mako254

You are absolutely right - you can't just handover a kill switch for your business to a megacorp. However, there are a lot of instances where alternatives are not viable because of the same megacorps. For example, email is a major online ID and being locked out of it can be disastrous even for an individual. Ideally, you would want an email server of your own - but then the 2 major email providers simply junk the mail from small servers even when they have good spam filter score. Similar story about search engines directing traffic to imposters. There are no reasons to believe that this is unintentional. This wouldn't be a problem if everyone else had the same priorities as you. What alternative do we have other than to loudly shame them where it matters and get as many people to off those platforms?

The story of how a merited upper caste lost out to an unqualified reserved caste is another misleading anecdotal argument. Even merited reserved caste people face the same accusation. I have anecdotes for that as well, but I've never seen the accusers accept that there are merited lower castes. But what is revealing is the demography of the upper hierarchy of the government positions. There are progressively more upper castes as go up the hierarchy -with almost all institutional heads being a sharma, verma or gupta. And it has nothing to do with merit either. It's a result of systematic discrimination, harassment and office politics against lower castes. It's evident in their discrimination against the customers too - if you ever accessed a government service. It's all too evident to even deny. This is prevalent even in elite educational institutions [1]. The instances of this injustice far outnumber the ones you talk about - even neglecting that meritorious lower castes face discrimination. Even the rich lower castes don't get to compete on a level playing field - your caste determines your opportunities, not economic status.

As for the supreme court judge's comment - they are not all that righteous or infallible. The SCI is infamous for decisions that favour super rich or conservative ideology. The same problem of upper caste domination politics exist among the judges too - just check the list of chief justices [2]. The solution the justice gave doesn't address the representation and bias problems that reservation is supposed to solve.

[1] https://theprint.in/opinion/brahmins-on-india-campuses-study...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chief_justices_of_Indi...

This is the biggest fallacy peddled by upper castes against reservation/quotas and to deny that caste discrimination in India. Reservations in India are not meant to equalize income or opportunities among the castes. They are meant to keep the government machinery unbiased against the 'lower' castes through representation - so that their services are not biased against lower caste citizens. It has nothing to do with the economic status of the reserved castes. Why is it needed? Precisely because of the type of incidents explained in the news article. It's extremely common for dalit officers to be harassed and denied opportunity by upper caste groups playing politics. Same goes for recruitment. This is far more common than the incidents where a reserved category person is promoted without merit. Just imagine how prevalent that is in India if they are willing to take such toxic practices to a corporation in US. That my friend, is the harsh reality. I didn't want that whitewashing narrative to go unchallenged here.