3

The Politics of Social Justice*

Pratap Bhanu Mehta**

Abstract
The Politics of Social Justice is a big challenge of our times. For the first
time in our history real social and economic change seems like a possibility,
and the sheer unleashing of aspiration and energy across different sections
of Indian society is staggering. But there are some concerns about the form
the politics of justice will take, even in this newly buoyant and optimistic
era. The first reflects on the limited set of instruments we have that can do
full justice to the aspiration of social equality and second, on why caste still
remains such an entrenched category around which the politics of social
justice is constructed, and what the consequences of this entrenchment
might mean. The present challenge of the politics of social justice must be
seen against the backdrop of a general, perhaps more global and historical,
pessimism about the relationship between democracy and equality. The
most obvious instrument is redistribution through taxation. But there is
no serious politics structured around using this instrument for several
reasons. First, of all countries like India have recent and vivid memories
of the distorting effects of high taxes in the context of low enforcement
capacity. Second, in the context of globalisation and mobility of capital
there is scepticism about the efficacy of very high tax rates. Third, taxes
provide redistribution, through the instrumentality of the state. The
second major instrument of redistribution is collectivising productive
assets, particularly industrial capital, third instrument is the focus of one
particular asset, land and fourth instrument for producing some kind of
distributive justice is the state itself. On this view the primary mechanism
through which redistribution happens is not transfer or collectivisation
of assets, but through the state provision of public goods, particularly

* Malcolm Adiseshiah Memorial lecture delivered on 21 November 2010 at the Madras Institute of
Development Studies, Chennai.
** President, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi

Review of Development & Change, Vol. XVI No.1, January-June 2011, pp.3-21
4 Pratap Bhanu Mehta
health and education. Institutionalisation of caste as the basis of equality
has some interesting consequences. First, it is a form of legitimising
class difference. Second, in India there is no serious discourse on the
relationship between justice and discrimination. Third, because equality
can now be claimed only on the basis of an immutable identity, there is a
growing clamour for the state to institutionalize these. Fourth, identity
politics and other forms of politics centred around welfare and justice are
often posed as alternatives.
It is deeply humbling to be delivering a lecture in memory of Dr. Malcolm
Adeshshiah. He was an exemplary intellectual in so many ways: a first rate scholar,
a superb institution builder, an intellectual with a global reach, but one firmly
grounded in the realities of India. His vast erudition was combined with a great
social sensitivity. His life long mission to empower people through education
and literacy was just one example of his acute sense of judgment about what is
important. I would like to believe that the topic of today’s lecture “The Politics of
Social Justice” is one he would have had a great deal of interest in. This lecture
cannot do justice to the high standards he set (and the high standards set by many
of my predecessors at this podium), but I hope it will prompt some reflection on
a big challenge of our time. India is going through enormous changes. There is,
rightly, a great sense of optimism. For the first time in our history real social and
economic change seems like a possibility, and the sheer unleashing of aspiration
and energy across different sections of Indian society is staggering. But there are
some concerns about the form the politics of justice will take, even in this newly
buoyant and optimistic era. This is the theme of my lecture today. The lecture
is divided into two parts. The first reflects on the limited set of instruments we
have that can do full justice to the aspiration of social equality. The second part
reflects, somewhat more briefly, on why caste still remains such an entrenched
category around which the politics of social justice is constructed, and what the
consequences of this entrenchment might mean. The aim of this lecture is, to
borrow Judith Shklar’s phrase, to be more tour of perplexities than a guide for
the perplexed.
I
The present challenge of the politics of social justice must be seen against
the backdrop of a general, perhaps more global and historical pessimism about
the relationship between democracy and equality. Democracies, in principle,
derive their legitimacy from a certain form of political radicalism, promising new
beginnings, a constantly challenged and renewed social order, and an affirmation
of equality. But in practice democracies have turned out to be remarkably
conservative institutions. Perhaps a little historical perspective is in order. In the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many perceptive observers of “democracy”
saw its conservative potential. Adam Smith had very presciently predicted that a
republic, the United States, would be the last to abolish slavery, much after many
The Politics of Social Justice 5
monarchies had done so. Alexis de Tocqueville, the most insightful observer of
democracy had commended it in part because democracies make revolutions rare.
While democracies relentlessly abolish formal distinctions of social status, they
are quite compatible with high levels of economic inequality. Contrary to those
who feared democracy, Tocqueville argued, that democracies promote stability
in property relations. This is so for various reasons. But one reason was quite
subtle. In countries where formally inequality has been abolished, and a myth of
formal equality becomes part of the self-understanding of a society, it becomes,
paradoxically, harder to critique real inequality.
There is a wider debate to be held about why democracies have turned out
to be so compatible with high levels of inequality. And this is, in some senses, a
truly global debate. In the United States, political scientists are puzzled by the fact
that the democratic system has allowed inequality to grow immeasurably over the
last two decades, with most of the gains of growth going to the top ten percent of
the population and a decline in real wages for much of the middle class. There are
several reasons advanced for this — from the role ideological mystification plays
in democratic politics to the susceptibility of democracies to special interests. But
in very different contexts, from the debate over democracy in China to the health
of democracy in the United States one question is being asked. Is the inability
to mitigate inequality a contingent feature of democracy? Or are there deeper,
far more structural reasons, why democracies are unable to mitigate inequality?
On the contingent view, the inability of democracy to mitigate inequality can be
explained by contingent features of the way in which democracy is organised.
