SIKANDARA, INDIA — Sitting in the middle of a highway under a baking hot sun is not Mansingh Burja's idea of a good time. But it's the best way, he says, for him and hundreds of fellow protesters to vent their anger over being classified by the government as a "backward" class near the bottom of India's social ladder.
They want to be lower.
The demonstrators, members of an ethnic group known as Gujjars, have blocked traffic for two weeks here on the road leading to the famed Taj Mahal, ever since dozens from their ranks were killed in a hail of bullets during clashes with state police. They vow to remain where they are until the government reclassifies them, putting them at the bottom of the official social hierarchy.
Such a move would in essence drop the Gujjars to a level similar to that of India's former "untouchables," who were pariahs under the ancient caste system. But it also would entitle them to more favorable quotas in education and public-sector jobs that the government has set aside for the nation's most oppressed and least modernized groups in an effort to redress historic wrongs.
It is the world's largest affirmative-action program, and the Gujjars say they deserve their fair share of it.
"Our community is just as backward" as the former untouchables, declared Burja, 32. "We need the same kinds of benefits."
He and his fellow demonstrators have brought life to a standstill in a large swath of Rajasthan, a state in western India popular with tourists for its imposing desert forts and picturesque cultural life.
The protesters bivouacked in the middle of the highway here have cut off the link between the city of Jaipur, about 30 miles away, and Agra and the Taj Mahal, a key artery not just for tourists but for movement of goods. Gujjar women have sat down on train tracks and disrupted rail service.
The demonstrators also have destroyed public property, pulling down stoplights and ripping out highway guardrails to fling onto the pavement as roadblocks alongside uprooted trees, boulders and the charred frames of burned-out motorcycles. Economic losses stemming from two weeks of protest are estimated at more than $1 billion.
Nobody anticipated such a violent response from state police, who fired on protesters in at least three incidents, beginning May 23. When the clashes subsided a few days later, 43 people were dead, nearly all of them Gujjars. Autopsies reportedly suggest that some had been shot in the back.
