Write short note: Role of Elite in social transformation. (1987)
An elite is the small stratum that occupies the command positions of a society’s key institutions — for C. Wright Mills, those “who make decisions having major consequences”. Elite theory asks whether such minorities drive transformation or merely manage it. The Indian record answers: elites have been indispensable initiators, but transformation completed only where mass mobilisation forced it.
The classical frame
- Vilfredo Pareto held that history is “a graveyard of aristocracies”: change occurs when one elite displaces another in the circulation of elites, the manipulative “foxes” alternating with the conservative “lions”. Transformation is thus rotation, not redistribution.
- Gaetano Mosca (The Ruling Class, 1896) held that an organised minority always rules an unorganised majority, though an open elite may represent wider interests.
- Robert Michels’ iron law of oligarchy (Political Parties, 1911) showed that even movements founded to democratise generate their own oligarchy.
- Mills (The Power Elite, 1956) shifted the explanation from psychology to institutions: interlocking economic, political and military command posts, an inert mass below.
The Indian experience
- The westernised professional elite produced by colonial education carried the 19th-century reform agenda. Raja Rammohun Roy and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar used legislation — the Sati Regulation of 1829, the Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act of 1856 — to move society ahead of its own consent.
- A. R. Desai, in Social Background of Indian Nationalism (1948), located nationalism in the new middle class thrown up by colonial capitalism; Yogendra Singh, in Modernization of Indian Tradition (1973), treated the modernising elite as the carrier of change.
- Counter-elites mattered more. Jyotirao Phule and B. R. Ambedkar drew their legitimacy from the excluded, which is why their work produced constitutional outcomes — Article 17, protective discrimination — rather than reform by petition.
- Rajni Kothari showed how the Congress system absorbed regional and caste elites, converting conflict into accommodation — widening participation while slowing transformation.
The critique
- Elite-led change reproduces elite interest. Desai read the post-1947 state as a capitalist state protecting propertied classes; André Béteille, in The Backward Classes and the New Social Order (1981), showed that entitlements concentrate in the better-placed strata of the beneficiary groups.
- Yogendra Singh noted the slow breakdown of upper-caste exclusiveness among political elites — real but recent. The Census 2027 caste enumeration, notified in August 2026, exists precisely because representation remains contested.
Conclusion
Elites are catalysts, not causes. They supply articulation, resources and access to the state; without mobilised pressure from below, Michels’ law holds and transformation halts at circulation. India’s evidence favours counter-elites organically linked to subordinate groups as the real agents of structural change.