Critically examine and comment on the assertion in about 200 words: Indian politics has influenced caste and caste has influenced Indian politics. (2011)
The assertion restates Rajni Kothari’s thesis in Caste in Indian Politics (1970): “It is not politics that gets caste-ridden, it is caste that gets politicised.” The relationship is one of mutual transformation, not capture — but the two directions are not equally strong.
How caste has shaped politics
- Ready-made structures: caste networks gave an unfamiliar parliamentary system channels of trust, communication and leadership that no party had to build.
- Caste associations: Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (The Modernity of Tradition, 1967) showed the Nadar Mahajana Sangam in Tamil Nadu and the Kshatriya Sabha in Gujarat bargaining with parties as pressure groups.
- Parties and agendas: the non-Brahmin movement — the Justice Party (1916), Periyar’s Self-Respect Movement — became the Dravidian parties, while in the north Ram Manohar Lohia’s socialism and later the Mandal settlement carried backward-caste assertion into party programmes.
- Coalition arithmetic: the Congress’s KHAM (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi, Muslim) coalition in Gujarat in the 1980s shows caste dictating electoral strategy.
How politics has transformed caste
- Secularisation: caste’s value shifted from ritual purity to numbers; a large low-ranking caste became worth more than a small high-ranking one, and caste associations became interest groups.
- Reversed mobility: Owen M. Lynch (The Politics of Untouchability, 1969) traced how the Jatavs of Agra, who had claimed Kshatriya status, turned to Ambedkarite identity once Scheduled Caste status and political organisation paid more — de-Sanskritisation driven by politics.
- Fission and fusion: to win majorities, parties created categories that ritual never knew — the OBC bloc, Bihar’s Karpoori Thakur formula (1978) separating the most backward castes, and the Mahadalit category (2007).
- Dismantling hierarchy: Article 17, reservation and adult franchise produced a Dalit political class and weakened the landlord–client vote bank that M. N. Srinivas first described.
Critical examination
- The symmetry is overstated: electoral change has not reached the family. Endogamy barely moves — about one marriage in twenty is inter-caste — and ritual hierarchy survives in the home.
- Politics can harden caste: André Béteille argued that official categories keep alive what the Constitution condemns; Dipankar Gupta (Interrogating Caste, 2000) sees castes as competing, discrete identities, each claiming its own superiority — politics sharpens these boundaries rather than dissolving them.
- Beneficiaries are uneven: democratisation empowered dominant OBCs first, while Dalits remain dependent on reserved seats; Anand Teltumbde adds that symbolic representation outran material change.
- Third variables: a Marxist reading holds that agrarian change — land reform and the Green Revolution enriching peasant castes — drove both caste assertion and political realignment. Religion now also mediates the exchange, as Hindu nationalism aggregates castes rather than replacing them.
Conclusion
The assertion is broadly valid: democratic competition has secularised, fragmented and re-combined caste, while caste has supplied Indian politics with its units of mobilisation. The exchange is unequal — politics has changed what caste does more than what caste is — and Census 2027, the first full caste count since 1931, will make that exchange explicit.