In April and May 1996, while conducting doctoral research, I spent a month living in Meerut College, western Uttar Pradesh (UP). In September 2004 a new project brought me back to Meerut, and I was nervous about my return to the college. Would I get on with the new batch of students? What of the age gap that had opened up between my informants and I? Do I mention my previous visit? These concerns quickly evaporated when I entered the college. Many of the students I had met in 1996 were still living in the same hostel rooms. Between 1996 and 2004 I had completed my Ph.D., married, and obtained an academic job. During the same period, many of my informants, now in their mid-thirties, had, it seemed, stood still. Unable to obtain salaried employment, one of these students asked me: “What can we do but study and wait?”

Rising unemployment is a key feature of the lives of young people across large parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Proliferating images of success based on prolonged participation in schooling and subsequent entry into professional or white-collar work have encouraged parents to invest in formal schooling. Yet widely different forms of neo-liberal economic change have simultaneously undermined young people's efforts to obtain secure well-paid work. Thus arises one of the most unsettling paradoxes of contemporary social change in the global south: at almost the precise moment that increasing numbers of people formerly excluded from schooling have come to recognize the possibilities held out by education for individual improvement, opportunities for these groups to benefit economically from schooling are disintegrating (Jeffrey, Jeffery, and Jeffery Reference Jeffrey, Jeffery and Jeffery2008).

While this crisis has been understood for some time (e.g., Dore Reference Dore1976; Bourdieu and Passeron Reference Bourdieu, Passeron and Nice1977), there have been few attempts to examine comparatively the political strategies that educated young people adopt to negotiate unemployment. This paper addresses this lacuna. Drawing on research I conducted among rich farmers in the mid-1990s in rural UP, and in the mid-2000s among educated unemployed young men in urban UP, I show how the contemporary scarcity of salaried work has precipitated the growth of a new generation of political intermediaries in UP who operate mainly outside formal politics. Like unemployed young men in other settings, the educated unemployed in UP frequently coordinate forms of collective youth protest and play intermediary roles between subordinate sections of society and the state. But unemployed young men in UP also engage in a more self-interested form of class-based politics that builds on the practices of senior male kin in rural areas.

THEORIZING EDUCATED UNEMPLOYMENT

An increase in people's investment in schooling combined with a shortage of salaried employment for high school and university matriculates has created a vast problem of educated unemployment, which, while not wholly new (see Dore Reference Dore1976) and far from confined to the global south (Kaplinsky Reference Kaplinsky2005), has become especially visible and intense in the 1990s and early 2000s in Asia (Jha Reference Jha2004; Jeffrey, Jeffery, and Jeffery Reference Jeffrey, Jeffery and Jeffery2008), Africa (e.g., Bryceson Reference Bryceson2002; Mains Reference Mains2007), and Latin America (Levinson Reference Levinson1999; Harris Reference Harriss2003). Economic change has typically failed to generate permanent white-collar jobs within manufacturing and services, even in areas of high economic growth such as China (Kaplinsky Reference Kaplinsky2005) and south India (Ul Haq Reference Ul Haq2003). In other contexts, the economic dependence of countries on trading a narrow range of commodities has often created cycles of boom and bust, which, in turn, have pitched young men in and out of the careers they were groomed to expect (e.g., Ferguson Reference Ferguson1999). The result has been widespread increases in unemployment and underemployment: dependence on involuntary part-time work, intermittent unemployment, and/or involvement in poorly remunerated labor (Prause and Dooley Reference Prause and Dooley1997: 245).Footnote ¹

In many parts of the global south, educated unemployment bears most pressingly on men in their twenties or early thirties. This is not to deny the importance of unemployment for young women, who are often exposed to reinforcing modes of subordination, as young people excluded by economic structures from salaried work and as women seeking to challenge entrenched gendered ideas (Miles Reference Miles2002). But the prevalence of male breadwinner norms in the global south often means that educated unemployment has especially direct negative consequences for young men (e.g., Osella and Osella Reference Osella and Osella2000). The strategies and preoccupations of these men frequently parallel in key respects those of younger ‘youths’ discussed in classic Western sociological research; they are unmarried, partially dependent on their parents financially, and remain preoccupied with questions of culture, style, and respect.

A generation of researchers in the 1960s and 1970s frequently depicted educated unemployed young men as either apathetic (Kerr Reference Kerr and Coleman1965) or engaged in idiosyncratic and extreme forms of politics (e.g., Dore Reference Dore1976; see also Hansen Reference Hansen1996). But much recent research shows that unemployed young men may play key roles in processes of democratic political change. Following Mannheim (Reference Mannheim, Altbach and Laufer1972), many scholars have suggested that the very structural liminality of youth often allows young people to challenge historical injustices, sometimes through reference to age-based or generational inequalities. Educated unemployed young men, in particular, often possess the time, skills, and motivation to engage in political critique and mobilization. The unemployed have been in the vanguard of several political upheavals outside the West, including, for example, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa (Bundy Reference Bundy1987), protests against financial crises in South America in the early 2000s (Harriss 2003), and environmental agitation in South-East Asia (Tsing Reference Tsing2004). At a more everyday level, Krishna's (2002) study of political brokerage in western India shows how educated unemployed young men, including those from middle-class backgrounds, often use their educated skills to assist the poor in their negotiations with the state. Similarly, Demerath (Reference Demerath1999) documents the emergence of a set of educated unemployed youth in Papua New Guinea who occupy positions in local government organizations, circulate radical political discourses, and act as mediators between the poor and urban state bureaucrats (see also Weiss Reference Weiss2002; Cole Reference Cole2004).

Recent research on state/state society relations in post-colonial settings offers a useful starting point for theorizing the political activity of unemployed young men (e.g., Gupta Reference Gupta1995; Corbridge et al. Reference Corbridge, Glyn Williams and Véron2005; Ferguson Reference Ferguson2006). Drawing on Foucault, recent scholarship on the anthropology of the state has exposed the subtle discursive and material apparatus through which the state constitutes people as “subjects of rule” (e.g., Fuller and Bénéï Reference Fuller and Bénéï2001; Hansen and Stepputat Reference Hansen and Stepputat2001). This emphasis on governmentality, understood as the micro-political processes through which state power conditions people to act in specific ways, demonstrates how particular visions of moral behavior disseminated by powerful institutions come to shape the political practices of young people on the ground (see Hansen Reference Hansen1996). Equally important has been research documenting how youth and other social actors inhabit, rework, and contest broader governmentalizing logics (e.g., Gupta Reference Gupta1995; Li Reference Li2005). But studies of governmentality in the postcolonial world sometimes emerge from an engagement with Foucault presenting a binary picture of political practice wherein the state and urban bourgeoisie is pitted against a local “political society” (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee2004) or “public culture” (Gupta Reference Gupta1995). These studies therefore risk distracting attention from the often-crucial role played by lower middle classes, especially youth, in processes of political change.

