Ambedkar's idea of social justice leads to 'egalitarian justice' as compared to Rawls' 'justice as fairness' which aims at the notion of 'pure procedural justice'. Comment

Rawls: justice as fairness and procedure

• In A Theory of Justice (1971), parties behind a veil of ignorance choose equal basic liberties, fair equality of opportunity, and the difference principle.
• Rawls distinguishes perfect, imperfect, and pure procedural justice. Gambling is his school example of pure procedure: whatever results from a fair bet is fair.
• Justice as fairness is presented as the closest political analogue of pure procedural justice: a fair original position defines the just distribution, without a prior independent pattern of desert.
• The self is prior to its social titles. Caste, race, and class are morally arbitrary and must not dictate life chances.
• The theory is ideal theory for a well-ordered society of free and equal citizens, not a handbook for annihilating untouchability.

Ambedkar: social justice as egalitarian substance

• Ambedkar treated caste as a system of graded inequality, not as one more social primary good to be redistributed after a veil.
• Annihilation of Caste, the Poona Pact struggle, Article 17, and constitutional reservations aim at a real equality of status, not only a fair procedure among already equal persons.
• Representation, education, and entry into office are instruments of egalitarian justice because the Hindu social order denied personality itself to the Depressed Classes.
• Granville Austin placed this in the Constitution’s social-revolution strand, beside political democracy.
• For Ambedkar, a procedure among caste Hindus would reproduce hierarchy. The end-state of equal dignity is known in advance and must be forced by law.

The comparison the question asks

• Rawls’s persons in the original position are already moral equals. Ambedkar’s society does not contain that fact; it must be made.
• Pure procedural justice suspends a prior criterion of just shares. Ambedkar has a prior criterion: end of untouchability, end of graded inequality, effective equal citizenship.
• Reservations look ‘patterned’ in Nozick’s hostile sense. For Ambedkar they are corrective of a structural wrong, closer to rectification than to a lottery.
• Rawls can support fair equality of opportunity and even some affirmative action in non-ideal theory. He does not start from caste as the central injustice.
• Egalitarian justice in Ambedkar is status equality plus material access. Justice as fairness is lexical liberties first, then distribution regulated by the difference principle.

Comment, not a false choice

• Both oppose natural hierarchy and both use the state. The comment is about starting point and metric.
• Indian courts after Indra Sawhney (1992) and the 103rd Amendment’s EWS debate show the tension: group remedy versus a Rawlsian-looking income criterion.
• Kesavananda keeps both dignity and equality inside basic structure, which is more Ambedkar’s substance than a pure gamble.
• A fair procedure is not enough where the players are not recognised as players. That is Ambedkar’s decisive addition.