This Is A Somewhat Expanded Version Of The Paper Presented At The Ambedkar Memorial Lectures In The Univversity Of Bombay In 1980. It Tries To Explore The Implications Of The Position In Society Visualized For The Backward Classes In Our Constitution. Cover Slightly Shopsoiled, Text Clean, Condition Ok.

This is the third edition of a painstakingly researched and remarkably comprehensive book on the Indian experiment with constitutionally sanctioned policies of preferential treatment/ compensatory discrimination/ affirmative action on behalf of the historically oppressed and excluded castes and classes of the country. The policies were meant originally to be transitional arrangements, the nation's ultimate goal being the establishment of a casteless and classless society. The way things turned out however, both caste and class have remained deeply entrenched as legal, administrative, political, and social realities. The book traces the pre - independence history of the developing concern for the 'depressed classes' in the first part of the twentieth century, the debates in the Constituent Assembly, and goes on to a critical analysis of the first thirty years of the constitutional regime of preferential treatment for identified beneficiaries - Scheduled Castes/ Scheduled Tribes/ other Backward Classes - in the fields of legislative representation, employment, education, and government service. The book's special emphasis is on the role of the higher judiciary and its interventions in the course of cases arising from the policy of reservation, as well as the constitutional context of fundamental rights. This edition includes a preface written by the author for the second (paperback) edition published in 1991, following the controversy over the proposal to implement the Mandal Commission Report. It also includes a new introduction summing up the current situation.

Should quotas in education and employment be treated as matters of policy and not of right? Is the individual or groups of the community the fundamental bearer of rights and capacities? Can past disparities be adequately redressed? The author begins to address these issues with a sociological critique of the equality provisions in the Constitution of India. He argues that the problem is not simply of the contradiction between the principle of equality and the practice of inequality, but also of the tensions between divergent concepts of equality. He focuses on the problem of balancing the principle of equal opportunities with the principle of redress, citing disparities between groups that were such a striking feature of traditional India. The author argues that if caste quotas are treated as matters of right and extended indefinitely, there will be irreparable damage to institutions such as universities, hospitals and banks that are governed by principles that are radically different from those governing the relations between castes.