‘Community and Caste still threaten social harmony and political peace in India.’ Discuss. (1991)
The statement reflects 1990–91, when the Mandal Commission report provoked self-immolations and the Rath Yatra left a trail of riots. “Community” here means religious community — communalism in Bipan Chandra’s sense, the belief that a person’s secular interests follow from religious identity. Three decades on, the claim holds in qualified form: both threaten peace when mobilised for exclusion, yet both have also integrated Indians into democracy.
How caste threatens social harmony
- Graded inequality: B. R. Ambedkar (Annihilation of Caste, 1936) showed that every caste has someone below it to despise, so assertion from below is met with violence from above. The National Crime Records Bureau recorded 57,789 crimes against Scheduled Castes in 2023. Massacres at Laxmanpur Bathe (1997, 58 Dalits killed) and Khairlanji (2006) punished Dalit claims to land and dignity.
- Status inconsistency: André Béteille found that caste, class and power, once aligned, were coming apart. Groups with numbers but no rank, or rank but declining farm incomes, organise — hence the violent dominant-caste quota agitations of Patidars (2015), Jats (2016, about thirty dead) and Marathas, and the clashes at Bhima Koregaon (1 January 2018).
- Everyday closure: barely one marriage in twenty crosses caste lines, and honour killings persist.
How community threatens political peace
- Paul R. Brass (The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India, 2003) described an institutionalised riot system in which “conversion specialists” turn a local quarrel into a communal clash, usually near elections — Gujarat 2002, Muzaffarnagar 2013, north-east Delhi 2020 (53 dead), Nuh 2023.
- The threat has changed form. The Centre for Study of Society and Secularism counted 59 riots in 2024 and 28 in 2025, but lynchings did not fall, and conflict moved into demolitions, boycotts and hate speech. Only 24 Muslim MPs (4.4%) in 2024 marks its quieter political face.
- Ethnic community can suspend ordinary politics: the Meitei–Kuki-Zo conflict in Manipur since May 2023 has left over 200 dead and about 60,000 displaced, and required President’s Rule.
The counter-view: caste and community also integrate
- Rajni Kothari (Caste in Indian Politics, 1970) argued that winning elections forces castes into alliances across ritual lines, so politics secularises caste. In his words, “Those in India who complain of ‘casteism in politics’ are really looking for a sort of politics which has no basis in society.”
- The “silent revolution” traced by Christophe Jaffrelot transferred power to lower castes through the ballot rather than insurrection.
- Ashutosh Varshney (Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life, 2002) showed that riots cluster in a few cities; where Hindus and Muslims share associations, peace holds. Steven I. Wilkinson (Votes and Violence, 2004) found that states stop riots when governments need minority votes — the threat is political, not civilisational.
- Institutions absorb conflict: Article 17, the Atrocities Act, and Sukanya Shantha (2024) ending caste segregation in prisons.
Conclusion
Caste and community endanger harmony not as identities but as instruments of domination and electoral polarisation, and the danger has moved from open riot to atrocity and everyday exclusion. Because the violence is politically produced, impartial policing, cross-community associations and fair representation can contain it — and these identities have deepened Indian democracy as often as they have disturbed it.