While most supporters of social justice celebrate ‘victory’ in the latest quota case, as a supporter of this cause myself, I am a bit disappointed that we — supporters of the cause — have perhaps let the opportunity slip allowing the social justice debate to be clichéd rather than innovative and bold.

As a social scientist, my disappointment is that we are not grappling with the complex reality of disadvantage and discrimination. We are allowing it to be simplistically comprehended both in our public imagination and our policy approach.

As a student of politics, I am almost convinced that in its victory, the social justice cause might just be becoming an ineffective tool for mobilisation and democratisation.

Is this disappointment about the SC ruling? The Court has displayed a certain amount of self-restraint and ingenuity, though one cannot but feel that like all other players, the Court may also have missed some opportunity there. Given the fact that this was only a five-judge bench, the Court had to follow the framework of the Indra Sawhney ruling — to allow caste as the basis for reservations and to impose the creamy layer restriction. The Court did exactly that. So, why the disappointment?

In fact, the disappointment is more about the circumstances around the ruling than the ruling itself. At one level, the issue was so limited — reservations in certain central institutions of higher education. We must remember that most states already have reservations in state level institutions of higher education. And even this limited move was coupled with the palliative of increasing the total number of seats to accommodate the ‘open category’. This would only pump a lot of funds into the already pampered central institutions. More importantly, this round of quota debate reaffirmed our inability to come out of the spell of easy solutions. The debate, the arguments in the Court and the ruling itself seem to have let slip the opportunity to shift the paradigm of the social justice debate. The supporters were blinkered in their steadfast effort to perpetuate quotas as instruments of social justice; the opponents showed a matching lack of concern for social justice as a policy concern; the Court chose to restrain itself and allow the political class to miss the opportunity.

... contd.