The Escape Valves
When the IT Industry Said “No Thanks,” Dominant Castes Demanded to Be Called “Backward,” and a Million Indians Just Left
On August 25, 2015, a quarter of a million people gathered in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.
They were not protesting oppression. They were not demanding civil rights. They were not marching against discrimination.
They were demanding to be classified as backward.
These were the Patidars—Gujarat’s wealthiest community. Dominators of the diamond industry. Controllers of the motel business across America (the famous “Motel Patel” phenomenon, where an estimated 40% of US motels are owned by people named Patel). Global business networks spanning continents. One of the most economically successful communities in India.
And they were rioting for the honor of being declared officially disadvantaged.
Their leader was Hardik Patel. He was 22 years old. Within months, he would be charged with sedition—actual sedition, for demanding a quota. He would be sentenced to two years for rioting. He would spend years fighting legal battles, becoming a symbol of... what, exactly? Upper-caste grievance? Quota mathematics? The strange new politics of competitive victimhood?
Then, in June 2022, Hardik Patel joined the BJP—the very party whose government he’d been opposing for seven years.
The reservation demand remains unmet. The Patidars are still officially “forward.” They’re still wealthy. They’re still powerful. And the whole circus accomplished precisely nothing except demonstrating that in modern India, being labeled “backward” has become so advantageous that rich people will riot for the classification.
George Orwell wrote that in the future, freedom would be slavery and ignorance would be strength. He forgot to add: forward would be backward.
Welcome to India’s escape valves.
The Backward March of Forward Castes
The Patidar agitation wasn’t an aberration. It was part of a pattern—a nationwide phenomenon of historically dominant castes demanding to be reclassified as oppressed.
The Jats in Haryana (February 2016):
The Jat agitation holds a special place in India’s reservation history: it’s the most expensive caste protest ever conducted.
Damages: ₹34,000 crore. That’s approximately $4-5 billion. Billion with a B. For context, that’s more than the GDP of Bhutan—destroyed in a few weeks of protests over quota classification.
The violence included allegations of mass rape near Murthal. Protesters sabotaged the Munak canal, cutting off a huge portion of Delhi’s water supply. The capital of India—25 million people—held hostage by farmers demanding to be called backward.
Over 5,000 security personnel were deployed across nine districts. The army was called in. All because the Jats wanted official victim status.
Here’s what makes this genuinely insane: Seven of Haryana’s ten Chief Ministers have been Jats. The community owns 29% of the state’s agricultural land. They dominate the police, the bureaucracy, the military officer corps.
These are not the oppressed. These are the establishment demanding the privileges of the oppressed while keeping their own privileges intact.
The result of all that destruction? Haryana passed a 10%/6% Jat reservation. The Punjab & Haryana High Court promptly struck it down. The violence, the water sabotage, the billions in damages—all for nothing.
Except the Jats proved something important: in 21st-century India, there is no political penalty for holding the capital’s water supply hostage until you’re declared backward. None. Zero consequences.
The Marathas in Maharashtra:
If the Jats demonstrated the violence potential of quota politics, the Marathas demonstrated its scale.
Fifty-eight massive rallies across Maharashtra. Hundreds of thousands marching in each. The famous “silent marches”—no slogans, no violence, just overwhelming numbers conveying a message: give us reservation or face the political consequences.
Who are the Marathas? They constitute 28% of Maharashtra’s population. They are the historical warrior caste whose empire once ruled much of the subcontinent. Shivaji, the legendary king who defied the Mughals, was Maratha. The Peshwas who controlled vast territories were Maratha. This is not a marginalized community. This is the community that built an empire.
And yet: 58 rallies. Silent marches. Demands for official backward status.
26 of Maharashtra’s 48 Lok Sabha MPs are Marathas. They control the state legislature. They dominate the bureaucracy. They ARE the establishment. And they claim victimhood.
The Supreme Court struck down their 16% quota in May 2021, declaring Marathas “a dominant forward class in the mainstream of national life.” The Court was stating the obvious. It didn’t matter.
Maharashtra passed a new 10% Maratha quota in February 2024. It’s currently under legal challenge. Activist Manoj Jarange Patil continues hunger strikes, demanding all Marathas be recognized as Kunbi (OBC). The circus continues.
The Pattern:
Kapus in Andhra Pradesh. Gujjars in Rajasthan. Lingayats in Karnataka. Each has demanded quota status. Each has staged protests, sometimes violent. Each presents the same spectacle: people whose ancestors ruled empires now claiming they need government help to compete.
The logic is simple: When 59.5% of seats are reserved, the 40.5% “general category” faces brutal competition. Even dominant communities feel the squeeze. Their solution isn’t to oppose the quota system—that’s political suicide. Their solution is to join it.
