What is affirmative action? Substantiate theoretical positions on affirmative actions with example. (UPSC CSE Mains 2019 - Sociology, Paper 1)
- Affirmative action refers to the set of policies of the Governments to support members of disadvantaged groups that have historically faced discrimination in the areas of education, employment, housing and respect in the society. The main goals of affirmative action are to bridge inequalities in access to education, employment, equal pay, better standards of living.
- As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “There is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.” Here, arises the need for such positive discrimination which would make humanity more humane and progressive. Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics wrote, justice is equality, as all men believe it to be quite apart from any argument. Indeed, in Greek, the word equality means justice. To be just is to be equal and to be unjust is to be unequal.
- Affirmative action becomes essential in righting societal inequities. It is based on the “principle of redress”; that undeserved inequalities call for rectification. Since inequalities of birth are undeserved, these inequalities are to be somehow compensated for.
- According to John Rawls, thus, in order to treat all persons equally and to provide genuine equality of opportunity, society must give more attention to those born into or placed in less favourable social positions. Affirmative action was established as a part of society’s efforts to address continuing problems of discrimination; the empirical evidence presented in the preceding pages indicates that it has had a somewhat positive impact on remedying the effects of discrimination. whether such discrimination still exists today is a central element of any analysis of affirmative action.
- India has been practicing affirmative action in its essence, longer and more aggressively than any other place in the world. It is with the lofty aim of alleviating the sufferings of the underprivileged and exploited sections of Indian society and for reconstruction and transformation of a hierarchical society emphasizing inequality into a modern egalitarian society based on individual achievement and equal opportunity for all that the protective discrimination programme was devised under the Indian Constitution. However, this ideal of egalitarianism did not come about in a day or two; rather it was the culmination of a long process of change in the traditional pattern of a medieval caste ridden society. These changes were, in fact, the culmination of a long drawn process of transformation in the traditional patterns of a caste-ridden society. Two factors worked as catalysts in the process; the indigenous reforms and western influences. Reservations in jobs, educational institutions, legislatures and in local self-governing institutions, better known as Panchayati Raj institutions for scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, other backward classes and now women has been a grand experiment by any standard. It may also be noted that scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and other backward classes are a whole cluster of thousands of castes spread over the length and breadth of the country.
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