The structure of election finance, forms of party organisation, the susceptibility
of media control, voter apathy, lack of information all contribute to making
democracies less self aware than they should be. Others, like Adam Pzeworski
argue that there may be deeper structural reasons why addressing inequality is
difficult.1 One major reason has to do with what I call “small liberty effects.” In
a society, which allows, some basic freedoms, even small differences can, over
time accumulate and transform into great ones. The most powerful illustration
of small liberty effects is illustrated in a classic paper by Debraj Ray and Dilip
Mookherjee. Their reasoning goes something like this. Suppose productive assets
were equalised. But there were very very small differences in rates of return due
to a variety of reasons. Some get a return on 0.02 percent and others suffer a small
loss of minus 0.02 percent. After fifty years such minute differences of return
will translate into one group having almost eight times the wealth of others. And
this is with minor differences. 2
But there may be other reasons as well. Is it the case that the instruments
of redistribution that democracies can use have severe limitations? And it might
be worth considering briefly, the set of instruments democracies have used for
this purpose and the politics around them in a country like India. The most
obvious instrument is redistribution through taxation. But there is no serious
politics structured around using this instrument for several reasons. First, of all
6 Pratap Bhanu Mehta
countries like India have recent and vivid memories of the distorting effects of
high taxes in the context of low enforcement capacity. There is a generalised
scepticism about the efficacy of high direct taxes. How far this scepticism is
justified can be debated in economic terms. But in the matter of taxes, there is
an interesting ideological phenomenon also at work. The rich benefit from the
fact that most people, at any level of society, do not like being taxed more; high
taxes, even for the very rich are often seen as a slippery slope for legitimising
high taxes for all. So while most democracies have some forms of progressive
taxation, there are limits to how much they can tax. Second, in the context of
globalisation and mobility of capital there is scepticism about the efficacy of
very high tax rates. Third, and this is a point I will return to later, taxes provide
redistribution, through the instrumentality of the state. Often there is scepticism
about a state’s capacity to use taxes wisely. Indeed the case for lower taxes and
an ideological delegitmisation of the “public sector” as it were, go hand in hand.
And certainly the historical performance of states gives grist to the mill of those
who are sceptical that more resources must be poured into the state. But even
when the state works the welfare effects of the state are likely to be higher than
its equality effects. So broadly speaking, there appear to be political limits to
taxation as an instrument of redistribution.
The second major instrument of redistribution was collectivising productive
assets, particularly industrial capital. This instrument has simply turned out to be
an unviable historical option. The third instrument of redistribution is the focus
of one particular asset, land. Certainly after independence it was thought that land
redistribution would be the major instrument of producing equality. But, and this
is a global phenomenon, democracies have not been very successful at radical
land reform. Most of the cases of successful land reform have been either through
revolution or colonial powers destroying a landed aristocracy as the Japanese did
in Korea. Land reform in democracies has been, at best ameliorative rather than
radical. But at the present conjuncture, in the context of our uneven development,
the politics of land is playing out very differently. At one level the issue of land is
absolutely central to conflicts in our society. Many major fault lines in our society
involve land, whether it is tribals desperately trying to secure use rights to their
traditional lands, to farmers contesting land acquisition, to conflicts over shaping
urban zoning. State regulation of land has also become central to the political
economy of Indian democracy. There is a joke that after liberalisation the state
controls only three things: land, liquor and learning. And these are three areas
where the visible hand of rent seeking is tremendously powerful. Historically,
of course land reform has been associated with better economic outcomes: states
with relatively more egalitarian distribution of land produced a more egalitarian
politics. But in a way this fact only highlights one of the paradoxes of land
politics: you already need a certain degree of asset equality to shape politics in a
more egalitarian direction. The politics of land itself has turned out to be greatly
path dependent. Politics itself seems a rather weak instrument for producing
The Politics of Social Justice 7
asset equality. But while land remains an issue of great social contention, it is,
with some exceptions, not the locus of an egalitarian politics for several reasons.
As Partha Chaterjee and many others have pointed out, in much of rural
India, the quest is now to get off the land. The fragmentation of land holdings
(combined with large scale shifts in life style aspirations) are making working
on land less desirable. While regularising the rights of tenants and share croppers
can have empowering effects, particularly in states like Bihar, the blunt truth is
that access to small land holdings is not seen as considerably empowering. In
rural India the greatest fault lines are often between the interest of small farmers
and landless labour; in some states the greatest complaint about NREGA raising
wage rates has come from small and marginal farmers. In short, often the conflicts
between “adjacent” classes are more consequential and immediately severe than
those between the top and the bottom, making politics less a matter of attacking
privilege than holding onto small distinctions. Land politics in India is very
complicated. But here I simply want to make one point. It is the axis of conflict.
But it is no longer the main fulcrum of distributive politics. Parenthetically, one
can make a stronger argument is that land assets are the means by which inequality
is being reproduced and exacerbated rather than reduced.
Land acquisition has also become a mechanism for exacerbating inequality
in India in three ways. First, property rights were weakened in India to facilitate
land reform. Ironically, weakened property rights, which were meant to help the
poor, ended up dispossessing them even more. Second, what farmers think of
land acquisition depends, amongst other things, upon two factors: location and
their existing assets. Again, ironically, farmers in an area with a real estate boom
or high circle rates like Haryana are more likely to be willing to part with their
land than farmers in poorer states. It is not an accident that land acquisition is
harder in backward states like Orissa, West Bengal and parts of Uttar Pradesh.
