While agreeing with some of your criticism of the government, I kept looking for an equally searching critique of the other player in the game, the anti-reservation agitation that seeks to question the very idea of social justice. Here we have a protest led and sponsored by a small but powerful urban professional elite and lionized by the media (both of which are disproportionately dominated by the upper caste) that uses rather crude arguments and even more crass symbolism to stall a scheme threatening their privileges.

Your silence on this matter, not just in this letter but through your many interventions in the last few weeks, has worried me. You know that I have seen you as one of the intellectual leaders of this country; you can understand my agony when I see you being portrayed as the intellectual mascot for this agitation. Let me propose a hypothesis to you: this shrill and powerful campaign against the very idea of social justice is one of the reasons why there is so little space left for thinking about social justice in a new paradigm.

Let me turn to the more substantive differences.

You say that the government’s proposed measure goes against the freedom of academic institutions and the principle of diversity, that each institution should be ‘left free to devise their own programmes’ for affirmative action. Pratap, how many elite medical, engineering or management institutions in this country can you think of that have used their freedom to introduce any serious measure of affirmative action? I need not remind you of the number of times that the SC/ST Commission has documented the tales of how all these elite and not so elite institutions of higher education have dodged legal provisions of reservation for SC/ST. I can’t believe that you want to give these very institutions the freedom to decide on affirmative action.

... contd.