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About goddamn time!
I'd say I hope for a similar end of AA/reservation in India, but we're even more far gone at this point with low odds of a return. Not as bad as places like, say Lebanon or South Africa, but the rotten practise runs rampant.
Not only is it bad for the commons, because a rational Bayesian does notice that someone's surname suggests they're from a demographic benefiting form heavy AA and thus likely to be a worse doctor/programmer/engineer, therefore they should be avoided. If AA wasn't in effect, then the people who did genuinely have merit and achieved their results through hard work wouldn't be tainted with the same opprobrium.
Further, it's inevitably poisoned younger generations and ended any hope for a caste blind society. I went from not giving a shit about caste myself to seething vitriolic rage after the trajectory of my life and professional career was forever derailed because my parents, with one of them being a literal penniless survivor of a genocide, didn't luck into that magical Scheduled Caste/Tribe certificate that guarantees passage on the easy lane.
I never hurt anyone or took what was rightfully theirs, and yet my odds of getting into med school and then into a residency program became god knows how many times harder, and all outside my control. I certainly won't let my kids fall into the same trap.
India is too far gone, but at least I can relish the distant bonfire of maybe a few of the more egregious grifters being burned at the stakes they built, though I agree with others that this is a step in the right direction.
Edit: Funnily enough, AA in India was nominally supposed to have an expiry date and also limits on how large a chunk of things could be reserved. Funny how that expiry date was decades ago, and now the practise is so entrenched it's political suicide to fight it. You take away their inch before they steal the mile.
It's the same in Malaysia, where I grew up (for context, I am Malaysian Chinese, though I live elsewhere now). The part of the Malaysian constitution (Article 153) that legitimises special rights for Malays was rationalised on the basis that this would speed up their economic and social development to standards enjoyed by Chinese and Indians. The Reid Commission, which helped draw this up, recommended that the article be reviewed in fifteen years to see if it should be repealed. Safe to say that the article is still in place today (as well as all the Malay privileges it implies) and continues to be rationalised by people as Actually Being A Good Thing. This always happens the same way. "It's a temporary measure to alleviate disadvantage, we swear!..." and then it never goes away.
People actually killed each other over this historically, May 13, 1969 being by far the most infamous example. What happened was that a general election was held that was contested on a major scale by non-Malay-based opposition parties (the DAP and Gerakan) that held stances on Malay rights that contrasted starkly with those of the Alliance government. They managed to topple the Alliance government from power in three states, and almost eradicated their two-thirds majority in Parliament. There were victory parades in Kuala Lumpur which were mostly led by and participated in by Chinese, which provoked the Malays, who announced a procession and came from the rural areas into the city. A fight between some Chinese and Malays eventually escalated into a situation where Malays went into the Chinese areas of the city and started killing people. And after this event, there was no correction (or at least, not in the direction you'd expect). The Tunku (the then prime minister) stepped down from office, and the government was re-organised to further favour Malays with the New Economic Policy.
This kind of stuff is incredibly dangerous, and this ruling, as far as I am concerned, is a very good thing.
The Malaysian system is great for Malaysian Chinese. You own the vast majority of profitable industry (excl oil and gas) in the country, run most profitable businesses, are disproportionately extremely wealthy and are no longer hunted by the Malays. To compare to my own people, the only country in which we have ever done as well as you (relatively) was in inter-war Hungary. Otherwise, neither European nor American Jews have ever been as disproportionately overrepresented among the wealthy and powerful as Malaysian Chinese are in Malaysia. And now, unlike in the 1960s, the CCP and China’s trade relationship with Southeast Asia guarantees the rights of Chinese Malaysians to some extent.
It always surprises me when Chinese Malaysians complain because you guys get the whole country for free, and all you have to pay for it is relatively meagre affirmative action. Take it from me, market dominant minorities elsewhere would kill for that deal.
Firstly, I fail to see why an ethnic group doing well in a specific country justifies discriminating against them in law and policy, especially considering that ethnic groups are not monolithically rich or poor and economic policies based on economic status are always less questionable (there's also the question of what the erosion of meritocracy does to a country). Secondly, I'm not entirely sure what "relatively meagre affirmative action" means to you, but I don't think quotas in education (like the 90:10 racial quotas in matriculation programmes), race preferences in government contracts, discounts on property purchases, access to a reserved slice of public share offerings, among other things, count as "meagre". I mean, I suppose in return the Malaysian Chinese are granted the incredible "privilege" of not being hunted anymore.
Either way, the disillusionment of Chinese Malaysians with the current system is reflected in the phenomenon of "brain drain". Often Chinese Malaysians jump over to Singapore, where there are both better prospects and where the ruling party is better at promoting meritocracy than the Malaysian government. If they want to lose human capital, they can go ahead and keep doing what they're doing, but people are going to leave for places which don't shoot them in the knee for the horrific crime of doing well.
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Ah, China-chads being such overachievers that at least 3 countries need to actively suppress them so that most other ethnicities don't get jealous (Indonesia, Singapore and the US, that I know of).
At least Singapore can offer a reasonable tradeoff of most people being significantly richer than they would be if they lived in any other neighboring country. (The US can too, but not to the same degree)
At its very best, the practise is zero sum, and in practise, negative sum because less talented candidates get opportunities and drag down those who could have made the most of it.
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I think the problem in India is more that public sector jobs are often seen as more desirable than many private sector ones, at least with the exception of the tiny minority of Indians who go work for a top ‘MNC’ (and most of those probably studied abroad or at an IIT). There are gazillions of pointless public sector sinecures in India and wiping them out would do more for the country than even getting rid of affirmative action would.
It’s always funny when you see Hindu nationalists rail against the SC/ST designation though, until they realize that it’s the one thing that keeps so many poor Hindus voting for them and that they’d abandon the BJP and its affiliates in a second if they stopped it.
The problem is that public sector jobs are the gibs and spoils that demagogues use as the bait in identitity politics. It's a political nightmare to revoke, and interest groups are incredibly militant about it.
I'm not aware of riots over AA in the US, at least in the past few decades, but an entire state in India is currently going to hell because of the attempts of a single minority group to wrest benefits from the recognition of their lack of privilege, and people are dying over it.
It's a largely coup-complete problem for the foreseeable future.
Not just demagogues. Public sector jobs are nominally welfare in disguise (edit: borderline sinecures) and the number of positions increases over time in the West.
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