Real conflict between privilege and representation in global DEI debate

If there was one phrase that defined American corporate discourse in 2025, it was this: “DEI is dead.” Once framed as both a moral obligation and a business imperative, the concept of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has, over the past few years, increasingly been portrayed as both illegitimate and suspect. Prominent political and corporate actors have openly disparaged it as “propaganda” (Elon Musk), dismissed it as a “hoax” (Donald Trump), and even called it “woke ideology” (2024 US presidential candidate Ron DeSantis).

But is there merit to these claims? Do diversity initiatives, in fact, erode merit? The Indian constitutional experience offers a striking counterpoint. In India, debates around DEI are neither novel nor externally imposed. And while the contemporary language of “DEI” may be recent, an underlying commitment to inclusion has been embedded in India’s constitutional design since Independence. Indian constitutional jurisprudence has rejected a purely formal conception of equality—one that treats all individuals identically, regardless of their social position or historical disadvantage.

Fixing structural inequalities

Instead, equality is understood as substantive, requiring the State to actively address structural exclusion in order to create genuinely equal opportunities. As Dr B R Ambedkar poignantly argued in ‘Annihilation of Caste’ (1936), the very idea of “pure meritocracy” is fundamentally flawed in deeply unequal societies because individual effort and ability are always mediated by the circumstances of one’s birth, access to education, family networks, and inherited wealth, all of which shape opportunities and outcomes. Therefore, in such societies, any form of selection based solely on an individual’s apparent “skills” actually rewards privilege rather than talent. One’s merit, therefore, can only be accurately assessed after these structural inequalities are first addressed.

Gender too operates through similarly entrenched structures of disadvantage. Decades of evidence show that women’s under-representation in education, employment, and political representation is not the result of individual incapacity, but of patriarchal arrangements. Viewed in this light, reservations for women and transgender persons may be seen as corrective mechanisms that question how merit itself is produced, recognised, and rewarded within gendered hierarchies. It is worth noting that in a landmark 2024 judgement delivered by a seven-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India, the Court emphatically rejected the long-standing framing of reservations as being a trade-off between merit and efficiency.

Echoing Justice Chinnappa Reddy’s influential observation in an earlier 1985 decision, the 2024 judgement reiterated that the real issue at hand was not between the “meritorious” and the “inefficient,” but between those who had long been shielded from structures of exclusion and those who remained subject to them. As Justice Reddy put it in 1985, “The real conflict is between the class of people who have never been in, or who have already moved out of, the desert of poverty, illiteracy and backwardness and are entrenched in the oasis of convenient living, and those who are still in the desert and want to reach the oasis.” Even though affirmative action jurisprudence in India does not presently extend to the organised private sector, debates on this question are ongoing.

No dilution of competence

But if we move away from the legalities of quota-based reservations in India to the broader principles underlying contemporary debates around corporate DEI, we observe strikingly similar discussions. DEI initiatives are also labelled as “anti-meritocratic,” “socially engineered”, or “corrosive” to institutional efficiency. Yet, study after study demonstrates that well-designed diversity initiatives do not dilute competence or performance; rather, they correct institutional blind spots, expand talent pools, and improve the quality of organisational decision-making.

Take, for instance, DEI policies that actively include queer employees. Research shows that inclusive workplaces enhance employee well-being and job satisfaction by creating environments where queer individuals can express their identities without fear of discrimination or harassment.

Language of “merit”

Why, then, does the language of “merit” continue to function as such a powerful rhetorical device against reservations and DEI? Harvard political philosophy professor Michael Sandel, in his 2020 bestseller, ‘The Tyranny of Merit’, argues that modern, secular notions of merit are deeply rooted in older religious ideas of a “cosmic meritocracy”.

The rhetoric of merit is deeply rooted in historical inequities, cultural norms, religious expectations, and hierarchies of privilege. Actions that we consider “meritorious” cannot simply be viewed as measures of talent; they are often mechanisms through which caste, class, and gender privilege are reproduced. Given that queer people and women already face unique barriers in many spheres of life, claims of merit in such spaces cannot be taken at face value. To be clear, this is not a wholesale dismissal of merit. It is a call to think about it more critically. When we begin to see DEI and reservations as restorative tools to correct historical wrongs, we may stop branding them as “anti-merit” or “woke.”

(The author is a communications manager at Nyaaya, the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy and can be reached at [e-mail])