Quotas Offsetting Caste System Help India’s Poor, but Stir Violent Debate : Asia: Nearly everyone agrees that reserving jobs has given hundreds of millions a chance for upward mobility. Nation has done just that for more than 70 years, but equality is still far away.

MUSSOORIE, India —  By the code of India’s ancient caste system, Asim Arun should have been a cobbler or tanner of hides, socially unfit to touch an upper-caste Hindu or even look him in the eye.

Defying history, Arun is in an elite academy, training for a coveted position in India’s civil service.

He was admitted under a quota that reserves one in five government jobs and university places for people from India’s primitive hunter-gatherer tribes, members of Hinduism’s lowest castes and the even lower-placed “Untouchables.”

For about 70 years, long before the term “affirmative action” was coined in the United States, India has used quotas to try to undo its caste system--one of the most widespread, rigid and exclusive systems of social discrimination ever devised by man and sanctioned by religion.

Nearly everyone agrees reserving jobs through quotas has given hundreds of millions of Indians a chance for upward mobility, spread literacy and given confidence to social classes doomed for centuries to oppression because of their birth.

But despite its long history, the “reservation policy” still excites furious--sometimes lethal--argument.

Last September, the state of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous and powerful, announced it was broadening the list of castes eligible for quotas. More than 50% of the bureaucracy would be reserved for low castes, which account for more than eight of every 10 Hindus.

Fearing they would lose their places in good schools, hundreds of upper-caste students marched through the narrow streets of Mussoorie shouting protests.

As so often happens in India, the crowd became a mob, police opened fire, and six people were killed. Since then, at least 30 people have died in Uttar Pradesh during violence in similar protests.

The new quota would apply all over the state, even in sparsely populated mountain areas where few low-caste Hindus live. That has brought demands by the hill people to break up Uttar Pradesh and give them their own state government.

Critics say that quotas amount to reverse discrimination, that they are undemocratic and that they deny the best jobs to the best people. India has outlawed discrimination by caste, but it paradoxically perpetuates it, they argue.

“I look forward to the day when we get rid of reservations,” said Arun, a soft-spoken policeman’s son. “But right now we still need them, not because we are innately incapable, but because (for) over 3,000 years we have been denied all opportunities for education or advancement.”

The National Academy of Administration, set in a forest of cedars and pines in Mussoorie, a hilltop town on the edge of the Himalayas, is a crucible of the quota policy.

After the British left India in 1947, the academy became the reserve of Indians from the best families who spoke English with an Oxford accent.

Today, because of the quotas, some students come from dusty villages that have erratic or no electricity and where water wells are still segregated by caste.

“For me, this school is a culture shock,” said Arun. Unlike him, his upper-caste classmates drink alcohol, date girls and know Western dancing. “This is alien to my community.”

The academy pays more attention these days to leveling people from varying backgrounds. An etiquette class teaches how and when to shake hands rather than use the traditional Indian greeting of folding one’s palms like someone praying, how to use knives and forks, and how to show sensitivity to other folkways and religions in India’s sometimes explosive cultural mix.

Caste is Hinduism’s hereditary hierarchy based on occupation. At the top are Brahmins (priests) and aristocracy; then warriors; then merchants and artisans; and, finally, peasant farmers and tradesmen. Each of the four castes has thousands of subcastes.

People like sweepers and grave diggers are outside the caste system and are considered so low that even their shadow is polluting to the high caste. They are the outcastes, or Untouchables.

Modern India, where more than 80% of the 900 million people are Hindus, recognized the system as odious. In the 1950s, it wrote the reservation system into its constitution, expecting that within 10 years quotas could be abandoned because they would have uplifted the underprivileged.

But today, politicians use the system as a tool to curry votes. Rather than disappearing, quotas are expanding.

Three years ago, the federal government unexpectedly agreed to enlarge the quota list to include many new categories. The decision set off a wave of impassioned protest. Over a three-month period, more than 100 students committed suicide by setting themselves on fire with gasoline or swallowing poison.

Challenged in the Supreme Court, the policy was upheld. “Equality is secured not only when equals are treated equally, but also when unequals are treated unequally,” it ruled.

The court said 50% should be the ceiling for quotas. Still, the controversy goes on.

In September, the southern state of Karnataka enacted a 73% quota for state jobs, leaving only 27% to be given on a merit basis. Tamil Nadu, the southern state where job quotas were first introduced in the 1920s, legislated a 69% quota.

Has the policy worked?

The vast majority of India’s 180 million Untouchables and tribespeople still live in undeveloped villages, shantytowns or urban slums. India’s middle class is still overwhelmingly from the Brahmin and other upper castes, said Dhirubhai Sheth at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi.

But increasingly, political power is flowing to the lower castes.

“Change is incremental. A one-stroke revolution has never been possible,” said Sheth.