This argument can be drawn out through reference to the influential recent work of Partha Chatterjee on “political society” in India. Chatterjee (Reference Chatterjee1998: 59) makes a distinction in India between civil society—which he defines as “those characteristic institutions of modern associational life originating in Western societies that are based on equality, autonomy, freedom of entry and exit, contract, [and] deliberative procedures of decision making”—and political society, “a domain of mediating institutions [and activities] between civil society and the state.” Chatterjee elaborates on the nature of political society in India through reference to the historical origins of this sphere. During the colonial period, opposition to the British occurred mainly though a nationalist elite operating according to the associational principles of civil society. But by at least the early twentieth century, the possibility of a different mediation between Indian people and the state was emerging. This nascent political society consisted of a wide range of popular maneuvers and strategies targeted against colonial rule and often coordinated by political brokers and nonparty political formations. The flowering of state-led development planning in the postcolonial period expanded the size and scope of political society in India. From the late 1940s onwards, the Indian state offered protection and resources to an array of different “populations,” who were classified as, for example, “Scheduled Castes” (SCs) or people “Below the Poverty Line” (BPL). For Chatterjee, political society in the post-colonial era therefore refers to the vast space of everyday political relations wherein differently labeled sections of the population compete for state power and developmental goods, often through adopting paralegal and violent tactics, and frequently via reference to the moral characteristics of their “community.” Chatterjee is aware of the violence and oppression of political society, but he often emphasizes how lower middle-class brokers within political society—teachers and left-wing activists, for example—mediate between the poor and government bureaucracies in ways that may promote democratic participation.

Chatterjee's account of subaltern politics foregrounds the type of ordinary political work conducted by the mass of unemployed young men in postcolonial settings, who lack direct access to influential politicians and do not belong to formal civil society associations. In addition, Chatterjee usefully challenges scholarly visions of patron-client networks as inevitably “corrupt” or “aberrant” political forms. But in emphasizing the democratic potential of political society, Chatterjee's work sometimes distracts attention from the role of lower middle classes in reproducing advantage within this domain of ordinary political action (cf. Harriss-White Reference Harriss-White2003). One of the most important aspects of late-twentieth-century social change in India, Africa, and Latin America has been the emergence of a large lower middle class, which has monopolized access to state goods in provincial settings, often by playing mediating roles between the poor and the state (e.g., Berry Reference Berry1985; Hansen Reference Hansen1996; Harriss-White Reference Harriss-White2003; Roitman Reference Roitman2004). The accumulative tactics of these “middling sorts” are rarely the explicit object of discussion in Chatterjee's analyses or in the work of anthropologists concerned with state/society relations in the global south. The central contribution of my paper in this context is to provide a grounded and detailed case study of how a section of the lower middle classes, especially unemployed youth, extend power in the sphere of everyday politics. I offer a vision of political society “turned in upon itself,” wherein lower middle classes, often in league with government officials, intensively defend their privileges against the incursions of the poor, including poorer unemployed young men.

As I have argued elsewhere (Jeffrey Reference Jeffrey2001), the work of Pierre Bourdieu offers a useful basis for theorizing the strategies of a lower middle class within the sphere of ordinary politics. Drawing on an analysis of French society, Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1984; Reference Bourdieu and Richardson1986) argued that people are differentiated according to their possession of economic capital, social capital—which he defines as useful social connections—and cultural capital: a range of goods, titles, and forms of behavior that confer distinction in social situations. Bourdieu was especially interested in the quotidian practices through which class advantage is communicated and reinforced, and stressed the manner in which power is contained within the “habitus”: internalized orientations to action inscribed in people's dispositions, reflexes, and tastes that both reflect people's histories and structure future action. Bourdieu viewed society as comprised of distinct fields of social competition—or “gaming spaces”—in which people with greater economic, social and cultural capital and with a habitus attuned to possibilities for gain tend to outwit poorer groups. Bourdieu's practical application of the concept of habitus pointed to the ability of young people from dominant backgrounds to negotiate markets for jobs and political opportunities with relative confidence and ease. Bourdieu dwelt especially on powerful people's “feel for the game,” or sens de placement, and a corresponding lack of social skill and spatial awareness among marginalized social groups (see especially Bourdieu and Wacquant Reference Bourdieu and Wacquant1992).

Bourdieu's theoretical schema is valuable in drawing attention to the durability of class power, the multi-dimensionality of dominance, and the importance of understanding the mechanisms through which class attributes are “stored” in people's bodily comportment and transferred across generations (Savage Reference Savage2003). Bourdieu's emphasis on social reproduction as a set of complex “games” and his reference to the importance of an embodied positional sense within these games is especially instructive for an analysis of youth society in western UP. But much of Bourdieu's work rather suggests that poorer sections of society are incapable of engaging in critique or effecting meaningful agency (e.g., Cloke et al. Reference Cloke Paul, Thrift, Savage and Butler1995). It is therefore useful to set alongside Bourdieu's framework the emphasis of other scholars on agency and resistance (e.g., Gramsci Reference Gramsci, Hoare and Nowell-Smith1971; Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee2004), and the agency of young people especially (Willis Reference Willis, Barton and Walker1982; Hall Reference Hall1985; Butler Reference Butler1997). Willis (Reference Willis, Barton and Walker1982) pays particular attention to how working-class youth sometimes challenge established social forces through forms of cultural production: active and imaginative practices shaped by broader structures and available symbolic resources. The notion of cultural production also implies that educated unemployed young men from middle-class background may engage in actions that do not straightforwardly reproduce class inequalities. In addition, the idea of cultural production opens up space for examining, pace Chatterjee (Reference Chatterjee2004), how particular cultural forms may create solidarities that crosscut social class.

In this paper I hold the work of Bourdieu, Willis, and Chatterjee in creative tension to expose how unemployed young men from lower middle-class backgrounds both engaged in strategies that perpetuated their class advantage and formed alliances with poorer unemployed young men. I also reflect upon the broader relevance of “fixing” as a basis for the cultural projects of unemployed youth.

The next two sections of the paper contextualize my account of unemployed youth with reference to the rise of Jat power in UP in the twentieth century and then through a discussion of the political strategies of Jat rich farmers in 1990s rural western UP. The paper then considers a generation of educated unemployed Jat young men studying in Meerut City in the mid-2000s from two perspectives. First, I focus on Jat “social reformers” who were coordinating collective youth protests against state “corruption” (bhrashtāchār). Second, I discuss self-styled Jat “fixers” who were using their political reputation to make large sums of money and shore up class and caste power. The conclusions reflect on the value of this discussion for broader comparative research on educated unemployed young men and everyday politics.

THE RISE OF JAT POWER IN UTTAR PRADESH

UP's population may be roughly divided into three social blocs. Upper caste Hindus (principally Brahmins and Thakurs) comprise roughly 20 percent of the population. These castes have dominated salaried employment, local government bureaucracies, and landownership in many parts of UP (Hasan Reference Hasan1998). A second bloc of households belonging to Hindu middle castes frequently controls access to political and economic power in rural parts of the state. This category of household includes the Jats, in the West, and Yadavs, in the East. The remainder of UP's population is mainly comprised of Muslims, Dalits (a term denoting ex-untouchables; dalit means broken and oppressed in Hindi), and poorer sections of the so-called “Other Backward Classes” (OBCs): castes legally identified as above Dalits in the caste hierarchy but suffering from social and economic disadvantages. There are elites among Muslims and Dalits in UP. But Muslims, Dalits, and poorer OBCs typically possess few material assets and tend to work in exploitative and insecure conditions.

