ABSTRACT
By the early 1990s, a sizable educated middle class had emerged among the Dalits mostly because of large-scale spread of education and jobs in public sector. Even reservations which have been actually instrumental in the economic progress of the Dalits and were perceived by them as such were articulated more as instruments of social and political upliftment rather than economic progression. When the government adopted neoliberal reforms in the mid-1980s and began reversing the constitutional ethos of welfare state, the Dalits remained completely oblivious of them and rather created space for opportunist elements among them to canvass for these reforms. The exhortation of the Dalit capitalists that the Dalits should take up entrepreneurship than seek jobs becomes misleading in this light. Contrary to the contention of the protagonists of Dalit capitalism, such ‘job-giving’ enterprises by Dalits also existed right at the inception of the Dalit movement.
