This paper argues that Indian affirmative action is more comfortable with prioritizing group rights over individual autonomy, and explains this as the contemporary effect of a colonial politics of community. Like race in the United States, caste in India, and especially the practice of untouchability, has been at the center of affirmative action policy. In this paper I draw on the legal theorist, Marc Galanter’s little-noticed claim that the conceptualization of Indian affirmative action was “very much a domestic product, produced with little guidance or borrowing from abroad,” and a unique kind of civil rights law. I address the relationship between legal redress, a project that dominates the postcolonial period, and struggles to redefine caste as a form of historic inequality rather a religiously sanctioned system of consensual hierarchy across India’s late colonial history. A politics of caste intersected with postcolonial paradigms of intensively conceived affirmative action which exceeds Constitutional commitments to balancing equal protection with preferential treatment, a hallmark of affirmative action policies in the United States. Instead, in India, the executive is tasked with remediation for a history of discrimination that is perceived to be so enormous as to render universal commitments to equality inadequate.