Examine the effect of caste and community in Indian politics. Do you foresee their continued relevance in the country’s politics? (2008)
Modernisation theory expected ascriptive loyalties to fade with literacy, cities and markets. India has urbanised and grown, yet caste and community — religious, ethnic and linguistic groups — remain the building blocks of its politics. Their effects are mixed, and their relevance is set to continue in altered forms.
Effects on Indian politics
- Party system: the one-party dominance Rajni Kothari called the “Congress system” rested on upper-caste notables delivering dependants. Its erosion after 1967 and the Mandal decision of 1990 produced caste-anchored parties and the coalition era of 1989–2014, when regional formations built on caste and community decided national governments.
- Deepened participation: Yogendra Yadav’s “democratic upsurges” brought backward castes (1960s–70s) and then Dalits, Adivasis and the poor (1990s) into politics; the Bahujan Samaj Party governed Uttar Pradesh four times.
- Policy: reservation became the main currency of social justice — 27% for OBCs, the 50% ceiling of Indra Sawhney (1992), and states testing it, as when the Patna High Court struck down Bihar’s 65% quota on 20 June 2024.
- Community and the Union: ethnic communities won recognition through accords — the Naga Framework Agreement (2015), the Bodoland Territorial Region accord (2020) — which accommodated rather than broke the federation.
- Costs: religious consolidation has reshaped representation — 49 Muslim MPs in 1980, 24 in 2024 — and mob violence prompted the Supreme Court’s Tehseen S. Poonawalla (2018) directions against lynching. Kanchan Chandra’s patronage democracy explains why voters read caste as a signal of who will favour them, at the cost of programmatic politics.
Why relevance will continue
- The state is re-institutionalising caste: Census 2027 will record caste, open-ended, for every community — the first full count since 1931. The data will feed demands to lift the 50% ceiling, sub-classify OBCs on the lines of the unimplemented Rohini Commission report, and carve OBC quotas within the 106th Amendment’s women’s reservation; the delimitation that follows will redraw every reserved constituency.
- Sub-caste is the new frontier: after Davinder Singh (2024), Haryana, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka divided their Scheduled Caste quotas, multiplying caste claims rather than retiring them.
- Religious community remains the organising cleavage of national competition, sustained by the Waqf, citizenship and Uniform Civil Code disputes.
Why its form will change
- The welfare beneficiary is a cross-caste category; Yamini Aiyar calls this politics “techno-patrimonial”, attaching recipients directly to a leader.
- Bloc voting is fraying: the BSP won no seat in 2024, and Tamil Nadu’s 2026 verdict for TVK rested on youth and women rather than caste arithmetic.
- Caste increasingly works through religion: Hindu nationalism aggregates non-dominant OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits instead of abolishing caste, and the Pasmanda assertion carries caste into Muslim politics.
Conclusion
Caste and community will remain relevant, but as negotiated, statistically measured and internally divided identities rather than obedient blocs. Kothari’s insight will hold — democracy transforms caste as much as caste shapes democracy — and the real question is whether their future use widens access for the excluded or protects the shares of the already mobilised.