The poor get a poorer deal in a poor state. High growth states like Gujarat have
less of a challenge. As the recent conflict in UP has shown, large farmers also
have a greater capacity to bargain, compared to small farmers, and are likely to
get better deals. So dispossession is also unequal in its effects. Finally, there is
one aspect to inequality in land discourse that is deeply insidious. There is some
focus on monetary compensation and promise of jobs. But let us face two ugly
truths. In most areas we have not invested enough in the skills of dispossessed
people for them to get meaningful jobs. Studies are showing that, particularly
in backward areas, companies do not employ local labour: partly because of
skills deficit, partly because of fear that local labour will unionise easily. But
there is also an aspirational dimension. Even in Singur, it was startling to see
the government promise jobs as janitors to those dispossessed. Contrast this
with what the mayor of a Chinese city is supposed to have told those displaced.
He admitted that the adults will have to sacrifice, but the promise was that the
children of those displaced would have the same opportunities as those of the
most privileged. And the state would ensure that. Whether or not this is entirely
8 Pratap Bhanu Mehta
implemented is not the point. The point is whether any Indian politician looks
at the children of the dispossessed in the eye and promises them something
genuinely aspirational: a first rate, instead of a third rate school; a dream of a great
job, instead of jobs low in the hierarchy. Land acquisition is often an occasion
for reproducing social distance rather than closing the gap. It is important to be
reminded of this backdrop because land conflicts are not just over compensation.
The compensation issue has become a distillation of a complex set of issues: low
trust in the state, resentment at inequalities that your encounter with the land
lottery can only exacerbate, and a politics that rests on the conviction that power
is arbitrary and access to it simply a means of making money. But cumulatively
land politics is exacerbating inequality.
The fourth instrument for producing some kind of distributive justice is the
state itself. On this view the primary mechanism through which redistribution
happens is not transfer or collectivisation of assets, but through the state provision
of public goods, particularly health and education. At one level there is something
powerful in this narrative. Welfare states have been the instrumentality through
which the lives of the poor have been improved. But the welfare state has a very
complicated relationship to the politics of equality along several dimensions. First
and most obviously, the effectiveness of welfare states depends upon a number
of factors, including state capacity. In India that state capacity is very unevenly
developed across time and space. State capacity is often a function of structural
features like ability to generate revenue; but it is also a product of contingent
political formations. But the unevenness and distrust of state capacity has meant,
at the very least, that support for public provisioning is still very limited in India.
One striking illustration of this is the fact that fact our discourse on universal
entitlements is so under ambitious. There is a powerful narrative that UPA wanted
to project of universalising a set of basic entitlements from the right to education to
employment. But you often get the feeling that these rights are so tepidly defined,
and even more haphazardly implemented that they are fighting yesterdays battles,
not tomorrows challenges. The Right to Education for example has been enacted
just at the moment where formal enrolment in a school is no longer a major
challenge. What is a major challenge is ensuring quality education for all. Yet the
focus of the legislation is largely on the infrastructural inputs. While many of the
bye laws of this legislation have to be drafted, there is a real danger that this Act
could hinder rather that support the pursuit of quality education. Similarly in Food
Security, what is being proposed lags behind the practice of many states, including
Tamil Nadu and Chattisgarh. Tamil Nadu has universalised food security much
more effectively than the Centre is proposing to do. So while welfare schemes
are amelioratively, helping people their relationship to the politics of equality is
much more tangential than should be the case.
There is another issue in the politics of welfare that needs some attention.
Historically the Indian state has been relatively bad at targeting. To take just
The Politics of Social Justice 9
one example, under inclusion and over inclusion in BPL lists is often as high as
fifty percent. Just the history of targeting failures in India suggest that there is an
administrative case to be made for universalization.
For policy purposes the BPL is a disingenuous construct. Normatively
speaking, this line is an exercise in bad faith because it arbitrarily separates those
who can avail benefits from those who cannot. The difference between those
immediately above and below the poverty line is miniscule, almost irrelevant from
a practical point of view. Yet that cut-off arbitrarily determines access to benefits.
A BPL line, rather than being an expression of a commitment to equality, is a
subtle exemplar of discrimination. The cut-off also bears no relationship to the
particular objectives of public policy. It also does little justice to the fact that the
poor are unevenly deprived along different attributes. A list has to be made with
reference to objectives; but here the existence of the list defines the limits of the
programme. The BPL is a classic case of state inversion that confuses ends and
means. Second, the process of creating BPL lists produces a strange intellectual
contortion. First there is a survey that supposedly caps how many poor people there
are. Then criteria are evolved to identify which particular households fall within
the set. This exercise is a bit of sleight of hand: the identifying criteria selected
should be such that they do not yield a figure higher than the cap that has been
predetermined. If you go by criteria, caps make no sense. If you are committed
to the caps, the criteria look arbitrary. Another instance of the state engaging in
circular reasoning unhinged to any objectives. Third, there is the practical difficulty
of implementing any criteria for selection. Again distinguished economists and
planners have performed a heroic task of identifying easily implementable criteria
that do not rely on complicated and dubious surveys. But objectively verifiable
criteria that do not over-include or under-include are hard to design. Then the
state resorts to including whole groups, or sometimes districts, in a blunt way that
again makes the list discriminatory. It is small wonder that the states are deeply
dissatisfied with the Centre setting the parameters of the criteria; the Centre in
turn is suspicious that allowing the states to do their thing is a recipe for anarchy.
But the most unconscionable practical consequence is the horrendous rate of
under-inclusion and over-inclusion that has characterised these lists, often in
excess of 50 per cent. The lists marginalise the poor rather than empower them.
So why does the state continue to persist with so flimsy a construction, one
that is normatively dubious and practically difficult? In some schemes the state
has made a departure, by making goods universal or by allowing self-targeting.
But the mystique of the BPL remains strong. In part its hold may be attributed
to state inertia; the state often continues along inherited ways of structuring the
world even when circumstances have rendered those strategies futile. Part of it
is ideological: to show that something is being done for the poor, you first have
to set the poor apart as a category, and make them a special object. How can we
be seen for standing up for the poor, if we are treating them as equal citizens
rather than as special wards of the state? It is also a way of ensuring that schemes
10 Pratap Bhanu Mehta
for the poor by being exclusively for them, receive little attention from others.
