Description
- RELEASE DATE : NOVEMBER 2021
- Author: Abhinav Chandrachud
- Pub: November 2021
- ISBN: 9780670094752
- Price: Rs. 699/-
- Category: Non-fiction/Politics & Government
- Binding: Hardback
- Extent: 320
ABOUT THE BOOK
By examining the history and evolution of the equality provisions in
the Constitution of India, This Seat is Reserved seeks to shed light on the
emotionally charged, decades-old debate concerning caste-based
reservations in India. Its objective is to introduce the reader to the law and
history of quotas in the country.
In this book Abhinav traces how groups eligible for reservations were
identified and defined: how the terms 'depressed classes' and 'backward
classes' were used in British India and how they evolved into the
constitutional concepts of 'Scheduled Castes' (SC), 'Scheduled Tribes' (ST),
and 'Other Backward Classes' (OBC). It looks at how the Supreme Court
invented tests to impose limits on quotas in the country - the rule that no
more than 50% of the available seats or positions can be reserved, the
principle that the 'creamy layer' must not receive the benefit of quotas, the
requirement that governments must have "quantifiable data" before
providing certain kinds of reservations. It examines the intellectual debates
that have taken place on these questions over the course of India's history
in the Constituent Assembly, the Supreme Court and Parliament. For
instance: are reservations an exception to the principle of equality of
opportunity? Do quotas in government service, especially in promotions,
undermine efficiency? Can 'merit' really be defined neutrally and do marks
in board exams or entrance exams really demonstrate a student's
intelligence? Thought-provoking, argumentative and comprehensive, this
book will interest history enthusiasts and general readers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Abhinav Chandrachud is an advocate who practises at the Bombay High
Court. He graduated from the LLM programme at Harvard Law School,
where he was a Dana Scholar, and from the JSM and JSD programmes at
Stanford Law School, where he was a Franklin Family Scholar. He has worked
as an associate attorney at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, a global law firm, and
as a paralegal at AZB & Partners, a leading law firm in India. He is the author
of Republic of Rhetoric: Free Speech and the Constitution of India (2017),
Supreme Whispers: Conversations with Judges of the Supreme Court of India
1980-1989 (2018) and Republic of Religion: The Rise and Fall of Colonial
Secularism in India (2020). He writes a column for Bloomberg Quint.
