Write short note: Caste and Indian Polity. (2001)
Indian democracy did not dissolve caste; it recruited it. Rajni Kothari (Caste in Indian Politics, 1970) put it as an exchange — politics becomes caste-ridden while caste becomes politicised, and in becoming political it loses ritual content. The polity is therefore the main site on which caste has been remade.
Where caste enters the polity
- Candidate selection and party organisation. Tickets are distributed by the caste profile of a constituency, and factions inside parties are frequently caste factions.
- Electoral mobilisation. M. N. Srinivas coined the vote bank for votes delivered through dependence; Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (The Modernity of Tradition, 1967) showed this vertical form giving way to horizontal mobilisation by caste associations and then to differential, cross-caste appeals.
- Ministry formation and patronage. Cabinets at the Centre and in states are assembled to balance caste blocs, and portfolios, transfers and contracts circulate along the same lines.
- Caste-based parties. The Dravidian parties descend from the non-Brahmin movement; Kanshi Ram’s Bahujan Samaj Party (1984) organised Dalits as a political bloc; Samajwadi, Rashtriya Janata Dal and Pattali Makkal Katchi rest on specific backward-caste constituencies.
- Reservation politics. The Mandal Commission recommendations implemented in August 1990, upheld with a 50 per cent ceiling in Indra Sawhney (1992), the 103rd Amendment (2019) for economically weaker sections, and continuing sub-quota demands have made the classification of castes a permanent political question.
- Local government. The 73rd Amendment (1993) reserved panchayat seats for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, which widened participation but also provoked dominant-caste retaliation against Dalit office-holders.
What the encounter has produced
- Srinivas called the outcome the secularisation of caste; Louis Dumont read it as substantialisation, castes turning into competing blocs rather than ranked complements.
- Christophe Jaffrelot (India’s Silent Revolution, 2003) and Yogendra Yadav’s “second democratic upsurge” record the gain: political power passing to the lower castes.
- The costs are equally visible — casteism in recruitment, criminalisation of candidates, quota agitations by dominant peasant castes, and continuing atrocities.
- Caste has also become an object of official enumeration again: after the Bihar survey of 2023, the Union government has included caste in Census 2027, whose population enumeration is scheduled for February 2027 with 1 March 2027 as the reference date — the first such count since 1931.
Conclusion
Caste in the Indian polity is neither a survival nor an aberration but a modern political form. André Béteille‘s warning is the right close: electoral competition keeps caste consciousness alive even as ritual hierarchy weakens, so the polity has democratised caste far faster than it has dissolved it.