The New Language of Inequality: Myth of Meritocracy

I remember the moment I first said it aloud: “It’s an inherited title. I will never fall below this, and you deserve the lower position.” Those words felt honest—brutally, almost dangerously honest. But then I stopped myself. “We cannot speak this language of inequality anymore. It’s not constitutional.” That pause, that correction, captures the central dilemma of our time. We have outlawed the open vocabulary of caste and birthright, yet the hierarchies remain. We simply learned to speak a new language—the language of merit.

Meritocracy as Alibi

Let me be clear: I am not arguing that talent and effort do not matter. They do. But the contemporary ideology of meritocracy has become what Jo Littler (2018: 2) calls “the key means of cultural legitimation for contemporary capitalist culture.” It allows us to believe that the playing field is level while ignoring that some start the race ten metres ahead.

In India, this is not abstract philosophy. This is the daily reality of the Joint Entrance Examination, the IITs, and the relentless machinery of coaching centres. Michael Sauder (2020: 195) defines luck as “chance, consequential, and at least partially outside the control of the person.”

Ajantha Subramanian’s (2019) brilliant study The Caste of Merit demonstrates this with painful clarity. She shows how the IITs, celebrated as bastions of meritocracy, remain overwhelmingly upper-caste in composition. When lower-caste students enter through reservations, they are met not with celebration but with suspicion—accused of being “quota candidates,” their achievements forever shadowed by the assumption that they do not truly belong. I have seen this. I have heard the whispers: “He’s only here because of reservation.”

The Double Standard of the Private Sector

Here is the contradiction that keeps me awake. The Indian state follows reservations in the public sector—imperfect, contested, but present. But what about the private sector? “Most of the jobs and educational opportunities increasingly so are being located in the context of India. What do we do about private institutions? Reservations don’t apply there.”

The answer, of course, is that private institutions claim to be “highly meritorious.” They insist they hire only the best. Yet experimental evidence tells a different story. Thorat and Attewell (2010: 45-46) conducted a correspondence study in India’s urban private sector, sending identical resumes with only the names changed. Applicants with Dalit or Muslim names received callback rates significantly lower than those with higher-caste Hindu names—0.67 and 0.33 odds respectively. A name. That is all it took.

This is not ancient history. This is not rural feudalism. This is the gleaming modern private sector, globalised, digitised, and proudly post-caste. And yet.

The Exam as Ritual of Exclusion

Consider the examination. I have sat in rooms where students from central board schools—overwhelmingly upper-caste, overwhelmingly English-speaking—confidently assert their “natural aptitude.” They do not see the decades of coaching, the private tutors, the families who could afford to let them study instead of work. They see only their own effort.

But what of the student who needs two hours to write what another writes in one? Not because they are less intelligent, but because English is their third language, because their school had no library, because their parents could not help with homework. The exam does not measure their potential. It measures their starting point. And then it calls that measurement merit.

As Friedman et al. (2024: 862) argue, different national contexts produce different understandings of merit. In the UK, elites frame themselves as “talent meritocrats”—naturally gifted, almost destined for success. In Denmark, they emphasise hard work. Both are self-justifications. Both obscure the structural advantages that made their “talent” or “hard work” possible in the first place.

The Tamilnadu Precedent

I have often thought about Tamilnadu. It is the region where lower-caste assertion forced upper castes to defend merit explicitly—not as a universal ideal, but as their property. Non-Brahminism and Dravidianism named caste privilege. In response, Tamil Brahmins claimed not just merit, but Brahmin merit. As Subramanian (2019: 22-23) documents, this marked a shift from universalistic claims to identitarian ones—a template now replicated across India.

What began in Tamilnadu has become national. The “general category” is no longer a neutral administrative label. It is a consolidated upper-caste identity, mobilised against reservations, defended in the language of “merit” and “excellence.”

Beyond the Ladder

Raymond Williams once wrote that the ladder is a perfect symbol of bourgeois society: you climb it alone. It offers opportunity to individuals while weakening community. I have spent years watching people climb. I have watched them look down and call those below “unmotivated,” “lazy,” “not trying hard enough.”

I do not have a perfect alternative. But I know this: meritocracy as currently practised is not justice. It is inequality with a justification. We need to move beyond the ladder—beyond the assumption that the only way up is over others. We need, as Sauder (2020: 216) suggests, to recognise the role of luck, of inheritance, of accident. And we need to build institutions that do not merely select the already-advantaged, but that actually equalise.

That is the thought. Now we cannot speak the language of inequality anymore. But we must also stop pretending that the language of merit is any more honest.