ABSTRACT
Introduction Disadvantage is a popular and controversial word in India these days. In October 2007, half a million Gujars, members of a traditionally pastoral community of north and central India, filled the streets of several towns in the Indian state of Rajasthan demanding they be classified by their state government as disadvantaged. The Gujars wish to be listed as Scheduled Tribes, and thereby receive greater parliamentary representation, preferential treatment in public employment and lower admissions standards in many educational institutions.2 Yet, ethnographers have cast doubt on their aboriginal descent, they share customs with other groups in the middle of the social ladder,3 and a current web site hosted by members of the Gujar community refers to the group as ‘a proud people’ with ‘the desire and ability to rule the world’.4 The case of the Gujars illustrates, oddly but powerfully, the ways in which culture and politics mingle to shape acceptable notions of social justice and government policy in democracies. In a poor, growing economy with academic costs well below the market value of educational training, the tag of disadvantage has come to acquire value and, ironically, the desire for mobility has brought about a demand to be classified as disadvantaged. It is this demand that I would like to reflect upon here – its cultural roots, its social rationale, the political mechanisms through which it is expressed and some of the economic implications of the policies that it has generated. Group-based policies of preferential treatment began under British rule in the first half of the twentieth century. After political independence in 1947, the Indian constitution converted some of these policies into rights and thereby facilitated the expansion of state-led affirmative action. The constitution was unusual in that it juxtaposed provisions for the equality of all citizens before the law with those that mandated the proportional political representation of specific groups and allowed the state to make special concessions for their advancement. In the decades that followed, these provisions did dilute the dominance of the elite in political and social life but also generated caste-based contests for the rents from public office and the gains from spending on public goods.
