JRF Awardee, Delhi, India
Online published on 24 November, 2015.
In India the social justice perspective is an essential component of the liberal social democracy doctrine and of the welfare state agenda. It is based on the universal civil norms of liberty, equality and communal harmony. To achieve this grand vision, identification of the socially deprived and economically backward sections and formulating necessary remedial mechanism for their empowerment become the main directives of the newly formed state in India. However, there is an ideological precision to the social justice perspective which is antithetical to the classical liberal notions of secular identities because of its communitarian values. It is dependent extensively on the historical experiences and judges the contemporary situation in reference with its historical trajectory. In this article main objectives are: (1) To reflect upon the inbuilt tension between the concepts of citizenship and social justice.(2) and deals with the history of social justice highlighting the prominent trends and moments, which firmly establishes as an essential part of the state policies.
Reservation, Other Backward Class, Social justice, SC/STs
