> "Affirmative action is always bad. Because the people getting benefit of it are likely to be privileged."
But this is not what affirmative action is. The purpose of affirmative action is to help under-privileged people. If the help is going to privileged people instead, it's not affirmative action, it's corruption.
If it's really true, as you suggest, that some Dalit are rich and some Brahmin are poor, that some Dalit are privileged and some upper castes are not, then what does the caste system even mean? And why do people care enough that it's still a thing?
Consider the case of race in the US. Some of the benefit of affirmative action goes to children from well off black families. That doesn't mean it's corrupt, it just means that if you are doing something on the basis of race and not wealth then you're sometimes going to give a benefit to people who are rich.
If you took your last paragraph, and substituted racial groups for castes, I think it would be clear that it doesn't make sense?
The big question is: are they privileged, or are they discriminated against? I've heard of rich black people in the US getting stopped and investigated by the police for driving a fancy car that they bought with their own money.
There's different kinds of privilege of course. You can be rich but still discriminated, you can be white but poor. And the way you need to help people who are poor is different from the way you help people who suffer from discrimination.
If poor people have a hard time getting access to something because it's too expensive, and you want to help them, then that money shouldn't end up with rich people. If a demographic group is kept out of universities or other opportunities because of their caste or the colour of their skin, then you correct that by giving them better access, maybe through a quota or some other form of preferential treatment that compensates for the effects of discrimination. And that shouldn't apply to people who don't suffer from that discrimination.
You need to address the thing that's going wrong, and not something completely different. Rich black people don't need money, they need to not get arrested over nothing by the police.
Affirmative action is not generally about giving people money, it's about giving people opportunities. The idea is something like, you set a lower bar for people from groups that have been historically discriminated against.
When we have programs that are specifically designed to help people monetarily, such as financial aid at colleges or welfare, they consider people's economic situation but not their race.
> If the help is going to privileged people instead, it's not affirmative action
While I might agree about this being a bad outcome, I also don't think a "no true Scotsman" argument is helpful. What is described here is still affirmative action - just a bad implementation of it. Instead of trying to define them away, we should admit that such bad implementations can exist, and push for good implementations instead.
But this is not what affirmative action is. The purpose of affirmative action is to help under-privileged people. If the help is going to privileged people instead, it's not affirmative action, it's corruption.
If it's really true, as you suggest, that some Dalit are rich and some Brahmin are poor, that some Dalit are privileged and some upper castes are not, then what does the caste system even mean? And why do people care enough that it's still a thing?