When Social Justice Feels Like Injustice
Farooq Brazloo
Twenty-three-year-old Rohan Sharma lives in a one-room rented house in old Jammu. His father, a daily-wage labourer, earns ₹350 on the days he finds work. Rohan scored 92 per cent in Class 12 but watched the NEET-UG 2024 cut-off for the general category in the J&K quota climb to 648 marks. A Gujjar student with 512 marks secured the same MBBS seat in Government Medical College, Jammu under the Scheduled Tribe quota.
“I am happy for him,” Rohan says, “but why am I punished for being born into a poor Hindu family that doesn’t fall under any reserved list?”
Two hundred kilometres away, in Srinagar’s Defence Colony, 19-year-old Ayesha Malik is preparing for her civil services interview. Her father is a 1996-batch KAS officer and her mother a college principal. Both belong to the newly included Pahari Speaking People (ST) category. Ayesha cleared the JKPSC mains with a rank that would have been impossible in open merit.
“I know the system helped me,” she says with a smile. “My father says our community was historically backward.”
These two stories now dominate drawing rooms, tea stalls and WhatsApp groups across Jammu & Kashmir. The trigger is S.O. 176 of 15 March 2024, which completely overhauled reservations after the repeal of Article 370.
The new structure is stark:
– 36% vertical reservation: SC (8%), ST (10%), OSC (8%), Pahari Speaking People & others (10%)
– 24% for Residents of Backward Areas, Actual Line of Control areas, and Economically Weaker Sections combined
– 10% horizontal for PwD, ex-servicemen, etc.
– Open merit (still called “general category”): only 30%
In a Union Territory where 68-70 per cent of the population belongs to no reserved category, seven out of every ten government jobs and college seats are reserved.
“It is reverse discrimination dressed as social justice,” says Prof. Hari Om, historian and former member of the Indian Council of Historical Research. “When 70 per cent of the people compete for 30 per cent seats and 30 per cent compete for 70 per cent, you have engineered inequality.”
The resentment is sharpest in Jammu region, which has almost no tribal population and therefore little share in the expanding ST quota. The inclusion of Pahari Speaking People as ST in February 2024 turned large sections of Rajouri, Poonch and parts of the Valley into reservation beneficiaries overnight, including many upper-caste Muslims and some Hindu pockets.
A senior JKPSC officer, speaking anonymously, disclosed that in the 2024 KAS results, at least 34 of the 89 selected under ST quota are children of gazetted officers, contractors or big landowners. Jammu & Kashmir has still not implemented the Supreme Court’s 2018 Jarnail Singh judgment that mandates creamy-layer exclusion for SC/ST.
Dr. Javaid Rahi, a prominent Gujjar scholar, defends the policy: “Most of our people still live in mud huts in the higher reaches. A few success stories don’t erase centuries of marginalisation.” Yet he adds, “Creamy-layer exclusion is fair. We are not against it.”
In the Valley, urban Kashmiri Muslims who are neither Gujjar nor Pahari feel squeezed. “We are caught between new ST elites and old RBA beneficiaries,” says Adil Hussain, a Srinagar engineer who missed the EWS cut-off by ₹40,000 in family income.
The sharpest pain, however, is felt by rural poor outside reserved categories. In village Kanjal near Jammu, 21-year-old Neha Devi scored 97.2 per cent but missed B.Sc Nursing because the general-category cut-off was unreachable. Her neighbour got the seat with 78 per cent because her village falls under ALC/IB. The neighbour’s father owns three shops in Poonch market.
Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha recently claimed the policy is “pro-poor and pro-marginalised”. When asked about ministers’ children availing reservation, he said, “We are working on robust verification.”
Activists remain unconvinced. Advocate Ankur Sharma, chairman of IkkJutt Jammu, demands a commission like Justice G. Rohini’s to rationalise and sub-categorise benefits based on current deprivation data rather than outdated anthropology reports.
Even within reserved communities, voices of introspection are rising. At a recent seminar in Srinagar, a young Pahari activist said publicly: “If my father earns ₹1.5 lakh a month as a Class-I officer, how can I take a poor boy’s seat with a clean conscience? There must be an economic ceiling and a generational limit.”
As J&K heads into its second Assembly elections after Article 370, reservation has become the new fault line, cutting across religion, region and class. The Dogra certificate agitation in Jammu, tensions between Gujjars and Paharis in Pir Panjal, and quiet resentment among Valley’s urban middle class are all symptoms of a policy that many believe has lost its moral compass.
The Supreme Court warned in 2021 that reservation cannot remain an eternal remedy. It is time Jammu & Kashmir asked the question Rohan Sharma whispers every night:
“Is this the social justice Dr. Ambedkar dreamt of, where the only sin of a poor child is being born in the wrong category?”