This paper focuses on the middle-ranking Jat caste. Jats comprise about 2.5 percent of the population of UP and about 8 percent of the population of western UP, but they have been important in the social and political history of the state, especially in the west. The rise of the Jats to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century can be traced to processes of social mobility occurring in the colonial era in western UP. Jats have historically worked as peasant farmers in this region, owning moderately sized agricultural holdings (Singh Reference Singh1992). Yet since at least the early 1900s some rural Jat families sought formal education for their sons and access to employment outside agriculture (Chowdhry Reference Chowdhry1994; Datta Reference Datta1999). The rise of the Arya Samaj Hindu reform movement in the 1880s and 1890s instilled in many Jats a sense of their right to compete for government-salaried employment in urban areas, and the Arya Samaj established a large number of educational institutions catering especially to rural Jats. Moreover, the colonial administration selectively inducted Jats into the local government bureaucracy and army, thus creating new lines of mobility for some rural households (Stokes Reference Stokes1986). At the same time, the commercialization of sugar cane and wheat production in western UP in the first half of the twentieth century greatly increased the capacity of Jats to invest money in non-agricultural career opportunities (Sharma and Poleman Reference Sharma and Poleman1993).

Processes of economic diversification and agricultural commercialization continued in the immediate post-Independence period, but the social and economic rise of Jat farmers did not gather pace until the mid-1960s. In 1964 the Indian Government shifted the direction of development planning from a model of industrial growth toward an effort to improve agricultural production. C. Subramaniam's appointment as India's Food and Agriculture Minister in 1964, advice from the World Bank, and fears of a Communist threat in rural areas, prompted the Indian Government to shift its economic focus to creating incentive prices for agricultural producers through the establishment of an Agricultural Prices Commission and the Food Corporation of India, set up in January 1965. This intervention in the food-grain market was married to a drive toward agricultural production increases, principally through encouraging the application of high-yielding varieties of grain, fertilizers, pesticides, and improved irrigation.

Between the mid-1960s and late 1980s, Jats intensified their farming practices through purchasing agricultural machinery, using subsidized fertilizers, pesticides, and insecticides on their land, and expanding their use of hired-in labor (Sharma and Poleman Reference Sharma and Poleman1993). Concerned about the subdivision of their agricultural holdings associated with the prevailing system of partible inheritance, many Jats invested agricultural profits in small businesses or in efforts to obtain employment in the state bureaucracy (Jeffrey and Lerche Reference Jeffrey and Lerche2000; Jeffrey Reference Jeffrey2001). These non-farm strategies were linked to a broader process of social mobility wherein Jat farmers removed family members from direct cultivation of the soil, offered large dowries at the time of their daughters’ marriages, limited the size of their families, and took advantage of the expansion of government schooling in rural and small-town western UP (Jeffrey, Jeffery, and Jeffery Reference Jeffrey, Jeffery and Jeffery2008).

The political profile of Jats also increased between the mid-1960s and late 1980s. The rise of political parties representing agricultural groups, especially the various parties led by the Jat politician Charan Singh, offered the Jats a platform for expressing political demands. Moreover, Charan Singh effectively employed populist rhetoric to gain support among a range of intermediate castes and poorer rural sections of society (Hasan Reference Hasan1998). This political power allowed rich Jat farmers to benefit from high agricultural prices and large subsidies on agricultural inputs.

Economic reforms in India since the early 1990s have threatened the social and political strategies of Jat farmers, however. Between 1947 and the mid-1980s, India's approach to macroeconomic planning combined a leading role for the private sector in economic decision-making with state intervention formally aimed at accelerating growth and redistributing social opportunities (Chandrashekhar and Ghosh Reference Chandrashekhar and Jayati2002). In the face of a growing fiscal crisis, however, and under pressure from multilateral lenders, the Indian state embarked on a series of economic reforms beginning in the mid-1980s and intensifying in the early 1990s. Prosperous Jat farmers continued to receive large subsidies on power, water, and fertilizers and benefit from high government purchasing prices for key crops during the 1990s (Corbridge and Harriss Reference Corbridge and Harriss2000: 157), but economic reforms posed a tangible long-term threat to their access to government largesse. Liberalization also resulted in a marked slowdown in the creation of government jobs in UP and thus jeopardized Jats’ access to salaried work outside agriculture. Moreover, liberalization failed to generate private sector employment in UP, at least until the mid-2000s. UP's long-established industrial base—of textile mills, especially in its second city, Kanpur—has almost completely collapsed, and UP has played little or no part so far in the newly emerging information technology and out-sourcing industries for which India has become renowned (see Ahluwalia Reference Ahluwalia and Montek2001).

A crisis of educated unemployment in UP has coincided with the rapid disintegration of the public provision of basic welfare services, especially education, health care, and infrastructure. This neglect is especially clear in the case of education. Until the early 1990s, the state was expanding its financial support for government schooling. Since that time, neo-liberal economic reforms have undermined government educational provision (Mooij and Dev Reference Mooij and Dev2002). With the exception of a small number of elite state colleges, government schools and colleges usually lack teaching aids and equipment, catering facilities, and basic amenities (Kingdon and Muzammil Reference Kingdon and Muzammil2003). Numerous non-state institutions have entered the educational sphere to fill this vacuum, but these schools and colleges are, on the whole, poorly regulated, staffed, and funded (Jeffery, Jeffery, and Jeffrey Reference Jeffery, Jeffery, Jeffrey, Chopra and Jeffery2005). A vast gulf has opened up in UP between a tiny upper stratum of higher educational institutions offering internationally acclaimed qualifications and the mass of poorly-funded government and private institutions catering for the majority of the population, including most Jats.

Jat farmers also faced new social and political threats from the late 1980s onwards, especially from Dalits. Between 1970 and the early 1990s, most Dalits in rural UP benefited slightly from the introduction of new technologies and marketing arrangements within agriculture, which often increased real wages within farming (Jeffrey and Lerche Reference Jeffrey and Lerche2000). Building on these small economic gains, some rural Dalits in UP strove to obtain formal education and salaried employment for their sons. Dalits have also profited from the rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) as a political force. Established in 1984, the BSP held power at the UP state level four times between 1993 and 2003, and it won a landslide victory in the 2007 state elections. The BSP has attempted to place Dalits in key positions within the UP bureaucracy, speed up the flow of development funds and educational opportunities to this community, and improve Dalits’ access to police protection and judicial redress (Jaffrelot Reference Jaffrelot2003). Drawing on the vision of upward mobility based upon education and entry into white-collar employment promoted by the Dalit leader, Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar, the BSP made particular efforts to encourage Dalits to acquire formal schooling. This drive was visibly manifest in a symbolic program founded on the establishment of educational institutions, libraries, and parks dedicated to Ambedkar and on the construction of statues across the state depicting this highly educated Dalit hero.

