Equality as a right and as a policy

In an important essay on affirmative action in the United States Professor Ronald Dworkin has urged the need to acknowledge the distinction between equality as a right and equality as a policy, a distinction that, according to him, ‘political theory has virtually ignored’.¹ I would like to devote the present lecture to an examination of this distinction for, although the subject bristles with difficulties, something may be gained by bringing to it the approach of comparative sociology. Problems that are very similar to those brought to light by the DeFunis case (and the Bakke case) in America arise frequently and persistently in India in a very different social and cultural setting.