What is reservation, and did Ambedkar invent it?
Reservation is the setting aside of a proportion of something — seats in legislatures, posts in government employment, places in state educational institutions — for communities listed in a schedule. It is not one policy but three, on different provisions with different histories and expiry rules, and most arguments collapse the three into one.
The three, kept apart
- Seats in legislatures. Articles 330 and 332 reserve seats in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Article 334 reserved these for ten years, and it is that clause — not the whole of reservation — that Parliament has extended every decade since.
- Public employment. Article 16 permits reserving appointments for backward classes not adequately represented in the services, and Article 335 requires their claims to be weighed against administrative efficiency. There is no ten-year clause here and never was.
- Education. Article 15 permits special provision for socially and educationally backward classes and for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
He did not invent it. Reserved seats for the Depressed Classes were already the substance of the Poona Pact of 1932 — 148 in the provincial legislatures, eighteen per cent of the Central Legislature — and the schedule that names the Scheduled Castes was made under the 1935 Act. What the Constitution did in 1950 was carry an existing arrangement into a republic's founding document and attach it to an enforceable guarantee of equality. He chaired the committee that drafted it. Reservation is not a poverty programme and was never designed as one: the disability it answers is exclusion by birth, which money does not remove. Arguments that treat it as welfare for the poor are about a different policy; whether it should be one is a real and separate question.
He was also its sharpest critic on one point. A seat reserved inside a joint electorate is filled by the whole electorate's votes, so the winner is the candidate the majority finds acceptable — not the one the reserved community would have chosen. He made that argument from 1919, against the Poona Pact in 1932, until he died. In 1952 he lost his own Bombay North Central seat to a Congress candidate from his own community who had been his assistant — the first general election of the republic whose constitution he drafted demonstrating his objection on him personally.
Most of what is argued about in India today — the extension to the Other Backward Classes after the Mandal report was implemented in 1990, the fifty per cent ceiling set by the Supreme Court in 1992, the later quota for economically weaker sections — came after his death in December 1956 and cannot be attributed to him either way. This site covers his life, and stops where it stopped.