The rise of caste politics is to be attributed to both regional aspirations and electoral manifestations. Comment. (2023, 20 Marks)
André Béteille noted that caste has lost much of its hold over occupation and ritual but remains highly active in politics. Before democracy, a caste that wanted a higher place could get it only by force or royal favour. Democracy made caste assertion routine and peaceful. The statement names two causes of this rise, the regional and the electoral. Both hold, but they are not the whole explanation.
Regional Aspirations
- Caste is regional by nature. Jatis are local, and the dominant caste that M. N. Srinivas identified varies from state to state. There is no single national caste order, only different caste arrangements in each state.
- Linguistic states gave castes an arena. Christophe Jaffrelot shows that reorganisation after 1956 handed each landed caste a stage the size of a state, as Maharashtra’s creation in 1960 did for the Marathas.
- Regional parties as vehicles. The Dravidian parties carried non-Brahmin aspirations in Tamil Nadu. In Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the Samajwadi Party and the Rashtriya Janata Dal carried the bullock capitalists of Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (In Pursuit of Lakshmi, 1987), the middle farmers whose economic gains turned into political power.
- Caste and region together. Telangana (2014) combined sub-regional grievance with backward-caste and Dalit demands for a share in power. Karnataka’s 2018 recommendation of separate-religion status for Lingayats presented a caste claim as regional identity. The Maratha quota agitation is still specific to Maharashtra.
- Federal design. Backward-class lists are drawn up state by state, and the 105th Amendment (2021) gave states back the power to identify socially and educationally backward classes after Jaishri Laxmanrao Patil.
Electoral Manifestations
- Rajni Kothari (Caste in Indian Politics, 1970) held that universal franchise politicises caste. Numbers become valuable, caste associations act as interest groups, and castes must bargain and form alliances because none is a majority.
- First-past-the-post rewards any bloc large enough to make a plurality, so constituencies are read as caste arithmetic. Kanchan Chandra‘s patronage democracy explains why voters use co-ethnicity as a cue for who will favour them in office.
- Social engineering. The Bahujan Samaj Party’s Dalit–Brahmin sarvajan coalition won 206 of 403 seats in 2007. The BJP’s non-Yadav OBC coalition in 2017 and the Samajwadi Party’s PDA plank in 2024 followed the same logic.
- Reservation as electoral currency. Constitutional quotas make backwardness a status worth claiming, so parties compete by promising inclusion in the lists.
What the Attribution Misses
- Movements from below. Jyotirao Phule, E. V. Ramasamy ‘Periyar’ and B. R. Ambedkar sought dignity, not seats. That aspiration came before mass elections and was neither only regional nor only electoral.
- The state’s categories. Nicholas B. Dirks (Castes of Mind, 2001) shows the colonial census fixing caste as an administrative identity, and Mandal later made OBC identity national. These are causes rooted in the state, not in region.
- National parties. Caste politics now works inside a national party that combines Hindutva with caste coalitions, so it is not a regional matter alone.
- Limits. In Bihar in 2025, welfare transfers to women worked together with caste arithmetic. In Tamil Nadu in 2026, a new party won on the votes of young people and women rather than caste blocs. Caste is one strong variable among several.
Conclusion
Regional aspirations explain where caste politics takes its shape and electoral competition explains how it works. Movements for dignity and the classifications of the state explain why caste became the basis of political claims. Caste politics has widened representation, but it can divide society when a mobilisation defends a share instead of widening access.