Under the impetus of “reservations” -an elaborate government policy of affirmative action- over the past six decades hundreds of thousands of Indian untouchables -individuals ranked extremely low... Show moreUnder the impetus of “reservations” -an elaborate government policy of affirmative action- over the past six decades hundreds of thousands of Indian untouchables -individuals ranked extremely low in the Hindu caste hierarchy- have managed to secure highly valued civil service jobs. The question explored in this study is why these untouchable bureaucrats are not much inclined -as those who introduced reservations had hoped and anticipated they would- to use their new-found positions of power and influence to extend special help to untouchable clients outside bureaucracy. In an effort to account for this puzzling phenomenon of unrepresentative bureaucracy the author conducted prolonged ethnographic fieldwork in a dust-level rural development bureaucracy in north India. He introduces the reader to a complex and vibrant local universe in which an array of actors, factors and considerations conspire to simultaneously limit untouchable bureaucrats’ opportunities and motives for acting as active representatives of untouchable interests and constrain untouchable clients’ possibilities for claiming special treatment. Affirmative action in civil service recruitment, it is concluded, seems to be of doubtful use as a social engineering tool, at least in the case of stigmatized ethnic minority groups in patronage democracies. Show less
