Wilful surrender is often the best defence when history demands correction of a legacy of sinful domination and exploitation over the majority. History repeatedly demonstrates that when a ruling class anticipates a grave resurgence of revenge or resistance from the suffering or victimised majority, the wisest course is often accommodation and voluntary surrender rather than confrontation. Standing against the wave of awakening to injustice, disparity and partiality has historically been devastating for those who attempted to preserve an old order beyond its time.

Reservation, viewed against India's centuries-old legacy of discrimination, is therefore not necessarily equitable justice for the entirety of the atrocities, betrayal and deception historically suffered by marginalised communities. It is, at best, a mechanism of containment, correction and institutional accommodation.

The new mushrooming aspirational leadership, fanning the sentiments of desperate unemployed youth of the upper castes and victimising reservation for all their economic and professional anxieties, is not merely treachery; it can become a national-security issue when legitimate economic frustration is deliberately converted into caste hostility.

Any person of sound mind, with abundant access to data, can make out that the jobs affected by reservation are so minuscule in relation to India's total employment universe that they cannot possibly explain the unemployment crisis of India's upper-caste youth, leave alone that of the country as a whole.

The Government's Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS), 2025 estimates that 61.6 crore persons aged 15 years and above were employed in India during 2025. Youth unemployment among 15–29-year-olds was 9.9%, while unemployment among educated persons aged 15+ with secondary education or above was 6.5%.

Against this enormous labour market, the Department of Personnel and Training's latest detailed Central Government data records 32,52,152 employees across 80 Ministries and Departments as on 1 January 2024. Of these, SC employees numbered 5,47,822 (16.84%), ST employees 2,82,785 (8.70%) and OBC employees 8,55,900 (26.32%).

The comparison is revealing: Central Government employment covered by this dataset is only a tiny fraction of India's total employment. Therefore, reservation in government employment cannot possibly be the principal explanation for India's mass unemployment problem.

Reservation was never designed to eradicate unemployment or poverty.

It is a tool to ensure participation, representation and equal accessibility to the institutions of administration and governance, and to universalise the State against the possibility of backdoor control by historically dominant or prevalent feudal classes.

Caste-based reservation addresses a different problem from unemployment. Poverty is economic; unemployment is largely structural and economic; caste is fundamentally social. Reservation seeks to correct historical exclusion from institutions and public opportunities. That distinction is repeatedly lost in the political debate.

The civil-suit test

If the upper castes have genuine discontent with reservation, they should statistically and intellectually analyse their claims, legally and scientifically. Technically speaking, caste politics should be approached like a civil suit: the plaintiff's first duty is to verify his own title before claiming his rightful share.

Before claiming exclusion because of reservation, one must establish with data the actual jobs and institutions affected, the proportion of employment and representation involved, and the claimant community’s population share, otherwise it remains merely an allegation. This is why a caste census is imminent and indispensable. The Union Government has decided that Census 2027 will include caste enumeration, with caste data to be collected during the second phase of population enumeration.

A comprehensive caste census can finally answer the questions political slogans cannot: population share, educational attainment, employment, government representation, economic position, ownership of assets, political representation and social mobility. If a community constitutes a certain share of the population but remains substantially under-represented in institutions of power, the disparity is measurable. If it is proportionately represented, the policy can be reviewed.

The debate can then be settled statistically rather than emotionally. Reservation should continue for as long as the evidence demonstrates that the disparity which necessitated it survives. The ultimate objective should be that population proportion and institutional participation progressively converge.

Without such meticulous study, every claim against reservation risks becoming a power tussle in which everyone is not taking a stand for a just cause, but many are taking a stand for a selfish cause in their blind desire for overreaching and over-franchising.

It is therefore not simply a claim to the "right to equality" or "right to equal opportunity." In its more unscrupulous form, it becomes a design to establish a system supporting a claim to a "right to exploitation."

Reservation is not the enemy of merit

The debate also cannot honestly be reduced to reservation versus merit. Merit is not produced in a social vacuum. A child born into an educated household, with access to good schools, private coaching, books, technology, nutrition, stable housing and professional networks, does not begin competition from exactly the same social position as someone who has inherited centuries of exclusion. Reservation is a measure to protect talent which is lost to social disparity and institutionalised agony, it’s not an incentive but rightful opportunity to participate.

Reservation is not a substitute for economic growth, job creation, education or poverty eradication. It is an instrument of representation. Therefore, telling an unemployed young man that reservation is the reason he cannot find employment is not an economic diagnosis. It is a political narrative. That is a dangerous redirection of economic frustration into caste conflict.