The efforts of the BSP to improve Dalits’ access to power and resources at the local level intersected with changes in the formal system of local government in India. In 1992, the 73rd Amendment Act granted village councils (panchāyats) an expanded role in the provision of public services, the creation and maintenance of public goods, and the planning and implementation of development activities. The Act also provided a 33 percent reservation of panchāyat seats for Dalits and women and made provisions for five-yearly panchāyat elections.

The Jats generally lacked the same level of party political representation as that obtained by Dalits in the 1990s and early 2000s. The death of the Jat politician Chaudhry Charan Singh, in 1987, deprived Jats of a figurehead in state- and national-level politics. Moreover, the decision of the Indian Government in 1990 to implement reservations in government employment for OBCs drove a wedge between “backwards” and non-OBCs and thus partially undermined Jat efforts to consolidate farmers as a voting bloc. The Hindu rightwing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) held power three times in UP between 1990 and 2005 and this party offered some Jats a means of expressing political goals (see Hasan Reference Hasan1998). Indeed, the BJP granted OBC status to Jats in UP in 2000, thus allowing this caste to claim reserved places in educational institutions and government employment. But the BJP gave most visible expression to the ambitions and anxieties of UP's urban classes and the upper castes (Corbridge and Harriss Reference Corbridge and Harriss2000).

In sum, the period between the mid-1960s and early 1990s witnessed a deepening of processes of Jat upward mobility. But since the early 1990s a decline in the availability of non-agricultural employment and crisis in educational provision, combined with the political rise of Dalits, have threatened Jat power. The next section uses research I conducted in western UP in the mid-1990s to consider how rural Jats were responding to these threats.

THE POLITICAL STRATEGIES OF RICH JAT FARMERS IN THE MID-1990S

In December 1996, I visited a rich Jat farmer named Harpal who lived in the large village of Masuri about 10 kilometers from Meerut City.Footnote ² Harpal was in his early fifties and belonged to one of the richest ten Jat farming families in Masuri. As I arrived at the family's large metal gate on the edge of their home, Harpal sprang from a chair in the courtyard, banished a German shepherd dog to the corner of the compound, and ushered me into his home. Within five minutes he had changed into a white shirt and pajama trousers and ordered tea, biscuits, and salted nuts to be arranged on the low wooden table at the center of the urban-style front room. On hearing that I was investigating the politics of Jat power, Harpal launched into a description of his family's influence in which he traced the fine channels of trust, obligation, and mutual appreciation that linked him to local politicians, land revenue officers, state marketing agencies, and the police. Harpal: “Being a successful farmer means cultivating connections as well as cultivating land!”

Between April 1996 and December 1997, I conducted fourteen months’ ethnographic field research examining the social and political strategies of Jat households owning between 10 and 30 acres of land in three villages close to Meerut City: Daurala, Masuri, and Khanpur.Footnote ³ Meerut district is a relatively prosperous district of western UP and lies on a flat, well-irrigated alluvial plain between the Ganges and Yamuna rivers. The rich loamy soils and high water table support intensive sugar cane and wheat cultivation. Following the widespread introduction of high-yielding crop varieties, chemical fertilizers, and electric tube well irrigation between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s, agricultural yields rose steeply. Jats possessed over 90 percent of the agricultural land in each of the villages in which I worked, most employed temporary wage laborers to conduct the most intensive agricultural tasks, and they generally made large profits from farming. But Jats were keenly aware of the economic threat posed by liberalization to farm subsidies and the political threat associated with the rise of Dalits.

As the example of Harpal suggests, rich Jat farmers were responding to a sense of economic insecurity through forms of political investment. These investments usually occurred outside party politics and formal political organizations and focused instead on developing what Jat farmers termed a “web”Footnote ⁴ of local political connections.

Jat political activity had five key dimensions. First, some Jats participated in periodic protests associated with the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) farmers’ movement. The BKU organized protests in the late 1980s and early 1990s aimed at raising the prices paid by the government for key cash crops, improving agricultural marketing arrangements, and preventing government bureaucrats from engaging in malpractice (Bentall and Corbridge Reference Bentall and Corbridge1996). Jat farmers within the BKU circulated a powerful moral discourse that contrasted honest, conscientious, and impoverished farmers in rural “Bhārat” (the Hindi word for India) with corrupt, lazy, and wealthy officials in urban “India,” and they represented this idea symbolically through dressing in clothes, such as the white shirt and pajamas worn by Harpal, that connoted a Jat history of agricultural work. By the mid-1990s BKU activity was scattered and tended to focus around farmers’ frustrations regarding marketing their sugar cane. But roughly three-quarters of the Jat farmers whom I interviewed in 1996–1997 had participated in a BKU rally during the previous year, and in most cases they tried to involve poorer farmers and local Dalit laborers in their protests.

Second, rich Jata farmers sought to maintain control over panchāyats. Rich farmers often organized feasts prior to panchāyat elections in order to convince poorer villagers to vote for them, and they sometimes intimidated Dalit laborers who worked on their land. Where a panchāyat position was reserved for a Dalit, Jat farmers typically arranged for a low caste laborer on their farm to stand as a proxy candidate. After winning the elections, Jat rich farmers effectively controlled the operations of the panchāyat and the opportunities for obtaining development resources that this position opens up.

Third, and at a more everyday level, Jats developed social contacts within the Cane Societies that managed the delivery of sugar cane to government mills. The Cane Societies periodically issued permission slips that allowed farmers to deliver fixed quantities of cane to the mills. Farmers relied on the regular arrival of slips in order to obtain quick profits from their sugar cane and clear their fields for other crops. Rich Jat farmers used blackmail, bribes, and intimidation to obtain influence within the Cane Societies and thereby obtain the permission slips out of turn.

Fourth, rich Jat farmers maintained contacts within the local police force. Rich Jats frequently visited local police stations to cultivate good relations. They also exerted pressure on the local and city police forces through maintaining a link with a politician in Meerut district, who had some power over the posting and promotion of senior police officers (see also Brass Reference Brass1997; Jeffrey Reference Jeffrey2000). Rich Jats sometimes invited middle- or upper-caste politicians to their rural homes where they sought to build relationships of trust. Rich Jat farmers were able to use their power over the local police to rig local government elections, intimidate opponents, and evade punishment for acts of violence perpetrated against lower castes.

Fifth, and most importantly, rich Jat farmers intensified long-standing efforts to diversify their household's economic base through seeking education and non-agricultural employment for their sons. Government work remained the acme of rich Jat farmers’ ambitions in the mid-1990s since it promised a secure income, pension, numerous employment benefits, and access to bribes and kickbacks. In the context of a decline in the quality of government schools and increasing competition for government posts, Jats sent their children to private schools in urban areas and encouraged them to obtain higher education. Of the 164 Jat men born before 1947 in my sample in rural Meerut district in 1997, 21 percent possessed a degree, compared to 47 percent of the 210 men born since 1947. Jat rich farmers also nurtured relationships with men perceived to have some influence over recruitment to local government positions, especially politicians and government recruitment agents.