Ironically, all subsidies which the privileged enjoy, like petrol, are mostly couched
in universalistic terms. Part of it is a false fiscal scare. On this view, if you don’t
target, and universalise schemes, the costs may turn out to be prohibitive. But
this assumption is mostly false. As states that have universalised PDS, like Tamil
Nadu, have demonstrated, there is self-targeting that limits the fiscal burden.
Finally, there is also political expediency. The ministry of agriculture and food
and state governments would rather let a catfight break out over who gets included
or excluded, than focus attention on the real issue at hand: how do you design
delivery systems with minimal leakage? The messiness of the BPL lists shifts
the blame to civil society. If food is not reaching the poor, it can be blamed on
the fact that people are gaming BPL lists; whereas the real culprits are delivery
mechanisms that include everything from FCI to the ownership of food shops.
Again, states that have done well with PDS focus less on futile controversies over
lists, and more on structures and technologies of delivery. What lists are needed
depends upon the objective of the programme. But at this historical juncture it
is clear that the BPL lists are serving very little purpose. For most schemes that
matter to the poor they are unnecessary; these schemes can either be universalised
or criteria can be evolved that bear some relation to the purpose of the scheme
rather than rely on an antecedently given list like BPL that we have not got right
in over five decades. It will also remove this great scramble in the states to make
poverty their sole revenue generation industry. Government needs to make a
distinction between two kinds of waste. There is a form where the state incurs
slightly higher costs, but the objective is fulfilled; universalisation of PDS will
probably take this form. Then there is the form of waste where neither does the
state save money, nor is the objective of the scheme fulfilled. But the BPL abets
this more insidious kind of waste, as our unconscionable nutrition outcomes show.
There is great hope being placed in the fact that Unique Identification (UID),
will help overcome some of these problems. The UID is certainly a necessary
instrument for an effective state; the state needs to identify its citizens, and poor
citizens in turn need an identity. But it is more likely that UID is more useful for
universal schemes than targeted ones. UID will certainly help solve one problem
in a universal scheme: identification of citizens. What is less obvious is whether it
will be able to solve the challenge of targeting. As a matter of intellectual history,
universal identification have gone hand in hand with the creation of universal
rather than targeted welfare states. But this is a technical discussion. For our
purposes what is important is this. BPL lists have two consequences for the politics
of justice. First, it is usually the case, as the saying goes, that schemes for poor
people are poor schemes. As a matter of simple political economy, schemes in
which the privileged do not have a stake, are not subject to great accountability.
But second, instead of producing widespread support for strengthening welfare
schemes, it has produced more a politics of getting access to state resources by
manipulating the categories of access, which again paradoxically ends up pitting
The Politics of Social Justice 11
the poor against the slightly less poor.
There is a final point to be made about welfare states in relation to the politics
of equality. Where welfare states function well, they can certainly contribute to the
improvement in the lives of the poor. In that sense they are necessary aspects for
the politics of equality. But welfare in this sense does not constitute the politics
of equality for a couple of interesting reasons. In principle access to health and
education and other public goods that form part of the welfare basket should
enhance the capabilities of citizens to take advantage of opportunities. But these
goods also enhance what one might call individuation. They allow the pool of
citizens who are capable of being upwardly mobile much wider. But they do not
address the challenge of structural inequality.
One way of seeing this point is to see how ideologies of education play out
in relation to equality. As a normative point it cannot be debated that all citizens
must have access to high quality education. But the comparative history of the
relationship between education and equality is a little sobering in the following
respects. First, access to equal opportunity in education is quite compatible with
high levels of inequality. All the equal opportunity does is widen the pool from
which successful candidates are drawn; it does not, by itself erase inequalities
between different classes. Or rather, to be more precise, equality is more a function
of compensation patterns for different jobs than it is of education itself. In an
openly competitive system, where the job market does not have the right kind of
distribution across incomes classes, equality of educational opportunity is quite
compatible with inequality. For equality depends upon the penalties associated
with not coming out on top. The more egalitarian an occupation structure, the
less severe are the perceived penalties for not coming out on top. Europe has in
part escaped the neurosis, a meritocratic competition can induce because there is
greater background equality. In short, education alone may not produce a politics
of equality. The real debate we need is on the kind of occupational structure we
see emerging. What is the relationship between education and that occupational
structure?
Meritocracy also has two peculiar psychic consequences. One of its
unintended consequences is that it inculcates the idea that those who are left
behind are somehow less worthy; and it creates a new form of inequality in turn.
There is also an argument to be made that over the last twenty years or so, it is
precisely meritocracy that has ideologically underpinned an ideology of great
inequality. As some social observers have noted, people who rise through the
system based on an idea of merit also have a greater sense of entitlement to all
the fruits of their effort. What is interesting about income inequality in places
ranging from the USA to China is not the fact that it exists. It is that people at the
top in particular and society more generally also came to the view that those at
the top deserved what they have. They deserved it in part because they rose by
the dint of their own talent. There is an odd sense in which privilege has to justify
12 Pratap Bhanu Mehta
itself, but merit does not. Since the idea of equality of opportunity in education is
so aligned with the idea of meritocracy (or rather the two legitimise each other),
education is often not seen as the locus of equality.