If you can’t beat the quotas, become a quota.
And if you can’t become a quota? Find an escape valve.
How IT Quietly Said “No Thanks”
While politicians fought over quota percentages and courts issued rulings that would be ignored, something interesting happened in the Indian economy: the private sector grew large enough to not care.
Post-1991 liberalization, India’s growth shifted from government-controlled enterprises to private companies. And private companies—with some exceptions—don’t have reservation requirements.
The IT sector became the great escape.
N.R. Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys, reportedly quipped that the IT industry succeeded “because politicians left it alone.” Whether he actually said this or it’s apocryphal, the sentiment captures a truth: technology companies hired whoever could code, regardless of surname.
The numbers tell the story:
The IT industry in 2024: $245 billion in revenue. 5.4 million employees. Almost entirely private sector. Almost entirely quota-free.
Government employment in India: Maybe 17-20 million jobs total across central and state.
Total employment covered by reservation mandates: Less than 4% of the workforce.
So much fury. So much self-immolation. So many protests and riots and constitutional amendments. All over a sliver of the job market.
The IT sector alone employs almost as many people as the entire central government. And IT hired whoever could code, regardless of surname. The “general category” families who felt squeezed out of government jobs and elite universities found alternatives. Their children went to private engineering colleges, learned programming, and got jobs at TCS and Infosys and Wipro paying more than any government position.
For every DRDO scientist protecting the skies at ₹6 lakh per year, there’s an IITian building chatbots in Bangalore at ₹30 lakh—or in Palo Alto at ₹1.5 crore.
The market did what politics couldn’t: it created options. It made the government quota prize less worth fighting over by offering better prizes elsewhere.
When the government proposed extending reservations to the private sector, NASSCOM—the IT industry association—opposed it vigorously. The proposal died. The escape valve stayed open.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: Caste didn’t disappear in the private sector. It just went underground.
A 2021 investigation documented caste discrimination in Indian tech companies—subtle biases, glass ceilings, exclusionary social networks. Dalit engineers reported being asked about their background in ways that had nothing to do with qualifications. The old hierarchies reproduced themselves without the formal structure.
Access to the IT escape route itself was filtered by caste. English-medium education—essential for tech jobs—correlates strongly with higher caste and class. The coaching centers that produce successful coders aren’t in Dalit villages. The networks that connect job-seekers to employers run through the same social channels they always have.
The IT sector didn’t eliminate caste. It eliminated quotas while the underlying patterns persisted in subtler forms.
From the upper-caste perspective, this is meritocracy working as intended. From the lower-caste perspective, it’s the same exclusion wearing different clothes. Both perspectives contain truth. That’s why this issue never resolves.
But from my perspective—the perspective of someone who refused to play the government’s game—the IT sector proved something important: alternatives exist. Markets create escape routes. You don’t have to accept the rules as given.
The Emigration Valve: Why I Left (And Why Millions Followed)
In 1984, even with my impeccably ambiguous Kayastha-Brahmin-question-mark lineage, I would not have been eligible for any reservations. My family’s caste confusion placed us squarely in the “general category”—competing for whatever seats remained after quotas were filled.
Not that I had any intention of staying. I’d already decided I was going somewhere else, and if I didn’t get in, I would scandalize everyone by not going to college at all.
India wasn’t for me. The plane to Columbia was.
I was lucky. I had options most Indians don’t have. I had a mother who could be “convinced” to sign off on the escape plan. I had test scores American universities would accept. I had the resources to make it work.
But the impulse—the refusal to play a rigged game—was not unique to me. It’s become a mass phenomenon.
The numbers:
Over 1.3 million Indians currently studying at foreign universities (by the way, in 1984, the number of undergraduates in US colleges that were Indian citizens and were not children of US residents was vanishingly small--on the order of less than a few hundred in the entire country)
750,000+ went overseas for education in 2023 alone
Over 216 thousand Indians renounced their citizenship in 2023—a record
The Times of India explicitly listed “caste-based reservations” as a driver of student emigration, alongside “limited opportunities” and “underwhelming quality of institutions.” This may be self-serving narrative-making by upper-caste families, but it reflects genuine sentiment.
The medical student example:
India has far fewer medical seats than aspirants. With substantial reservations in those seats, many middle-class students who don’t get government MBBS admission either pay enormous fees at private Indian colleges or head abroad.
This was tragically illustrated in 2022 when war broke out in Ukraine. Over 18,000 Indian students were studying medicine there—a startling number, revealed only because they had to be evacuated.