A few Dalit political entrepreneurs tried to undermine Jats’ influence over Cane Society employees, the police, and government recruitment processes. These men used the authority conferred by the BSP to make appeals to state officials for assistance. But Jats were well-placed to counter Dalit threats, by emphasizing affinities of habitus with police and Cane Society officials, investing in feasts for government officers visiting rural areas, and using bribes to win round state employees. These strategies were largely successful: rich Jat farmers typically cleared their fields of sugar cane much earlier than poorer Jats and Dalits, maintained a powerful level of control over the police force even while the BSP was in power in 1997, and had been more successful than Dalits and poorer members of their caste in obtaining government and salaried private work in the 1970s and 1980s, in spite of reserved jobs for Dalits in government employment.

The continued dominance of Jats nevertheless posed dilemmas for prosperous members of this caste. Jat farmers depended on other villagers for votes in panchāyat elections and assistance in farmers’ agitations, and therefore did not want to gain a reputation for liaising with local officials and promoting “corruption.” Rich Jats engaged in two sets of tactics aimed at negotiating this difficulty. In the public sphere, for example in large mixed-caste gatherings, they feigned naivety about local state relations, denied that they colluded with government bureaucrats and stressed their honesty, simplicity, and preoccupation with the physical toil of farming (cf. Chari Reference Chari2004). Second, among members of their own caste, rich Jats acknowledged that they possessed close links in multiple state agencies, but justified their efforts to construct informal political networks by referring to the upward mobility of Dalits and support that low castes allegedly received from the Indian state. In these situations, Jats often contrasted their own alleged poverty, powerlessness, and simplicity with an image of the rich, cunning Dalit “pampered by the government” or “wandering around the village in smart clothes.”

Rich Jat farmers in western UP in the mid-1990s were therefore responding to economic and political threats by dominating multiple “fields” of social competition (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1984). Rather than acting as mediators for poorer sections of the rural population, in the manner described by Chatterjee (Reference Chatterjee2004) in his discussion of political society, a rural lower middle class in western UP were using their political acumen to defend social advantages.

STUDENT POLITICAL ACTION

One of the unintended consequences of the strategies of rich farmers in the 1990s was to create a cohort of Jat young men in higher education in Meerut in the 2000s. Meerut, with a population of 1.07 million in 2001, has long been a center for government, army operations, and artisanal production. Between the mid-1960s and late 1980s, the intensification of cash crop agriculture encouraged commercial development in the city, and since the early 1990s Meerut has become a major provider of private health care, non-state education, and financial services. But Meerut remains outside the areas of most significant economic expansion fanning out from Delhi, and there is little evidence of any information technology boom in the city.

In 2004–2005 and 2007, I conducted a total of eight months of research on the political strategies of young men studying in Meerut, focusing especially on the Jats.Footnote ⁵ Meerut possesses a rich history of student politics. Meerut students were energetically involved in the Indian nationalist struggle (Mittal Reference Mittal1978), and, after Independence, Chaudhry Charan Singh was keenly aware of the political advantages of mobilizing students. The period from Charan Singh's death in 1987 to the present has been characterized by the rise of Dalits as political actors and by the growing influence of Hindu nationalist organizations on higher educational campuses, particularly through the Akhil Bharatiya Vidhya Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the BJP. But political parties were not as active in student politics in Meerut in the 1990s and 2000s as they were in some other urban centers in UP. The absence of student unions in the most influential college in the city, Meerut College, dissuaded political parties from investing resources in Meerut politics. Indeed, the ABVP was the only active student party in Meerut during my 2004–2005 research. I conducted much of my research in Chaudhry Charan Singh University (CCSU), a hub institution that offers postgraduate degrees on its own campus and affiliates other government and private colleges. There were just over 2,600 students studying on the CCSU campus in 2003–2004. A further 240,000 students were enrolled in institutions affiliated to CCSU in 2004. Roughly 25 percent of students studying on the CCSU campus were upper caste, 40 percent Jats or members of another prosperous and rurally dominant middle caste, the Gujars, and 25 percent Dalit (compared to 10 percent in 1996). There had been an enormous expansion of higher education in Meerut district between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s, for example the population of CCSU students increased by 145 percent between 1996 and 2004 and the number of affiliated institutions increased from about 120 to 382.

Young men studying at CCSU in 2004 had typically grown up believing in a vision of future progress based upon formal education and entry into government employment. Teachers, the media, and development organizations in western UP have promoted notions of personal development through this path, and young men were groomed by their parents to expect government work. But very few students, even rich Jats, had obtained a government job. Competition for positions had become so intense that money for bribes, local social links, and cultural capital no longer guaranteed access to state employment, which typically went to people with high-level political contacts and close relatives in the relevant bureaucracy.

Jats had responded to their inability to obtain formal employment in varied ways (see also Jeffrey, Jeffery, and Jeffery Reference Jeffrey, Jeffery and Jeffery2008). Some Jats left CCSU after completing their first postgraduate degree and returned to their family farms. These young men typically presented themselves as managerial farmers and they often assisted their caste peers in liaising with government officials. Other Jat young men drew upon social contacts, often with fellow caste members living in urban western UP, to obtain private employment in the local informal economy, mainly within consumer goods sales, transport, agricultural marketing-related activities, and the running of small computer booths. These jobs offered very little money but allowed young men to position themselves as people engaged in “service employment” (naukrī), and their families could usually support their involvement in this face-saving work. These men also tended to leave CCSU after completing a single degree. But the most common response of Jats to their inability to obtain government employment was to remain in formal education and continue applying for government jobs. Thus many of the students studying at CCSU, and particularly those enrolled in their second or third degrees, referred to themselves as “unemployed” or “underemployed.”

Jat frustration at their exclusion from government employment was exacerbated by a pervasive sense in CCSU and affiliated colleges of being trapped in spaces of physical and intellectual decay. By the mid-2000s a shortage of funds for higher education in UP meant that classes in CCSU, and especially in government colleges affiliated to this university, were often infrequent and disorganized. Extra-curricular activities and educational facilities were almost non-existent. Students increasingly obtained the majority of their knowledge from expensive textbooks written by their professors and from similarly costly private tutorials, often held in the basements of professors’ large urban homes. Simultaneously, degrees issued by CCSU were being devalued. The deteriorating reputation of CCSU within and beyond north India in the late 1990s and early 2000s was evident in a sharp reduction in the enrolment of students from outside UP in this institution and a wave of negative media reports regarding CCSU in local and national newspapers.

Disgruntlement among students had resulted in the emergence of a few self-styled Jat “social reformers” at CCSU. Although comprising only about 1 percent of the Jats studying at CCSU, the nine social reformers I interviewed in 2004–2005 played important social and political roles within and beyond the university and involved large numbers of students in their demonstrations. Jat social reformers all defined themselves as “unemployed” and said that their negative experiences of competing for government employment had been important in their decision to develop a political profile at CCSU.

