Justice by fractions

Keep your calculators out. The Central government is all set to deliver social justice via fractions. In case wiser counsel by the law ministry truly does not prevail, the UPA will go ahead with an absurd plan to allocate funding in key social sector programmes for the minorities in proportion to their share of the population, in the country and in specific states depending on the modalities of different schemes. This cynically formulaic strategy of earmarking 18.4 per cent of spending for the minorities carries with it very grave dangers. It threatens to separate the plurality of India into religious categorisation. It militates against the very spirit of the Constitution, its bestowal of equality of opportunity to the individual and its adherence to secularism. And it actually shrinks the minorities’ entitlement to proportionalism. The government must know that this facile formula jeopardises the founding contract of the Indian republic.

Reading of the 15 schemes to be carved up under the proposal reveals that most of them demand a match with socio-economic indicators, not religious identification — for instance, eligibility to avail of the Integrated Child Development Services and employment schemes. Here really is the catch. Given that some minorities lag behind the national, or regional, mean in these indicators, they should be beneficiaries of a greater share of overall allocation than their proportion of the total population. This proportionlalism instead could cap that allocation.

The UPA’s proposal also highlights — through its extreme measure — the gradual erosion of the equality of opportunity by recourse to identity politics. That equality guaranteed in the Constitution is meant to be enhanced through affirmative action and safeguards for the rights of minorities. Instead, by lazily opting for easy measures like reservations in ever more sectors and institutions, successive governments have been transforming affirmative measures into proportional representation. That nullifies the freedoms of the individual. And now, by lurching straight for that proportionalism, the stage could be set for individuals to be dwarfed by community, and for communities to be set into confrontation for funds based not on circumstance, but on percentages.