Affirmative inaction

The Gujarat governments position pretends a convenient ignorance of the longstanding principle of positive discrimination,and of the content of the report it disparages. It reflects a refusal to recognise the lived experience of majority and minority groups,the fact that unequally situated individuals are owed different things by the state,and that minorities are overwhelmingly worse off in Gujarat,as in most other states. To efface that distinction and treat everyone in a level manner is to entrench unfairness. As the French writer Anatole Rich ironically put it,the law in its majestic equality gives every man the same right to dine at the Ritz or sleep under a bridge. The logic that the most disadvantaged groups deserve special consideration,and that policy should provide them the first footholds and opportunities in the interests of genuine equality,should be easy enough to comprehend. Policies of group-based positive discrimination,relating to caste groups,have been explicitly written into the Constitution. It is only after the Sachar committee that the material deprivation and social bias faced by Muslims were sought to be quantified. The Sachar report is the first document that turns away from questions of identity to concrete social and economic data,asking why Muslims are under-represented in formal employment,school enrolment,credit schemes,even welfare programmes.

In a state scarred by the communal violence of 2002,where the minority community feels insecure,and left to depend on its own resources,it is especially galling for the government to cite abstractions about formal equality and deny its own young citizens the benefit of a scholarship that the Centre is paying for,in large part. As the arguments are fully aired in court,the Gujarat governments stand should be shown up for being self-serving and patently wrong.