ABSTRACT
This chapter examines issues of social hierarchy and ‘corruption’ in the civil services in the light of bureaucratic policies that prioritised proportionate representation of communities and castes in recruitment. It also explores the early questions about reservations in the government services. This history encourages us to reconsider the way in which subject/citizens interacted with civil servants and police officers, particularly when it came to issues of recruitment. The chapter is, therefore, concerned with the nature of interactions and boundaries between state and society and offers an alternative to political histories which treat the state in India as a uniform homogeneous entity. First, by looking at how different communities attempted to gain access to government employment, it examines how the interactions between officialdom and the public affected bureaucratic corruption in terms of the use of state resources and manpower for particularistic purposes. Second, to this end, it more directly develops a historical background for the existing literature that posits the idea of a ‘fuzzy state’ in contemporary India.1 The chapter examines three specific phases in the colonial and postcolonial state’s approach to caste and communal representation in the services. First, it will consider the early to mid 1930s, the period surrounding the Round Table Conferences leading up to the 1935 Government of India Act, and the Communal Award. In particular, here it will survey the debates in the UP Appointments Department (established to manage and review civil service recruitment) about the possibilities of community or caste reservations in the services. In the second section, it will move on to the mid 1940s and concentrate specifically on the kinds of pressure and lobby groups that emerged as a result of government reservation proposals, and the ways in which they played themselves out around the 1946 elections. Finally, it will look at the period of the early 1950s, and consider how the independent Indian state managed the question of Scheduled Caste (SC) reservation in a very different political context.
