Write short note: Rationale behind Protective Discrimination. (1989)
Protective discrimination is the constitutionally sanctioned use of group-based preference to correct inherited disadvantage. Its logic is that formal equality applied to structurally unequal groups reproduces inequality. Articles 15(4) and 16(4) permit special provision for socially and educationally backward classes and the Scheduled Castes and Tribes; Article 46 directs the state to promote their educational and economic interests; Article 335 requires their claims to be weighed consistently with administrative efficiency.
The grounds of the rationale
- Compensatory justice. Deprivation was imposed by birth over centuries, denying land, literacy and worship; the remedy must therefore also be group-based. B. R. Ambedkar insisted safeguards were restitution, not charity.
- Cumulative disadvantage. André Béteille showed that ritual rank, land and power were traditionally cumulative; disadvantage is thus multi-dimensional and cannot be dissolved by growth alone.
- Legitimacy through representation. A state whose legislature, bureaucracy and universities are monopolised by a few castes lacks credibility with the rest; preference is also a claim about who governs.
- Breaking the reproduction of stigma. Marc Galanter (Competing Equalities, 1984) reads the Indian scheme as an attempt to sever caste identity from life chances, while warning that it also makes caste an enduring administrative category.
- Substantive over formal equality. As M. N. Srinivas’s account of Sanskritisation implies, imitating the twice-born delivers position without altering structure; only state intervention alters the distribution.
Critiques
- Creamy layer capture. Indra Sawhney (1992) excluded the advanced section of the backward classes and fixed a 50 per cent ceiling; the Rohini Commission (2023) found roughly 97 per cent of OBC reservation benefits reaching about 25 per cent of OBC communities.
- Efficiency versus equity. Article 335 is invoked against preference, though “merit” measured by examination itself encodes prior advantage.
- Perpetuating the category. Preference keeps caste administratively alive, the objection Ambedkar anticipated when he sought safeguards that would become unnecessary.
- A shifting rationale. Janhit Abhiyan (2022) upheld the 103rd Amendment’s 10 per cent EWS quota, detaching preference from social backwardness, even though the Court in 2021 had refused to relax the 50 per cent ceiling for the Marathas. State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (2024) then permitted sub-classification of Scheduled Castes, conceding that beneficiaries are themselves unequal.
Verdict
The rationale holds: the National Crime Records Bureau recorded 57,789 crimes against Scheduled Castes in 2023, and the India Human Development Survey found only about five per cent of marriages inter-caste. Caste still allocates life chances, so a caste-blind state would merely ratify the existing distribution. What needs reform is not the principle but its targeting, so that protection reaches those for whom it was designed.