Who were these students? Largely from non-reserved categories. SC/ST/OBC students have better odds at Indian medical schools via quotas. Poor students can’t afford to go abroad. The Ukraine medical students were disproportionately upper-caste and middle-class—exactly the demographic squeezed by the mathematics.
They’d rather study medicine in a war zone than compete under India’s quota system. Think about what that says.
The Cisco case:
But here’s the twist: caste travels.
In 2020, California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing sued Cisco Systems, alleging that a Dalit engineer had faced caste-based discrimination from higher-caste Indian colleagues and supervisors. The case made international headlines. It revealed that caste hierarchies don’t dissolve at the airport—they get packed in the carry-on luggage.
Ambedkar predicted this. He wrote that “if Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Indian caste would become a world problem.”
Seattle proved him right. Silicon Valley proved him right. Cupertino and Sunnyvale and Mountain View—all the places where Indian engineers cluster—proved him right. The discrimination follows. The consciousness follows. The debate about whether American diversity policies should recognize caste follows.
Some Indian emigrants who spent their youth decrying affirmative action at home discovered something ironic upon arrival: in America, Indians qualify as an underrepresented minority in some contexts. The same people who opposed reservation in India benefit from diversity initiatives in the US.
As one Reddit commenter put it: “We try so hard to escape reservation just to become one ourselves in America.”
The irony is perfect. The escape valve leads to another country’s version of the same debate.
Why I left:
People ask me why I left India. The honest answer is: I refused to play a game I considered rigged and moronic.
Not rigged against me specifically—I probably would have been fine. My family had resources, connections, education. I would have gotten into a decent college. I would have had a career.
But I would have had to participate in a system I found philosophically repugnant. I would have had to fill out forms asking about my caste. I would have had to navigate a bureaucracy designed by morons for morons. I would have had to pretend that any of this made sense.
Exit is the loudest voice. Fuck ‘em is the correct response to morons and moronic systems.
The plane to Columbia wasn’t just transportation. It was a vote. A vote against the whole edifice—the quotas, the bureaucracy, the memorization-based education, the suffocating conformity, the morons and their moronic rules.
I’ve never regretted it. And apparently, a million Indians a year are now making the same calculation.
The Government Job Premium: Why Anyone Still Cares
If the IT sector pays better and the private sector doesn’t have quotas and you can just leave—why does anyone still fight over government jobs?
Because government jobs in India aren’t just jobs. They’re a different category of existence.
What government employment offers:
Virtual immunity from termination (good luck firing a government employee for incompetence—I covered this in Post 17)
Comprehensive medical benefits for life
Old Pension Scheme for those grandfathered in (guaranteed retirement income regardless of market conditions)
Substantial social prestige
Housing allowances, transport allowances, dearness allowances
And let’s be honest: potentially remunerative opportunities for corruption
When you account for total compensation—salary plus benefits plus security plus side income opportunities—government jobs can be worth 5-10 times equivalent private sector positions.
The marriage market premium:
This is where it gets fascinating. Research found that dowry payments doubled between 1930-1975, with total payments from 1950-1999 reaching approximately $247 billion. Much of this premium correlates with groom occupation.
Government job holders command a premium dowry. Even clerks report receiving cars worth ₹15-20 lakh. The Federal newspaper noted in 2025: “Since government jobs are diminishing, the demand for grooms in a government job is increasing consistently.”
A government job doesn’t just provide income. It provides status. It provides marriage prospects. It provides a lifestyle that private sector salaries—even higher private sector salaries—often can’t match because of the security differential.
This is why 30 million people apply for 90,000 railway jobs. This is why 2.3 million people applied for 368 “office boy” positions in Uttar Pradesh. This is why the exam-preparation industrial complex I described in Post 17 exists—half a million young people in Musallahpur alone, studying for years, hoping for a ticket to government employment.
The prize is worth the lottery odds. Or at least, enough people believe it is that the competition becomes self-reinforcing.
The Vacancy Paradox
Here’s the final absurdity, the one that makes the whole system look like performance art:
While millions compete for reserved positions, tens of thousands of reserved positions go unfilled.
As of 2020, over 42,000 reserved positions in central government remained vacant: - 5,559 SC positions unfilled - 5,463 ST positions unfilled
- 6,747 OBC positions unfilled in Railways alone
Reserved seats sit empty while the reservation debate rages.
Why? The pipeline problem. Inadequate primary and secondary education for disadvantaged communities creates bottlenecks that reservation at the employment stage can’t fix. You can reserve seats, but you can’t conjure qualified candidates out of thin air.
Administrative failures. Positions don’t get filled because paperwork doesn’t move, because bureaucracies are slow, because hiring processes take years.
