Furthermore, the second premise of your argument – that others in an identical position save for caste are not worse off – is difficult to sustain. You make the point that class is not the only factor that makes one educationally disadvantaged – but, as you know, this has never been conclusively proved in the literature and continues to be hotly contested today, especially because the Government extends caste based reservation to private educational institutions – where class is the main reason that prevents entry, whether through prohibitive coaching classes or fees or otherwise. Therefore, that there are free Government schools and colleges does not explain the rampant caste-based reservations in institutes for higher education, especially private ones, where a poor lower caste individual may not have a better claim than an equally or poorer higher caste individual.

Two doctrines have emerged in American law to prevent this very thing – strict scrutiny and narrow tailoring, which require the Government to identify a “compelling State interest” and tailor the classification as narrowly as possible. Mihir has written an excellent paper on this subject (I’ll post a link if I can find one), arguing that those doctrines make caste-based reservations in higher education in India unconstitutional, and I think that argument is true not just as a matter of law (with respect to the Supreme Court), but also more generally.

Niranjan,
What you think is a first premise isn’t. No one uses the word ‘solely’ and no one thinks reservation is a solution. Reservation is only a step to strengthen the Dalit movement, which I think is part of the reason why it is so vehemently opposed. The main reason is that upper caste, urban students feel disadvantaged. As per using caste as a yardstick for reservation, as you know, caste is a reality in this country. Being poor is never the only factor to make someone educationally disadvantaged. (And most govt run schools and colleges are almost free.) Caste is a huge factor and class and caste have an interesting interplay.

Caste is one subject that should be of great concern to all thinking Indians, and the subject is way more complex to get a coherent understanding. I would like to add the following aspects to this debate.

(1) Some very recent thorough studies in political science (in JNU) have proven that the policy of reservation has failed to ‘bridge’ the gap, and the resource difference between different castes remains remarkably similar as it was fifty years ago. This can call to question the very basis of reservation as a policy at ANY level.
If thorough analysis proves, that it is NOT working, do the proponents have a reasonable argument set to justify it’s continuation.

(2) Beyond reservation:
I personally believe that there has been too much ‘ado’ about reservation, and too little emphasis on REAL emancipation, that should be the goal.
A policy framework can neither ensure nor guarantee emancipation, and we need to move ahead and create other methodologies to see how ‘equality’ can be achieved (more importantly, how much? Are there barriers to the effort itself?)

(3) Examples of such frameworks can be allocating direct jobs in certain sections, ‘special’ education facilities (say, like free computers) etc. for a certain class etc.

Basically, I am arguing for creation of new methodologies.

Reservation has already dried itself out, and most debate is either repetitive or misses the real point, and has been dragging on for too long to get to the roots and depths of these problems.

For this argument to work, two things need to be proved: first, that the “ills” that caste-based reservation seek to correct are SOLELY attributable to defects arising out of historical caste oppression; and two, that people similarly situated today in every respect but for their caste are not relatively “worse off” than their lower caste counterparts insofar as the objectives of caste-based reservation are concerned. These seem to be the two premises of this argument – neither is explicitly a premise, but has to be so implicitly, for otherwise there is no reason to choose caste as the yardstick of reservation. And I think the argument fails because the first premise is probably incorrect, and the second almost certainly so. It is hard to argue that caste-based oppression is the sole cause for the travails of the lower castes today – although it is undoubtedly the dominant one. As to the second premise, I don’t mean to suggest that a poor, lower-caste person is not worse off than an equally poor higher caste counterpart, but that the proper question to ask is “worse off in what respect”? Is he worse off for the purpose of education or employment for which reservation is used? The answer is no, because the premise of that very system is that education will lift a lower-caste person out of his present social status. The answer, then, is to use to reservation system that is caste-neutral, and instead measures the sort of disability that it is the business of the education system to correct – in a word, economic reservations.