THE REPRESENTATION QUESTION

The warning sounded by Oxfam this week should not surprise anyone who has watched politics steadily bend towards wealth over the past two decades.

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What should, however, give us pause is the scale of the imbalance it describes: billionaires, the report says, are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary citizens. That is not merely an inequality of income; it is an inequality of voice, access and power.

When money becomes the dominant qualification for public office, democracy slowly hollows out from within. Elections continue, parliaments sit, laws are passed—but the social contract frays as citizens begin to feel that governance no longer responds to them, only to those who can afford proximity to power.

Seen against this bleak global picture, India’s reservation system stands out in the report as a “compelling” counterexample—an unusual acknowledgement in an international discourse that often treats affirmative action as a moral question divorced from political outcomes.

India’ experience suggests something more pragmatic: that structured inclusion can alter who sits at the table and, over time, what the table discusses. Reservations for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in legislatures were not acts of charity; they were constitutional design choices rooted in the recognition that historical exclusion cannot be corrected by formal equality alone.