The ongoing crisis in coalition politics has led many persons to call for a comprehensive review of our present Constitution. It is rightly believed that such a review is an essential condition for devising a more coherent, a more effective and more stable system of governance ...
... Our ... Constitution is not a bare blueprint for just a particular form of governance, but a bold challenging design for a new type of society based on the equal rights of individual in place of the old one based on the hierarchy of castes. The transformation of a whole society ... Naturally, many unsuspected obstacles have appeared in the path of this transformation, and the Constitution has had to be amended some four-score times in less than 50 years. Have all these amendments carried us forward, or are some of them going to set us backward?
The Constitution ... sought ... a new conception of citizenship ... But to appreciate what is owed to the citizen as an individual is not easy in a society that has been dominated by caste, clan and community for 2,000 years. The claims of the individual are overlooked and disregarded, and this undermines the value placed on citizenship which is the bedrock of our legal and constitutional order.
In the old order, the relationship between the individual and the State was mediated by kingroup, caste and community; the idea of an unmediated relationship between the individual as citizen and the state did not exist ... The passage from such an order to one in which the individual is treated on merit, without consideration of race, caste or creed is of the most momentous social and political significance.
The demand for restrictions on what is due to the individual as a citizen is ... made in the name of equality ... The marks of the invidious social distinctions are visible everywhere ... It is important to devise policies that will lead to the reduction if not their elimination ... over time. But those policies cannot be grounded on the assumption that disadvantaged castes and communities have rights that can override (those of) individuals as citizens ... Quotas based on caste, community and gender directly threaten the conception of citizenship on which our Constitution rests.
In the first ten to 15 years after independence, the extension of caste quotas in the name of equality was viewed with suspicion and mistrust. Kaka Kalelkar, the Chairman of the first Backward Classes Commission had written in 1955 that nothing should be allowed to organise itself between the individual at one end and the nation at the other 'to the detriment of the freedom of the individual and the solidarity of the nation'. Justice Gajendragadkar had in 1962 condemned the reckless extension of caste quotas as a "fraud on the Constitution" ...
... There are no short cuts to equality, and that quota justice is for the benefit of the politicians and not the people. And yet, the juggernaut of reservations moves forward. (Source: The Times of India, 5 August, 1998)
Shahabuddin's Response Letter to The Times of India, 11 August, 1998
In a plural and segmented society, group rights are as important as the rights of the individual. In fact, the internationally accepted view of human rights covers group rights, as well in terms of sub-national collectivities. Further more, in a state of India's size, the relation between the State and the citizens have to be mediated by regional as well as ethnic formations.
Reservation for women as proposed is inequitable not only from the class angle but also from the ethnic angle, though it concedes sub-quotas for SC and ST women. Why not for OBC and Muslim women - indeed for the women of any identifiable and self-conscious group whose population entitles it to at least one seat? Such quotas will only serve to give body and life to the relation between the State and the social groups, between the Constitution and the discrete collectivities of citizens who are today only nominally equal.