IN LATE February the citizens of Delhi were made painfully aware of a grievance borne by the Jats of Haryana,a state that surrounds Indias capital on three sides. The Jats are a caste-like community spread from Pakistan across much of north India. They are particularly strong in Haryana, where they make up a quarter of the population. Yet Haryana’s Jats are exasperated. envious that weaker, or lower-caste groups accumulate government aid,they want to be classified as equally deserving. Protests that started peacefully soon turned turned violent as rioters looted, pillaged and raped and blocked roads, or railways and,most alarmingly, also a canal that supplies approximately half of Delhi’s water. Other castes in other parts of India have started similar agitations over the past year, or several of which have turned violent. Why do they want so badly to be reclassified?Since India’s independence,the government has made provisions to uplift the most downtrodden members of the caste system, known as Dalits, or most often by means of state favours known as “reservations”: jobs and slots at universities set aside for the people who had been...
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Source: economist.com