The historical question

The upper castes should be mindful of history and learn from the British. When the British realised that Indians had awakened, understood the forms and designs of colonial domination and were no longer prepared to accept the legitimacy of imperial rule, the prudent policy was ultimately to leave rather than endlessly fight the awakening. The analogy is not that caste hierarchy and British colonialism were identical. They were not. The lesson is political: When a majority becomes conscious of a system it believes has historically exploited or excluded it, the prudent policy of a dominant group is accommodation, reform and voluntary surrender of privilege rather than confrontation with the awakening itself. India's constitutional settlement after Independence similarly represented an historic compromise. Historically privileged communities accepted reforms designed to correct centuries of social exclusion. That was not surrender of dignity, It was surrender of the assumption that historical privilege must remain hereditary. Any desire to remain in the past and reform society according to an archaic order can have dire consequences. Democracy, however incompetent it may sometimes be, gives every five years a fertile opportunity for reform and rightful resurgence.

The decline of leadership

When reservation was formulated and subsequently expanded legislatively and constitutionally, the upper castes were more than adequately represented and politically powerful. They were not powerless spectators being forced into a settlement without representation. If today's protesting masses doubt the intellectual capacity of those who created or defended this constitutional project, they should first introspect about their own leadership. The present generation of caste-oriented leadership comprising of Yogi Aditya Nath, Giriraj Singh, Anant singh, Anand Mohan etc., is difficult to compare with the calibre of leaders such as Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Dr. Rajendra Prasad and Sri Krishna Singh. There is equally no meaningful comparison between V. P. Singh, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, P. V. Narasimha Rao and Chandrashekhar and much of today's upper-caste political leadership.

The point is that political leadership appears to have progressively detonated intellectually, with each succeeding generation becoming more timid, more dependent upon identity arithmetic and less intellectually ambitious than its predecessors. Amateurs, apprentices and ignorants never bring revolutions. They bring devastating anarchies. Today's incapable upper-caste leadership and unverified, unauthorised and unqualified social-media intellectuals are playing with fire. That fire may eventually exhume and consume the very people who are attempting to ignite it.

The upper caste is not a monolith. It has its noisy, uninformed and self-obsessed voices, but it also has an intelligentsia capable of reading history beyond immediate grievance.

They remember Partition. They understand the tragedy of Tamils in Sri Lanka. They know that when caste-based economic, social and political tensions are allowed to spiral, the fire rarely respects the boundaries of those who lit it.

They also recognise that reservation has enabled historically marginalised communities to advance, without erasing the accumulated social, economic and political advantages historically enjoyed by privileged communities.

If such constitutional reforms are suffocated, however, the alternative may not be preservation of the existing order. When the pressure valve of reform is blocked, the demand may shift from reservation to redistribution, from representation in institutions to redistribution of resources, land and private property, and eventually towards more radical, even communist-style, restructuring.

That is why historically privileged communities must understand the difference between controlled constitutional reform and uncontrolled social restructuring. Reservation may itself be the pressure valve that prevents the pressure cooker from exploding.

The proposition is therefore simple: Either continue with the existing evidence-based reservation policy, or move towards genuinely equal competition after dismantling privilege and making the starting conditions genuinely comparable, only then can merit theory truly prevail. Otherwise, abolishing reservation without dismantling inherited privilege would merely change the rules while preserving the old advantage, which will apparently bring back the older order of caste based exploitation and will push the society back into dark ages.

A national conversation before the fire spreads

I am confident that if all political parties put together a universal workshop, something like the Prime Minister's Mann Ki Baat, it could educate the masses and settle the reservation conundrum significantly. The country should be shown the reality comprising of caste-wise population, employment, government representation, educational attainment, economic position and social mobility.

But do not allow aspirational politicians, desperate unemployed youth and unverified social-media intellectuals to manufacture a caste war out of an employment crisis. The overuse of reservation as a political issue is pushing Indian society towards mistrust and fragmentation. A conscientious effort must address this immediately, before it is blown out of proportion and causes severe damage, no political entity will ultimately benefit. Rather, a universal apocalypse may fall upon society itself, and anyone can become its victim.

The historically privileged should understand that history does not disappear because it becomes inconvenient to discuss. And political leadership should understand that its responsibility is not to tell unemployed youth whom to hate, but why the economy is failing to produce sufficient opportunities and what must be done about it.

Wilful surrender of historical privilege is not defeat. Sometimes it is the most intelligent form of self-preservation. Because when a society awakens to an old injustice, the wise do not attempt to extinguish the awakening, they accommodate it, they reform with it, and to the most can negotiate with it. And, when necessary, they surrender what history gave them unfairly, before history comes to take it back in a manner over which nobody retains control.

- Advocate Mukesh Kishor, Managing Partner at Audacious Law Network, is a Supreme Court lawyer championing human and labour rights with a strong focus on fair labour practices and safeguarding fundamental freedoms.