Born into the Brahmin caste, Sunil Sharma occupies the highest rung of India's ancient social hierarchy. But as he sat the other day in his tiny one-room apartment, with its single barred window and a portable gas stove in the corner that serves as the kitchen, it was hard to see quite where the advantage lay.
The illiterate son of an illiterate milkman, Sharma, 35, is a truck driver who supports a wife and 10-year-old son on about $15 a week. They have no running water and often have to borrow money from neighbours.
"We've lost all the clout we used to have centuries ago," said Sharma, a stooped, doleful-looking man. "The social standing, that is gone."
For more than half a century, India has maintained quotas for socially disadvantaged classes in government jobs, political bodies and educational institutions. Brahmins and other supposedly privileged groups were left to fend for themselves. Here in the state of Rajasthan, however, the government recently proposed an idea that some say turns the logic of affirmative action on its head: it wants quotas for high-caste Indians, albeit on the basis of economic need.
Supporters say they are merely trying to make the system fairer. But to many people, the initiative is yet another example of how interest-group politics is subverting the goals of a vast experiment in social engineering that already bestows preferential treatment on roughly half of India's billion-plus people.
Since a 1992 Supreme Court decision that greatly expanded the scope of affirmative action in India, advocates for lower castes have scrambled for access to the quota system, which is widely viewed as a ticket out of poverty and an avenue to political power, by means of "reserved" seats on village councils and other legislative bodies.
The result, many analysts say, is a highly politicised contest for affirmative-action spoils in which electoral clout often plays as much of a role as evidence of backwardness or discrimination.
The current situation in Rajasthan is rooted in the 1999 national election, when Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee courted members of the state's Jat community - a relatively prosperous landowning caste - by promising to include them in the government's list of "backward" classes. Vajpayee delivered on his promise, with the result that about 78 per cent of the state's population can now benefit from affirmative-action quotas.
Resentment
That created great resentment among upper-caste Brahmins and Rajputs, for whom birth is no longer a guarantor of wealth and status. In traditional Indian society, for example, Brahmins served as teachers and priests, roles that afforded respect and a measure of economic security. But in the face of rapid industrialisation and development, they have branched out into other professions. Some have prospered, but those who haven't now want their own piece of the pie.
As in the US, the use of quotas in hiring and education has generated controversy, with critics attacking them as reverse discrimination that undermines the idea of meritocracy and fair play. Some have even seized on the upper-caste campaign in Rajasthan as evidence that the entire system of "reservations" should be scrapped.
"The existing quotas ... deny the eligible the opportunities they rightly deserve," the newsmagazine India Today said in a recent editorial. "Every other day one caste or another is struggling to be labelled Other Backward Classes ... The quota system, in reality, has become a huge political enterprise."
By most accounts, the concept of affirmative action as it is understood in the West began in India, whose founding fathers viewed caste prejudice as a major impediment to their goal of secular democracy.
The country's 1950 constitution, written three years after independence from Britain, established quotas for members of indigenous tribes and so-called untouchables, or dalits, because they do not even register in the caste hierarchy and consequently have suffered the greatest discrimination.
The trouble began in 1990, when Parliament passed a law reserving another 27 per cent of government jobs for members of 3,743 lower castes, or "Other Backward Classes". The measure infuriated young upper-caste Indians who saw it as a threat to their employment prospects.
The Supreme Court's endorsement of the expanded quota system came with the caveat that 50 per cent of government jobs should be filled solely on the basis of merit. The court also created a National Commission on Backward Classes, which so far has added 676 "socially and educationally" disadvantaged castes to the original list.
In deciding which groups to include on the list, the commission considers factors such as literacy rates, the prevalence of child marriage and more obscure benchmarks such as whether widows are permitted to remarry (considered a sign of backwardness because upper-caste widows typically do not remarry).
The process can seem arbitrary. India's Muslim minority, for example, is outside the caste system and therefore has been largely left out of quota policies, despite a history of discrimination. Still other groups have been overlooked because "they are so backward they have no knowledge of the system", said Ram Surat Singh, a retired judge who chairs the commission. And some castes are considered backward in some states and forward in others.
Striving for more
In the mid-1990s, for example, Rajasthan's Jats applied for inclusion on the backward-classes list. They cited, among other things, 1931 census data showing that child marriage in their community was more prevalent than among other officially backward castes, according to Dharam Vir, a Jat leader.
In 1997, the commission recommended to Parliament that the Rajasthan Jats be added to the list. But it wasn't until two years later, during a heated electoral campaign, that Vajpayee promised to follow through on the pledge, after mass rallies by the large and well-organised Jat community.
Although Jats once were tenant farmers, many now own land as a result of post-independence agricultural reforms, and are therefore better off than many from higher castes who do not own land, government officials say.
"The Jats got the reservation because of their agitation and political power," said C.P. Joshi, a cabinet minister in the state's Congress Party government, which recently proposed a 14 per cent quota for upper-caste poor in government jobs. "All parties are fighting for their political survival and they are using the reservation as a tool."
In Shahpura, a farming town of about 40,000 people roughly 100 miles southwest of New Delhi, Jats own most of the surrounding farmland and many of the largest businesses. Thanks to political quotas, they also dominate the municipal council, whose chair is occupied by Parmand Palsania, a successful Jat farmer who grows wheat and barley on 25 well-watered acres just outside of town.
Despite his backward status, Palsania has a 12th-grade education, drives an air-conditioned SUV and just spent $150,000 on a new well-drilling machine; a son is studying for a master's degree in business at a Rajasthan university.
Palsania asserted that Rajasthan Jats are deserving of quotas in part
India's 'quota system': Upper castes want in, too
India's 'quota system': Upper castes want in, too