Equality by any other name

"Most of us react angrily if we feel we are being treated unequally. While the rhetoric of equality is often used as a mere slogan by politicians, most people intuitively feel that it captures something truly important about the human essence.

- NAYANTARA ROY

Forget academic debates concerning the distribution of government benefits and historic patterns of inequality, even very young children will reject the idea of being treated unequally. Thus, equality seems to capture something unique, almost primeval, about us as persons."

With these words, Saurabh Kirpal, a senior Supreme Court lawyer, sums up the results of a research study carried out on employees of corporations in California in regard to equality in Who is Equal: The equality code of the constitution, a wonderfully unusual book on an aspect of law that concerns us at a basic humanitarian level but is often buried in technicalities and polemics. Writing deftly and in an easy style, he takes the reader through a philosophical and jurisprudential understanding of equality as a concept and thence, through its historical progress and judicial handling in Indian law and society.

At the base of the book is the author's contention that "there are multiple and often competing visions of what it means to be equal and how best to achieve that goal". As he writes, "When we look around and ask, who is equal, the short answer is not very many."

Expounding on the complexities of the concept, he points out that a "Dalit or a woman, may suffer discrimination at the workplace, but their experiences would not be identical. The experience of a Dalit woman would also be distinctive because it's an amalgamation of the two axes of discrimination".