We Don't Want Equality, We Want Our Turn

There is a pattern I have noticed, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

Watch what happens when a group that was historically excluded finally gets access to power. A Dalit man becomes a collector in a district where his father was denied entry through the front door. A woman reaches a boardroom that spent decades keeping her out. A backward-class student secures a seat at an institution that once belonged only to the upper caste.

The pattern is this: very rarely do they dismantle the structure. They occupy it.

This is not a criticism. It is an observation about what power does to people, and what people do when they finally have it.

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We have convinced ourselves that the fight for equality is a fight against hierarchy. That the oppressed, once liberated, will build something flatter, fairer, less cruel. History keeps suggesting otherwise.

Caste is the clearest example in India. The dominant narrative frames it as a war between the privileged and the marginalised. But look more carefully at how caste actually functions on the ground, in villages, in offices, in matrimonial columns, and what you find is not one group oppressing everyone else. What you find is a ladder, and nearly every rung is simultaneously looking up with resentment and looking down with contempt.

The OBC community that fought upper-caste dominance for decades has its own internal hierarchy, its own untouchables. The dominant castes within SC communities exercise quiet but real power over the more marginalised ones. Every group that has ever mobilised around caste oppression has, upon gaining some ground, immediately begun drawing its own lines.

This is not hypocrisy. It is something more honest and more uncomfortable. It is people behaving exactly as power has always made people behave.

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Gender follows the same logic. The feminist movement, at its best, argues for a world where gender stops determining destiny. But much of what gets practiced in its name is not the dismantling of gendered power, it is the redistribution of it.

Women who gain access to leadership positions in institutions built on masculine norms often do not change those norms. They learn them, master them, and sometimes enforce them more aggressively than the men who came before. Not because they are bad people. Because the institution selects for a certain kind of person, and the path to the top filters out the ones who wanted to change the rules.

This is what the structure does. It does not convert you. It selects you.

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Class is perhaps the most honest of the three because it is the least ideologically dressed up. Nobody mobilises around class equality and then pretends the goal was something spiritual. The middle class in India is explicit about what it wants. It wants to stop being middle class. It wants to cross the line, not erase it.

The aspirational Indian family that scrapes together money for an English-medium school is not trying to make English irrelevant. It is trying to make sure its children are on the right side of the English divide. The IIT graduate who moves to a Gurgaon apartment is not trying to flatten the gap between Gurgaon and the town he left behind. He is trying to never go back.

Again, this is not a moral failing. This is rational behaviour inside an irrational system. You cannot blame a drowning person for swimming toward the boat instead of trying to redesign the ocean.

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But we should at least be honest about what we are doing.

When we say we want equality, we mostly mean we want what the people above us have. When we win, we protect it. When we lose, we call it injustice. The language of justice is real, the suffering that produces it is real, but the goal underneath it is almost always about position, not principle.

The rare exception, the person who genuinely wants to level the structure rather than climb it, tends to be treated with suspicion by both sides. Too radical for the powerful, too naive for the oppressed.

Maybe that is because they are threatening the one thing everyone, across caste, class, and gender, seems to silently agree on.

The ladder should stay. Just let me get higher on it.