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CHAPTER 6 Early Reservation Policy Development in India In this chapter and the one the follows, I analyze the development of affirmative action, known as reservation policies, in India. The Indian experience diverges in several ways from that of the United States. The antecedents to the final policies began much earlier, at the beginning of the twentieth century. The policies initially targeted untouchables, but they later encompassed other disadvantaged groups as well. And their development spans the colonial period and the period after India gained independence from the British. Nevertheless, I argue that the same combination of theory and empirical evidence used to explain affirmative action in the United States can explain reservation policy development in India. As in the u.s. case, policies were developed to make individual politicians and political parties appeal to specific electoral groups. The policies were debated, passed, and implemented by the same types of governmental actors. And the factors that affect the policy outcome are the same: the preferences of actors, the number ofactors and the structure of their incentives, and the institutional structure in which actions are embedded. While the types of actors, preferences, strategies, and actions found in India are the same as in the United States, the specific attributes of the policy process in India vary across time because ofchanges in the institutional structure and the relationships of the actors. As a result, the same model cannot be used for every situation. In the U.S. case, there was a single institutional framework, that of a democratic, separation-of-powers system, across the entire period being analyzed. In India, by contrast, there are two major types of institutional frameworks, that of a colonial political system and a federal parliamentary democracy, and within the latter there are differences in the types of party systems. The early years ofdemocratic India featured a one-party dominant system, while the post-1971 era has featured growing multiparty competition. To explain policy development in these different periods, I use a variety of models, all of which share the same assumptions about behavior but which capture the different institutional frameworks. In the colonial 145 146 The Politics of Preference period, indigenous groups bargained with the British in a system that featured asymmetric power relations, so I employ an extended game in which players move serially and have a number of different strategies. In the postcolonial period there is a balance of power between government institutions who bargain over policies, so I employ single-dimensional models similar to those used in the U.S. case. During the periods following independence , actors select among policies that target different coalitions of electoral groups, so I use models that emphasize the trade-offs among these coalitions. At the beginning of this book I asserted that a key factor common to both countries was that they were democracies. But I include in my discussion of India policy development under British rule. Obviously, this is not a democratic political system. However, the policies were developed and maintained with the critical participation of indigenous groups. These groups, especially the Congress, the Muslim League, and the leadership of the untouchable community, gained legitimacy with the British to the extent that they could show strong popular support. Therefore, in selecting among policy options they behaved in similar ways to vote-seeking politicians, and it is reasonable to model their policy choices as ifthey were actors in a democratic political system. In this chapter I analyze the development of reservation policies during the colonial period and the early years of democratic government in independent India. The policies developed in the early part of the century were never intended to give Indians much power, but they introduced questions about the form of political representation that should be established . The British had two motives in encouraging groups within India to demand separate political representation. On the one hand, they wanted to protect those who had been their allies, especially the Muslims, while at the same time restraining the ambitions of the Indian National Congress, whom they correctly perceived to be a threat to their power.1 But on the other, they also had a genuine belief that from a cultural point of view the religious, linguistic, and regional variations within Indian society naturally divided them into distinct and competing political groups.2 The British felt that in time, as political sophistication and experience increased, Indians might be able to overcome these primordial identities, but until then they would dominate...

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