Caste, Constitution, Court, Equality: The Social Justice Imbroglio in Contemporary India
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How do democratic ideals and constitutional provisions of inclusive citizenship and “reasonable classification” of universal rights to combat social oppression and promote social justice get worked out in the crannies of state policies, citizen politics and legislative and legal pronouncements? This article addresses these issues by revisiting the convoluted trajectory of positive discrimination (termed “reservation”) in India as an illustrative and instructive example. It combines an innovative reading of Constitutional Assembly Debates, constitutional provisions, constitutional amendments, and crucial Supreme Court rulings to trace the gradual undoing of constitutional ideals and provisions. An exploration of changing state policies in tune with the imperatives of a neo-liberal Hindu authoritarian regime, and shifting electoral demands of privileged upper castes and classes, allows the article to underscore a radical shift in ethos that has resulted in an interrogation of constitutional provisions for social equality and justice. A lack of consensus on the justifiability of (re)distribution of resources by extending special benefits to the socially suppressed (“backward”) castes and classes of citizens, has laid bare the ambiguities inherent in constitutional ideals and provisions, highlighted the resourceful use of such ambiguities by the socially entitled citizens to disavow caste-based social oppression, and insist on economic weakness that hampers equal opportunity as the fair ground for “reservation.” A shift in emphasis from “social backwardness” of the oppressed to “economic weakness” of the advantaged in the language of the state ratified by the Supreme Court, underscores the undemocratic consequences of democratic provisions. A serious interrogation of the fairness of reasonable classification of equality and the justifiability of distribution on the part of the socially privileged, has served to disavow calls for social justice and recognition of difference by the oppressed, and overturned the basic premise of equal respect that ground liberal theories of social justice and social democracy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".