These quotas are built on facts

He quotes some black American scholar’s five-year-old article to buttress his point but glosses over the debate which still rages in the US and which has emphatically tilted in favour of affirmative action. It is worth visiting the US Supreme Court’s judgement on affirmative action last year. It involved two white students who went to the highest court challenging the US government’s policy of affirmative action when they were denied admission to Michigan University. There was division even in the Bush administration on this issue. While President George Bush expressed unhappiness over the continuance of this policy in a speech delivered in January 2003 in Michigan, his then secretary of state, Colin Powell, and then national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, had underlined the fact that if the policy had not been in force, they would not have got the opportunity to bid for such high office. In the end, the judgement delivered by the Supreme Court upheld this policy despite noticing a “vertical division in American society”.

In short, people like Kapoor must understand that the “battle against egalitarian fanatics” cannot be fought without recourse to facts and nuances.