Rights for forgotten tribes

Rajasthan and the Gujjar agitation

4 June 2007
Hindustan Times

Predictably, public discourse on the Gujjar-state-Mina (as the census spells them) standoff in Rajasthan has centred on two, or, at best, three issues: while a large section of the media and some political commentators — fresh from the OBC bust up — have decried the irrationality of community-based reservations, another section has tried to frame the legitimate claims of the Gujjars against the lack of trickle-down. The brutality of the police firing merits passing mention, but will soon disappear, like all the other statistics of people killed by a trigger-happy police let loose by incompetent administrations. As if five lakh rupees here, and one lakh there were enough to deflect from the underlying issue of how governments in India treat demonstrating interest groups.