Mismatch between reservation and reality. Reserved positions exist in locations or departments where qualified reserved-category candidates don’t want to work. The IAS officer’s son from Delhi isn’t competing for a clerical position in rural Chhattisgarh, even if he could technically claim an SC quota.
The result: A system that simultaneously excludes general-category candidates from positions while leaving those same positions unfilled.
Millions compete for seats that are reserved. Tens of thousands of reserved seats sit empty. The mathematics creates scarcity that turns out to be partly artificial.
If this were a company, you’d fire the management. But this is the Indian government, so instead we extend the system for another decade. 335-0.
The Only Reforms That Actually Work
Democracy in India operates under a simple mathematical reality: whoever wins more votes wins power. And in a country where caste correlates with voting behavior, where parties explicitly calculate “caste arithmetic” when forming tickets and alliances, where everyone knows the vote bank numbers by heart—reservation is democracy-proof.
No party can oppose it and survive.
The BJP tried changing the subject to religion. Hindutva as an alternative solidarity, cutting across caste lines. It worked electorally, but the BJP still supports reservations. It extended them. It created EWS. It can’t afford not to.
Congress tried the opposite: expanding quotas, positioning as the party of the marginalized. That locks in different vote banks while conceding the same fundamental point.
Both strategies accept reservation as permanent. Neither questions whether 75 years of “temporary” measures might have a sunset.
The only actual change in how Indians access opportunity comes from escape valves:
Markets. Private sector growth creating alternatives to government jobs. The IT industry hiring whoever can code. Startups that don’t ask about your caste because they need talent more than they need to discriminate.
Emigration. A million Indians a year voting with their feet. The brain drain that policymakers lament but can’t stop because they won’t address why people are leaving.
Love. Inter-caste marriage rates increasing. Young people not knowing or caring about sub-castes. Urbanization mixing communities that villages kept separate. Economic mobility scrambling the old correlations between caste and occupation.
My grandfather’s violin. Still playing. Still winning.
The caste system is dying from the bottom up. The reservation system keeps it alive from the top down.
What I Learned
Here’s what India taught me:
You don’t have to play rigged games. If the rules are moronic, find different rules. If the system is designed by morons for morons, find a different system. Exit is always an option—sometimes the only sane one.
Opinions should be earned, not inherited. The reservation debate in India—like most debates—consists mainly of people repeating things they heard somewhere without the slightest critical examination. “I believe X.” Why? “Someone told me.” That’s not a belief. That’s an echo.
The sphinx skill is underrated. When surrounded by morons spouting moronic opinions, silence is golden. You don’t have to engage. You don’t have to correct them. You can sit there, face blank, thinking fuck ‘em, and walk away when the opportunity arises.
Individuals matter. Groups don’t. The entire reservation debate—on both sides—treats people as representatives of categories. But categories don’t have rights. Categories don’t have potential. Categories don’t make choices. Individuals do. The solution to group-based discrimination is not more group-based discrimination. It’s treating people as individuals.
Markets beat politics. The IT sector did more for caste mobility than any government policy—simply by not caring about caste. The marriage market is eroding caste barriers faster than any constitutional amendment—simply by young people falling in love with the “wrong” person. Change happens when people make individual choices, not when politicians pass laws.
My grandfather knew this in 1930s Lahore. He didn’t petition the government to recognize inter-caste marriage. He didn’t start a movement. He picked up a violin and played until she said yes.
That’s still the model. Individual humans making individual choices. Ignoring the categories. Refusing the game.
The government can extend reservations forever. It can’t stop the violin.
What the reservation debate reveals, ultimately, is the bankruptcy of collective thinking. Treat people as individuals—judge them by their choices, their abilities, their character—and most of these problems dissolve. Insist on treating them as category members, and you get an endless war over whose category deserves more.
India chose the second path. It will be debating reservations in 2050, in 2100, forever. 335-0, decade after decade, world without end.
But somewhere, in some city, some kid who refuses to play rigged games is booking a flight. And somewhere else, some kid with a guitar is standing under a window.
The escape valves work. The violin works. The morons will be debating quotas until the sun burns out.
Fuck ‘em.
If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy my book, “The Science of Free Will”. Among many other things, I explore why we can’t trade with ants, what that has to do with the future of AI, and why we need a Supreme Court if the world is deterministic.
