Affirmative action in India Inc?

The US Supreme Court8217;s judgment this week upholding affirmative action bears vital lessons for India. Especially because it has come at...

The US Supreme Court8217;s judgment this week upholding affirmative action bears vital lessons for India. Especially because it has come at a time when the Vajpayee government, clearly in election mode, is considering the specious proposal of extending reservations to the poor among upper castes. In fact, only last week Attorney General Soli Sorabjee, in a well publicised move, provided an elaborate strategy to the Centre for expanding the existing quota in the teeth of the Constitution. While India continues to show a propensity to misuse reservations for political reasons, the US Supreme Court judgment shows that the American experience with affirmative action has been altogether different.

The US, too, has had its share of controversies over affirmative action. While the matter was pending before the Supreme Court, President George Bush himself came out against the system of giving preference to under-represented races or ethnic groups. Yet, the battle was confined to whether the policy of affirmative action should continue or not. Nobody suggested a deviation from the basic notion that affirmative action is meant to benefit only historically discriminated sections. The question of extending the benefit to the poor among 8216;whites8217; did not arise at all. Thus, the message from one democracy to another is that the Vajpayee government should abandon its populist move to make a mockery of affirmative action.

What is perhaps even more important is the lesson the US case holds on the question of extending reservations to the private sector. This question has assumed greater importance in the last decade as India liberalised its economy and the pool of government jobs started shrinking. Parliamentary committees have repeatedly called for imposing quotas on the private sector to make up for this shortfall of jobs. Last year, the Constitution Review Commission gave further respectability to this demand. Two months ago, Karnataka Chief Minister S.M. Krishna warned a gathering of industrialists that reservations in the private sector was 8220;inevitable8221;. More recently, UP Chief Minister Mayawati announced that her legal department was already working out a way to introduce reservations in private companies.

Industrialists have generally maintained a discreet silence on the subject. Their opposition to the whole idea is, however, no secret. They don8217;t want to be saddled with reservations because they fear that it will compromise 8220;merit8221; and their freedom to run their business as they like. The irony is, their American counterparts seem to share none of these fears. On the contrary, scores of Fortune 500 companies, including Microsoft and GM, intervened before the Supreme Court in favour of affirmative action. They have already tried that system for years and pleaded with the court to let them carry on with it. The contrast could not have been greater. Why do Indian and US companies think so differently?

This is not necessarily because American companies are altruistic or more conscious of their social obligations. In fact, they don8217;t see it as a burden at all. Rather, they seem to believe that it is in their enlightened self-interest to adopt affirmative action. Those 65 companies went out of their way to say all this in a case that had little to do with the corporate world. The petitions taken up by the Supreme Court were only about admissions to a university. The apex court reiterated its 25-year-old ruling that a university could take race into account while selecting students. The rationale is, in order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. The endorsement in the US of a 8220;race-conscious8221; admissions policy is the equivalent of the caste system being judicially recognised in India as the basis for reservations. But the difference is, the Americans don8217;t see affirmative action as only a compensation for past injustice. They regard it as a means to ensure that a university reflects the ethnic and racial diversity found in society. As the court put it, the state had 8220;a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body8221;.

Had the court ruled otherwise, the effect would been felt not just in universities but also in workplaces. The corporate sector would have had to give up race as a factor in hiring. It intervened in the case to avert such an eventuality. The conscious effort to have diversity at the workplace seems to have worked so well that the corporate sector actually developed a vested interest in its continuance. As the court put it,8221;Major American businesses have made clear that the skills needed in today8217;s increasingly global marketplace can only be developed through exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas and viewpoints.8221; Given our own diversity, why are Indian businesses loathe to adopt the same work culture?