Manu Joseph | India’s Supreme Court is right: Exclude the creamy layer

livemint.com:

No other nation describes its elite as “creamy layer" because “cream" is enough to convey the idea of a top layer. But this is the least of India’s flaws. A few days ago, India tried to reform an injustice within its social justice programme when a Supreme Court bench said that caste is not a homogenous entity, and that the “creamy layers" of oppressed castes should not be entitled to the same benefits as the poor among them.

One of the judges said, “Putting the children of the parents from the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes who on account of benefit of reservation have reached a high position… and the children of parents doing manual work… in the same category would defeat the Constitutional mandate." Across the world, when a disadvantaged community is given special treatment, the elite among them, who might even be better off than the traditional elite, are the first to benefit. It is a way of the world; there are no villains in this. This was, in fact, an argument against political quotas for women.

It is hard to dispute that the way reservations have worked so far is by taking seats from upper castes and giving them to the privileged among oppressed castes. The government thought about the Supreme Court’s opinion and decided that it does not want to antagonize ‘creamy layers’ of Dalits, which is a term that refers to those who were traditionally oppressed by the Hindu caste system, including “outcastes" who were not assigned any caste. The government may have practical reasons, but its decision is not morally sound.

The Dalit community has its own caste structure, where top Dalit castes treat lower castes poorly. For instance, they don’t inter-marry and some high-castes do not even dine with lower castes. I