Dominant castes can’t digest Dalit progress. It’s why they attack reservation with propaganda: Anurag Bhaskar 26 January, 2022 https://theprint.in/opinion/dominant-castes-cant-digest-dalit-progress-its-why-they-attack-reservation-with-propaganda/812617/According to a paper published by Brandeis University, challenges to reservation best represent the attack on the Dalit revolution.
Before his death, Ambedkar had proposed to write a detailed treatise with the title Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India. Ambedkar considered the establishment of democratic principles in the Buddhist era as a revolution. According to him, the counter-revolution pioneered by Brahminical forces resulted into decline and fall of those democratic principles. This history was pointed out by him even in his last address on November 25, 1949 to the Constituent Assembly. If one was to apply that analogy to modern era, then the adoption of the Constitution of India must be seen as a form of revolution. It is to undo the effects of this modern revolution that upper castes have revolted in the form of a counter-revolution. … As Jean Dreze has aptly noted, ‘of all the ways upper-caste privilege has been challenged in recent decades, perhaps none is more acutely represented by the upper castes than the system of reservation in education and public employment.’ … Since reservation was entrenched in the text of the Constitution due to Ambedkar’s efforts, the judiciary could not strike it down directly. Instead, a larger narrative was created and promoted against Dalits and Adivasis, where they were declared to be incompetent and inefficient to be a part of services and educational institutions. For a long time, the Supreme Court of India held that reservations dilute efficiency to some extent. There was no empirical backing in support of this claim, yet the society at large and the Supreme Court kept on repeating this myth to create caste prejudices against Dalits. Economists Ashwini Deshpande and Thomas E. Weisskopf have demonstrated through their study that reservations do not dilute efficiency, rather these might enhance efficiency. … Thorat, Tagade, and Naik, in their study on myths on reservation, show that the beneficiaries of reservation policies have mostly been economically backwards. Furthermore, the upward economic mobility of the lower caste as a result of reservation and other supportive policies has met with the rise in atrocities and abuses against Dalits. … The Indian legal academia also maintains a form of untouchability on the issues of caste discrimination and the rights of Dalits even within the academic spaces. Most of the scholarly works on the Indian Constitution shy away from discussing Ambedkar as a central figure in constitutionalism, despite his influence during several decades of constitutional reforms (1919–1950). It is only recently that Ambedkar has now resurged in the public sphere (Perrigo, 2020), but credit must be given to the anti-caste movement, which kept the memories of Ambedkar and his contribution to the Constitution alive.__
Why the Supreme Court now thinks it was wrong on pitting merit against reservationshttps://scroll.in/article/1015729/why-the-supreme-court-now-thinks-it-was-wrong-to-claim-that-reservations-undermine-the-idea-of-merit
Reservations do not contravene the idea of individual merit or the idea of equality, the court said. In fact, they are a way to realise the Constitutional goal of equality. The case also takes an expanded idea of merit, saying that instead of just high marks, it should include values that benefit society such as equality. … merit cannot be viewed solely through a candidate’s marks but should also be viewed in terms of the social value a doctor from a particular community could bring. While holding this, the court said that although many want to draw a binary between merit and reservation to say that “reservation is antithetical to establishing meritocracy”, merit “cannot be separated” from existing inequalities in society. …The court said that even the drafters of the Constitution recognised this and wanted the idea of social justice to be taken into account while promising equality of opportunity. … Courts have now moved from a “formal” version of equality, which says that equal treatment should be meted to everyone, to a “substantive” version of equality, which says that special provisions can be made for the benefit of groups of disadvantaged people.
Marks are not merit The court noted that the notion that high-scoring students are meritorious leads to “reproducing and reaffirming social hierarchies”. This is because there are widespread inequalities that affect how candidates perform in competitive exams. The privileged classes have a lot of advantages, which are often invisible, while backward classes have structural barriers to overcome. The privileges that forward-class candidates have are not limited to schooling and after-school tuition, the court observed, but include “social networks and cultural capital” such as “communication skills, accent, books” that they inherit from the family. This ensures that “a child is trained unconsciously by the familial environment to take up higher education”. Even when seeking guidance on preparing for the exam, privileged people have social networks from which to obtain advice, even if their family does not have the necessary exposure to the field. … a ruling from 1985, where a judge wrote that there is no merit in a system that keeps out the disadvantaged groups in the society. This was one of the first instances of an expanded idea of merit finding its way into the higher judiciary.
