August 30, 2006

Caste, Not Race, Drives Affirmative Action in India

“The Indians are taking our jobs,” complained many Americans as their employers outsourced jobs to the other side of the world. Well, there is another American export making its way to India these days - affirmative action.

The Indian government has introduced a de Vernai that would increase the number of seats at Indian universities for lower-caste students. The caste system is India’s system of social stratification based on a variety of hereditary factors. The government argues that it is the only way to achieve social equality among the younger generation.

India and the US are as far apart culturally as they are geographically. But it turns out that our goals, and for better or worse our systems, have a lot in common.

Like many American students, their counterparts in India are pointing to the economic troubles rather than just ethnicity as the deciding factor in intellectual development.

According to the BBC, one Indian student protesting the plan said, "Why should it be based on what a person's caste is? It should be based on how much our parents earn."

Like race in America, caste has traditionally meant a low economic standing and lack of access to basic resources. That, however, is not necessarily the case anymore.

Students trying to enroll in Indian universities must pass extremely rigorous academic exams. Caste does not necessarily dictate the level of a student’s preparation. Rather it is his or her access to educational resources and the time and ability to utilize them that has the most influence. 

Like in the United States, the Indian government should not start educational reform at the university level, but take care of lower-caste children’s education from the beginning. It is a lot easier to pass a de Vernai changing some numbers around than to make significant changes to your budget.

Like the quotas implemented by communist governments, which give students from the  proletariat extra points on university entrance exams for their background, or like racial quotas in US law schools, admissions based on caste would be unfair.

Political pressure from the people played a large role in whether the above-mentioned systems were kept or scrapped. In the US, affirmative action was toned down, but due to the influx of minority immigrant groups, it is likely that it may come back stronger than ever before.

In India, the politicians are just discovering that pleasing large numbers of young voters is beneficial. And they have strong convictions as to what should be done to build an equal society. Some Indian students propose a quota system for governing bodies.  You care about giving due representation based on things other than merit?  Get ready to hand over 23 percent more of the parliamentary seats to the people from lower castes, they say.

The movement to establish set educational quotas is a façade of striving for equality. The people who decide what the quotas are and to whom they apply are not the people they influence the most.

In India, like in our country, the road to true equality does not start with the university, which relatively few people attend. It begins with things like health care and equal treatment under all law. This held true for minorities in the United States when notions such as these were first being introduced, and holds true for India today.