Competing Equalities

Can a democratic society pursue a policy of compensatory discrimination without forsaking equality or sliding into a system of group quotas? For over thirty years, India has been engaged in a massive effort to integrate "untouchables" and other oppressed peoples into the mainstream of Indian life. This book is the first comprehensive study of the Indian experience with policies of systematic preferential treatment. Galanter includes a discussion of the relation of the courts to public policy in his analysis of the choices and tensions in the Indian policies of compensatory preference.

This is the third edition of a painstakingly researched and remarkably comprehensive book on the Indian experiment with constitutionally sanctioned policies of preferential treatment/ compensatory discrimination/ affirmative action on behalf of the historically oppressed and excluded castes and classes of the country. The policies were meant originally to be transitional arrangements, the nation's ultimate goal being the establishment of a casteless and classless society. The way things turned out however, both caste and class have remained deeply entrenched as legal, administrative, political, and social realities. The book traces the pre - independence history of the developing concern for the 'depressed classes' in the first part of the twentieth century, the debates in the Constituent Assembly, and goes on to a critical analysis of the first thirty years of the constitutional regime of preferential treatment for identified beneficiaries - Scheduled Castes/ Scheduled Tribes/ other Backward Classes - in the fields of legislative representation, employment, education, and government service. The book's special emphasis is on the role of the higher judiciary and its interventions in the course of cases arising from the policy of reservation, as well as the constitutional context of fundamental rights. This edition includes a preface written by the author for the second (paperback) edition published in 1991, following the controversy over the proposal to implement the Mandal Commission Report. It also includes a new introduction summing up the current situation.

Examines the United Progressive Alliance-led government's (2004-14) agenda for the religious minorities in India.

This book makes a significant contribution to the ongoing global conversations on the various understandings of equality. It illuminates the many ways in which diverse equality guarantees clash, or are interrelated. It also sets out principled approaches on how they can be coherently interpreted to address the myriad inequalities in Kenya. Taking a comparative approach, the book considers how other jurisdictions including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa, India and Botswana have approached the conceptualisation, interpretation and application of various equality concepts. The book focuses on important issues such as: - transformative constitutionalism in relation to the interpretation of Kenya's 2010 Constitution; - expanding the list of enumerated grounds for non-discrimination; - affirmative action; - accommodating religious and cultural diversity versus gender equality; - the interrelation between socio-economic rights and status-based equality.

A cross-cultural volume that investigates the question of how social minorities are formed

This monograph explores some of the conceptual questions which underpin the legal disputes which arise in relation to equality and discrimination. Among these are questions about the meaning of 'equality' as a legal concept and its relationship to the principle of non-discrimination; symmetrical and asymmetrical approaches to equality/non-discrimination; the role of comparators in discrimination/equality analysis; the selection of protected characteristics and the proper sphere of statutory and constitutional protections, and the scope for and regulation of potential conflicts between protected grounds. The author engages with domestic, EU and ECtHR case law as well as with wider international approaches.

The Politics and Practice of Religious Diversity engages with one of the most characteristic features of modern society. An increasingly prominent and potentially contentious phenomenon, religious diversity is intimately associated with contemporary issues such as migration, human rights, social cohesion, socio-cultural pluralisation, political jurisdiction, globalisation, and reactionary belief systems. This edited collection of specially-commissioned chapters provides an unrivalled geographical coverage and multidisciplinary treatment of the socio-political processes and institutional practices provoked by, and associated with, religious diversity. Alongside chapters treating religious diversity in the ‘BRIC’ countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China, are contributions which discuss Australia, Finland, Mexico, South Africa, the UK, and the United States. This book provides an accessible, distinctive and timely treatment of a topic which is inextricably linked with modern society’s progressively diverse and global trajectory. Written and structured as an accessible volume for the student reader, this book is of immediate interest to both academics and laypersons working in mainstream and political sociology, sociology of religion, human geography, politics, area studies, migration studies and religious studies.