Prof. Balagangadhara tears apart the UGC equity framework — and finds not ideology, but incoherence.
In this sixth installment of his series on the University Grants Commission, Prof. S.N. Balagangadhara subjects the UGC’s equity regulations to rigorous philosophical scrutiny, beginning with the Supreme Court’s own finding that the regulations are vague and unclear. His central argument: “implicit discrimination” — a cornerstone of the UGC framework — is not merely poorly defined but cognitively impossible. Every act of perception, learning, and language requires explicit discrimination; the moment you identify a Scheduled Caste member, you have already discriminated explicitly. Attaching criminal punishment to a concept that cannot exist, he argues, is a legal absurdity.
Balagangadhara then traces the genealogy of “social justice” — showing it entered India’s Constitution unexamined, borrowed from the Irish Constitution of the 1930s, itself shaped by Catholic papal encyclicals responding to European industrial upheaval. Eighty years later, Indian jurists and intellectuals have still not audited this borrowing. The result: a vacuum-word that can be attached to anything — land reform, reservation policy, gender equality, industrial law — blessing each without explaining any.
The episode closes with a withering analysis of UGC’s “exclusion studies” program: if Dalits, women, and tribal communities are members of Indian society, the metaphor of exclusion is self-contradictory. What UGC funds, he concludes, is sophisticated-sounding political posturing — not knowledge.

About The Speaker:
S. N. Balagangadhara is a professor emeritus of Ghent University in Belgium, and was director of the India Platform and the Research Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap.