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I agree that this is a factor, but I do find it funny how many Indians I know who are in the 'upper middle caste' and will go absolutely berserk about scheduled castes and whatnot taking their opportunities inside India. Then three breaths later will go on about how the Western society they moved to is biased against them and that white people should roll over and move out the way since they've had it so fantastic for so long. Which isn't necessarily a massive contingent of people, I just had a housemate for a year in Australia who was the daughter of an Indian Air Force General and granddaughter of some mid-tier nobility who owned 10 cinemas throughout Hyderabad, and would go on about this stuff endlessly. Especially galling when the majority of anglo-Australians she was deriding as privileged were multi-generational peasant/working-class descent.
It's broadly funny to me how a lot of Indian migrants have an incredibly-honed awareness of how to play bureaucratic affirmative action games (since they need to be great at them to get anywhere inside India, and if I were in their position I'd 100% do the same thing), are critical of how big they are inside India and then immediately try to install themselves as a scheduled caste in the West. Which I'm not accusing you specifically of doing, but I just find it endlessly amusing.
This is incorrect, I'm afraid. You can't use that kind of identity politics to get ahead the way you can in the States. When do you get the tangible benefits in the form of reservations and quotas for being lower caste? When you have a certificate from the government that says your ancestors were lower caste.
Can you get a fake one? Technically yes, but you'd be spending a lot of money on bribes, and you'd be rather screwed if you were caught. I don't know anyone who did this, though I'm sure it does happen (as I always say, India is a big country, with many Indians).
No, the sad reality of it is that the kind of person you spoke to learned to play that game in the States, or were intelligent and unprincipled enough to be well prepared before they got there.
I mean more in the sense that 'my average Indian friend has a way-keener understanding of admission/job hunting to be a game that you need to play to eke every possible point out of due to the system in place in India' than necessarily 'they were able to squeeze stuff into existence inside of India on the basis of caste'. I remember seeing my Hyderabadi helping another friend apply for jobs in Australia, and the sheer incisive effort they put into optimizing every part of the resume and process for somebody who barely spoke English was impressive, but also did a huge amount to explain to me why Indians are very good jobgetters
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