The poll promise of the INDIA coalition to have a caste survey and increase the share of reservations for the disadvantaged groups has invited accusation from none other than Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He accused the Congress and the INDIA bloc of wanting to bring in Muslim quota.While Rahul Gandhi and other leaders have maintained sobriety in stressing their resolve, the prime minister and his band of Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) star campaigners have gone virulent in pointing out a Muslim tilt of the Congress and the alliance.In this avoidable carp, a set of sane proposals that were put before the nation eighteen years ago under the Manmohan Singh government, but were thrown into the trash can, are being talked about only salaciously by the Modi government. The Congress, which was behind these exercises, is not even referring to them. The reference indeed is to the Sachar Committee to study social, economic and educational status of the Muslim community of India, under the chairmanship of noted jurist and human rights activist late Justice (retd.) Rajinder Sachar, which submitted its recommendations in 2006. As it revealed the dark societal dungeon in which the maligned Muslims in India live, the committee made recommendations to increase their access to education, employment opportunities as well as special financial aids in terms of grants-in-aid and loans, and so on.The most significant recommendations of the Sachar Committee, however, were to broad base the institutional support to India’s diverse population going beyond religion, caste and ethnic identities through equal opportunities in all fields. To operationalise this, the committee recommended equal opportunity and diversity perspectives so that the discrimination and disabilities the oppressed and dispossessed face in a diverse India are neutralised. For seeking justice, the committee also suggested the formation of an Equal Opportunity Commission (EOC) to consider India’s diversity and formulate mechanisms for equality in education and employment cutting across traditional stratification and ethnicities.The government of India set up two expert groups as a consequence — one chaired by N.R. Madhava Menon for designing an EOC and the other headed by Amitabh Kundu to draw up a Diversity Index (DI) to measure diversity in public spaces (education, employment and housing). The two groups submitted their reports with recommendations in 2008 that had the potential to raise the policy discourse in India for the first time on a higher plane. Yet the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government slept over the recommendations of the Sachar Committee, EOC and DI.As the UPA faced an adverse political tidings before the 2014 elections focusing on scams, it constituted the post-Sachar Evaluation Committee in 2013 chaired by Amitabh Kundu. However, following two extensions, its report was submitted in September 2014. The UPA lost the election and the new National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government led by Modi had no use for any such evaluation. While these four reports with valuable data, analysis and fresh suggestions to deal with economic and social inequity continue to be in the public domain, they have remained in a dormant state.Also read: Areas With More Muslims, SCs Have Less Access to Public Services in India: StudyThe EOC was envisaged to ‘address the concerns of all deprived groups, with respect to equality of opportunity in education, employment and other sectors in a proactive manner.’ Situating the idea of equality on the Right to Equality in Part III (Fundamental Rights) of the Constitution of India (Articles 14-17 and 29), and emphasising that it is further strengthened by the provisions of Part IV (the Directive Principles of State Policy), which expand the scope of the idea of equality to equality in the socio-economic spheres (particularly Articles 38, 39, 41, 43, 45-47), the expert group underlined an urgent ‘need to develop a wide variety of context-sensitive, evidence-based policy options that can be tailored to meet specific requirements.’As India prepares to celebrate 77 years of its independence, the society has added an articulate aspirational class and millions yearn for equal opportunities, more particularly socially excluded groups. As former US president, Lyndon Johnson aptly said:“We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result…. To this end equal opportunity is essential, but not enough.”The public policy interventions based on equal opportunities supervised by an autonomous institution has been necessitated greatly in the past one decade due to growing socio-economic inequity that has led to myopic emergency measures such as free food grains to the disadvantaged groups, obviously pushed by vote bank politics. While it indeed has brought the votes for the incumbent government, it has led to crippling of the socio-economic initiatives by encouraging a dependence syndrome without economically enabling such classes. Further, the assertion for application of the criterion for the OBC quota cutting across religious lines, increasing contestations on majority-minority issues, attacks (physical and political) by the majoritarian groups on hyphenated identities such as Christian-Dalits, Muslim-Dalits, Christian and Muslim OBCs and Christian-Tribals, invite appropriate and sound policy interventions. The Congress and several other state parties have been demanding and promising (if they came to power in the eighteenth general elections) a caste survey in the country to redefine and accordingly allocate job quota beyond the 50% ceiling.The expert group on Diversity Index, chaired by Kundu, based its analysis and recommendations on the fact that concentration of individuals in ‘say, a housing complex, an educational institution or a production distribution unit’ not because of personal choice, but because of ‘discrimination and the denial of opportunities to groups that are different, not on grounds of merit, but on grounds of their ethnic characteristics or group affiliations’. Admitting the complexity of representing diversity across multiple social spaces in India, it attempted a pathway beyond reservation, in developing an index to measure diversity for the purpose.Also read: Does This Country Hate Muslims?The Kundu expert group took its cue from diversity indices used in ecology to measure the number of species in an ecosystem. It then applied it to the contentious arena of social diversity. This exercise was attempted earlier by the USA Today in 1991 to measure whether any two people are of a particular race in the US society. In the Indian context, first measuring, and then increasing, social diversity in public spaces is built on the notion of fair and proportional representation of the social mosaic consisting of religious, linguistic, caste, tribe, race and gender identities.Social exclusions of the past and present in a competitive and volatile democratic milieu make the representational dimension complex. Faced with operationalising the proposed Diversity Index, the expert group has recommended a Diversity Commission that should be entrusted with the complexity of applying incentive and disincentive mechanisms to ensure a diversity-based equal opportunity in the three spheres it recommended. Of course, with due consideration it can be applied in other spheres also.Indeed, this makes the fear of a multiplicity of institutions a real one. The three expert group reports, read with the post-Sachar Evaluation Committee, nevertheless are a result of the first serious attempt in the country to look at diversity beyond caste, communal and sectarian prisms. They deserve an integrated reading if we are to debate and critique their proposals. Hope that the new government which assumes power in June, takes the recommendations of these expert groups seriously and takes considered steps for their implementation.Ajay K Mehra is a political scientist. He was Atal Bihari Vajpayee Senior Fellow, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, 2019-21 and Principal, Shaheed Bhagat Singh Evening College, Delhi University (2018).