NEW DELHI -- Members of India's lowest castes have struggled for generations for dignity and a better chance in life. But job and education quotas aimed at helping them have unintentionally spawned a new phenomenon: The eager downwardly mobile.
Over the past week, tens of thousands of members of India's Gujjar community -- politically powerful traditional farmers and shepherds from India's Rajastan state -- have burned buses, shut down interstate highways and sparked clashes that killed 25 people, all in an effort to be downgraded in caste.
For years, the Gujjars have been included in a broad group known in India's convoluted caste classification as "other backward classes" that under the constitution are entitled to 27 percent of government jobs and university enrollments.
But as Indians everywhere struggle to get ahead in the country's fast-growing economy, the Gujjars have set their sights on a richer and less competitively crowded entitlement: the added 15 percent of jobs and university spots set aside for the country's lowest castes, the so-called unscheduled tribes and scheduled castes that include the people once known as "untouchables."
"There are many segments of our society that are still not in the mainstream of our nation, and they want to be part of India's growth story," said Sachin Pilot, a Gujjar member of parliament who has helped push for his caste's reclassification. Some Gujjars have prospered, he said, but others should be included in the "many, many hundreds of millions [of Indians] who are not able to do that."
After protests Monday that shut down much of the traffic into Delhi, leaving normally congested highways virtually empty, India's government agreed to study the group's demand to become a "scheduled tribe," groups traditionally considered literal "outcastes" from the country's ancient caste system and at the bottom of its complex social ladder.
The Gujjars themselves might have agreed to the study, rather than an immediate status change, in part because the Meenas, an even larger bottom-rung caste in Rajastan, had begun to take up arms in recent days to protect their affirmative-action turf from Gujjar encroachment, a move that triggered fears of a domino-style series of caste wars.
Gujjars are about 5 percent of Rajastan's population and Meenas 15 percent, official figures show.
The irony, sociologists say, is that quotas India created to reduce social inequalities and eventually help eliminate the country's caste structure are now reinforcing it.
