Write short note: Social Justice. (1999)
Social justice is the principle by which a society decides how burdens, opportunities and recognition are distributed. Unlike procedural justice, which asks only whether rules were impartially applied, it asks whether the rules themselves, and the starting positions they act on, are defensible.
The idea in social theory
- John Rawls (A Theory of Justice, 1971) gives the standard formulation: behind a veil of ignorance people would choose equal basic liberties, then the difference principle — inequalities are legitimate only if they benefit the least advantaged most.
- Robert Nozick replies that justice lies in legitimate acquisition and transfer, not in any pattern of outcomes — in India, the merit argument against reservation. Amartya Sen (The Idea of Justice, 2009) instead compares actual states of affairs and the capabilities people really have.
The Indian constitutional scheme
Justice here is social, economic and political, in that order, in the Preamble; the design is B. R. Ambedkar‘s. Article 14 guarantees equality before law; Articles 15(4) and 16(4) permit special provision and reservation; Article 17 abolishes untouchability; Article 46 directs the state to protect Scheduled Castes and Tribes from social injustice. The device is protective discrimination — collective and group-based, set against an individual, justiciable right to equal opportunity, a tension the courts manage rather than settle.
His own standard was wider than law. Social democracy — liberty, equality and fraternity as an indivisible union — was the precondition of political democracy; caste, as graded inequality, was its obstacle, since every stratum has someone below it to defend the system for.
The sociological critique
- Marc Galanter (Competing Equalities, 1984): compensatory discrimination redistributes opportunity while creating a politics of classification and stratification among beneficiaries.
- Gunnar Myrdal‘s soft state explains the gap between statute and practice: ambitious law, weak enforcement, elites exempt.
- Justice here is gendered as well as caste-bound: Uma Chakravarti shows that caste endogamy is maintained through control over women, so justice confined to caste categories leaves brahmanical patriarchy intact.
The shifting criterion
In Janhit Abhiyan v. Union of India (7 November 2022) the Supreme Court upheld, 3:2, the 103rd Amendment’s ten per cent quota for economically weaker sections — the first resting on economic criteria alone, breaching the fifty per cent ceiling of Indra Sawhney (1992) and detaching social justice from social backwardness. Whether disadvantage is stigma or income is now the live question.
Conclusion
Social justice in India has been pursued chiefly through law, and law reaches the event rather than the structure. Ambedkar’s warning stands: political democracy built on social inequality is a palace on dung. The social base, not only the statute book, must alter.