Examine the role of caste as a pressure-group in contemporary Indian politics. (1984)
A pressure group seeks to influence public policy without seeking office. Caste qualifies awkwardly but powerfully: it is ascriptive, yet its modern organisations articulate interests, lobby, bargain and agitate exactly as interest groups do. Rajni Kothari (Caste in Indian Politics, 1970) called this the secular dimension of caste — the use of a ritual grouping for wholly worldly ends.
How caste performs interest articulation
Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (The Modernity of Tradition, 1967) described the caste association as a paracommunity: voluntary membership, elected office-bearers, funds, journals, schools and hostels. Such a body does what an interest group does — it aggregates scattered demands and presses them on the state. Its typical claims are:
- Classification — inclusion in, or elevation within, the Backward Classes and Scheduled lists, since category determines access.
- Distribution — reserved seats and posts, scholarships, loan waivers, procurement prices, corporation funds.
- Protection — enforcement or dilution of atrocity law, and police response in local conflicts.
- Recognition — statues, memorials, renamed institutions and official commemoration of caste icons.
Pressure group or party?
| Criterion | Caste as pressure group | Caste-based party |
|---|---|---|
| Objective | Influence policy | Capture office |
| Method | Petition, lobbying, agitation, bargaining for tickets | Contest elections |
| Base | One caste or cluster | Broader coalition |
| Answerable to | Its own members | The electorate |
| Instance | Vanniyar Sangam, khap mahapanchayats, Maratha morchas | Pattali Makkal Katchi, Bahujan Samaj Party |
The Indian peculiarity is conversion: the Vanniyar Sangam’s agitation of 1987 produced a Most Backward Classes quota in Tamil Nadu in 1989 and then a party in the same year. Pressure groups here are rarely anonymous lobbies; they are party-affiliated, and therefore agitate more than they lobby.
Contemporary quota agitations
- Marathas: dozens of silent morchas across Maharashtra in 2016–17; a 16 per cent quota legislated in 2018 and struck down by the Supreme Court in 2021; Manoj Jarange’s fasts from 2023 demanding Kunbi certificates; a fresh 10 per cent statute in 2024, itself under challenge.
- Jats: the Haryana agitation of February 2016 left about thirty dead and produced a new Backward Classes (C) category that the High Court set aside within months.
- Patidars in Gujarat and Gujjars in Rajasthan followed the same script, as did the upper-caste “merit” mobilisation against the Mandal recommendations in 1990.
An assessment
Caste pressure groups genuinely deepen representation: they give between-election voice to the middling agrarian proprietors the Rudolphs later called bullock capitalists, and they force distributive questions onto the agenda. But they also convert street power into veto power, set claimant against claimant, and allow dominant landholding castes to claim backwardness — precisely the “politics of classification” Marc Galanter (Competing Equalities, 1984) predicted compensatory discrimination would generate.
Conclusion
Caste today is less a hierarchy than an organised claimant on the state. Its pressure-group role has democratised access while making policy hostage to agitation, and the test of Indian democracy is whether such claims can be settled by evidence and adjudication rather than by the size of a mobilisation.