Seeking Equality in Multicultural Societies. As the U.S. debate over affirmative action seems to grow ever more rancorous and divisive, it seems clear that America desperately needs an infusion of new ideas to address the fundamental problems that affirmative action programs were intended to remedy. India, the world's largest democracy, has developed a legal system that is probably more similar to that of the United States than found in any other country, particularly in the field of constitutional law.
Similar quotas exist for higher education including exclusive medical and engineering schools.
In the first three decades selection of groups to receive preferential treatment was left largely to state governments, with the result that the Indian Supreme Court repeatedly struck down plans that seemed primarily to benefit politically powerful groups or that were based on traditional assumptions of caste-based prejudice without empirical research to show which groups were truly in greatest need. Proposed implementation in 1990 was delayed by protests from high-caste Hindus, both in the streets and in the courts, but is now moving forward since the Indian Supreme Court issued a comprehensive decision in 1992 largely approving the commission's proposals. Twenty years ago one man, Justice Lewis Powell, determined the course of American law on equality by rejecting two arguments for using quotas to increase medical school admissions from racial minority groups. Among the many useful lessons that might be learned from looking at India's experience, in this essay we focus on the topic of how beneficiary groups to receive affirmative action should be selected and defined by generalizing the principles of the Indian approach and then putting them into the U.S. context with the benefit of current social science research.