Quotas in India Have Yet to Create Harmony

According to proponents of Proposition 209, race-based affirmative action has fostered division and racial animosity. Proposition 209 opponents counter that affirmative action is necessary for historically disadvantaged minorities to succeed.

Both sides might benefit from looking at India, a country with the most extensive quota system in the world and where government routinely enforces preferences and hands out benefits based on accidents of birth. Unlike U.S. preference systems, the Indian system is based on one's caste, or one's place in the Hindu social hierarchy. Like race, caste is something one is born into, and caste in India is as sore -- if not sorer -- a subject as race is in the United States.

Everyone is classified in India. Those on top are descriptively called "forward castes," while those on the bottom are called "backward castes." More than half of government jobs and educational slots, and many seats in most state legislatures, are reserved for members of about 2,000 castes.

Caste-based preferences in India were established 50 years ago, when India gained its independence from Britain. Then, it was believed that caste-based discrimination was so pervasive that only a concerted, affirmative government effort could erase caste bonds. Today, caste-based affirmative action, by creating a system where certain castes had guaranteed privileges, has, if anything, succeeded in making people more aware of what caste they belong to. Victim status is a bonus in Indian politics.

In the 1980s, when the government tried to extend quotas to three-fourths of the Indian population, the forward castes, who would have been the net losers, responded with a series of public suicides by self-immolation. About two years ago, members of backward castes in the state of Maharashtra rioted over a misprint in a list of quota-eligible tribes; 113 people were killed in the worst incident of caste bloodshed in memory.

"Backward Caste employees must be promoted after five years with no regard for merit or seniority," a Brahman supervisor for Air India told U.S. News & World Report. "What incentive do they then have to do a good job?"

It all sounds eerily reminiscent of the affirmative action debate in the United States, although India has gone further down the road than we have. As opponents of Proposition 209 point out, racial and ethnic minorities have been oppressed in America. Indeed, so they have. But racial, ethnic and caste-based minorities have also been oppressed in India for thousands of years. And the evidence that government-sponsored affirmative action has succeeded in producing harmony between social groups in India is distressingly slight. Taking a look at the ethnic, religious, and caste-based violence in India, one cannot help but wonder whether quotas have exacerbated the problem.