The India Paradox is a series exploring how the world’s most diverse democracy somehow functions despite—or perhaps because of—its beautiful contradictions. [All previous posts available at samirvarma.substack.com]
This latest column culminates all that I have come to appreciate in your writings of India. In a similar vein, years ago I reflected on my experience with pernicious forces. Here’s what I wrote:
“This is a good place to offer some expanded thoughts on a theme present throughout this journal, namely, individuals trying hard to succeed with, and within, institutions, which generally comes down to the struggle between opportunism and principle. These present-day reflections are gleaned from observing and thinking much about such experiences over the course of my life and include references to others who have offered their own, often eloquent, perspectives on the subject.
“Whether in a branch of military service, a Fortune 500 corporation or an academic institution, in all of which I have been employed and from all of which I ultimately withdrew, the same general patterns of behavior can be observed. Dominant among them are the machinations for power and competition for dominance. This norm includes a critical moral aspect, which, at its best, effectuates and reveals the courageous and inspiring, and, at its worst, seen among those who display an extraordinary diligence in looking out for their own personal advancement, often manifests itself in the ethically sordid, ranging from mild obsequiousness to careerist-driven dishonesty.
“When presented with a matter of personal advantage that would require abandoning principles, the human mind goes to work overtime to rationalize taking that advantage. Every participant must make an implicit or explicit decision with respect to whether he prefers winning ignobly over losing honorably. “For,” as famous sports writer Grantland Rice wrote, “when the One Great Scorer comes to write against your name, he marks—not that you won or lost—but how you played the game.”
“Practically speaking, the best that those members not devoted to advancement by any means can do—those who decline to capitulate to those in circles of power and are willing to pay the price—is to defend themselves when their integrity requires it. In refusing to sacrifice a higher value to a lower one, and in doing so often ineluctably furthering the ends of the self-indulgent “winner” at a personal cost, the moral act of the defiant “loser” nevertheless has this beneficent attribute: it does more to advance the general welfare.
“Historian David McCullough, in his Landon Lecture, Kansas State University, February 2002, cited a statement by John Adams that speaks to these divergent attitudes.
“In a letter to his wife, Abigail, written by Adams at Philadelphia in what seemed one of the darkest moments of the whole story (the American Revolution), and he knew how worried she was, how frightened she was of what the outcome of all this might be. And he said to her, ‘We can't guarantee success, but we can deserve it.’
“And when I read that I thought how different that is from our time, when all that matters is success, being number one, being at the top, irrespective of how you got there, what devices, what elbows and knees and the rest you used to get there. They're saying something exactly the reverse. And when I read that sentence, I thought what a mind he had and what a moral lesson that is.”
“Harvard historian James Hankins has studied and written extensively on this topic (“Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy” (2019); “The Case for an American Revolution in Morals,” Wall Street Journal, August 20-21, 2022), one he has described as a divide between followers of Machiavelli (1469-1527), who counseled a more calculating and venal approach to leadership, and followers of the ideas developed by the Italian humanists, including Petrarch (1304-74), who counseled “virtue politics.” While the former think they are virtuous, Hankins suggests “they’re enjoying the approval of their own consciences without training their minds in any serious way through moral effort. … The humanists were opposed to the scholastic idea that you could argue someone into good behavior. They thought you needed the whole person—you had to engage the passions and appetite … precision of language and eloquence in the service of nobility.”
The Cisco caste case arose because a Manager was foolish enough to hire a batchmate from IIT who was a Dalit. Once the California DFEH decided to fund caste based discrimination cases, the Dalit had CISCO over a barrel but they decided to fight it out. The idiotic Iyer- a leftie libtard who used to share his bonus with his staff- was exposed to calumny. Hopefully he has learned his lesson. The hilarious aspect is DFEH is also supporting another such case where a Kapu Naidu claims he was discriminated against by a Kamma Naidu. Meanwhile, in England, a curry cook who was dismissed claimed that it was because he was of Arain caste while the employer was ‘Chaudhury’. The tribunal decided that the employer too was Arain but had taken the name Chaudhury when they acquired some land. In Tamil Nadu, there is a caste which is Brahmin in the morning and ‘pariah’ in the afternoon. Such a person could sue himself for caste discrimination.
In the 1930s, Dr. Ambedkar raised funds from Jatav millionaires in Kanpur. The best way for Jatavs to rise was through soft loans to develop the leather industry and then branch out. Indeed, the Japanese came to regret they hadn’t taken this course in dealing with their own ‘untouchable’ class. If caste is notionally ‘occupational’, promote private enterprise in that occupation and you soon get internal economies of scope and scale and diversification into related fields.
Indians never understood that Poverty is about Productivity which is about Utility- usefulness. Public finance takes priority over Welfare Econ. Budgets matter. Plans or promises don’t. Caste could have been used to motivate productivity growth (though this has happened spontaneously for many ‘jatis’) instead of for tying up the country in yet more red tape so as to create more clerical jobs.