Social Justice

Justice is a little like love. We know what it means even when we cannot define it perfectly, and almost everyone wants it. The oldest and simplest definition comes from Plato. Justice means giving each person their due. The hard part is to decide what is actually due to a person.

Today we answer that through dignity. The thinker Immanuel Kant said that every human being has dignity. So what is due to each person is a fair chance to develop their talents and follow their goals. Justice is therefore not a private matter between friends. It is about the way a whole society shares its benefits and its burdens. That is why it sits at the heart of politics.

Every culture has struggled with the idea of justice. In ancient India justice was tied to dharma, and a just order was the first duty of the king. In China the philosopher Confucius said that rulers should punish wrongdoers and reward the good. In Greece Plato asked a sharp question. Why should we be just at all when the dishonest often seem to do better?

Plato's answer was simple. If everyone cheated, no one would be safe. So it is in our own interest to be just. The lasting idea is that we must give each person their due. Over time the meaning of "due" has grown to cover what every human being deserves.

Giving each person their due needs three principles working together.

The first principle is equal treatment for equals. All of us share a common humanity, so we deserve equal rights and equal treatment. Two people who do the same work should get the same reward. No one should be judged by their caste, class, race or gender.

The second principle is proportionate justice. Equal treatment on its own is not enough. Suppose every student in a class got the same marks for an exam whatever their answers. That would feel unfair. Once everyone starts from the same base of equal rights, it is fair to reward people in proportion to their effort, their skill and the difficulty of their work.

The third principle is the recognition of special needs. Even equal treatment can leave some people behind. A visually impaired student may fairly be given extra time in an exam. Disability, age or a lack of good schooling are fair grounds for special help. This does not contradict equal treatment. It extends it. People who are unequal in important ways may need different treatment to become truly equal.

India has written the special-needs principle into law through the Persons with Disabilities Act. The Act gives persons with disabilities concrete legal entitlements:

• Free education: a child with a disability is entitled to free schooling in government schools until the age of 18.
• Preferential land allotment: persons with disabilities get preference in the allotment of land for setting up business.
• Barrier-free access: public buildings must provide ramps and similar features so that persons with disabilities can use them.

All three are benefits under the same Act. Exams often test whether a candidate knows that the Act covers all of them together.

Governments often find it hard to balance the three principles because pushing one of them too far can weaken another.

Fair laws are only part of justice. Social justice also means sharing goods and opportunities fairly. Where serious inequalities exist, a society may need to redistribute important resources so that citizens get a level playing field. Some concrete ways societies pursue just distribution:

• Removing past wrongs. India abolished untouchability so that people of every caste could use temples, jobs, wells and public places. The aim was not just to ban a practice. It was to open up opportunities that had been closed for centuries.
• Land reforms. Several Indian states broke up large estates and redistributed land to landless tillers. Owning land decides livelihood, status and bargaining power in a village economy.
• Affirmative action and reservations. Setting aside seats in education, jobs and legislatures for historically disadvantaged groups is a form of recognising special needs. It turns formal equality of rights into real equality of chances.
• A guaranteed minimum. Free or subsidised schooling, basic health care and a safety net for the very poor try to ensure that everyone starts from a decent base.

A standard objection is that redistribution can clash with proportionate justice. Heavy taxation or quotas may seem to penalise effort and merit. Balancing fair shares against fair rewards is the hard trade-off social justice has to manage.

Some injustices outlast the laws that ban them. Two of them have produced named campaigns and schemes that exams test.

• Manual scavenging: the caste-linked practice of cleaning human excreta by hand. It persists despite legal prohibition. Rashtriya Garima Abhiyaan is the national campaign to eradicate manual scavenging and to rehabilitate manual scavengers in dignified work. It is specifically about manual scavengers. Do not confuse it with rehabilitation schemes for bonded labourers or for sex workers.
• Child labour: Article 24 forbids employing children below fourteen in factories, mines and other hazardous work. The Gurupadswamy Committee (1979) studied child labour and recommended banning it in hazardous occupations while regulating it elsewhere. Its approach shaped the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986. The National Child Labour Projects (NCLP) scheme then withdraws working children and places them in special schools. NCLP is run by the Ministry of Labour and Employment, not the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment. The wrong ministry is a standard trap.

