They are one of India’s most prosperous communities, a name synonymous with commerce as far away as the United States, home to at least 145,000 of them.
Now Patels in the Indian state of Gujarat want the government to give them a new label: “backward.”
Huge crowds are expected to gather Tuesday in Gujarat’s capital, Ahmedabad, to demand that quotas for school admissions and government jobs be extended to the Patel community. They argue that India’s byzantine, decades-old affirmative action system known as reservations — designed to elevate historically marginalized castes and tribes — has left them behind.