This little excursus on meritocracy is interesting in relation to the politics
of justice for another reason. In upper classes which have a sense that they have
risen on the dint of merit, there is the possibility that there is less support for an
egalitarian politics. This is because a society where achievement is linked to
education attainment also gives those who achieve a sense of entitlement. It is
perhaps easier to shame an aristocracy by claiming their wealth is undeserved; it
is harder to induce guilt in those whose self- perception is that they have attained
wealth by legitimate means. The expansion of a professional middle class may
be conducive for supporting expansion of education. But this class, may at the
same time have less patience with any politics of redistribution because it is the
very ideology of education that supports their sense of entitlement.
There is therefore something of a crisis in articulating an egalitarian politics
of social justice. Traditional Marxists believed that there is a subject or bearer of
egalitarian politics, namely the proletariat. But there is no such natural subject,
in part because all classes are now placed in very complex and contradictory
relationships. There “instruments” of equality have very limited reach. And even
when they are successful in delivering certain goods, they often enhance the ethic
of individuation, mobility, and competition rather than a politics of equality. It
is therefore possible to articulate a discourse of improvement, but there is no
locus of social justice.
II
If this is the case, then a profound challenge opens up for Indian democracy.
At the moment when our republic was founded, Ambedkar very famously
articulated the life of contradictions India was about to enter. On the one hand
our constitution promised political equality. On the other hand actual social
life was going to be marked by deep social and economic inequality. In some
respects, this contradiction was not unique to Indian constitutionalism; it has
been a feature of most democracies. In fact the kind of political equality that
modern constitutions introduce is often seen as Janus faced. On the one hand these
constitutions instantiate a normatively attractive conception of political equality.
One central feature of this conception is that who one is should not matter to what
political or even legal rights one has. The modern conception of citizenship is,
in many ways, founded on this ideal. But this very attractive normative feature
is also seen as, in some respects threatening. For this doctrine of equality is, as
many have pointed out, as much a doctrine of anonymity. To repeat, who one is,
is irrelevant to what rights one has.
Why is this conception of equality a threat? The worry is that this anonymity,
while it opens up certain formal avenues of access, can actually also throw a veil
The Politics of Social Justice 13
over inequality. Indeed, Tocqueville had argued that in societies governed by
formal equality (or anonymity), it is harder to mobilise and egalitarian politics.
So, as Ambedkar had rightly worried, constitutional anonymity can leave real
structures of inequality intact. This is a general challenge faced by democracies.
But in a society marked by the particular form of inequality India had, this fear
of constitutional anonymity was real and powerful. The challenge was to address
this fear, while at the same time retaining the attractive normative features of
constitutional anonymity. It was in this context that the recognition of caste as
an axis of equality became central to Indian politics. The idea was that whatever
constitutional anonymity might do, it must not render this particular form of
inequality invisible, particularly in the case of Dalits.
But I want to draw attention to two features of this politics and the impact
it has had on the politics of social justice. The first, I have discussed at some
length in The Burden of Democracy, but the gist of the argument bears repeating
here, because it explains some difficulties of egalitarian politics in India. But
later in this section I will draw out some new implications of this argument to
address one interesting analytical question about the salience of caste over class
politics in India. Although I must make full disclosure and state emphatically
that I worry about the new forms in which caste is being entrenched in Indian
political discourse. But here I try and analyse why caste defines the contours of
what we think of as equality so insistently.
Democratic aspirations are in some senses tied to the idea of equality. The
idea of equality is complex and immediately invites the question, “Equality of
What?” Income? Wealth? Political Equality? Opportunity ? But understanding
the political trajectory of Indian democracy does not require beginning with an
answer to this question. In any society, especially democratic ones, the meaning
and scope of equality will be fiercely contested and will be the basis for ideological
divisions. Rather, it is the psychological impulses that lie behind the demand for
equality; the existential burdens that any demand for equality seeks to address
that leave their imprint on politics. The variety of structures, caste, class,
patriarchy, that maintain and reproduce inequality are all too familiar, and Indian
society exemplifies many of these to an unconscionable degree. But inequality
is not simply a structural condition in which people find themselves; a condition
measured by such objective indicators as Gini coefficients or development indices.
Inequality is resented, and becomes salient for politics, because it is experienced
existential burden that inflicts complex psychic costs by diminishing a sense of
self. Not all forms of inequality are unjust. And the ways in which the experience
of inequality shapes the self is a complex subject. But fundamentally inequality
imposes the profoundest existential burdens when it seen as denying individuals
the minimum regard due to them, or when it constantly puts them is situations
that are experienced as humiliating.
It is now a commonplace observation, thanks largely due to Rousseau who
14 Pratap Bhanu Mehta
most vividly wrote about the psychic burdens of inequality, that most human
beings, unless they have been dehumanized to an unimaginable degree, place some
value upon themselves. This does not mean that they are selfish; it is rather that
they place some value upon themselves and wish that this value be somewhere
affirmed. The institutions and practices of most inegalitarian societies deny
individuals this basic form of recognition, the recognition that they are valuable
in some sense, that they have some moral standing. In most societies this quest
for having one’s worth affirmed will take debased forms. The only way in which
you can secure others acknowledgement is either by seeking to dominate them,
or by putting a convincing show of attributes and accomplishments that are
capable of winning the acknowledgment of others. This is because the only way
you can get acknowledged is by having power over them, by being able to say,
“I know I am worth something, because I have power over you.” Those not in
a position of being able to dominate secure acknowledgement in other more self
debasing ways. They say something like, “Pay attention to me, because I can
make your comparative sense of self worth even more pronounced by debasing
my self for you, by flattering you.”   Inegalitarian societies where there is no
public acknowledgment of individual’ self worth will be characterized by both
a fierce competition to dominate, and paradoxically, an exaggerated sense of
servility. These are the two strategies of securing acknowledgement. Both desire
to dominate and a kind of self abasement, Rousseau suggested, would lead us to
lead inauthentic lives: lives that were not governed by values our concerns that
were properly our own. Such societies would also give individuals frequently
reasons to consider their self respect injured: inegalitarian societies will routinely
humiliate it members.
