The Impact of Affirmative Action in India: More Political than Socioeconomic

India was probably the first field for experimentation with positive discrimination policies. Christian missionaries and British colonial authorities, inspired by utilitarians, wanted to improve the human condition through programs for the advancement of the underprivileged. As early as the late nineteenth century, the first beneficiaries of these policies were found among the victims of India’s inherently inegalitarian system of castes. At the top of this social system are the “twice born,” including the Brahmins, and at the bottom the Untouchables, ostracized out of a belief that they were impure from birth. According to the census taken every ten years since 1871, this segment of the population made up about onetenth of India’s inhabitants by the end of the nineteenth century. Untouchables, then, were the logical first targets of the colonial positive discrimination policy, which in the course of time was to take the form of quotas, known as “reservations.” This policy became even more systematic when India achieved independence, but it brought only limited results. By contrast, its extension to the castes ranked just above the Untouchables sparked fierce debate and had a major political impact disproportionate to its socioeconomic effect, which has remained inconsequential. Hence the two paradoxes on which this article focuses: first, Dalits “benefited from” their very low status in the sense that caste, in their case, was immediately identified as the relevant criterion for positive discrimination, whereas it took decades to reach the same conclusion in the case of the caste groups situated just above them; second, while the political scene has been profoundly transformed, at least in North India, by the controversial implementation of reservations for these low castes, in practice these measures did not produce any substantial socioeconomic changes.