How can people agree on fair rules when everyone is tempted to choose rules that favour themselves? The thinker John Rawls offered a clever answer. Imagine that a group must decide how society should be organised. No member knows which place they will hold in it. They do not know whether they will be rich or poor, upper caste or lower caste, strong or weak. Rawls calls this thinking behind a veil of ignorance.

Behind the veil each person still acts in their own interest. But since anyone might turn out to be the worst-off person, each one chooses rules that protect the worst-off. They also make sure that the better-off are not crushed, because they themselves might be born into that group. The beauty of the idea is that it does not ask people to be saints. Ordinary self-interest leads to fairness once it is stripped of the knowledge of one's own position. That is why Rawls's approach is often called "justice as fairness".

From behind the veil, Rawls argues, rational people would agree on two principles of justice, in a fixed order of priority:

• First, the liberty principle. Each person is entitled to the most extensive set of basic liberties (such as freedom of speech, conscience and the vote) that is compatible with the same liberties for everyone else. These basic rights come first and cannot be traded away for economic gain.
• Second, once equal liberties are secured, social and economic inequalities are acceptable only if they meet two tests. First, positions must be open to all under fair equality of opportunity. Second, any inequality must work to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. This second condition is the famous "difference principle". An inequality is just only if it leaves the worst-off better than they would otherwise be.

Even when people agree that the weak should be helped, they disagree about how to do it. Supporters of free markets argue that open competition rewards talent without caring about caste, religion or gender. They say this produces a just result. Thinkers in this tradition, such as Robert Nozick, hold that if people acquire and exchange property fairly, the resulting distribution is just however unequal it turns out to be. On their view, forced redistribution by the state violates individual rights. The state should do little beyond protecting life, liberty and contracts. This is called the "minimal state".

Critics reply that private business goes where the profit is highest. Markets therefore tend to favour the strong and the wealthy. Remote villages are left with few schools. The poor cannot afford good health care. People who start with less can almost never catch up. This is why supporters of a welfare state argue that the government must step in. It should guarantee basic facilities for all, covering education, health, work and a minimum income. Many countries take a middle path. They let markets create wealth but use taxes and welfare schemes to spread the benefits. In a democracy this disagreement is healthy. Politics is the way we settle such differences through open debate rather than force.

Justice in a real democracy has to deal with the social differences people are born into. People differ by gender, by religion and by caste. These differences are not a problem in themselves. The real question is what politics does with them. A healthy democracy lets people express their differences and then works to address them fairly. A weak democracy lets one group use a difference to dominate the others, and that is when a difference becomes a division. Three kinds of social difference matter most in politics: gender, religion and caste. Each one meets politics in its own way.

The division between men and women is often treated as natural, but most of it is not. It is based on social expectations and stereotypes. Boys and girls are brought up to believe that their main roles are different. Society then values the work of men more than the work of women. A division of labour in which women do most of the housework and men work outside is found in almost every family. Yet it is rarely questioned.

For a long time this was seen as a private matter. The feminist movement changed that. Feminists argued that the personal is political. They demanded equal rights for women in education, in work and in the family, and they pushed for women to take part in public life. The Constitution backs this push in several ways:

• It bans discrimination on the ground of sex (Article 15(1)), but expressly lets the state make special provisions for women and children (Article 15(3)), so favouring women is not "reverse discrimination" but a permitted exception.
• The Directive Principles tell the state to secure equal pay for equal work for men and women (Article 39(d)) and adequate means of livelihood for both (Article 39(a)).
• Practices derogatory to the dignity of women are listed as a Fundamental Duty to renounce (Article 51A(e)).

