In the post-liberalization era, Indian politics is moving from ascriptive politics to developmental politics. Comment. (2017, 10 Marks)
Ascriptive politics mobilises voters by attributes they are born with — caste, religion, tribe, language — echoing Talcott Parsons’s ascription–achievement distinction; developmental politics asks for votes on growth, governance and welfare delivery. The claim that liberalisation has moved India from the first to the second holds only partly: development has been fused with identity rather than replacing it.
The case for a developmental turn
- Aspirational voters: liberalisation enlarged an urban, young middle class judging governments on jobs, roads, power and schooling.
- Governance mandates: Nitish Kumar’s Bihar was re-elected in 2010 with a larger majority on roads, law and order and bicycles for schoolgirls; the “Gujarat model” framed the 2014 national campaign.
- The labharthi: Yamini Aiyar’s account of the beneficiary voter, and the “new welfarism” of toilets, gas, houses and bank accounts, show named, attributable benefits cutting across caste lines. In Bihar in 2025 the NDA won over 200 of 243 seats after ₹10,000 transfers to over a crore women.
The case against
- Caste reorganised, not retired: the Mandal-era mobilisation of OBCs and Dalits now works through sub-castes; Bihar’s 2023 caste survey (extremely backward classes about 36 per cent) and the enumeration of caste in Census 2027 — the first since 1931 — make jati numbers central to policy.
- 2024: the Samajwadi Party’s PDA (backward, Dalit, minority) coalition won 37 seats in Uttar Pradesh; Lokniti-CSDS’s National Election Study found that both welfare receipt and caste shaped the vote.
- Religion: Abhijit Banerjee, Amory Gethin and Thomas Piketty (2019) show class gradients in voting fading since the 1960s while caste stayed sharp and the religious cleavage widened; communal polarisation remains a campaign strategy.
- Welfare itself is targeted through identity — women, EBCs, Scheduled Tribes — so “development” is often delivered to ascriptive constituencies.
Assessment
Yogendra Yadav and Suhas Palshikar (“Ten Theses on State Politics”, 2008) noted that southern states, where lower-caste empowerment had stabilised, were better governed: identity assertion can be the precondition of developmental politics, not its opposite. Voters now practise “identity-plus” politics — identity sets the range of acceptable parties, performance chooses among them — and appeals built on development alone, or identity alone, have usually failed.
Conclusion
The movement is real in the vocabulary of Indian politics but incomplete in its structure. Development has become the price of entry, not a substitute for identity; the caste census and the delimitation debate ensure ascriptive claims will shape the next decade of developmental competition.