Merit and Justice -- Amartya Sen

Today population is divided into two portions: one who vehemently oppose selection by merit and believe it is constructed as another tool to advance control by privileged class and the other group who believes meritocracy as a whole is the only morally sound principal for advancing society. What has caused this significant difference in perception? Is the difference in perception because:
1. losers in a meritocratic system oppose it and the winners support it?
2. one group is observing the advantaged elite and the other group focusing on importance of society to progress?
Or, Is there more in the debate?

Off course this debate has stirred academia to identify the points of justification and the points of oppose. Amartya Sen identifies societal foundations of meritocracy and its limitations in this first chapter of the book "Meritocracy and Economic Inequality". Sen argues that merit system involves rewarding good actions in a society so that it could lead to good consequences in the society. For example, giving police job and good remuneration to a person who is identified to be knowledgeable in enactment of law will cause better enforcement of laws and will benefit the society as a whole (mine own). So "meritocracy is just an extension of a general system of rewarding merit and elements of such a system clearly have been present in one form or another throughout human history".

However, rewarding merit is conditional on what we consider good in the society. For example, in a totalitarian society or a country with a foreign rule may consider enforcement of arbitrary laws, and rewarding and recruiting best people for law enforcement to be bad for the society (mine own). Similarly Sen argues that if removing economic inequality is good for a society then the society may reward those positions and actions that have distributive outcomes.

A second point that Sen argues is that the actual value of reward is separated from the action for it to have any productive role. For example, paying something for his knowledge of law enactment in a specific case has no productive aspect (and just trade aspect) and only when we assign the job of enforcement of all laws to a person with some demonstateable actions will have any productive value. Similarly, choosing students for teaching engineering cannot involve testing them for engineering and has to be something different. Sen argues that people are skeptical of the system when the difference between reward and the measure is revoltingly high. I am actually not able to combine the above two arguments well: Isn't taking account of an unrelated objective like reducing economic disparity or providing social justice into the selection of a police officer actually widens the difference between the criteria of selection and the work required of a police officer. So can we put arbitrarily any objective into the rewarding system?

Some additional arguments that may creep into judging merit:

1. Personification and genetics: Rewarding of good action by a person changing into a label of 'meritorious' or personification of the person.

2. Desert and entitlement: Rewarding good action does not necessarily mean that a person "intrinsically deserves" to get more. It has to be judged by what is good in the society which is external to the person.

3. Distribution independence: A system of rewarding merits may well generate inequalities of well being and of other advantages. But much would depend on the nature of consequences that are sought on the basis of which merits are to be characterized. If the results desired have a strong distributive component, then in assessing merit concerns about distribution and inequality would enter the evaluation.

Review: Falling over backwards -- Arun Shourie

Falling over backwards
-- An essay against Reservations and against Judicial populism
By Arun Shourie (2006)

Arun Shourie presents an insightful view into the reservation debate from the most important point: Lawmaking and Judiciary. Today the reservation debate has informed common people on the positive and negative aspects of reservation. However, the major decision making does not involve common people and rests with the Legislatures and the Judiciary. Because of this distribution of power, knowing about how legislature and judiciary have answered the reservation debate in last 60 years of our independence is increasingly important.

After independence, the framers of our constitution decided that the principle of divide and rule played by the Britishers have caused the partition of India and Pakistan. They believed that Government should play an active role in removing all forms of discrimination. To achieve this goal, they incorporated a number of provisions in the constitution as the inviolable fundamental rights. Shourie provides a detailed view on the fundamental rights against discrimination as in Article 14: right to equality, Article 16(1): right to equal opportunity in government employment, Article 16(2): " No citizen shall, on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, descent, place of birth, residence or any of them, be ineligible for, or discriminated against in respect of any employment or office under the state. For

Then Shourie provides detailed analysis of how Supreme Court interpreted Constitution in striking down different laws and some Judges accepting them by a liberal interpretation of the provision and making room for reservation. Whenever the court struck down any law, the legislatures were quick and alert to immediately change the constitution with unanimous voice and complete absence of debate on the floor. Specifically:
The first amendment in 1951 was actually carefully argued by Nehru and even B.R. Ambedkar on the pros and cons of this provision.

Article 15 (4) Nothing in this article or in clause (2) of Article 29 shall
prevent the State from making any special provision for the
advancement of any socially and educationally backward classes of
citizens or for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes.

When Supreme court ruled that quotas in promotion means differentiating between equal class of people Constitution was quickly amended to:

Article 16 (4A) Nothing in this article shall prevent the State from making any provision for reservation in matters of promotion, with consequential seniority, to any class or classes of posts in the services under the State in favour of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes which, in the opinion of the State, are not adequately represented in the services under the State.

When Supreme court ruled that not more than 50% of the seats can be reserved in any year, the Constitution was amended to carry over unfilled reserved vacancies to other years:

(4B) Nothing in this article shall prevent the State from considering any unfilled vacancies of a year which are reserved for being filled up in that year in accordance with any provision for reservation made under clause (4) or clause (4A) as a separate class of vacancies to be filled up in any succeeding year or years and such class of vacancies shall not be considered together with the vacancies of the year in which they are being filled up for determining the ceiling of fifty per cent. reservation on total number of vacancies of that year.

Supreme Court ruled in August 2005 that Government cannot prescribe its reservation policy to unaided institution. The Article 15 in the Constitution was amended in Dec 2005 to reverse that:

5) Nothing in this article or in sub-clause (g) of clause (1) of article 19 shall prevent the State from making any special provision, by law, for the advancement of any socially and educationally backward classes of citizens or for the Scheduled Castes or the Scheduled Tribes in so far as such special provisions relate to their admission to educational institutions including private educational institutions, whether aided or unaided by the State, other than the minority educational institutions referred to in clause (1) of article 30.".

Shourie presents a detailed analysis of Supreme Court Judges in their warnings to the Government and some Supreme Court Judges who thought specific implementation of social justice was important even if it meant breaching fundamental rights.

Shourie book will make you thinking on some important questions:

1. Were other backward castes (OBC's) really "enslaved" by upper castes?

2. How discrimination based on caste started when our constitution does not allow it? How identification of backward classes was reduced to castes and how Supreme court accepted this argument even with a fractured verdict in the Mandal Case?

3. How legislatures have pushed India to have reservation in just everything from Government Jobs, educational institutions (aided or unaided) to even threatening to the private sector? How we have moved from 50% reservation in city colleges to highest institutions in the country?

4. Is there a way of providing social justice without abrogating fundamental rights on such a large scale?

5. How SC has set the limit to 50% and on what argument?

Hope I have inspired you enough to pick up the book :)