41% white students, 27% Asian, 18% Hispanic, 5% black. .. So a vastly disproportionate number of Asians, relative to their population. And just 5% blacks, many of whom could actually be admitted under the sports quota.

This is the problem when people insist on pure merit-based admissions. The same thing will happen if you abolish reservations in India. There are structural and cultural problems that prevent blacks in the US and SC/STs in India from attaining high scores in entrance examinations. You simply cannot have exam scores as the criteria.

https://chicagomaroon.com/53303/news/uchicago-enrolled-more-male-fewer-black-undergraduates-last-year/

Bro, it doesn't work like that. The whole point of reservation is that marginalised groups CANNOT win, because of historical discrimination. So me NEED to compensate them, by giving reservation. Forget exams, there are enough articles showing that even dating apps are biased in favour of upper caste, fair skinned people.

This is a very poor argument. You identify a specific problem, namely, of discrimination, and then you decide to respond to that problem through an extreme solution and without even attempting to use other potential solutions that are much more proportionate to the scope of your problem.

This is like cutting the hands of a person in order to make sure they never steal. It is insane and it does not even achieve that someone will not steal because you impaired them. That is what your quotas do. You simply judge an individual as guilty of discrimination on account of who they were born to and punish them by telling them that they must pay for what their forefathers allegedly did. This is not democracy. This is medievalism. And it is what is called casteism. And quotas are intensely casteist by nature. Quotas have no place in a society that is truly committed to egalitarianism.

You want to “compensate” those who hail from less-than-fortunate backgrounds? You invest in their childhood, their health and education. You make sure they go to schools that are well equipped in both infrastructure and pedagogy. You make sure that they have access to public goods like sports and playgrounds. What you do not do is promise them a seat by virtue of their birth without preparing them to do justice to themselves once they are on that seat. Because no matter how many seats you give away, it will not make any difference if that seat is already broken, literally and metaphorically, by the time your intended beneficiary arrives to sit on it.

Surely it is not at all insane if you don't phrase it as contentiously as you do. Democratic liberal societies are in part about the fair allocation of limited national resources to create a fairer society, such as university places, or government jobs, in order to achieve social ends such as uplifting certain sections of society that have historically and continue to largely be horribly discriminated against.

You may disagree with this as a worthy aim or that there are more effective ways of doing so, but as stated in the other response above, if you take away quotas, most likely they will be replaced with very little to nothing, or empty promises.

So it turns out that truth can be quite bitter. It is a fact that quotas work by excluding one candidate at the expense of another candidate. That is just how it is. At least acknowledge the enormous moral and practical cost of that and ask yourself under which extreme scenario is it ever possible to justify such a policy. How do you look into the eye of a candidate and tell them they are to be punished because you have deemed their entire genetic heritage as being complicit in “oppressing” others? How is this any different from the British categorising entire tribes as inherently “criminal”? So much for principles of natural justice!

Fairness cuts both ways and your call for so called 'meritocracy' only goes so far. Do you object to taxes being spent on any welfare programmes? Is it fair that intergenerational wealth and the opportunities this creates exist disproportionally in the more privileged castes, i.e. entirely by their 'genetics' having not been the cause of their unfair oppression for hundreds of years or longer? Could a fairer society not be created if we try to address some of that, however imperfectly? Do you have any other suggestions of how this could be done?

Reply to your first question: you are confusing welfarism with consociationalism. When a citizen pays tax in a modern democracy, they do so fully aware that their contribution is public in nature, i.e., it is to be used for developing public goods. Unlike quotas, the underlying principle of using taxes for public welfare is not exclusionary because the latter recognises the equality of every citizen. Even when taxes are used to provide special access to public goods for a specific class of citizens, it is not done so at the absolute expense of other citizens. Quotas, on the other hand, follow a manifestly different logic: they explicitly partition public goods and define who can and cannot access them on grounds that have little to do with either welfare or equity.

Reply to your second question: it is a pity that you have framed the principle of individual responsibility as a straw man under whose guise so-called “oppressors” continue to thrive. But your point remains under-developed. It is one thing to recognise inequality as a moral concern and say that one must do their utmost to reduce it. It is another thing to utilise that moral concern to encourage the politics of quotas that, by their own logic, are intensely communal and denigrating of any free-thinking individual. In one go, to satisfy your moral righteousness, you have happily sacrificed the dignity of the individual by reducing their life to a function of their genetic heritage. Besides, you know only too well that the picture of “more privileged castes” that you paint here is not so black-and-white either. There is a reason why Indian judiciary had to come up with the innovation of “creamy layer” within the allegedly backward communities precisely because the reality of who is privileged on-the-ground does not align as neatly to specific forms of caste identities as you would like to claim.

