“What do you understand by community power structure? Discuss the major changes in recent times in the pattern of the distribution of power in Indian society.” (1988)
A community power structure is the relatively stable pattern in which individuals, groups and institutions in a community control resources and influence binding decisions. In India the relevant “community” has long been the village and the caste. The broad change has been a move from an ascriptive, pyramidal structure towards a competitive, plural but still stratified one.
The concept
- Floyd Hunter (Community Power Structure, 1953) coined the term. Using the reputational method in Atlanta, he found a pyramid topped by a small business elite.
- Robert A. Dahl (Who Governs?, 1961) used the decisional method in New Haven and found dispersed inequalities: different groups won on different issues.
- Power structures thus range from monolithic (one bloc dominates every sphere) to pluralist (issue-specific coalitions). Critics such as Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz (1962) added that the powerful also decide what never becomes an issue.
The traditional Indian pattern
- Ritual status, land and authority largely coincided. M. N. Srinivas’s dominant caste (Rampura) combined numbers, land and ritual rank to control the village panchayat and dispute settlement.
- William H. Wiser (The Hindu Jajmani System, 1936) described hereditary patron–client ties that bound service castes to landowning jajmans. Headmanship was often hereditary, and colonial revenue administration reinforced it.
Major changes in recent times
- Disarticulation of caste, class and power. André Béteille (Caste, Class and Power, 1965) showed that in Sripuram power passed from Brahmin landlords to non-Brahmins. Party politics and adult franchise made numbers count, and the three orders stopped coinciding.
- Rise of intermediate and backward castes. Land reforms and the Green Revolution enriched owner-cultivators. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph (In Pursuit of Lakshmi, 1987) called them “bullock capitalists”, who turned economic weight into political power. After the Mandal Commission’s recommendations were implemented (1990), OBC and Dalit-led parties formed governments in the largest northern states.
- Constitutional broadening. The 73rd Amendment (1992) created a mass local political class. Of 32.29 lakh elected panchayat representatives, 15.03 lakh (46.6%) are women, and 21 states and two Union Territories reserve 50% of seats for them. The Constitution (106th Amendment) Act, 2023 will reserve one-third of Lok Sabha and Assembly seats for women after delimitation.
- Stratification within the beneficiaries. In State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (2024), a seven-judge Supreme Court bench allowed states to sub-classify Scheduled Castes. The judgment recognised that a few groups had captured most of the gains of reservation.
- New closures of money and family. A 2025 analysis of sitting legislators found that 21% came from political families, rising to 31% in the Lok Sabha. Kanchan Chandra (Democratic Dynasties, 2016) argues that these are products of democratic competition, not feudal survivals: families lower the cost of building a vote base.
Conclusion
Power in India has spread downward and outward, from upper-caste landlords to intermediate castes, Dalits and women. The pattern now resembles Dahl’s dispersed inequalities more than Hunter’s pyramid. Yet new elites of wealth, lineage and dominant sub-castes show that democracy has changed who holds power faster than it has reduced how concentrated power is.