Empowerment

Empowerment through the expansion of the civil, political and social rights of citizenship is a laborious and unexciting process. Empowerment through the class struggle was a different story altogether; but that story has now been played out and it offers hardly any new prospect. There is no doubt the prospect of empowerment through caste war; but that is something that will appeal only to those who have put their minds to sleep. So in the end, the Indian way of securing empowerment for the unempowered seems to be by the safe way of providing, as extensively as possible, quotas on the basis of community, caste and gender. But can the belief that quotas, no matter how extensive, can by themselves bring about a radical or even a perceptible redistribution of power be anything more than wishful thinking?