The aspiration to democracy is in part an aspiration to have one’s moral
worth acknowledged. The charge that an arrangement or a set of procedures
is “undemocratic” carries moral resonance, not simply because it describes a
faulty procedure, but because it is accompanied by the sentiment that in being
undemocratic someone’s moral standing has been slighted. Acknowledgment
by others of your moral worth is at least partly constitutive of an individual’s
sense of self respect. A sense of self respect is necessary to have a firm sense
of one’s own value, to have the conviction not only that life is worth living but
worth living well. The absence of self respect can be corrosive; it can make most
pursuits meaningless.
In some senses, equal voting rights are a dramatic expression of individual’s
moral worth. But unless the collective arrangements of society give individuals
the minimum bases for social self respect, of which the equal right to vote, is
just one aspect, society is likely to be characterized by an odd combination of
a fierce competition for domination on the one hand, and abject servility on the
other, and when neither succeeds, violence as a way of announcing ones moral
standing. What institutions and objectives can satisfy the minimal requirements
The Politics of Social Justice 15
of acknowledging people’s moral worth is a debatable one. But at the very least,
freedom from abject necessity, removal of invidious and humiliating forms of
discrimination, some equality of opportunity and access to set a of goods that are
minimal requirements for being a capable agent in the modern world. The great
liberal hope, embodied in the Indian constitution, was that ameliorating serious
material deprivation, and an effective equal standing in the eyes of the law would
go some way towards mitigating the desire to have one’s worth affirmed, either
by dominating others, or by having one’s own sense of self fashioned by what
we think might get others attention. Indeed, arguably, if the basis for social self-
respect is adequately protected, the existence of other inequalities might matter
less, because they could not be used as a base from which to dominate, despise,
or negate others.
Conceptually speaking, there are many different ways in which, equality
of moral worth can be affirmed. One might say, for instance, that we are equal
in the eyes of God. Within Indian history, religious traditions, and traditions of
dissent, these modes have always been available; but they did issue in effective
and enduring demands for ordering the texture of social relationships. It is not
indeed an impossibility to assert both that we are equal in the eyes of God and
that a hierarchical social organization such as caste is defensible; indeed the
theoretical radicalism of so many claims to equality in the past was compromised
by their practical conservatism. It can be granted that Indian history provides
at least some conceptual resources for affirming equality. But the introduction
of democracy is radical. Democracy is a way of affirming human dignity by
granting individuals civic standing, In a democracy the desire for having one’s
moral worth affirmed, for emptying social space of humiliation is given open
social legitimation and expression
But, paradoxically, the struggles to affirm one’s moral worth do not
necessarily take the form of a demand for justice. Indeed, if Rousseau’s diagnosis is
plausible, the desire for having one’s worth acknowledged can express itself in all
kinds of debased forms, ones that require debasing others. Indeed, the paradox is
that while individuals and groups can be acutely conscious of society’s indifference
towards them, they can, in turn be acutely indifferent towards others. Indeed, you
would almost experience this to the case in highly inegalitarian societies. The
only meaning empowerment has in such a society is power over others, some
claim of power or privilege or access that sets you apart, rather than a generally
shared sense of empowerment as such. The paradox is that the more unequal the
background institutions and practices of society, the more likely it is that politics
will be a struggle to displace the holders of power rather than an ambition to
bring about social transformation. The struggle to move a head will not be a
common struggle for justice – for little commonality exists – but a competitive
quest for power. A society that is adept at humiliating its members is, as Rousseau
convincingly argued, more likely to make them adept at humiliating others than it
16 Pratap Bhanu Mehta
is to teach them about justice. This perhaps explains one of the paradoxes at the
heart of Indian politics. There are few other democracies where the universalist
language of injustice, rights, even constitutionalism is so profusely used and has
become part of so many political mobilizations. But it is a stratagem for particular
individuals or groups to gain access to power, not an acknowledgment of the due
claims of all. Discourses of law, constitutionalism, rights, justice, obligations, do
not signify that a particular set of values are being taken as authoritative and these
set genuine moral constraints for individuals. Rather, they are the languages in
which particular grievances are expressed or interests advanced without the least
acknowledgment of reciprocal or parallel interests and grievances of others. A
sense of justice towards someone presupposes a sense of reciprocity, it presupposes
that you acknowledge others. The more the social distance, the less likely that
such reciprocity obtains. It is quite possible for a democracy to experience
great clamour for recognition by particular individuals and groups without these
resulting in diffusion of norms of justice. This follows the general pattern of the
ways in which Indian society has been democratized. Democracy in India has
advanced through the competitive negotiations between groups, each competing
for their interests, rather than, the diffusion of democratic norms. It is, in some
senses, a contingent outcome of social conflicts, not necessarily a deep seated
norm. The purpose of political mobilization has not been to make the state more
accountable but to get access to or share in its power.