The Jat reformers with whom I spoke did not intend to seek a formal position within student politics. Instead, they concentrated on acting as everyday social and political intermediaries. These men visited local high schools to discuss issues affecting youth, provided tutorials to the Jat poor in their home villages, and sometimes ran short “training camps” in rural areas in which they lectured on topics such as educational commercialization and job opportunities. Jat reformers were having a tangible effect on people's educational strategies in rural areas of western UP. In particular, by persuading young people to acquire vocational skills rather than prolonged formal education, Jat reformers were important in countering a trend toward increasing higher education in the region.

Jat reformers also attempted to represent students’ goals vis-à-vis the university bureaucracy and government officials, especially through reference to the problem of “corruption.” Students had largely internalized moral visions of liberal government circulated by the state, media, and development organizations, and they therefore tended to reflect negatively on instances in which government or university officials accumulated large private incomes from their posts or neglected their formal duties (see also Gupta Reference Gupta1995). Some of student reformers’ anti-corruption effort was channeled through social networks. Jat reformers worked often alongside Dalit student activists to establish links with sympathetic government officials, develop friendships with local news reporters who would publicize their actions, and compose letters to senior government bureaucrats that bemoaned state “corruption,” teachers’ neglect, and a lack of employment opportunities for graduates. But Jat reformers’ energies were usually directed towards engaging in everyday forms of political agitation. Increasing frustration among unemployed students in the late 1990s and early 2000s in Meerut had contributed to a sharp increase in the incidence of collective student political action on issues of government “malpractice.” In 1996, in the most prominent regional newspaper there were just twenty-four articles relating to student protests in Meerut City, whereas in 2005 there were 125 such items. Student protests focused especially on malpractice within the process of admissions to educational institutions, accreditation of colleges affiliated to CCSU, recruitment to government bureaucracies, and practices of policing. Distinct from earlier student struggles in India (e.g., Franda Reference Franda1972; Rudolph and Rudolph Reference Rudolph and Rudolph1987), Jat reformers and their allies tended to focus on their status as students. Moreover, whereas student protests in the 1960s and 1970s were often held in rural areas, demonstrations in the mid-1990s were more tightly organized around controlling the campus as a political space: students blocked major roads through CCSU, surrounded university or government officials in their offices, and sometimes closed down the university altogether.

Jat social reformers acted as a check on processes of educational commercialization and bureaucratic “corruption” in Meerut. Among the more notable successes of these men between September 2004 and April 2005, were their efforts to publicize a lack of facilities in some of the new buildings on campus, campaign against a nepotistic appointment at a government college, establish a careers’ advice center at two colleges in Meerut, and improve the security of a hostel for young women studying at CCSU. Read alongside the more everyday ways in which Jat social reformers assisted students and rural people, these political achievements are notable. The Meerut evidence therefore supports research in other parts of India (e.g., Anandhi, Jeyaranjan, and Krishnan Reference Anandhi, Jeyaranjan and Krishnan2002; Krishna Reference Krishna2002) and the global south (Demerath Reference Demerath1999; De Vries Reference De Vries2002) in identifying the democratic mediating roles that unemployed young men may adopt. As many Jat reformers themselves noted, “we have the time to protest.” But it is important not to exaggerate the political impact of Jat social reformers, who were few in number and lacked the power to organize durable campaigns or institutions. Many social reformers gave up their political activity after two or three years and either returned to farming, entered fallback jobs in the urban informal economy, or, in the case of three ex-reformers, worked for local newspapers. None of the Jats who had formerly worked as reformers had entered state- or central-level politics. Moreover, the youth collective protests organized by Jat social reformers in Meerut tended to be sporadic, short, and focused around immediate events in the life of the university. As Bourdieu's work primes us to expect, inequalities based upon young people's access to economic, social, and cultural capital fractured a broader movement of the unemployed. This is a point that comes across especially clearly in the activities of so-called Jat “fixers.”

JAT STUDENT FIXERS

Self-styled Jat “fixers” (kām karānewale) or “leaders” (netā) tended to undermine collective student protest (see also Jeffrey Reference Jeffrey2008). These men often worked alongside reformers in orchestrating student agitations. But, unlike reformers, the fixers coveted positions in the CCSU student union and were keen to find ways to earn large sums of money from their political influence. The example of Anil offers insights into the actions of the twenty Jat fixers I interviewed in CCSU. Anil was from a fairly prosperous Jat farming family on the edge of Meerut and in his late twenties in 2004. In 2000 he arrived at CCSU for postgraduate study. While working for a Masters of Technology degree in 2000–2002, Anil tried several times to obtain a position in the UP bureaucracy. He said that the experience of failing to acquire a government position was crucial in his decision to enter student politics at the end of 2002. He began his political career by publicizing instances in which university bureaucrats were perceived to be preying on students. Anil launched a series of agitations aimed at lowering students’ fees in CCSU and he also lobbied the university administration to establish a career-guidance center for students on campus.

In 2004 Anil used his reputation for representing students to obtain a position on the CCSU student union. He did not abandon his interest in leading youth protests targeted against the university administration. But after winning the student union post he increasingly combined collective protest with efforts to develop mutually advantageous relationships inside the CCSU bureaucracy. Anil made a large amount of money by using his student union position as leverage in efforts to take a cut of university officials’ illegal side-incomes. He also assisted a Jat educational entrepreneur in establishing a CCSU-affiliated private engineering college on the edge of Meerut. Anil handled the negotiations between the businessman and CCSU officials, who feared Anil's reputation for instigating protests. Anil also helped the businessman stave off student protests within his engineering college, which was poorly equipped and lacked qualified lecturers.

Anil offers insights into the strategies of Jat fixers, who tended to be from more prosperous backgrounds than Jat social reformers. Like Anil, Jat student fixers often cited the experience of failing to acquire government work as a reason for entering politics, and typically began their political careers after a period of two or three years searching for government work. Jats had dominated the CCSU student union. Of the thirty men who held one of the top two positions in the CCSU student union between 1991 and 2004, twenty-four were either Jats or middle-caste Gujars. Jats captured these posts in part through developing a reputation for moral action among students. They staged demonstrations protesting against “corruption” within university and government offices, and friends within local newspapers wrote up glowing reports. Student leaders also relied on caste solidarities to win power. They organized social events for other Jats at which they celebrated popular stereotypes of Jats as honest, straightforward, and hard working, and capitalized on a shared appreciation of Jat habitus. They also usually spent large sums before elections producing posters and hiring vehicles for their campaigns. Students obtained much of this money from their families. They also contacted ex-student activists who introduced them to local party politicians. A connection with a political party offered financial sponsorship and social support, and a few politicians visited the CCSU campus prior to elections to pledge their allegiance to candidates. Student leaders also sought the support of the ABVP, not out of concern for Hindu nationalist agendas but with a view to receiving logistical help with their campaigns.

