For almost two years, one side of the Delhi-Jaipur highway in Gurugram has been the site of an agitation for the creation of an “Ahir regiment”. The spot is marked by a large tented space that includes a kitchen, sleeping facilities and toilets. The walls of the tent are decorated with posters of “heroic” figures from Yadav historical memory and banners with traditional as well as modern armaments and slogans. Frequently, men of the community take out marches in the surrounding villages, block traffic (“chakka jam”) and hold “interaction sessions” with visiting politicians who are exhorted to support the cause beyond mere words. On my last visit to the site, one of the organisers told me that the “Ahirwal region has provided hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Our community has provided many brave soldiers in significant battles such as Rezang La (1962), Kargil, etc… but still we don’t have a regiment! The government is making 28 new regiments, they should also make a 29th, the Ahir regiment.”
Since the period of the 11th Five Year Plan (2007-12), various governments have formulated programmes for “skill development” among poor urban and rural youth. This has intensified under the Narendra Modi government. A variety of small and large corporations have been contracted by the government to establish residential Skill Development Centres. The companies, known as Project Implementation Agencies (PIAs), provide training across different “domains” such as Hospitality, Customer Retail Service and Health Care. In 2014, the government created the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (MSDE), intended to provide a more coordinated focus on training activities that have otherwise been spread across various individual ministries. The Skill India Programme launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015 aimed to train 402 million people by 2022, and the 2015 budget allocated Rs 5,040 crore for skill development. The most significant impetus behind the skills push is to prepare young people for service-sector jobs in the private sector. Some years ago, I was talking to a young man — a Dalit — who was a student at a Skill Development Centre (SDC) in Ranchi. What remains with me of our conversation is his plaintive question: “Why can’t private jobs be made into government jobs?”, he asked. “A government job”, he added, “has personality and respect”.
Over the past few days, the media has been full of reports of on-going violence in different parts of Maharashtra, relating to the demand for reservations for Marathas. A Maratha activist, Manoj Jarange-Patil, has been on a fast for over a week to force the issue and, on October 30, the house of a politician who made critical comments about Jarange-Patil was burnt down. The reservations-for-Marathas demand has been around for several decades and, over the years, the state government established commissions of inquiry to investigate Maratha “backwardness” as well as offering “Kunbi” or OBC certificates to limited numbers and the courts have weighed on the percentage quota limits.
The Yadav men in Gurugram seeking an Ahir regiment, the skill development trainee in Ranchi, though being trained for a private sector job but seeking a government position, and the Maratha protestors have something important in common. Beyond the obvious politics of caste and concerns with social and economic mobility, they bring to the fore a fundamental conundrum of our times.
This concerns the continuing significance and attraction of the state in the life of the common people at a time when, through multiple sources, we are told that we are in the middle of a very significant transformation. It has become common to suggest that the “New India” is characterised by the overwhelming importance of private enterprise and the unleashing of a creative spirit of entrepreneurialism that had apparently been held in check in previous eras.
The group agitating for a caste-specific army regiment can afford to spend several days at a protest venue as the resources they have acquired through selling land to real estate companies afford them this luxury. The SDCs at which young people are being trained – and where they hanker after government jobs – are run by private companies. And yet in this world, apparently fuelled through the actions of non-state actors, a very large number of people still wish for avenues of social and economic mobility facilitated by the state? Why is this?
An important factor relates to the popular perception that, rather than becoming less important, the state has actually become more so. The arbitrariness of state action against perceived “enemies” of the state has led to a popular perception that the only safe place to be is inside the state. For all its lip service to making people free from the restrictions of excessive state control, we are now in the middle of a situation where state control is even more overwhelming than at earlier points in time. Given this, and the precarity of everyday life for many, it is, perhaps, unsurprising that so many think that they would much rather choose to be where actual power lies. It is all very well to speak of a market-led society and the spirit of free enterprise, but if this happens in a context of an overweening state presence in everyday life, no one is silly enough to actually believe it.
Secondly, while there has no doubt been expansion of private enterprise over the last few decades, this has been accompanied by a situation where the state has abandoned its responsibility towards appropriate regulation of the market. Not over-regulation but just enough to ensure that the most vulnerable are spared the excesses of the market. For example, the persistent efforts at weakening labour laws that might ensure decent conditions of work and a modicum of job security has meant that the state has effectively sided with private sector employers over the needs of those least able to protect their own interests. Here too, people recognise that, in the main, state jobs offer a higher standard of “respectability” and security than private sector ones.
In a situation where the state seems the only safe haven against arbitrary action and markets are allowed untrammelled power to determine how we work, it’s unsurprising that there is such a strong desire to be part of the state. As long as this state of affairs persists, not many are going to accept Narayana Murthy’s advice that a 70-hour week is the way to greater success in life. Smarter perhaps to work half this time and be a part of the state.
The writer is British Academy Global Professor, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS University of London
While there has no doubt been expansion of private enterprise over the last few decades, this has been accompanied by a situation where the state has abandoned its responsibility towards appropriate regulation of the market. 
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