This conception of politics was most dramatically manifest in the way in
which citizens often thought of the state. Given the commanding presence of the
state, underwritten by an ideology of state led development, access to state power
became, for good or for ill, the principal means of improving the life chances
of individuals. In an economy with slow and sluggish growth, averaging under
three per cent, the state became a disproportionate provider of opportunity. Even
access to opportunities and resources outside the state were mediated through
state influence. Indeed, in one sense politics, through access to state power has
become the swiftest route towards social mobility. In a strange kind of way,
compared to the market, or educational institutions, politics of all kinds, from the
most ambitious aspiration for power, to the interest in gaining smallest benefits,
came to be seen as a surer route to social mobility. Access to the state gave jobs
and a likely class status that was better than anything available outside the state;
the discretionary power the state conferred on all its officials, was experienced by
many as empowerment, or at least an escape from the subordination that resulted
from being at the receiving end of that power. Access to state power was about the
only way of ensuring that one counted for somebody. Big scams do not tell the real
story of the connection between corruption and social mobility. It is the thousands
of petty fortunes that are made through the state that seemed to most citizens a
surer bet of improving their class status than the uncertainties of a market. One
of the peculiar features of Indian society has been that political power became
almost the sole means of social mobility. Is there any other sphere of activity that
The Politics of Social Justice 17
is less stratified and more representative of Indian society than politics?
But the consequence of the growth of the state and its undoubted success
in producing a kind of social mobility is attended by a paradox. This paradox
is, namely that once the state is seen as a means for social mobility, it is not, for
the most part seen as the provider of public goods. The state is adjudged to be
successful, the more opportunities for large numbers of private individuals it
can create through its own spending: if the number of government jobs expands
for instance, even when not required, this is adjudged to be a political success,
regardless of the opportunity costs this form of job creation imposes on others.  
The state exists primarily to satisfy the private interests of collusive interest
groups. Although it is undoubtedly true that the dominant proprietary classes will
have a disproportionate share of the state’s resources, there is enormous fluidity
in the nature of social groups that have at different times gained access to the
state. But the net result was that almost never has that state been governed by a
public philosophy; it is rather a high stakes competitive game in which individuals
or groups seek advantages on particularistic lines. The raison d’etre of politics,
the aims of public representation are no longer to respond to fundamental issues
impinging upon common life but to organize the state’s power in such a manner
that its resources can be channelled in the direction of particular groups or
individuals to protect their exclusive interests. The cumulative impact has been
a view of the state and constitutional fabric that see them as institutions to be
manipulated according to particularistic interests. One can appropriate Hegel’s
melodramatic phrase, ‘the state exists no longer.’ What Hegel meant in his context
that the state and constitution were being manipulated to serve particular interests
that the decisions that emanated from it did not carry the necessity of principle,
but only the arbitrariness of expedience. To be sure, there are restraints internal
to expedience, but how effective these restraints are will be a matter of some
concern.   It is extraordinary that the association of the state with the “public”
or the state with the “common” the two sustaining associations of the state are
wearing so thin.
But this politics continues because it has also acquired great normative
depth. And it is this normative depth that I want to focus on, in the remainder
of this talk. What I mean be normative depth is this. This de facto competition
of groups to gain access to state power is now being given constitutional depth
in different ways. First, as Sudipta Kaviraj pointed out several years ago,3 India
had a discourse of equality in which equality was not about transcending caste. It
was rather about claiming equality on the basis of caste. The measure of equality
becomes the share of caste power in institutions like the state. The most extreme
version of equality on the basis of caste is the legitimacy of what you might call
the mirror theory of representation. On this view institutions are legitimate only
in so far as the distribution of power within them mirrors, broadly speaking the
relevant social cleavages in society. To a certain extent, the attraction of this
18 Pratap Bhanu Mehta
ideal is understandable. If groups are systematically excluded from structures
of power, there is prima facie a case that a society is operating on mechanisms
of exclusion. There was consensus that these mechanisms very visibly and
oppressively operated in the case of Dalits. But slowly this narrative was expanded
to include other “Backward Castes”. And one of the strange ironies of modern
India is that the historical narrative of subjugation and marginalisation that was
specific to Dalits has now been appropriated by other groups.
A society like India requires some form of affirmative action. What form that
should take, who the state should target, why we should target them and how we
should target them is an important subject that is best left for another occasion.
Here I simply want to focus on some of the political and normative underpinnings
of the kind of emphasis on reservation that we have institutionalised, and the
implications of these assumptions for the politics of social justice. One way of
bringing out the peculiarity of these assumptions is to ask the question how will
the demand for equality be expressed? How will society ensure that constitutional
anonymity does not throw a veil over inequality. One other possible criterion for
ensuring this that has often been debated in the public sphere is the use of economic
criteria. There was an understanding at the time of independence that this criterion
would not cater to the specific form of injustice and discrimination Dalits faced.
But using this criterion could help address other forms of Backwardness.
But we have come to believe that using economic criteria or class as a basis
for reservation or affirmative action does not express a politics of social justice.
Part of the reason often cited for this administrative: caste is thought of as a more
easily identifiable characteristic than income. Part of the reason is that the caste/
class overlap was very strong particularly in the case of Dalits. But this overlap is
becoming much more complicated, particularly amongst non-Dalits, as the caste
and occupation linkage is becoming weaker. But there is also a deeper reason at
work. Reservations based on anything other than ascriptive criteria like caste are
not seen as expressing a politics of equality for the following reasons. The first
reason can be best highlighted by a little semantic experiment. Think of what the
phrase “equality of classes” might mean. As applied to distributive justice it can
mean only the abolition of classes; otherwise the phrase equality of classes is a
little bit of an oxymoron. But for reasons mentioned in part one, we do not have
any instruments for the abolition of class. But the phrase “equality of caste” is
not, in this sense an oxymoron. It requires neither the abolition of caste. And the
degree to which we have achieved equality of caste can be crudely measured by
the share of different caste groups in structures of power.
