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KEWORDS: Caste, political parties, voting, Indian state, reservations
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5509/2012852363
When incumbent chief minister and leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Mayawati, announced her party's list of candidates before the 2012 Assembly elections in India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, she did not bother to name the individual contestants but instead chose to break up the party slate in terms of its caste (and religious) composition: 85 Scheduled Castes, 113 Other Backward Classes, 85 religious minorities (primarily Muslims), 117 upper castes of which 74 were Brahmins and 33 Thakurs.1 The BSP is a party that is identified with the Dalits (former untouchables) and lower castes and has its origins in the 1970s under Mayawati's mentor Kanshi Ram as first the Backward and Minority Classes Federation (BAMCEF) and later the Dalit Shoshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti. The party slate, which now had more upper castes in the hope of replicating a successful experiment of a "rainbow" coalition tried out in the 2007 elections,2 was an example of how caste, as a political construct,3 has evolved in modern India.
This was also a validation of what Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph had so presciently written about caste in this journal over five decades ago: "Within the new context of political democracy, caste remains a central event of Indian society even while adapting itself to the values and methods of democratic politics." They added that it was the "chief means by which the Indian mass electorate had been attached to the processes of democratic politics."4 This formed part of a larger thesis in their book, The Modernity of Tradition, where the Rudolphs argued, against prevailing academic wisdom, that tradition, as represented by structures like caste, and modernity were not "radically contradictory" and that they could "infiltrate and transform" each other.5 What I'll do in this short essay is show why caste-and not caste associations, which was the subject of the Rudolphs' article-very much remains a relevant category to analyze Indian democracy by looking at two things: the trajectory of caste in Indian politics since the 1950s and the policy of the Indian state on castebased affirmative action or reservation.
It must be remembered that at the time the Rudolphs wrote their article in Pacific Affairs, the consensus among...