The Supreme Court is asking long-overdue questions. India needs some affirmative action policy. The debate is over who should be targeted, why they should be targeted and how they should be targeted. The current reservations policies do not provide a rational basis for answering any of these questions. At Independence there was a consensus that SC/STs had been subjected to such an appalling degree of subordination that their case for reservations was self-evident. One of the greatest travesties of modern Indian politics is how that narrative of exploitation was appropriated by castes whose condition and entitlement was, by any stretch of imagination, not quite the same. The number of groups entitled to reservation was recklessly expanded till the policy became a catch-all grab for power rather than a social justice programme.

The Supreme Court’s query about the number and identification of Other Backward Classes can be interpreted in two ways. The weak interpretation will simply give an aggregate number based on a favourite data source. All agree that the Mandal Commission’s number of 52 per cent had no foundation. But other data sources will put this number somewhere between 30 and 40 per cent. But is this all that we should be discussing? We have created a new paradigm of thinking in so many fields. Is it not possible to use this opportunity to think about the sorts of deprivations that impede individuals from realising their opportunities in a more complicated and rigorous way?

Our current paradigm of thinking about deprivation is a mess, and likely to be made more so by the patchwork of groups that will be added on under new proposed schemes. Should we not at least think of a properly constructed deprivation index that has considerable advantages over the current system? It will make caste at most only one consideration and enable us to move beyond it, it will be able to assign weights that better target those who are genuinely economically marginalised, it will pick out relevant individuals more than bluntly defined castes, and will in principle be more sensitive to different layers of deprivation that stand in the way of opportunity. This scheme could, if well-designed, cut through so many of the dichotomies that bedevil the current system. It could be an alternative to caste-based reservations rather than a supplement, as the National Knowledge Commission has strangely proposed. While a full discussion of alternatives is a matter for another occasion, it is worth stressing that the court is giving us an opportunity to think about deprivation rigorously and junk analytically dubious categories like OBC altogether. The point of reservations is to overcome caste, not perpetuate it.

... contd.