'...so long as it is black'

"Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black"
- henry ford.

only four dalits have been appointed as justices of the supreme court until now. how many sc judges were from an adivasi background? we do not know. how many were obcs? we do not know. came across this paper which says ( in the abstract):

If the Indian Supreme Court is institutionally biased towards protecting the fundamental rights of all Indians, than it stands to reason that the Court will have a non-elitist ideology. The methodology used in this paper is an examination of the castes of justices in benches of different sizes and the cases assigned to them. Using a random sample of cases dealing with caste reservations between 1950 and 2005, I find an overwhelming support for the institutional responsibility hypothesis and that across bench sizes, Non-Brahmin justices are much more likely to be assigned to cases involving caste reservations than Brahmin justices. [italics mine]

for the researcher, shyam sriram, analysis of the background of all justices (from 1950 to 2000) was important. he finds out:

TOTAL NUMBER OF ALL JUSTICES (INCLUDING CHIEF JUSTICES) = 166 (From 1950 to 2000)
-Percentage Hindu: 81% [Brahmins – 56.6%; Non-Brahmins – 43.4%]
-Percentage Muslim: 11%
-Percentage Christian: 4.4%
-Percentage Other Religions [Sikh, Parsi/Zoroasterian & Buddhist]: 4.4%

in the research results he points out that more non-brahmin judges get assigned to deal with cases involving rights of the underprivileged such as reservations:

The results overwhelming support my hypothesis. Across bench sizes, there is a substantial difference in the number of Non-Brahmin justices assigned to these cases versus Brahmin justices. Of the 73 cases chosen for analysis, there were a total of 300 justices in all the benches. According to the results in Figure 4, a Non-Brahmin justice was four times more likely to be assigned to a case involving caste reservations than a Brahmin justice. This is more than a coincidence, but evidence of a pro-minority and anti-elitist ideology of the Chief Justice and subsequently, of the institute of the Supreme Court as a whole. [italics mine]

now who are these non-brahmin judges? apart from the sikh, christian, muslim judges? there's a list at the end of the paper (in the appendix).

check how many of the non-brahmin judges are obcs, dalits, adivasis. i can spot some khatris, kayasths, rajputs, marathas, reddies etc., non-brahmin does not mean non-brahminized, does it? remember how long it took for the indian state to constitute the national commission for scheduled castes and tribes. remember how long it took for the second backward classes commission to be appointed after the first. remember how long...