In the mid-1990s, it was only possible to earn small sums from a student union post: Rs. 20,000 according to some estimates. But the privatization of education in the late 1990s and early 2000s and rapid expansion of the size of the student body greatly increased possibilities for enterprising Jats to convert their political standing into economic wealth. There was a general consensus among older students, that, from the late 1990s onwards, Jat fixers had usually abandoned their pretence to be assisting “the ordinary student” after winning the student union elections, and devoted time instead to building social networks that would provide rapid economic profits. Jat student leaders on the CCSU student union could make over Rs. 800,000 from their posts in the early and mid-2000s. They earned this money in part through working as paid intermediaries between students seeking entry into private educational institutions and senior CCSU bureaucrats. Student leaders also lobbied CCSU university officials to grant affiliation to private colleges and in return received from the private educational entrepreneur the right to “sell” a place at that college to students seeking admission. Jat student leaders were also sometimes able to influence appointments to teaching and administrative positions within CCSU or affiliated colleges. Moreover, student politicians could sometimes influence the disbursement of contracts and tenders for the construction of government and private educational institutions. Student leaders often received bribes from business interests, and some leaders after leaving university became contractors themselves. Jat student leaders offered officials, contractors, and entrepreneurs a source of tactical advice, but they also traded on their potential nuisance value, for example their capacity to instigate disruptive protests and publicize acts of “corruption.” Student leaders redistributed a portion of their earnings to those who had financed their student union campaigns. They also invested money in fighting new student elections and a few said that they had hired university professors to write Master's or Ph.D. dissertations in their name.

After leaving their student union post, Jat leaders sometimes used their contacts to acquire temporary work as political fixers for educational entrepreneurs or state- or district-level politicians. These positions were insecure and only moderately well-paid, and indeed many young men playing these fixing roles continued to refer to themselves as “unemployed.” In other instances, Jat fixers had been able to obtain permanent employment as university professors or advocates, jobs that they could combine with political activity. Of twenty Jats who had developed reputations for political leadership in CCSU between 2001 and 2005 and whose whereabouts I could trace, ten had become political fixers, four had entered law, three had secured teaching positions in government colleges, two had returned to agriculture, and one was in jail. Since the early 1990s, no Jat leaders have entered district representative government, let alone state-level or central politics (cf. Hansen Reference Hansen1996). Jats argued that the chances of becoming a state- or central-level politician were remote relative to earning opportunities within the informal economy of state practices. Jat fixers were uninterested in BKU politics and in the relatively piecemeal opportunities for rent-seeking associated with panchāyat politics.

Jat social reformers were often reluctant to counter the actions of their caste peers. But Dalit political entrepreneurs sometimes attempted to challenge the power of Jat fixers through developing counter-networks of influence. They tried to establish rapport with government and university officials through developing an air of prosperous, “civilized” comportment and they also wrote letters to senior government officials and politicians that outlined the extent and nature of Jat fixers’ “corruption” (see Jeffrey Reference Jeffrey2008).

But Dalits’ attempts to improve low castes’ access to resources and political power did little to alter processes of class and caste social reproduction within CCSU in the period between the late 1990s and mid-2000s. Jats continued to dominate access to the local state, as a result of their superior access to economic capital for fighting union elections, social contacts with government officials and rural Jats, and capacity to use their educated status and middle-caste demeanor to build relationships with local bigwigs. Several Jat young men said that being a Jat in Meerut is like possessing an “invisible license”: a type of in-built capacity to generate good relations within the mainly middle/upper-caste government bureaucracy akin to what Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1984) terms sens de placement. By 2007, the lack of opportunities to counter middle-caste power through network-based political action on campus had encouraged aspiring Dalit politicians and some Jat social reformers to abandon attempts to critique the practices of dominant Jats and concentrate instead on running for village- or district-level political posts.

Importantly, Jat student leaders in the mid-2000s were more attuned than was an older generation of rural Jats to opportunities to convert social connections and cultural capital into economic wealth. This became especially obvious when Jat student leaders returned to their rural homes and enjoined senior kin to develop a more proactive and mercurial approach to co-opting the local state. As one student leader put it, “We tell our seniors: ‘you have been sending those officials mangoes and butter for years, you should make some money from your link!’ We give our fathers a course in brokerage.” Jat young men's more energetic approach to social and political networking was reflected in differences between their language and that of their fathers. In contrast to the rather static notion of the “web” employed by older Jats in rural areas to describe social connections, Jat student leaders more commonly discussed their influence with reference to the idea of possessing a “setting”: a plastic, polycentric nexus of contacts which needed to be nurtured through accumulating “force,” the police or caste peers willing to intimate or beat up opponents, and “source,” which typically denoted access to a high-level political connection.

Thus, Jat student fixers were not simply reproducing class and caste power; they were also deepening social inequalities through their energetic approach to economic accumulation. The penultimate section of the paper examines how Jat young men were perpetuating caste and class inequalities in the cultural sphere.

THE VIRTUE OF NECESSITY

Dalits were responding to their inability to counter Jat fixers’ power within informal political networks in part by engaging in a type of low-level aesthetic politics aimed at communicating their moral superiority to Jat leaders. Dalits posited an idealized opposition between the immoral, debased, irresponsible Jat fixer—mired in “corruption”—and the moral, upright, and civilized “ordinary student.” These critiques formed part of a wider field of protest against the actions of Jat student leaders. A varied collection of Dalits, upper castes, Jat social reformers, and young women frequently depicted Jat fixers as having abandoned a common student cause in favor of a “selfish” politics.

The rise of vocal Dalit critics in the university setting meant that Jat student leaders felt compelled to rationalize their “corrupt” practice to a greater extent than did rich Jat farmers in the mid-1990s in rural western UP. One way in which Jat fixers countered other students’ accusations of betraying a broader student cause was by making public denials. I frequently watched some of the most notoriously avaricious student leaders issuing bold challenges to their audiences at large public gatherings: “You tell me one instance in which I have been corrupt!” When students started listing examples, the student leader would dismiss their arguments as self-interested and false or accuse his opponent of failing to appreciate “true corruption” (sahī bhrashtāchār). These performances borrowed from the political styles of national-level politicians faced with accusations of malpractice and from images of bold “student activists” that emerge from Indian films, such as Shiva (1989) and Yuwa (2004). Jats knew that most students would not be convinced by their public drama. But they were aware that new students were constantly arriving at CCSU, many of whom had little idea about who could make claims to being genuinely “straight” (sīdhā). Some Jat student fixers engaged in making money from their posts were able to maintain a reputation for moral action for several years.

In other circumstances Jat leaders grudgingly acknowledged that they colluded with government and university officials but contrasted their own “corruption” (bhrashtāchār), understood as routine efforts to work the system, with “fraud”: actions that contravened the moral understandings embedded within everyday corruption. For example, student leaders said that they regularly colluded with the CCSU Registrar to raise students’ grades in examinations and assist students in obtaining their results before the official date—forms of “corruption” which they regard as “okay” (thīk). But student politicians were incensed when it emerged in the summer of 2006 that the CCSU Registrar had been lining his pockets by arranging for Master's dissertations to be graded by school students as young as eight years old, an act of “fraud” which brought students into the streets to burn their degrees.

