Meritocracy and Democracy: Indian Affirmative Action and the Politics of Caste

In the lead-up to independence, Indian statesmen grappled with how to address persistent social inequalities within an emerging democratic polity. The end of colonial rule promised equal citizenship in place of colonial subjecthood. At the same time, there was general agreement in the Constituent Assembly that enduring disparities of caste and class demanded substantive redress. The need for redress was mitigated by concerns around perpetuating caste as a form of social distinction by according it legal recognition. The tension between a governmental commitment to eliminating forms of inequality rooted in ascriptive ties and the perception of caste as an outmoded category of social belonging with no place in a modern polity limited the scope of intervention. Despite the persistence of such concerns, however, the Indian legislature and courts over the past sixty years have moved definitively towards an embrace of quotas as a necessary mechanism of recompense and redistribution. In response, upper castes have advanced arguments in defense of meritocracy. Upper caste claims to merit against affirmative action are a critical window onto the possibilities and limits of democratic transformation. On the one hand, they illuminate the success of lower caste assertion in opening up public institutional spaces previously monopolized by upper castes and disrupting older patterns of capital accumulation. On the other hand, they point to the countervailing trend of upper caste retrenchment in the domestic private sector and in the diaspora. These dynamics attest to the importance of affirmative action and its limits as a substitute for more far-reaching redistributive measures that keep pace with political economic changes.