Reply to your third questions: this is nothing if not emotionally exploitative language. Once again, you are using your moral concern against inequality and discrimination to justify measures that are easily extreme to the point that they extinguish the liberal conception of democracy and civil rights as well as hardly doing anything to actually ameliorate your moral concerns. I contend that quotas are not just a moral abomination but also a practical failure in policy making. The quotas you defend are worse than “imperfect” because although their supporters justify them on grounds of combating discrimination, the truth is that the real cause of supporting quotas has always been the communal logic of domination and submission. In a stratified society like India, there is nothing revolutionary about relying on quotas because it is simply the easiest thing to do and it enables, under the false guise of oppressor-oppressed binary, the politics of which group can dominate another group. Do you not already see what this politics has done to whatever little hopes we had when we inaugurated our Republic? Do you not see that your quotas have only enabled elites from different groups to thrive without contributing to the kind of holistic and welfare development for which I am more than happy to contribute my taxes to?

Reply to your fourth question: the fact of the matter is that quotas were, and remain, the low-hanging fruit of our discourse. They are easier to advocate for not because they are truly revolutionary and emancipatory but precisely because they are not. You want real change that is comprehensive and sustainable? You start with schools. You start with teachers. You start with investment and innovation in pedagogy. You start by acknowledging the fact that there is really no substitute for a childhood spent in a well-maintained classroom and in presence of teachers who are responsible for moral and intellectual development of the young student. After all these decades, we have not done this precisely because it is difficult, because it is expensive, not just in terms of resources needed but also in terms of moral imagination that we simply do not possess. Quotas exist because we have abdicated our moral imagination. But quotas will not achieve what we all pretend to achieve through them. You know it. And so do I. But here I am, inviting you to recognise this farce of quotas whose only promise is to give someone a seat somehow without bothering to prepare them to be worthy of that seat in the first place. What do you think happens when entire generations grow up learning that excellence and integrity are lesser principles than one’s membership in a community and into which they were born by accident? What kind of a democracy and discourse does that lead to? Think, for your own sake and for others. Think.

Thanks for your considered reply, though a lot of it presupposes agreement on the relative importance of personal liberties and individualism.

Your fourth point though remains the most relevant but also unclear: sure, there are probably many better mechanisms than quotas, such as investment in schooling, etc. But do you think if you abolish quotas there will be any guarantee that they will be replaced with anything commensurate, and won't just stay abolished.

If you want to abolish quotas at any time in future, those investments and reforms in education must to happen now, because they certainly have not for generations. And then maybe, in 10 or 20 years, it would be more realistic to begin to talk about abolishing quotas (though it probably still wouldn't be nearly enough yet nor a society of equal opportunities for all, and there will be little guarantees to those communities that such investments would even continue once quota perks have been lost).

Right now, it would just be taking away something from the already disadvantaged, and, realistically, replacing it with very little to nothing. Or do you see a practical way forward?

In any society that aspires towards civility, it is imperative to have certain norms that its members consider absolute and immune from reaction; open to critique, yes, but also sacred enough to be appreciated as just and necessary.

It is my understanding that whatever aspirations most of us may have from our Republic, diverse as they may well be, can be made possible only by our sense of regard for the paramount status of the individual life. No claim to economic development or social justice can, or should, be allowed to diminish the value of the individual from being an autonomous self to a mere sub-set of a group. Why do I make this non-negotiable? Because there is a very good probability that whatever claims are usually made when we are told to sacrifice our individuality on the altar of either development or justice, that more often than not, they turn out not to be true. But in the process of their execution and our acquiescence to them, we end up undermining the very essence of our personal liberty for promises that are unlikely to be realised.