Just continue this line of thinking for a second. What are the differences
between how we represent caste mobility and class mobility? If a poor person
becomes middle class, this may reflect a salutary fact that society has opened up
avenues for opportunity. But precisely by virtue of this mobility the person is able
to change his class. And a society with great class mobility is a desirable one; at
The Politics of Social Justice 19
the very least is a potent expression of the thought that where one is born does not
determine the opportunities one might have. But class mobility is compatible with
two things. First, class mobility presupposes the continued existence of classes
and inequality — all it suggests is that individuals can change their position. And
the individuals who are so able to change their position no longer represent the
class they came from.4 A poor person becoming middle class, is an instance of a
poor person becoming middle class. In class mobility your position on the axis
of deprivation being measured changes. Such a movement provides a measure
of mobility; it is not seen as providing a measure of equality.
But caste operates somewhat differently. A Mala or Maddiga becoming rich
may change their class status. But they remain a Mala or a Maddiga. They can still
represent the caste from which they came in the calculus of power sharing. They
may have become rich or powerful, but their position on the axis of deprivation
being measured(in this instance, caste) does not change. In fact, one of the ethical
dilemmas posed by reservation is the way in which it perpetuates a compulsory
identity on citizens through officially sanctioned categories: once a member of
a particular caste, always a member of a particular caste. But this normatively
disturbing feature of the way in which we want to perpetuate caste as a compulsory
identity also makes it attractive as a locus of social justice. This is because caste
now comes to be a measure of equality in virtue of an immutable characteristic.
In a way ‘caste’ answers the question “Equality with respect to What” in a way
no other characteristic does, precisely because of its constructed immutability.
Equality with respect to “class” would require the abolition of class. Equality
with respect to caste does not require this abolition. This immutability can also
be combined with a simple measure: simple count the “representatives” of each
caste in the share of power. Again, with class this is impossible to do, because the
mere act of access to power transforms the individuals structural relation to class.
This institutionalisation of caste as the basis of equality has some interesting
consequences. First, it is a form of legitimising class difference. Since we have
limited instruments to achieve deep equality, class is now seen almost as a
legitimate form of inequality. Caste has become the form in which the politics
of social justice has come to be sublimated.
Second, in India there is no serious discourse on the relationship between
justice and discrimination. This is in part due to the fact that the category of
discrimination was specific to the Dalit experience. But the appropriation of the
Dalit narrative by other communities has meant that power sharing rather than
discrimination has become the central normative category in our thinking on
justice. And in a way for “upper castes” as well there is a tacit assumption that
since a share to power has been reserved, discrimination is no longer a category
one needs to think about.
Third, because equality can now be claimed only on the basis of an
immutable identity, there is a growing clamour for the state to institutionalize
20 Pratap Bhanu Mehta

these. Almost everyone knows that the politics of social equality depends
on particular categories of identity being recognised and codified. The latest
demand for a caste census is an inevitable outcome of this recognition. Social
classifications recreate and solidify the realities rather than merely representing
them. But the focus of politics of justice has shifted to what are the appropriate
identity categories that need to be so codified. This will, in coming years take
new forms. For instance, there will be greater political pressure to create new
subdivisions within broad categories like Dalit or OBC. The demand for these
subdivisions is inherent in the logic of equality on the basis of caste.
Fourth, identity politics and other forms of politics centred around welfare
and justice are often posed as alternatives. Recent Indian history has shown that
identity politics is the form in which the politics of social justice is expressed.
And there is no reason to believe that the force of identity politics is going to
diminish in the near future. Its forms may change, the categories deployed will
be contested, and there will be a demand to expand this politics to new domains,
including the private sector. But its central axis is going to remain demanding
equality on the basis of an immutable characteristic.
The politics of social justice is at a deep impasse. The fear that constitutional
anonymity must not draw a veil over inequality has led to the constitutionalisation
of caste, as it were. It has provided a ready locus and measure of equality. But its
price has been a move away from the ideals of Indian constitutionalism and the
essence of democracy in two respects. It has reinforced the tyranny of compulsory
identities and has reduced justice to crude and limited measures of power sharing.
But caste becomes the locus of a politics of equality in part because there is deep
structural pessimism about addressing other forms of inequality. India is going
through a profound change, and the gains in both growth and poverty reduction
are very real and widespread. But these changes do not, by themselves, address
the politics of social justice.
India’s growth has opened up new possibilities. It has certainly given
the state more resources and potential for institutionalizing welfare schemes.
It is also producing new forms of improvement and mobility. But it has also
increased the potential for rent seeking. Perhaps the best that we can hope for at
the current conjuncture is “small equality” effects that growth and welfare can
produce. But how we will resolve the contradictions that Ambedkar talked about,
still remains an open question. Were will be the locus of a politics of justice?
Will the historical logic that made caste the dominant paradigm in which we
think of justice continue? And will it crowd out the essential challenge we face.
This challenge is best summed up in the words of the Chinese thinker Qin Hui.
He put it in a striking formulation “What is excessive now is not liberalism or
social democracy, but oligarchy and populism. It is therefore essential to critique
both oligarchy from a liberal standpoint and populism from a social democratic
standpoint.” When I read these words I wonder whether there can be any better
The Politics of Social Justice 21
formulation of the challenges for Indian democracy. And I wonder how far we
are from meeting these challenges.
Notes
1 Adam Pzeworski, Democracy and the Limits of Self Government (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010)
2 Dilip Mookherjee and Debraj Ray “Persistant Inequalities,” Review of Economic
Studies, 2003, pp. 369-393.
3 Sudipta Kaviraj, “Democracy and Inequality in India,” in Zoya Hasan, Francince
Frankel (ed.) Transforming India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
4 I do not mean that they cannot have views that are sympathetic to the poor, or
that they cannot identify with the poor or act on their behalf. The reference to
representation here is not a reference to substantive views in this sense. It is
simply that on the dimension of class they have become someone else.
