so. The real conflict is between the class of people, who have never been in or who have already moved out of the desert of poverty, illiteracy and backwardness and are entrenched in the oasis of convenient living and those who are still in the desert and want to reach the oasis. There is not enough fruit in the garden and so those who are in want to keep out those who are out. The disastrous consequences of the so-called meritarian principle to the vast majority of the under-nourished, poverty-stricken, barely literate and vulnerable people of our country are too obvious to be stated. And, what is merit? There is no merit in a system which brings about such consequences…

Backwardness may have advantages, but it has disadvantages too, not least that as soon as a periphery forces its way into an older core it finds itself confronting new peripheries similarly intent on forcing their way in.

Slave States, 2024