You and I agree, I think, on the challenge of how to design policies that reduce inequality with least harm to anyone affected by them. But think of it this way. If after all these years of quotas the so-called marginalised have not been able to build the capacity to apply those very substantive and comprehensive reforms in domains of health and education that I previously mentioned, then what does it tell us about the promises that were made to us when our leaders said that quotas would end backwardness in our society? I take this historical failure of quotas as a further evidence of both their normative inadequacy (pretending to combat discrimination while actually used for solidifying communalism-as-dominance at the expense of the individual-as-equal) as well as their practical incapacity (where, by their nature, quotas are implemented at the end-stage of a given process so that one ends up confusing an artificial number of candidates qualifying for quota-mandated positions as a sign of progress when, in fact, that number is largely fictitious and of doubtful value in assessing genuine social transformation).

For reasons that should disturb each and every citizen of the Republic, the revolution of the mind is yet to occur, a revolution that would allow men, women, and everyone to free themselves from ascriptive destinies. Our response to this absent revolution can only be thus: to keep striving, to keep working, to fight the scourge of caste and every other kind of stratification with absolute integrity. An inhumane system that ranks human life is unworthy of either explicit respect or implicit toleration. And this is where the structures of our democracy, imperfect as they may be, are supposed to prepare and assist us. They provide us the means to organise, agitate, and revolt. None of this is to pretend that such a revolutionary endeavour is easy. It is not. But it is possible. It is necessary. And it is just.

I maintain that quotas have allowed us all to grow morally complacent. We have become wishful in thinking that quotas alone will achieve social justice. For reasons that I have already cited above, this is a grave error on our part. Hence my maximalist stand: abjure the quota, annihilate the caste. And whate stands in our way, be it religion or culture, whatever prevents us from destroying this social and moral plague, we must be total in our willingness to rid ourselves of it as well.

In other words, what I am calling for are not half-measures. The time for them is long over. Now is the hour to be absolute and to have the courage to define our ideals that enable every sentient being to live truly and beautifully, and for whose preservation we are prepared to devote all of ourselves.

Merit and IQ are elitist concepts that privilege whites and Asians in the US, upper castes in India. In reality, many law firm jobs are clerical and don't require a high IQ. Anyone can do it. So no harm in taking low LSAT scorers from black communities in Harvard, low CLAT rankers from SC/ST communities in NLSIU.

Even in the sciences and medicine, most jobs will become clerical once AI takes over.

The only reform that the reservation system needs in India is that the number of reserved seats should, in fact, be increased. It should be 70% reservation for SC/ST/OBC. Another 10% for Muslims (who can then be excluded as OBC). Another 5% for disabled and trans/non-binary persons. The remaining 15% can be for general category, roughly in line with their population. Within this 15%, there can be an EWS sub-quota.

Bottom line: if you are a general category person who is not EWS, you shouldn’t really be in a government institute with heavily subsidized fees. You should head to a private institute charging market rates, or go abroad. On this point, I am willing to support 0% reservation in private institutes.

Such a system will be fair to all. And it’s not that private institutes place you at a disadvantage. Jindal gets just as many law firm offers as a good NLU. And, of course, studying abroad gives you tons of opportunities.

Don't confuse Merut with IQ. IQ is a very narrow way of measuring intelligence. It's almost robotic. Cultures with such robotic systems in place excel more in IQ test and hence score higher (East Asians). Also, IQ is also affected by upbringing. Matzhavle Jatav from Dharavi drinking from fluoride contaminated public pipes since childhood will not have same IQ as Lavanya from SoBo Highrises.

As a senior at NLS with a sub-20 AIR in the 150-question CLAT, I’d much rather have someone with a 21,000 AIR in my law school, someone who gets an opportunity to enter law school, grow, and potentially help lift themselves and their community out of marginalisation, than someone who constantly cribs about being at NALSAR (assumin ure rank 120 and thats y ure bitter lol)while not even understanding the basics of reservation or why it exists in the first place.

To all the anti-reservationists making arguments that reservation should be scrapped: have you people actually given a thought to what will happen if reservation is really abolished? Yes , there will be near-zero SC/ST/OBC students and the merit nerds of general category will dominate. Congratulations. But do you know what happens after that?

Scenario 1: All non-GCs unite and vote in a UPA government with a super majority. They bring back reservation and increase it to 90%, including private sector.

Scenario 2: Complete civil unrest. Rioting, violence and the breakup of the country.

Do you want this?

And so your point, I suppose, is to tolerate one injustice in order to avoid another injustice. This is just cowardice.

If this nation is incapable of treating all its citizens equally and fairly, then this nation does not deserve to exist. As Burke said, “[i]n order for us to love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”