In still other instances Jats argued that, as student politicians, they have no option but to engage in “corruption.” On many occasions, Jat fixers told other students that they are effectively “trapped” or “bound in” (band hona) within a complex set of obligations, practices and rules that make it impossible to “get things done” without bribing, flattering, and intimidating others. In a typical statement, one Jat student leader said: “An honest person cannot succeed in politics in UP. Politics here is about competition. If I am on foot and competing against a person on a motorcycle, I will lose. If I am honest, people will bear down on me on all sides trying to pressurize me into taking money […] No, to succeed in politics you need public support. This only comes through offering and taking bribes and through showing force.” Jats also argued that, since everyone is involved in “the game” (khel), there is no point outside the system from which others can critique their practices, and many leaders were able to recount instances in which Jat social reformers and Dalits had been forced to “play the game” (khel khelna hai).

Jat student fixers not only tried to justify their involvement in “corruption” in novel ways, they also engaged in forms of cultural production that actively celebrated their capacity to make money from their student union posts. To a greater extent than rich Jat farmers, Jat leaders used references to their ability to co-opt the local state as a form of cultural capital. In small gatherings of relatively trusted student colleagues and government officers, in particular, Jat student fixers presented their capacity to engage in collusive activity with government and university officials as a valuable skill. In certain instances, my presence acted as a trigger for these conversations, but positive accounts of their capacity to bend and manipulate the state were such a marked feature of my conversations with Jats that I believe that they represent an important aspect of an emerging culture of political entrepreneurship. Student leaders argued that as Jats from rural areas they are distinctively equipped with the bravery, pragmatism, and masculine strength to overcome trifling moral objections to making money alongside state officials.

Jats frequently referred to their political entrepreneurship with reference to the Hindi word jugār. Jats sometimes used jugār to refer to varied forms of skilful political opportunism, and in McGregor's Hindi dictionary jugār is defined broadly as “provisioning.” But discussions of jugār frequently referred more specifically to a capacity to “fix things” through bringing together unlike practices or materials. Jat young men commonly argued that the idea of jugār is encapsulated in the image of a rural bullock cart that has been fitted with a modern engine (jugārī gārī). Jats also explained jugār by referring to a young man who, on waking in the morning, slips on one smart leather shoe and one plastic sandal, because these two pieces of footwear just happened to be under his bed. In the political sphere, a Jat fixer laid claim to being able to do jugār by citing an instance in which he had used a rope bed to break the air conditioning system in a university official's room. In another instance, a politician underlined his improvisational skill by discussing how he had rigged up a speaker system in a tree during a political rally on the edge of the campus. One Jat student fixer explicitly linked jugār to visions of environmental conservation. This young man combined his efforts to extract money from private educational entrepreneurs with a program to encourage rainwater harvesting in Meerut. He said that, while others might regard these political projects as strikingly different, he considered them to be connected by their commitment to jugār.

Jats did not have a monopoly on discourses of jugār. Two Dalit leaders from comparatively prosperous backgrounds had responded to their failure to undermine Jat power by joining student fixers in efforts to acquire student union posts and make money from their political clout. They also laid claim to jugār, stressing that, as people from relatively poor backgrounds, they are especially attuned to the necessity of judicious opportunism. These Dalits also contrasted their jugār with the social practices of higher castes, which they depicted as unimaginative and leaden-footed. But Jats did tend to dominate discussions of jugār, which they sometimes linked to histories of Jat resourcefulness (cf. Stokes Reference Stokes1986).

Jugār was nevertheless a morally uncertain concept; it carried with it associations of not doing things properly (thīk se). Some dominant Jat leaders chastised their friends for celebrating jugār and spoke of the importance of remaining “straight” as far as possible. In addition, before experiencing a catalogue of disappointments in their search for salaried employment, many Jat fixers had spoken proudly of their desire to become part of the Indian state and, once in post, avoid jugār.

This moral ambivalence rendered jugār an especially effective means of developing rapport with caste peers and government officials. By admitting to doing jugār, Jats could bestow on their peers and co-conspirators the warm feeling of being “let in” on an intimate secret. On many occasions I watched Jat leaders use humorous references to jugār as a preface to discussing opportunities for making money with other Jat students and government officials. For example, at a Jat chicken and whisky party involving government officials held in February 2005, a Jat fixer said that he would illustrate the nature of jugār by telling a story of a friend who had recently visited the government ‘anti-corruption officer’ in Meerut:

Few of these jokes or stories were original and probably still fewer were true; what mattered was the pleasure of listening, the skill of the teller in elaborating on familiar themes, and the stories’ elevation of the figure of the moderately-prosperous middle-caste man as arch improviser, one working the system through imaginative acts of cultural combination or through a more general creative élan. Student leaders’ stories of colluding with local state officials therefore operated as a type of “intimate culture” (Herzfeld Reference Herzfeld2005): a feature of social life regarded as somewhat embarrassing when exposed to outsiders but viewed by insiders as a basis for shoring up a sense of community and reproducing the “good relationships” that underpin political networks.

The rapid commercialization of Meerut district and associated rise of private companies and non-state educational institutions were undoubtedly important in persuading Jat young men to celebrate jugār. The idea of creatively combining unlike technologies, of making bold but difficult decisions, and of resolving difficulties through individual enterprise were common tropes of television advertisements, signboards, and leaflets distributed by major firms and private universities in Meerut and other parts of north India. Moreover, the proliferation of private educational institutions, loosely regulated by the state, had expanded opportunities for graft and therefore the profits available from jugār.Footnote ⁶ But Jat young men did not simply “buy in” to a regional ideology of political opportunism. Rather, Jat student leaders creatively reinvented a vision of entrepreneurial skill through making use of local symbolic resources, and often through repeatedly embellishing their claims to be able to “do jugār.” This process of improvising around a central argument might be conceptualized as social poetics, in Herzfeld's (2005: 16ff) sense of the imaginative use of stereotypes in processes of social practice and performance, or, to use a South Asian metaphor, the “rāg” (Shukla Reference Shukla1992): a traditional form of Hindu music consisting of a central theme on which variations are improvised within a framework of melodic formulas and rhythmic patterns. Like the rāg, Jat young men were constantly ornamenting their central theme—of their own capacity to do jugār—with flights of cultural invention. At the same time, these narratives acquired their force through repetition and adherence to certain organizing schemas. A sense of mischief also ran through young men's elaborations of jugār that marked them out from notions of entrepreneurship associated with economic liberalization. Young men experimented with ideas of jugār as virtue in their jokes and horseplay. They interspersed fairly earnest discussions of the value of jugār with hints at the possible negative connotations of the concept, and they repeatedly sought to outdo their peers in their descriptions of jugār.

My analysis therefore suggests that Jat student leaders were not only dominating access to local earning opportunities within the informal economy but also engaging in intensive cultural practices that allowed them to justify their opportunistic approach to local politics and build relationships with prosperous Jat peers and officials. Rich Jat farmers in the mid-1990s were engaging in such cultural work, for example when they made arguments about the relative advantages allegedly being bestowed on Dalits. But Jat young men appeared to be pursuing the task of cultural production with greater verve and they were more willing to celebrate their capacity to make money from the informal economy of state practices.