India has been shaken, and its thriving state of Gujarat paralysed, by a massive agitation by its influential Patel community.
Millions gathered in the state's major towns under the surprisingly belligerent leadership of a hitherto unknown 22-year-old called Hardik Patel, clamouring for their caste to be granted affirmative-action benefits known as "reservations".
Violence erupted, property was damaged, eight lives were lost and the army was called in. Hardik Patel was briefly arrested and, when his arrest sparked fury and more violence, released.
The agitation damaged not only property and people but also some of the fundamental assumptions of Indian politics.

Discrimination

India's constitution, adopted in 1950, inaugurated the world's oldest and farthest-reaching affirmative action programme, guaranteeing scheduled castes and tribes - the most disadvantaged groups in Hinduism's hierarchy - not only equality of opportunity but guaranteed outcomes, with reserved places in educational institutions, government jobs and even seats in parliament and the state assemblies.
These "reservations" or quotas were granted to groups on the basis of their (presumably immutable) caste identities. The logic of reservations in India was simple: they were justified as a means of making up for millennia of discrimination based on birth.
It was a small way of compensating the millions of unfortunates who suffered daily the inequities and humiliations of untouchability.
Reservations became more political in 1989, when the VP Singh-led government of the day decided to extend their benefits to Other Backward Classes (OBCs), based on the recommendations of the Mandal Commission.
The OBCs hailed from the lower and intermediate castes who were deemed backward because they lacked "upper caste" status.

Prominent and successful

As more and more people sought fewer available government and university positions, we witnessed the unedifying (and unwittingly hilarious) spectacle of castes fighting with each other to be declared backward: the competitive zeal of the Meena and the Gujjar communities in Rajasthan, castes not originally listed as OBCs, to be deemed more backward than each other would be funny if both sides weren't so deadly serious.
As an uncle of mine sagely observed, "In our country now, you can't go forward unless you're a backward."
The Patels, however, are an unlikely caste to be seeking such recognition: they are in fact dominant in Gujarat, prominent, successful and wealthy beyond their share of 15% of the state's population.
Gujarat Chief Minister Anandiben Patel is from the community; several Patels occupy important portfolios in her cabinet. Hardik Patel says the majority of his fellow Patels are less well off.