This is also a political issue because women remain badly under-represented. Even though women are about half of the population, very few reach the legislatures. The fix is to reserve seats for women, and India has built this up in stages:

• Local bodies first. At least one-third of all directly elected seats in panchayats are reserved for women (Article 243D), and the same one-third floor applies in municipalities (Article 243T). Offices of chairperson may also be reserved. So a large slice of grassroots leadership is already set aside for women.
• Legislatures next. The Constitution (106th Amendment) Act, 2023 ("Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam") reserves one-third of seats in the Lok Sabha, the State Legislative Assemblies and the Delhi Assembly for women, on a rotational basis, with sub-reservation for SC/ST women inside that quota (it inserted Articles 330A and 332A). The catch: it takes effect only after the next census and a delimitation exercise redraw the constituencies, and then runs for 15 years.

Religion can enter politics in healthy ways. People may bring their religious values into public debate, and a believer may demand that the state treat all religions fairly. The problem begins when religion is used to claim that the followers of one faith form one community with the same political interests. The further claim is that this community is superior to others. This belief is called communalism.

Communalism can take many forms, from everyday prejudice, to the demand to form a political community on the basis of religion, to riots and violence in its most ugly form. It treats one religion's followers as a single political bloc and sets them against the rest. This is dangerous for a country as diverse as India.

India's answer to communalism is a secular state. The Constitution gives this concrete shape:

• It gives no religion the status of a state religion. The state has no official faith.
• It guarantees every person the freedom of conscience and the right to profess, practise and propagate any religion, or to follow none (Article 25), and lets religious denominations manage their own affairs (Article 26).
• It bans discrimination on the ground of religion (Article 15) and bars any religious test for public employment (Article 16(2)).
• It frees citizens from being taxed to promote any particular religion (Article 27) and from compulsory religious instruction in fully state-funded schools (Article 28).

The crucial point that exams test is the kind of secularism this is. India does not follow the Western "wall of separation", where the state stays completely away from religion. Indian secularism keeps a "principled distance": the state stays neutral, but it can step into a religion when a clear principle of justice or equality demands it. Examples include abolishing untouchability (Article 17), throwing open Hindu temples to all castes, or banning practices like sati. So Indian secularism means equal respect for all religions (sarva dharma sambhava), not indifference to them.

Caste is the third kind of social difference. India inherited a rigid caste system that decided a person's occupation and status by birth and treated some groups as untouchable. The Constitution outlawed this and gave the just-distribution measures discussed above a legal shape:

• Untouchability is abolished and its practice in any form is forbidden (Article 17). This provision sits inside the Right to Equality (Articles 14 to 18), not the Right against Exploitation. (The Right against Exploitation, Articles 23 and 24, bans forced labour, trafficking and child labour, a common point of confusion.)
• The state may make special provisions for backward classes, SCs and STs (Article 15(4)) and reserve posts in public employment for them (Article 16(4)).
• Indra Sawhney v Union of India (1992), the Mandal Commission case, set the ground rules still in force. Reservation in jobs is capped at about 50%, the well-off "creamy layer" must be excluded from OBC benefits, and there is no reservation in promotions (later allowed by amendment).
• Reservation must be balanced against the efficiency of administration (Article 335), but Article 335 does not itself define what "efficiency" means.

Caste has not disappeared from politics. It influences elections in several ways. When candidates are chosen, parties keep the caste make-up of a constituency in mind. When governments are formed, parties try to include different castes. And many voters feel close to candidates of their own caste.

But it would be wrong to think that caste alone decides elections. No single caste forms a majority in any constituency, so every candidate must win the support of several castes and communities to get elected. Many voters also look at the work of the government and the record of the party, not only at caste.

Just as caste shapes politics, politics shapes caste. Political competition makes castes aware of their numbers and their interests. It also brings together neighbouring castes that were earlier kept apart. So caste in politics is not simply caste feeling. It is a way in which groups press for their share in a democracy.