Justice on the cheap

A brilliant observation from Pratap Bhanu Mehta's op-ed in the Indian Express.

Quotas are our justice on the cheap; as happened with SCs, once we gave them, we absolved ourselves of larger and more difficult ethical questions about discrimination and so forth. Formal representational equality makes it politically harder, not easier, to articulate the case for substantive equality.

Quite right. We've had a SC president, an SC Chief Justice. But at grassroots level, SCs are still discriminated againt. This is the fallout of our attempt at social engineering.